"SNES has a more powerful CPU and higher resolution in games than the Genesis"

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Originally Posted by Black_Tiger

The inverse is true when it comes to slowdown. Which is why Yohko's confusing PCE R-Type for SMS R-Type should make you cringe and think through his wacky comments before agreeing.

R-Type for PC Engine is more difficult than the arcade version because of how much less slowdown it has than the cutting edge arcade hardware released released only 9 months earlier. R-Type for PC Engine was released 7 months before the Mega Drive itself, yet it would run like Super Gradius III if it was dropped into the Thunder Force IV engine.

It stands out more like the Neo Geo, as it can handle massive amounts of sprites in any variety of sizes with Giga Power levels of animation, without being plagued by slowdown (not that the Neo Geo itself was always immune). Plus the vibrant color and detail. Sapphire tosses around more than any other non-Neo Geo 16-bit console game (and many actual Neo Geo games) in 1-player mode, but it also handles 2-player co-op just fine.

However, like the Neo Geo, PC Engine and Mega Drive games need large rom sizes to contain enough assets to reach their potential. SNES/SFC games are shaped more by multiple bottlenecks.

But yeah, most of the best PC Engine games aren't in most English roms sets and are rarely seen in motion by people who use the term "moonrunes". So youtube fans pick games like Ordyne instead of Ai Cho Aniki, Final Lap Twin instead of Anearth Fantasy Stories, Tailspin instead of Future Boy Conan, Gunboat instead of Macross Eternal Love Song, etc... and then lament the lack of parallax in every game.

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I guess I missed the part on SMS R-Type, I thought the port was very good considering the hardware. The PCE port is much closer to the arcade but still has sprite dropouts and flicker at busy moments. The real disappointment is the SNES port, graphics look good but there's slowdown in every stage.

Sapphire would be a masterpiece on any 16-bit platform, goes to show that by the mid '90s developers knew how to get the most out of the hardware. The fact that it can load tons of pre-rendered animation from a CD to 2.25 MB of RAM certainly doesn't hurt.

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Originally Posted by axel

My favorite split-screen "racing" on the Genesis is the Vs. mode in Sonic 2, I would have bought an entire game like that with more courses and playable characters.

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It doesn't fit your description exactly but have you played Dashin' Desperadoes?

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Originally Posted by Black_Tiger

But yeah, most of the best PC Engine games aren't in most English roms sets and are rarely seen in motion by people who use the term "moonrunes". So youtube fans pick games like Ordyne instead of Ai Cho Aniki, Final Lap Twin instead of Anearth Fantasy Stories, Tailspin instead of Future Boy Conan, Gunboat instead of Macross Eternal Love Song, etc... and then lament the lack of parallax in every game.

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I don't think that's really accurate. For one thing, Ai Cho Aniki is internet famous for its surreal and homoerotic content -- in my experience, I've seen/heard about Ai Cho Aniki from other people far more often than Ordyne. I happen to own both and people occasionally recognize Ai Cho Aniki IRL but nobody has ever heard of Ordyne. People only talk about Talespin because it's a game based on a popular Disney cartoon from the early 90s, which gets it on a lot of lists, and also is often contrasted with the semi-popular NES game. Whereas Future Boy Conan is an anime from 1978 that very few Westerners know of, nor does it have a more famous game on another platform to invite comparison (there was a 3DO game too but it's even more obscure).

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Originally Posted by j_factor

It doesn't fit your description exactly but have you played Dashin' Desperadoes?

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No I had not but THANK YOU for telling me about it... it's like a split-screen Spin Master on the Genesis! Definitely gotta try this one :)

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Originally Posted by Sik

…

*looks up screenshots*

https://www.mobygames.com/game/amiga...ShotId,173471/

OK yeah there are black borders on the sides. They presumably blend in with the sides of the monitor? (and when watching videos on YouTube, it likes to pad the sides with black too so it blends there as well, and emulators in widescreen will also pad with black borders…)

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The Amiga is running a 7.159mhz pixel dot clock (slightly lower for PAL), same as PCE's mid res mode and higher than Genesis 6.7mhz dot clock mode. So a 320x game on the Amiga has the same screen realstate as 300px on the Genesis 6.7mhz mode, or the equivalent of 240px wide of 256px on common 5.37mhz dot clock of the 8/16bit consoles.

So that means SotB on the Amiga is basically equivalent showing 270px clipped width in 320x mode on the Genesis, or 216px clipped width in 256px mode.

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Originally Posted by axel

I guess I missed the part on SMS R-Type, I thought the port was very good considering the hardware. The PCE port is much closer to the arcade but still has sprite dropouts and flicker at busy moments. The real disappointment is the SNES port, graphics look good but there's slowdown in every stage.

Sapphire would be a masterpiece on any 16-bit platform, goes to show that by the mid '90s developers knew how to get the most out of the hardware. The fact that it can load tons of pre-rendered animation from a CD to 2.25 MB of RAM certainly doesn't hurt.

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PCE has full vram access during active display, but there's no DMA from local to the VDC. If you use the cpu's block transfer instructions, you're limited to 64bytes per scanline. So while yeah you're not limited to vblank for updates, that still cuts more into CPU time than on the Genesis and SNES. That's what makes Sapphire impressive in my opinion (and doing that without slowdown with two players simultaneously). PCE can speed up that rate to 91bytes per scanline transfer if you embedded the graphics as ST1/ST2 opcodes, but you can't do that out of arcade card ram and it also doubles the storage space for graphics. And because of the doubling of size, I don't know of any game that uses that trick (only demos and homebrew).

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Originally Posted by Black_Tiger

As for the border nonsense, console war fanatics here always champion MD games with an ugly 64 pixel wide vertical border. The most common example is Raiden, which runs slower than the PCE version and has half as many sprites at best.

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You're wrong here in terms of the on screen sprites.
The MD version has twice as many sprites as the PCE version in several instances, especially during some of the boss fights. I suppose you mixed it up with the SNES version.
The wave patterns are also much closer to the arcade version in the MD than either PCE or PCE CD version.

You're right about the animation being slower though. And the colors of the original releases are vastly better on the PCE; I only began to enjoy the MD version after fusaru's hack which makes it look very close to the arcade.

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Originally Posted by Barone

You're wrong here in terms of the on screen sprites.
The MD version has twice as many sprites as the PCE version in several instances, especially during some of the boss fights. I suppose you mixed it up with the SNES version.
The wave patterns are also much closer to the arcade version in the MD than either PCE or PCE CD version.

You're right about the animation being slower though. And the colors of the original releases are vastly better on the PCE; I only began to enjoy the MD version after fusaru's hack which makes it look very close to the arcade.

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I spent way too long looking for anything from when I compared versions of the game years ago, but here's something:


Number of enemies counted from appearance of 1st enemy until last enemy before pre-boss music kicks in:

PC ENGINE: 170
ARCADE: 89
GENESIS: 89
SNES: 62


That didn't count all of the shadows separately from the objects casting them in the PC Engine version. If you add in the shadow sprites, I think it's fair to say that the PC Engine version stage 1 has over 3 times as many sprites. I remember taking a screenshot of the PCE version that had over 20 enemy sprites on a single screen. Which is huge when you look at how many total appear in the other versions' first stage. I also remember that they cut out a huge chunk of the stage in the SNES, because of how long it took to scroll. The MD version is very arcade accurate. I'm not a fan of the game in general, but I appreciate the more frantic pace of the PCE version. I also had a Raiden arcade board that I was comparing with way back when. From what I remember, I thought that the odd boss might've tossed a few more bullets in either PCE or MD versions, but they're kinda underwhelming either way. I haven't played through all available difficulties to see how they may vary between versions either.


VCDecide may be terrible, but it's pretty easy to see in this video:


https://youtu.be/5EUUtrQu1Uk

Well, I'll requote your original claim:

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Originally Posted by Black_Tiger

As for the border nonsense, console war fanatics here always champion MD games with an ugly 64 pixel wide vertical border. The most common example is Raiden, which runs slower than the PCE version and has half as many sprites at best.

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And leave this here:
Arcade version - Stage 2 boss (2nd loop):
https://youtu.be/6JOjIBOB8JM?t=2486

Arcade version - Stage 2 boss (3rd loop):
https://youtu.be/-CcELMq26ME?t=4653

MD version - Stage 2 boss on Hard Mode:
https://youtu.be/p9thtumEZSI?t=485

PCE version - Stage 2 boss (2nd loop):
https://youtu.be/swfR9g6pAts?t=2063



Arcade version - Stage 6 mid-boss (3rd loop):
https://youtu.be/-CcELMq26ME?t=5741

MD version - Stage 6 mid-boss on Hard Mode:
https://youtu.be/p9thtumEZSI?t=1716

PCE version - Stage 6 mid-boss (2nd loop):
https://youtu.be/swfR9g6pAts?t=2998


I mean, c'mon, it's pretty different than what you had claimed.

What you actually have is different, stretched enemy waves in the PCE version which can have more enemies in total count depending on the stage, but they're less crowded/dense on the other hand.
And during boss fights, there's some simplification/reduction going on.

Watching that comparison video and that PCE port flickers a lot (and I don't mean the shadows). I'm not sure that's worth praising, of course you can have tons of enemies if you don't care about them blinking all over the place. It's like when people insist that the Saturn Shenmue looks awesome yet ignore its craptastic framerate (and it was mostly a good texturing job rather than 3D detail, so it didn't even really have an excuse for it).

That said, PCE version does seem to have more effort put into it… Heck, starting from the title screen. Though this also says something about how much anybody gave a fuck (remember that PCE and later Super Famicom was were all the attention was going to in Japan)

Also reminds me, I wonder what people would say about Fire Shark? It's easier on Mega Drive than in arcade, but the developers also admitted that it's closer to how they actually wanted the game to play (arcade was harder both because of lack of time to balance the game properly and because it had to be a coin muncher). So is it inferior or not? (bringing this up since I imagine several of these arcade ports were made easier for more reasons than just "the hardware can't cope with it")

I don't know why people find the Raiden comparison interesting. It seems to come up a lot. I guess there aren't that many games on all three 16-bit consoles, but none of the three Raiden ports are great examples for the system they're on. The SNES version is pathetic and the comparison tends to exaggerate how bad the SNES is at shooters. And yet the other two don't exactly shine.

Just play the Playstation version. :p

Is Ys III a fair comparison even tho different teams?

I've always preferred the PCE/TG16 version of Raiden to the Genesis/MD. The stock version for the Gen/MD has such horrible colors; fortunately there's a ROM hack to improve the colors, making it much easier on the eyes.

The SuperCD hack of Raiden on PCE CD pushes around a lot more sprites in higher difficulty modes. We basically found a hidden higher difficulty setting and allowed it to be enabled.. we also found an super easy setting, and that's accessible now too haha.

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Originally Posted by Barone

Well, I'll requote your original claim:


And leave this here:
Arcade version - Stage 2 boss (2nd loop):
https://youtu.be/6JOjIBOB8JM?t=2486

Arcade version - Stage 2 boss (3rd loop):
https://youtu.be/-CcELMq26ME?t=4653

MD version - Stage 2 boss on Hard Mode:
https://youtu.be/p9thtumEZSI?t=485

PCE version - Stage 2 boss (2nd loop):
https://youtu.be/swfR9g6pAts?t=2063



Arcade version - Stage 6 mid-boss (3rd loop):
https://youtu.be/-CcELMq26ME?t=5741

MD version - Stage 6 mid-boss on Hard Mode:
https://youtu.be/p9thtumEZSI?t=1716

PCE version - Stage 6 mid-boss (2nd loop):
https://youtu.be/swfR9g6pAts?t=2998


I mean, c'mon, it's pretty different than what you had claimed.

What you actually have is different, stretched enemy waves in the PCE version which can have more enemies in total count depending on the stage, but they're less crowded/dense on the other hand.
And during boss fights, there's some simplification/reduction going on.

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The stage 6 mid-boss section of the MD version is chugging and the music is dragging because of the slowdown.

I agree with Black_Tiger on this one.

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Originally Posted by turboxray

The SuperCD hack of Raiden on PCE CD pushes around a lot more sprites in higher difficulty modes. We basically found a hidden higher difficulty setting and allowed it to be enabled.. we also found an super easy setting, and that's accessible now too haha.

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Please, is there a link to this hack?

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Originally Posted by Barone

Well, I'll requote your original claim:


And leave this here:
Arcade version - Stage 2 boss (2nd loop):
https://youtu.be/6JOjIBOB8JM?t=2486

Arcade version - Stage 2 boss (3rd loop):
https://youtu.be/-CcELMq26ME?t=4653

MD version - Stage 2 boss on Hard Mode:
https://youtu.be/p9thtumEZSI?t=485

PCE version - Stage 2 boss (2nd loop):
https://youtu.be/swfR9g6pAts?t=2063



Arcade version - Stage 6 mid-boss (3rd loop):
https://youtu.be/-CcELMq26ME?t=5741

MD version - Stage 6 mid-boss on Hard Mode:
https://youtu.be/p9thtumEZSI?t=1716

PCE version - Stage 6 mid-boss (2nd loop):
https://youtu.be/swfR9g6pAts?t=2998


I mean, c'mon, it's pretty different than what you had claimed.

What you actually have is different, stretched enemy waves in the PCE version which can have more enemies in total count depending on the stage, but they're less crowded/dense on the other hand.
And during boss fights, there's some simplification/reduction going on.

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Unfortunately I have very little time each day at my desktop computer and it's only by cutting into my sleep.

The problem with gameplay videos is that the player is doing everything they can to kill enemies, esoecially bosses like these, before they can pull off their various attacks.

The wing attack of the stage 2 boss is very cool, even if it's still just projectiles with different artwork. I'd much rather play against the wing attack of arcade boss, based on what we happen to see in those clips.

It looks like the PC Engine version tosses four wings at you while the outer wings on the boss are still intact and three at a time while their gone. It looks like the Mega Drive version tosses six at a time, but it's hard to tell with the boss at the top of the screen.

It looks like that paeticular attack has more sprite objects with collision in the Mega Drive version (I dont know how the diffuculties line up) and that the PCE vversion has more sprite objects.

I only gets minutes of time to post now and then and my phone browser and/or sega-16 erase the text box when I go to another window, so this is all I can say for now.