I got tired of waiting.
Genesis - 64/512 colours:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...ge_9bpp_MD.png
PC-Engine - 482/512 colours:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...e_9bpp_PCE.png
SNES - 256/32768 colours:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...mple_image.png
As you see with the PC-Engine, you got 482 colours on-screen instead of 64, but it doesn't even look that much better. Genesis should've had bigger master palette, with a few more sub-palettes.
Quote:
Originally Posted by azonicrider
Wikipedia, parrots, and colors... if only it where that simple, kiddo.
It's even worse for the genesis since you can't freely use 64 colours anywhere you want ;).Quote:
Originally Posted by tomaitheous
EDIT: Actually I'm wrong, apparently wikipedia parrots take into account tile limitations.
EDIT2: And stupidly they only do that for some, the genesis one does use the 64 colours freely. Stupid parrots.
Even if they didn't have that inaccuracy, there's still the fact that digitizing an existing image is way different from creating artwork for the system, which is what was done most of the time. Most games are not Mortal Kombat.
But Mortal Kombat clearly showed a weakness in the genesis. It's also responsible for the heavily dithered games that these days just make the genesis look terrible in emulation. You also have situations where the developers/artists just couldn't be arsed to optimize the colours (Castlevania Bloodlines *cough*).Quote:
Originally Posted by j_factor
Twice the palettes would have made a huge difference. Increasing the master palette to 4096 would have made a huge difference too. Either one, both even better.
That's not to say you can't make good art with the colour restrictions of the genesis, Ristar is top 10 best looking 16-bit games to me, but then you have games like El Viento...
The colors for the Genesis parrot aren't even true 9bit in the wiki page. I posterized it to 9bit, and it lost one color - and looked worse/different.Quote:
Originally Posted by Kamahl
Actually.. given that the image is 150x200 pixels, you could show this image on the Genesis without tilemap limitations (as a demo thingy). Two BG layers overlapping gives 16+15 colors. Setting the resolution to 320, you can overlay two sprite layers for the rest of the 15+15 colors. That gives you 61 color without any hsync tricks. Of course, you could do one better and have one layer of the sprites also do S/H for a bigger palette and more shades. But none of this is the point.
But yeah, subpalettes. They're pretty much an everyday kind of dev thing for the Genesis and related consoles. Me thinks BC kid needs to read up on them, before posting more parrots ;)
That's not how it works in general, the Genesis' palettes are more flexible than PCE/SNES and even if those examples were done correctly within such an imperfect selective scenario, they're omitting factors like resoution/dithering and automated conversions in general are highy unoptimized and not representational of both the games we got and the potential of games we didn't.Quote:
Originally Posted by azonicrider
It's just about as bad an example as you could post, which is shocking since it's from wikipedia. :roll:
I remember Spiffy mentioning the TurboGrafx/PC Engine having more colors than the SNES, but I didn't realize it was by that much!
In my opinion 4 things could have made the Genesis better while keeping production costs at a reasonable level:
1.- No Z80(and no Z80 ram), no SMS compatability and no PSG. In America and Japan this made more sense as the SMS was never a strong console there anyway.
2- Faster 68K clocked at 10-12Mhz (To allow it to control the FM chip without performance penalties)
3- YM2151 + PCM chip (or perhaps DMA for PCM?)
4.-384 colours on screen off a 4096/8192 colour pallete.
That wouldn't have done anything but unnecessarily split the market.Quote:
Originally Posted by Christuserloeser
In terms of business/marketing, it would've been a bad move. In terms of business and marketing, Genesis was fine "as is" (after all, it beat SNES in sales in '93 and '94, iirc). What it needed was to keep up the price advantage over SNES as well as have a steady stream of games and a focus on it as the key Sega home product. That means no 32X, no Sega CD, and no curtailing support in '95 to focus solely on Saturn.
Would it have been nice to have Genesis support more colors? Sure. In hindsight, if Sega could've released Genesis with better color support in '89 ('88 in Japan) it would've allowed for Genesis/MD games to look better. Much better. But in '93, to release another Genesis system when Sega was winning? Heck no. Bad move. Better to spend that sort of R&D money on better, more effective marketing and best yet on more and better software development (which could have included, but not necessarily have included, support for some cartridge add-on chips).
The following changes would be pretty easy, and might actually make the system *cheaper*:
- No SMS compatibility (would remove the need for a Z80, Z80 ram, PSG and useless VDP modes), that's a huge cost saving right there.
- 68K could remain as is, it's pretty fast already.
- Stick with the YM2612, add a DMA for the DAC so PCM is easy.
- Add external CRAM, the genesis VDP already supports 128/4096 colours, it just needs to be connected to external CRAM.
The only somewhat expensive thing here is the external CRAM, but removing SMS compatibility more than makes up for it.
In Sega's defence, this is all hindsight. The genesis was a hardware monster in 1988, they had no way of knowing 64/512 colours wouldn't be enough, or that SMS compatibility wouldn't matter in the slightest.
Those images are just simple conversions of a single image to have a lower color count. With the Genesis' 64 colors on screen limitation in mind, you'd have to distribute the colors manually to that image. That image could really look a lot better if colors were accurately and optimally placed, instead of just converted.Quote:
Originally Posted by azonicrider
The Genesis/Mega Drive didn't need it
Just fine as is, If Sega would have made it more Colors like 128 so so, Nintendo would of made the SNES Better
So this thread is useless
Add me to the "512 colors are fine but more subpalettes please" camp, I love the look of well-done PC Engine games, some of them seriously rival what the SNES can pull off. Having the fluidity and overabundance of parallax the Genesis was known for combined with PC Engine-esque coloring would have been quite something. :cool:
Says the guy who wishes SF Alpha was on Genesis.Quote:
Originally Posted by KnightWarrior