Printable View
Yeah, I only wish Sarah Jane Avery would do the same. She (no clever remarks) was an amazing coder back in the day and pushed the Mega CD to its limits and used extra MD and Mega CD trick inthe bookQuote:
Originally Posted by Kamahl
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wQu2LrZPoxs&t=230s
She did write a (part 1) blog post on how SoulStar works, but never released part 2 :(. She still has fun doing homebrew which is really cool.
After all, it would be really great to see a homebrew that used this feature in game situation,Quote:
Originally Posted by Sik
I have one more for you guys, Gamopat friends told me that this is the few scenes in which Genesis is doing sprites multiplexing, how does the process of cheating VDP work, and generating more sprites than the hardware actually supports?
https://j.gifs.com/wmOkkw.gif
Just like every other raster effect: rewriting some memory mid-screen :v (in this case, part of the sprite table)
Actually the game seems to reserve two sprite entries (off the top of my head) for the snow and only rewrites those (and the rest of the table is used as normal). Probably made things a lot simpler.
EDIT: I suppose I should bring up that rewriting the sprite table mid-screen is a non-issue for the Mega Drive, aside from the fact it's way too slow (SNES meanwhile would barf at the attempt). There's a quirk with the sprite cache, but that's when you swap the sprite table address without rewriting it (while rewriting the entries themselves always updates their respective cached entries).
She is still working on it, but that C64 RPG and writing books must be taking up more of her spare time:) . She's lovely on social media and will always take the time to answer questions one hasQuote:
Originally Posted by Kamahl
I know for most its a simple effect, but I always loved how impressive the Shinobi 3, Stage 3 boss looked (art wise) and the nice effect used on him too
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9LYbRdH9U3k
Yeah it's a simple effect (just using standard hardware features) but I can't think of another game that uses them like that, to make a wobbly disgusting monster, so it's definitely clever.
New case on the table, @Kamahl its for you
Some years ago i'm was trying do something more amiga style on SOTB2 ( I gonna finish it someday.. )
and the one cool stuff is that backgroud shadings does not use my cram palletes avaliable
So i put 76 colors on the screen at once.. and i can put i litle more on the future.. (i need fix some bugs)
seems like a emulation of a copper effect on amiga.. but on MD, can you explain this ?
https://i.imgur.com/8EZJKhe.png
https://i.imgur.com/iXihXfx.png
It works the same way the water on Sonic does, except it changes only 1 colour and does it multiple times.
I don't know why more games didn't do that, maybe because there's a bit of a performance hit on the MD to do it compared to the PCE, Amiga or SNES.
Can be but tell me.. where is the main char pallete there ?Quote:
Originally Posted by Kamahl
The main quest i keep to the end.. =D
The limited color range probably also has something to do with why it isn't more common, it makes the gradient steps way too blunt.
The first stage in Zero the Kamikaze also has the same effect and puts it to good use.
https://i.imgur.com/uDHj5kO.png
Nice you remenber this case.. too..Quote:
Originally Posted by Sik
Another one that i change to make a comparison with snes version 5 or 4 years ago
https://i.imgur.com/NBsA0Vv.png
But in this case.. the main char charecter pal is there, is the same of the UI and etc..
On SOTB2 the main BKG and the main character pal does not loads on cram
so you always have 3 pal avaliable to bkgs + enemys sprites
i never saw one game doing it before.
It was a good way for the PC Engine to add an independently scrolling background layer, but the only game(s) that I know uses it is Magical Chase.Quote:
Originally Posted by Kamahl
I see what you mean Pyron, the only explanation I can think of is that the game is not just changing the background colour per line, but even more colours.
You can change 2 or 3 (maybe 4) per line without cram dots being visible, the water in Sonic 3 (without flickering waves) works like that.
That is something that should have been done a lot more often on the MD, just to bump up colour counts, even if there's a perf hit.
And yes, the PC Engine should really have used this effect a lot:
https://gamesgoneby.files.wordpress....ot-game-1s.png
This plus some 32px wide sprites for clouds and nice little parallax background. You can even get a grass/water/sand/whatever texture by using 8x8, 3 colour tiles and changing those 3 colours all to the same colour (so all the grass "pixels" become just a cloud colour at a certain line).
Note how the game uses an extra "line" out of place to make the gradient levels blend more, this is something that could have been done on the Mega Drive to make the gradients smoother.
Different style but same idea in Turrican 3:
https://amigachaptertwo.files.wordpr...rrican3_01.png
This game is certainly trying to mimic Amiga copper like effects.
https://j.gifs.com/32BzZ4.gif
This too
https://j.gifs.com/jq7XEY.gif
That first GIF also shows the most common mistake with horizontal lines (using them to transition between the blunt steps instead of actually trying to smooth out the whole gradient).
EDIT: though Zero the Kamikaze's approach is still the best looking in my opinion (have a 50% dither pattern with two colors then alternate between changing them, note that the gradient will stay in place even as the dither moves).
The horizontal lines trick works fine for smaller gradients (like the two separate gradients in Fire & Ice). For full gradients like Yogi Bear... yeah the Zero The Kamikaze Squirel's approach is better.
Yes, full solid stripes on MD does not work very well because every color step is too high,Quote:
Originally Posted by Sik
so the dither helps with smooth transition
82 colors but looks like a crap
https://i.imgur.com/p2v3lpf.png
https://i.imgur.com/7CvmPXH.png
Because this i was follow more the amiga aprouch
edit: with blue tones its more easier blends the shades
https://i.imgur.com/XPD42Mo.png
Earthworm Jim 2 does it in the blind cave salamander level. At one point, the whole tunnel gets the wobbling effect, then it goes away. A small touch and makes the level that much more dramatic (as if using Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata for the music didn't already make it dramatic enough).Quote:
Originally Posted by Kamahl
The effect is Megadrive exclusive too. No other versions do it.
It got much better Pyron!Quote:
Originally Posted by Pyron
The Humans seems to use the same technique and somehow work much better with blue shades transitions.
Very good!
https://j.gifs.com/gL1vRr.gif
No too good
https://j.gifs.com/yrQRq6.gif
It would be great if more games used this!
yeah, blue tones give you much more flexibility, you easly can blend cyan, gree to blue tones and later to purple tones, you can notice when this game change the background to hot tones they uses much less shades on background
When you accidentally add too many sprites to the stress test (whoops, that's why a chunk of the pattern is missing)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wv6MiuWjR8w
That and the sprite overflow limits what can be done with this :/ (probably a reduced viewport is advisable if you don't want to reduce the sprite count)
Sik this stage in Great Circus Mistery seems to use the same technique, the flickering is apparent since the HUD is formed of sprites.
https://j.gifs.com/vo4gvg.gif
Definitely Sonic Team deserves a prize for having programmed the Sonic 1 bonus stage without apparent flickering!
It's a shame the MD only got the worst of the trilogy :(, but yeah that's definitely the same effect.
It's not much, but I always loved the Predator style effects on some of the enemy ships in Battle Squadron on the MD.
The downside is that the entire background needs to be a single palette (although it was a port from an Amiga game, so it's not like it was a stretch in this case…).
No fancy hardware tricks here, the game is literally copying pixels from the background, applying a mask then uploading the result as the graphic for a sprite (all this has to be done in software). Not exactly trivial when you consider the background is made out of tiles, so the game has to process the tilemap, fetch tiles, and account for any pixel-level shifting (all of which make it a pain to write :D).
Probably another point for the Amiga since there you can just use the blitter to do all that (not to mention the background being a bitmap for starters so the pixels are already arranged in a linear fashion).
I remember, as a kid, seeing one of the Battle Squadron bosses split into two utterly gigantic ones. It was quite astounding!
When I learnt there was an Amiga version of the game, I was a little disappointed to learn that the Amiga version didn't perform this. :)
Crusader of Centy also does a simpler "predator" effect, on a rather large boss (12:25):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H17R_eFTCKQ
It only copies the background once rather than per frame, but it's still cool. I wonder how hard this would be to pull off on the SNES.
As far as moving a ton of stuff around, the Amiga that wonderful tradeoff machine can throw a ton of "sprites" around, if you're ok with the colour of your game looking like shit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lbeiPV84XH8
BG-copying like that would be about the same on SNES. Some expansion chips allow a linear framebuffer, but I think converting from that to tiles is slower than tile-to-tile copies, even with masking.
There's also the fact that when it's a single frame ordeal performance doesn't matter at much. Worst case, may drop one frame there that will be barely noticeable (slowing down every frame is where it'd become a problem). As long as you have the memory to afford it, it isn't a big deal.
Anyway:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IK4h6HAs53Y
Never seen that game before, it looks so good and like a Snes game. Nice effect too, but I think Battle Squadron does it better. Also, I love the sound used on the shaking mental on the gun turrets, its so well done and sounds totally amazing IMOQuote:
Originally Posted by Kamahl
@Sik
Those are some huge borders.... you sure you can't get rid of one side? One way to make it a bit fancier is to use a background layer with a repeating, rotating pattern (or 2). You cover the whole map with the pattern (e.g. a water pattern). Then you do the sprite trick you have there to make the "walls", then within the walls you replace the background tiles with flat colour tiles (or another rotating pattern, e.g. sand).
@TA
Yeah the effect in Battle Squadron is quite a bit better, but just showing another game that tried something similar.
No, I can't remove the borders (sprite overflow happens) and no, I can't fill in the background with solid tiles (not enough CPU cycles to spare). The idea is to spread some decoration around the maps a bit to try to fill in the floor area but yeah, not much more I can do about it.
EDIT: also even if I had room for a lot more sprites, the rotation computations are already eating up most of the available CPU time.
Yeah, I can imagine doing rotation at 60 fps takes its toll, bummer. Still a pretty neat effect.
Somebody nowadaways can explain how takara did thats amazing tricks on Samurai Shodown ?
@sik post some good infos on his topic sometime ago, but no conclusions are done.. also hes stops to investigate it.
That's the most unspecific question you could have ever asked :v
Also there really doesn't seem to be much more than what I mentioned earlier, they clearly had room to try to cram in Earthquake (but had to quit on that at some point) and had gone out of their way to try to recreate the background animations as accurately as reasonably possible within the hardware limit.
Basically:
- The game loves to swap palettes mid-screen a lot (CRAM dots be damned)
- Each character gets 256 tiles of room in VRAM which is a lot (though projectiles also go here)
- HUD and referee are plane A (probably to account for Earthquake)
- Display isn't disabled in the black bars (whoops) so there's room for improvement there
- Backgrounds animations are actual animations with the planes being rewritten on the fly, rather than just alternating between two tilemaps or resorting to palette animations (unlike the Sega CD port)
Short of somebody working on a hack for the game (there's 1MB left!) I'm not sure there's much else to say.
Nice points, you really explained most of part but i forgot =DQuote:
Originally Posted by Sik
But i still i don't understand why they update kuroko pallete all the time with alot of red shades,
while it always have alot of red shades loaded to interface all the time.
It's confuses me while i'm hacking because i never found where hes pallete is loaded, i took some time find it.
@sik can you did something about black bars? maybe with this extra bandwith the game improves a bit the performance?
One of the red shades is unique to it (note that I'm playing the enhanced color hack) and the colors also flash white when one of the bars is close to depleted (as opposed to rewriting the graphics). Probably was just easier to do it this way… Also worth noting that this very same area gets replaced by the dialog box colors when a character says their winning quote (likely still using the same code), and those are definitely unique colors.Quote:
Originally Posted by Pyron
https://i.imgur.com/IF5xcbN.pnghttps://i.imgur.com/oGcohlW.png
On the topic of mid-screen palette changes, Street Racer does it too (as well as the sky gradient thing):
https://i.imgur.com/Wf7TeP6.pnghttps://i.imgur.com/I2iBIq0.png
It seems everything is possible if you're fearless about CRAM dots.
I'm lazy :P It's not just implementing that without breaking the existing the raster effects, I'd have to figure out where the heck the code is in the first place and I can't be bothered right now honestly.Quote:
Originally Posted by Pyron
Are the CRAM dots totally unavoidable when changing palette during hsync ? Or do they appear only when you change too much entries ?
They always appear, the trick is keeping them either in the border area (where you can't see them) or somehow covering them up with noisy graphics (like water in Sonic 1 and 2). Or just hope nobody notices (Samurai Shodown :P). Note that during active scan there are 18 slots per line, of which only 3 are in border area (short of resorting to weird things that are a pain in the ass to do), so it isn't trivial to change palette mid-screen without visible CRAM dots.
Note that CRAM dots show up even in vblank, there are some games that intentionally push palette updates down just so the dots aren't visible (especially in PAL, where the border area below tends to be visible).