Yes, but as I was saying, it's an effect that couldn't be duplicated on the other 8 bit consoles, because they lacked the color range of the primitive VCS.
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Yes, but as I was saying, it's an effect that couldn't be duplicated on the other 8 bit consoles, because they lacked the color range of the primitive VCS.
How about this from the humble ZX Spectrum (the system that got me into gaming)
The game wasn't good but the gfx was on another level
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kueN2DMN0J4
I mean, if we're gonna take this out of Mega Drive now…
Q*Bert on Atari 2600:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vkZhWsiHCqM
This may not seem like much… until you remember background can only have two colors yet the cubes at the bottom can have up to 6 different colors + background + Q*Bert. Long ago I read a forum thread where somebody complained about the wide gap across the middle and started calling the programmer lazy for not bothering to fix it, so somebody else decided to go ahead and disassemble the game… and huh, the game is straight up changing the background color across the line to color the cubes and there's pretty much no cycles left for anything else (which is also why enemies have coarse movement, there's no room to draw them on the same lines as the colored parts of the cubes). Lazy?
tbh the Atari 2600 is so limited in hardware that doing anything other than Pong consists of a "special effect" on it.
I usually think that the graphics on the Spectrum were pretty bad for their time, but that was really impressive.Quote:
Originally Posted by Team Andromeda
The Zx Spectrum could so some ace visuals, but it was held back by the colour and its pants sound.Quote:
Originally Posted by gamevet
These looked really good at the time too and as footnote was programmed by John O Biren - Adv of Batman :Mega Drive, Batman Returns, Cliffhanger 3D sections: Mega CD and the 3D sections to Batman: Amiga
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onhV55pUejk
Amazing for 84
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7n7qtErhF-A
Besides the 2600, I don't think any system has been pushed as hard as the spectrum.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQI8Af6Wutg
From what I understand, the more impressive 2600 homebrew is using extra hardware including cpus.Quote:
Originally Posted by Kamahl
This is what the Intellivision is doing without any kind of radical upgrades:
http://youtu.be/Ws0aIlTEql0
http://youtu.be/TYzE0Qhg5Dw
But thenQuote:
Originally Posted by Black_Tiger
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uBJNpvOyo8U
Unless you also include mappers, in which case yeah, any game over 4KB is required to use a mapper. Though I wonder if you're talking about the ARM-powered cartridges instead (where the ARM was actually intended to emulate the mappers because the console is that slow, but homebrew can use it directly as well).
I think one can add the Mega Drive to that. Not so much for the homebrew stuff, but for the incredible stuff developers used to get out of the system back in the day. I mean Adv of Batman & Robin and Redzone are just getting everything out of the hardware and using every clock cycle of the CPUQuote:
Originally Posted by Kamahl
Yeah I was thinking homebrew, but for "back in the day" stuff there is a lot of craziness on the MD for sure. Mega CD too.
There is some crazy HomeBrew stuff on the Jag too, but I don't want to discredit or put down anyone's hard work, but I've always gone on what developers did back when the systems were still current and what tech and development tools they had at the time. I can't think of many systems that were pushed as hard as the MD was at the end of its life. The Mega CD was pushed with Soul Star, but I would have loved to have seen what the ASIC chip could have done in standard style platform game pushed really hard , Puggsy and Son of Chuck just give small glimpsesQuote:
Originally Posted by Kamahl
I recognize that I have a certain difficulty to unravel what is happening in this scene:(
https://j.gifs.com/6XRGkQ.gif
It looks like a combination of windowing and blending, but I can't quite tell what goes where either.
It's confusing because the backgrounds are definitely more than 4 colour, which means there are only 3 backgrounds max. But then what is it that makes the sphere effect? There's definitely some blending, on the sides of the sphere.
Granny is the 3rd background (3 colours per tile). The sphere is some windowing trick + blending for sure, but how exactly it is setup is tricky to tell.
The SNES has some capabilities like "Clip colours to black before math" and "Prevent colour math" which can be set "Inside/Outside Window only". That can probably make that effect happen.
The SNES VDP is a horribly convoluted, absolutely amazing piece of engineering.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Sik
I believe CBS used a mapper for Omega Race on the 2600. It was an impressive effort.
Saved due proportions, Cosmic Space Head performs an interesting window effect, IIRC no much Mega Drive games do this trick.
https://j.gifs.com/WL71xW.gif
I'm going to guess that one plane is both the background and the window, with sprites being used for the silhouette (since priority is tile-aligned and sprites can help work around that in those parts). The other plane is the foreground, of course :P
Another way to do it (if you want a moving background) is to use sprites for the whole window, but sprites limits are gonna bite you back at the top and bottom sides of the window.
The Intestinal Distress stage from Earthworm Jim used a similar effect. Lately I've been making an earnest effort to learn 68k assembly and the Sega hardware and the more I learn about it, the more impressed I am with Earthworm Jim's effects.Quote:
Originally Posted by EPSYLON EAGLE
For what's worth it, that particular effect barely takes any CPU time (a sines look-up table is your friend :v). A lot of effects are not about CPU grunt but just clever use of what's there.
I'm still think thats Tides of Time do some amazing effects that's i almost never see in other titles on generation
also artistc direction is outstanding!
https://66.media.tumblr.com/c69e7bf9...dr2mo1_540.gifhttps://i.gifer.com/9B1x.gif
https://www.spriters-resource.com/re...s/63/65640.png
https://cantogamer.files.wordpress.c...cco_u__015.gif
Quote:
Originally Posted by Sik
Probably you are correct, curiously plane B scrolls in some stages, and the window got another silhouette. ;)
https://j.gifs.com/5Q9rXK.gif
One of the guys working on Ecco mentioned something about the Password screen. The one with the wobbly water effect in the background - they got it to look like that accidentally. It was meant to be a simple sine ripple.
Yeah, it's very easy to end up with that when you make the effect way too strong. Sine wave linescrolls are one of the things where you need to use small values as any "subtle" change has a strong effect. In some cases you may even outright use dedicated tables for them so you can offload the required precision out of the sine table you normally use for other things.
Well, can be simple but is very well executed but is not so common to see something like that in others games.Quote:
Originally Posted by Sik
i think that criativity using the resources of console is the strong point here.
I have to say I love the gfx in Wonderdog on the Mega CD, the line scrolling effects are some of the best on the MD/MegaCD
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwOfImIGELg
^^^
It's a nice effect scrolling effect, but this game graphically does nothing that a Mega Drive stock would not do.
Complementing Pyron's post, Ecco Tides of Time, has one of the best shadow applications to generate semi-transparencies.
https://j.gifs.com/k8ZwO5.gif
If you want to impress Sega fans, throw in a shitton of linescroll. Disregard the fact that you don't even need raster effects because there's a dedicated table just for this :vQuote:
Originally Posted by EPSYLON EAGLE
One would hope it would impressive SEGA fans since this is a SEGA board.Fancy parallax and line scrolling were real strong points for the Mega Drive against its rival systems like the Snes, PC Eng and AmigaQuote:
Originally Posted by Sik
The whole point is precisely that it's not hard for the console to do, it was par for the course :P It's one of its most basic functions. It's not impressive when it's trivial to do.
I don't agree. The line scrolling effects on Earthworm Jim 2 and Sonic II are fab (some love ones in the pinball stage of Sonic CD) it was an effect that the MD simply did better than its rivals and in Wonderdog is so well done its added a wonderful layer of depth and almost looked 3D.Quote:
Originally Posted by Sik
One of the biggest letdowns for me with Street Fighter 3 in the Arcades was how it dumped the line scrolling effects on the floor and I thought that took away from SF 3 Gfx a little, compared to the wonderful scrolling effects in CP 2 fighters
Linescrolling can be pretty dope even if the hardware can handle it on its own, you just got to push it up to eleven.
https://i.postimg.cc/020kxrc3/Thunde...Mega-Drive.gif
What are the things that are hard for the hardware to do, anyways?
Realtime calculations like polygons, scaling, rotation, etc.Quote:
Originally Posted by paulojr_mam
Displaying a lot of color while looking good and natural.
Running multiple sound samples at once.
These things contrast with misc raster effects in that there isn't a built-in easy setup/support for them and it's up to the developer to do the work.
I went back to playing Power Drive recently and I've got to ask, does anyone know how they achieved the effect of the headlight beams in the night driving sections?
There's an example at 12:10 in this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHNcXsISZYw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHNcXsISZYw
If I had to guess I'd say that most of the track is in the background layer, and then the light beams are the foreground layer. However its done it looks impressive.
Looks like S/H to me (low priority background + sprites using highlight color, so end result is that background is shadowed except where the lights are).
Yeah it's probably just shadow/highlight. What's more interesting is that the headlight is seamlessly rotating. But I guess they just had three circle sprites overlapping in a mickey mouse head shape.
Thanks for taking the time to watch the video clip and provide an explanation guys. The effect looks quite impressive to me, almost like a SNES transparency, gotta wonder why the trick isn't used more often.
Yeah, it's just three sprites.Quote:
Originally Posted by zyrobs
Because it's tied to layer priority which can make it a pain to manage. It's doable, but it requires planning ahead of time (and in particular, considering to change sprite priority based on location, rather than doing that to the foreground tiles as is the norm).Quote:
Originally Posted by Mad Moham
More details on S/H:
https://plutiedev.com/shadow-highlight
Very cool effect!
https://j.gifs.com/k8ZAAr.gif
I have no idea how it was done: |