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

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Originally Posted by Black_Tiger

Their is no trade off for color use as gamevet theorized.

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Of course there is a trade off. More colors = more memory = less resources for other things, like screen resolution.

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Hundreds of PC Engine games use resolutions higher than the Mega Drive can do (more like 30%) and some also run at "only" 320 x 224+. Someone on here checked the resolutions of the Genesis/Sega-CD library and found that around 30% ran at 256 x 224.

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I don't believe these numbers. I know the Genesis library very well and it's absurd to think about 30% of games running at 256x224. More like 5% or less, if I have to guess.

I also doubt that "hundreds of PC Engine games use resolutions higher than the Mega Drive". I would be surprised if more than a dozen runs at a resolution higher than 320.

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The number one reason games use lower resolutions is the same as why Mega Drive SFII ports are lowest resolution: games have budgets. Why make the same game require twice as big a rom when all you have to lose is your profit margin.

The other reason exclusive for PC Engine is that most of its library is on CD, which only allows you a tiny space to run content out of. When the Arcade Card finally arrived games that supported it were of two extremes: not making much use of the extra space at all or games so huge that the space was still not enough.

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So, since the budge for the memory was a concern for every company at that time, using a lower resolution was a trade off...

Even so, are you saying that PC Engine games could be using 320 (or higher), if there was enough ROM memory, without impacting any other aspect of the game?

He’s saying that once the PCE got the larger memory Arcade card for the CD, that memory space needed for higher resolution display modes wasn’t an issue. A lot of PC Engine games had to fit on HU cards, and I believe the largest was a bulked up 20 meg card for Street Fighter 2. It looked like a PSP battery when it swells up.

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Originally Posted by gamevet

He’s saying that once the PCE got the larger memory Arcade card for the CD, that memory space needed for higher resolution display modes wasn’t an issue. A lot of PC Engine games had to fit on HU cards, and I believe the largest was a bulked up 20 meg card for Street Fighter 2. It looked like a PSP battery when it swells up.

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Are you sure? Because of the 9 games released for the Arcade CD-ROM², only Art of Fighting and Madou Monogatari I: Honou no Sotsuenji seems to use a higher resolution mode, and this last one have huge borders around the screen.

It seems there are only 29 games using the low resolution mode on the Mega Drive. List:

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Bart's Nightmare
Krusty's Super Fun House
Megaman the Wiley Wars
Midnight Resistance
Mighty Morphin Power Rangers
Monster World 4
New Zealand Story
Pat Riley Basketball
Road Rash
Saturday Night Slam Masters
Scooby Doo
Shadow of the Beast 2
Shining on the Darkness
Shining Force
Shining Force 2
Snake Rattle and Roll
Snow Bros.
Sol Deace
Splatterhouse 3
Star Trek: The Next Generation
Street Fighter 2’:champion edition
Super Street Fighter 2:The new challengers
Super Monaco GP
Super Volleyball
Super Battleship
Super Battletank
Sunset Riders
Virtual Bart
Wonder Boy in Monster World

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Considering a total of 900 games were released for the system, that would be only 3.2% of games using the low resolution mode. And not 30% like was said ;)

Where is Addams Family?
Where is Chase HQ II?
Where are Fatal Fury and Fatal Fury 2?
Where is G-Loc?
Where is Kawasaki Superbike Challenge?
Where is Lemmings?
Where are the two Lotus games?
Where is the Muhammad Ali game?
Where is Outlander?
Where is OutRun 2019?
Where are Sonic 2, Sonic 3D, Sonic CD? (see: special stages)
Where is Super Monaco GP II? (it wasn't just the first one)
Where is Wani Wani World?
Where is Worms?

This isn't an even remotely exhaustive list, I just went check a few games and looked at which ones made use of 256px wide mode. Stop bullshitting.

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Originally Posted by turboxray

It took gasega68k a bit to work it out, and top of that we're in an age where a lot of the tricks are already known (there are plenty of write ups of how to do fast scaling/rotation, even on the 68k). That, and almost all Japanese game companies, honestly, weren't optimal coders. Great with game development/design, not so great with optimizations IMO. Euro developers had crazy optimization techniques, but crappy games IMO haha. Even with demoscene nowadays for retro systems; there really isn't anything new out there - just improvements/variations on old stuff that's known now. A single homebrewer/coder today doesn't have deadlines like developers BITD. And there's also the size. The G-Zero demo is almost 4megabits. No enemies, one map? You're gonna need a pretty big rom for a production game.

I absolutely LOVE the tech gasega68k has pulled off. But honestly, 1/4 the resolution of SNES mode 7? At less than half the frame rate? With 16 colors vs 256 colors + color math (transparency, fading, etc) on the SNES? Impressive as it is, and it definitely is, it would have give SNES fans and magazines all the more to harp on the Genesis/MD.

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About G-Zero it would be great if Genesis had something like that in commercial days, in the early 90's the vast majority of us were just a bunch of primary school kids, who really never cared about resolution and number of colors in a single plane? The gaming magazines at the time. were not well known for their technical proficiency,
i doubt much that they would have a negative stance against the game.

Gasega promised us a 2 player mode, something that never happened in the original, i would give him a chance.

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Originally Posted by Sik

Where is Addams Family?
Where is Chase HQ II?
Where are Fatal Fury and Fatal Fury 2?
Where is G-Loc?
Where is Kawasaki Superbike Challenge?
Where is Lemmings?
Where are the two Lotus games?
Where is the Muhammad Ali game?
Where is Outlander?
Where is OutRun 2019?
Where are Sonic 2, Sonic 3D, Sonic CD? (see: special stages)
Where is Super Monaco GP II? (it wasn't just the first one)
Where is Wani Wani World?
Where is Worms?

This isn't an even remotely exhaustive list, I just went check a few games and looked at which ones made use of 256px wide mode. Stop bullshitting.

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Here's a longer list although it still misses some of the examples you presented:
http://www.firebrandx.com/downloads/...-Mode-List.txt

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Originally Posted by tisurame

Of course there is a trade off. More colors = more memory = less resources for other things, like screen resolution.

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As turboxray explained the PC Engine doesn't work like that.

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I don't believe these numbers. I know the Genesis library very well and it's absurd to think about 30% of games running at 256x224. More like 5% or less, if I have to guess.

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I believe that the person who checked the North American library made a dedicated thread. There are roughly 900 North American Genesis and Sega-CD games. Do you honestly believe that only 45 run in the lower resolution?

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I also doubt that "hundreds of PC Engine games use resolutions higher than the Mega Drive". I would be surprised if more than a dozen runs at a resolution higher than 320.

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It's difficult getting screenshots in proper resolutions, but here's a couple dozen:


https://i.ibb.co/MSmbbXr/336-1.png
https://i.ibb.co/4jDspM2/336-2.png
https://i.ibb.co/R604KkM/336-3.png
https://i.ibb.co/WzC7dKx/336-4.png
https://i.ibb.co/QDs41f6/336-5.png
https://i.ibb.co/0G0sWmp/336-6.png
https://i.ibb.co/4JBHkLv/336-7.png
https://i.ibb.co/8K9zbCj/344-1.png
https://i.ibb.co/wMyr5Wv/344-2.png
https://i.ibb.co/5K1mkCk/352-1.png
https://i.ibb.co/z6BqszS/352.gif
https://i.ibb.co/qYvb6sD/352-2.png
https://i.ibb.co/5RZCDQs/352-3.png
https://i.ibb.co/fCSN94c/352-4.gif
https://i.ibb.co/YRdYYqs/352-5.png
https://i.ibb.co/0Jh2MLb/352-6.png
https://i.ibb.co/WggYkvx/352-7.png
https://i.ibb.co/MsnyVWw/352-8.png
https://i.ibb.co/Z2rCgyM/352-9.png
https://i.ibb.co/hy5M0NT/352-10.png
https://i.ibb.co/NLjcGcV/368-1.png
https://i.ibb.co/f8D0Ky5/512-1.png
https://i.ibb.co/hZFwkqP/512-2.png
https://i.ibb.co/f8sGxF2/512-3.png

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So, since the budge for the memory was a concern for every company at that time, using a lower resolution was a trade off...

Even so, are you saying that PC Engine games could be using 320 (or higher), if there was enough ROM memory, without impacting any other aspect of the game?

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The specs remain the same, but English programmers recently discovered that there are quirks with some of the 96 resolutions. Some of the higher resolutions lose some sprite bandwidth if you draw a screen in the same order. They figured out how to arrange it so that you still have normal sprite limits under those though. It turns out that the original PCE version of R-Type actually has less sprite bandwidth than the hardware is capable of because of this. It sounds like they didn't figure out the work around when putting together the TG-16 version, so they just dropped the resolution a bit, but it might not have gained anything other than having fewer sprites visible.

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Originally Posted by tisurame

Considering a total of 900 games were released for the system, that would be only 3.2% of games using the low resolution mode. And not 30% like was said ;)

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vgmuseum isn't comprehensive, but since I already had it open I quickly checked the games they happen to have under # and A before going to bed. Of the 56 listings, some of which were duplicates (alternate regions), 17 unique/non-duplicate games used 256-pixel wide resolution.

EDIT: 22 more under "B".

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Originally Posted by tisurame

It seems there are only 29 games using the low resolution mode on the Mega Drive. List:



Considering a total of 900 games were released for the system, that would be only 3.2% of games using the low resolution mode. And not 30% like was said ;)

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Maybe for the cart games, but you have to include Sega CD games that used FMV. Was a game like Dragon's Lair, running at a lower resolution?

Fair enough. There are more games using 256x224 on the Mega Drive than I expected. Something around 20%, it seems. And a large number are ports from other systems that could be using 256x224 just for laziness (like Street Fighter 2).

But the point remains: the large majority runs at a higher resolution.

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Originally Posted by Black_Tiger

It's difficult getting screenshots in proper resolutions, but here's a couple dozen:

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Some are using huge borders. Others are strategical games with very simple graphics.

There are very few games action games on the PC Engine running at higher resolutions occupying the whole screen.

A higher color pallet is very important and I was regretting SEGA for not making the Mega Drive capable of more, but if the cost of more colors would be lower resolution (and more ROM memory consumption), or any other thing that could be detrimental to the game play experience, I think they made the right decision.

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Originally Posted by tisurame

Fair enough. There are more games using 256x224 on the Mega Drive than I expected. Something around 20%, it seems. And a large number are ports from other systems that could be using 256x224 just for laziness (like Street Fighter 2).

But the point remains: the large majority runs at a higher resolution.



Some are using huge borders. Others are strategical games with very simple graphics.

There are very few games action games on the PC Engine running at higher resolutions occupying the whole screen.

A higher color pallet is very important and I was regretting SEGA for not making the Mega Drive capable of more, but if the cost of more colors would be lower resolution (and more ROM memory consumption), or any other thing that could be detrimental to the game play experience, I think they made the right decision.

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I'm not gonna line item your previous post, but I'll just explain some thing here.

First off, resolutions on a PC verse MD/PCE are different. Yes, they take up more space and yes they take up more processing power.. on a PC. The MD/PCE are tile/cell based. For backgrounds, this is an effective method of compression; repeating tiles. If you change resolutions, the background is just the same set of tiles used over as usual (and further flipped vertically and horizontally). So graphics wise, it's not really taking anymore space. And since both these system increase the clock for processing all these graphics, there's no color loss. PCs and small home computers often couldn't handle higher color with higher resolutions, or whatever options you need to make, because of both video processor clock speed and video memory. This doesn't affect the PCE/MD.

Effectively, for typical games the space really isn't going to increase much because they're tile/cell based. But once you start using tiles, or cells in general, as unique bitmaps that make up a larger unique piece of art - then yes higher res is going to take up more rom space and more vram space. I mean that's pretty obvious. But point is, the extreme edge of that case is max 25% more vram space on the MD (33% more on the PCE), and on the low end is it's like 2-5%. Neither of those reduce color.

Secondly, the PCE has a slight disadvantage to its higher res modes; the sprite pixels per scanline remains fixed regardless of the resolution. So you still have the same sprite bandwidth per scanline of sprite pixels, the number of pixels per scanline has increase, so the ratio is no longer 1:1 - i.e. for the same 'realstate' as 256px mode, you lose 25% sprite 'realstate' in mid res, and 50% in high res. You know, because higher the resolution, the more pixels there are per scanline. The MD has the same proportion for 256px and 320px. You lose nothing in relation to sprites going to 320px mode. MD relays on DMA to get data to vram (optimally, but the CPU can do it manually), and the speed of the DMA also increases. I.e. no loss in benefit there either. So MD is comfortable in both modes, while the PCE sacrifices some sprite sprite bandwidth.

As to what Black_Tiger was referring to; the PCE only has three dot clocks for resolutions (5.37mhz, 7.159mhz, and 10.74mhz). But you can specify the number of lines 'showable' on screen from 1 to 240. You can also specify the number of 'showable' horizontal pixels in units of 8 pixels; from just 8 to all the way to the edge of overscan (for low res mode, I was able to capture ~280px for 5.37mhz mode). What he was saying about the localization of Rtype for US, and some JP ports. Some companies were told full vram speed in mid res mode amounted to overclocking vram, so they put vram in slower mode and clipped the display to try to compensate for this (but they got their math wrong). They were both wrong in their math (calculating that the clipped display gave the VDC enough bandwidth to fetch all 16 cells for the scanline), and wrong about mid res overclocking vram (only 10.74mhz mode does, and it's by ~12ns or such in full vram speed mode). So the games with mid res that did this, show less than the 16 sprite cells per scanline. Usually 12 or 14 cells instead.

US localization of PCE R-type is the worse offender though.. 12 sprite per scanline because they're idiots haha (the PCE JP version runs full 16 cells per scanline). And to top it off, they clipped the output from JP's 352px wide screen down to US's 336px wide screen, but didn't both changing the in-game code for inserting/removing sprites for the virtual window (which is wider than 352px.. probably matches the arcade)! The PCE doesn't give a crap where the sprite is; it simple fetches sprites all the way up to 1024 pixel position - off screen or not. I.e. unnecessary flicker/dropout if you don't manage that effectively against the virtual window. NECs port of Forgotten Worlds is like this too; it still uses the arcades 384+ horizontal virtual window to bring in sprites, increasing the scenario of sprite flicker. They either didn't know or simply didn't care. It took me one simple test to see it happening.

gamevet: More space doesn't give you more colors. It's not like you can say.. I only want to use 64 colors on the PCE so since it can show 482, then I'll get a 7.5x savings. The SNES, Genesis, and PCE all use 4bit pixels for sprite/cells (with the snes having some 2bit modes). What effectively gives their color count rating, is the number of palettes they have access to. 4bit is 16 indices (15 actually, one for transparency). Genesis; 4x15. SNES; 8x15. PCE; 32x15. Okay, if all the cells use the same 4bit pixel but with palettes.. then the palettes must take up a lot of memory right? A single 16 color palette entry for ME/PCE is 18 bytes! BYTES! But lets be realistic and same they didn't bit pack them and used as WORDs; 32bytes! It's not like you have thousands of palettes. And you obviously can't have 1 unique palette per 8x8 pixel cell. Palettes are such a tiny fraction of a fraction of rom space that it's almost non existent compared to everything else. So yes, on the PCE.. it was literally down to the artists. Trust me, I was completely floored when I started hacking and taking apart PCE games, let alone doing homebrew games.. like wtf?? If you've done pixel art with these old systems, then you probably are aware that there's no way you're going to get unique colors in each of those subpalettes; it's just not a thing. Palettes will often have redundant colors in them because an graphic cell might transition between two or more palettes. But limitation is across all three systems. So the more palettes you have, the less that restriction hinders you from having more unique colors.

Back to the Genesis; 320px is used by more games because it simply gives you thee best setup on the Genesis for sprites. The proportion of sprite bandwidth is the same, pixel wise, but the number of cells increase to 20. That alone is more than enough reason to use that mode. For ports, between SNES and Genesis maybe it becomes a concern for PAR, but for games designed from the ground up for these two systems - the res really isn't that big of a deal (although I'm sure pixel artists will argue otherwise haha). Honestly, if it was down to a choice between Genesis having the higher res mode or a 256px mode with double the color - I'd totally take more color. Hell, if you were play your Genesis using rf or composite BITD - you did NOT see more resolution on the Genesis in 320px mode. Genesis simply had crappy composite output (which is higher than RF too).

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Originally Posted by tisurame

Some are using huge borders. Others are strategical games with very simple graphics.
There are very few games action games on the PC Engine running at higher resolutions occupying the whole screen.

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Some? I'm having a hard time figuring out which games have HUGE borders from his examples. Kindly point them out. Oh wait.. you mean one game, not some: Beyond Shadowgate. Did you even look at the pics? Genesis has 224 vertical res inside a 240p window for NTSC. When you see images of Genesis games online,or typically in an emulator, they crop to 224. Look at those PCE images. The system has the same 240p window and ALL those images are shown with that window.. not cropped. So yeah, they're showing more of the 'whole screen' than Genesis games. But even then, that's a ridiculous statement. If anything, those PCE games should have been clipping for overscan but a lot of those example pics are showing more in overscan than Genesis games are able to - yet somehow it's still not enough???

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Some are using huge borders. Others are strategical games with very simple graphics.
There are very few games action games on the PC Engine running at higher resolutions occupying the whole screen.

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Genesis/MD has hardly any JRPGs compared to PCE/SFC. So they must be the most difficult for the Sega hardware then?

You're now discounting actual graphic quality. Art/detail/shading/color are a waste of resolution but "action" justifies it?

You also just went from "there are only a few" PCE games in higher resolutions to "okay, now only these are the games" in higher resolutions. Those are just some screenshots I recovered from a dead hard drive. There are more "real" games in misc resolutions that you might count, but your narrow frame of mind as to what merits a game's worth indicates you're not really a fan of video games.

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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Originally Posted by turboxray

Some? I'm having a hard time figuring out which games have HUGE borders from his examples. Kindly point them out.

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Sure...

https://i.ibb.co/4jDspM2/336-2.png
https://i.ibb.co/R604KkM/336-3.png
https://i.ibb.co/QDs41f6/336-5.png
https://i.ibb.co/8K9zbCj/344-1.png
https://i.ibb.co/5RZCDQs/352-3.png
https://i.ibb.co/WggYkvx/352-7.png
https://i.ibb.co/hy5M0NT/352-10.png
https://i.ibb.co/NLjcGcV/368-1.png
https://i.ibb.co/hZFwkqP/512-2.png

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Oh wait.. you mean one game, not some: Beyond Shadowgate. Did you even look at the pics? Genesis has 224 vertical res inside a 240p window for NTSC. When you see images of Genesis games online,or typically in an emulator, they crop to 224. Look at those PCE images. The system has the same 240p window and ALL those images are shown with that window.. not cropped. So yeah, they're showing more of the 'whole screen' than Genesis games. But even then, that's a ridiculous statement. If anything, those PCE games should have been clipping for overscan but a lot of those example pics are showing more in overscan than Genesis games are able to - yet somehow it's still not enough???

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Are most PCE games filling the 240p window? If so, that's very nice advantage over the SNES/MD, even if most TVs at that time cropped the picture putting into the overscan area. Most emulator screenshots I'm seeing are x224 only, but maybe it's cropped.

I don't even know what y'all are actually arguing about. 95+% of people wouldn't have been able to see a full 240 lines on anything they had in their homes in the early 90s. CRT overscan can be adjusted but the vast majority of people didn't know how. Some pre-VGA (or multisync) monitors would show it correctly and by default. I'm sure if you dive deep into Usenet you can find one guy who bought a Turbo CD in 1990 and already owned an Apple IIgs or something and had them both on the same monitor. Kudos to Mr. 1990 Trust Fund Kid on his sweet setup.