Sega Genesis games with Mode-7 like effects

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Originally Posted by Vector

Well, SNES can't do GH, add that. Even though they are creating it. MD does a lot esp without chips. Bad apple is awesome. That Star Fox MD with no chips is impressive. There is plenty to put in our new Genesis Does commercial.

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Wait, what game is "GH" referring to here?

And yes, there's lots the MD can do (or do better) without added hardware, including many "mundane" things applying to "normal" 2D games. (it has a lot of advantages for animation -better VRAM bandwidth and better pixel format and CPU resources for doing sprite/tile compression) Then there's the advantages in an actually useful higher res mode, much more flexible sprites (better for almost any circumstances that matter). And all that in spite of being 2 years older tech and significantly cheaper to manufacture.

On the topic of Star Fox though, a purely software rendered counterpart on the MD is going to fall short of the SNES overall (it'll be interesting to see how well Stef managed it though). But also interesting is that, had some sort of add-on chip been used, it would take far less to get the MD up to Super FX quality 3D (or slightly better in some aspects) than the SNES . . . like something on the level of cost/complexity as the DSP-1 Nintendo was using in 1990/91. (also meaning Star Fox could have been done on the MD around 2 years earlier than the SNES and at reasonable cost . . . and considerably cheaper than Super FX later on)

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Originally Posted by Black_Tiger

There's the Masaya logo in Target Earth. Nothing else may be happening, but it is impressive nonetheless (especially since you can control it).

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You can control it?

In any case, that's small enough that it probably wouldn't have been too wasteful to animate the rotation and just do the scaling/raster perspective effects in realtime. (actually, given some of the comments I've read about Pier Solar's design, I get the feeling that it's not using realtime rotation either . . . there's mention of that mini game terrain map eating up tons of ROM space, which could imply it's pre-rotated animation that's just being scaled in realtime)

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Originally Posted by Vector

Gunstar Heroes.

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And I stated a snes demo is being made of it, but it's fully functional and great on md.

Yep, the NCS Masaya logo in Target Earth has a code that lets you scale and rotate and stretch it. It only gets to a certain size, so there is no direct comparison with something like SNES Mode 7. Still, it's cool they let you do that, it at least proves that it is real time scaling, rotating and distorting.

Kitty or others, have any more suggestions than the games and parts me and others provided ? Would help out. Be cool to see video this weekend.

I am usually a little slower with my videos than that, but yeah if we get a handful of scenes that we want recorded I can pop up a quick and dirty version by this weekend.

Anybody have a hd or great quality version of Genesis Does commercial ?

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Originally Posted by Vector

Anybody have a hd or great quality version of Genesis Does commercial ?

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All you need is a black background and white font. Just rip the best audio you can find.

http://lazytechguys.com/wp-content/u...Campaign-2.jpg

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Originally Posted by Vector

http://lazytechguys.com/wp-content/u...Campaign-2.jpg

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That reminds me, "Spider-Man" must've been in development for quite awhile if it was being advertised as early as Spring 1990 (which is where the above ad dated from). It wasn't released until Summer/Fall 1991 I believe. Heard it sold really well too.

I just re-purchased a Spider-Man cartridge at my local retro store for $4. I remember really liking it when it first came out. I'm looking forward to playing it again on original hardware, and this time it will remain in my collection. My 6 year old son loves playing Genesis, and he's into Spider-Man, so he should enjoy it too. His favorite right now is The Adventures of Batman & Robin. People here are right - there are some great effects in that game. I missed it when it originally came out (probably because I wasn't really into Batman when I was a kid), but I bought that one for $4 as well. It even had the manual, and someone cut up the cardboard box to make the front, back, and one side fit into a Genesis clamshell. It actually came out really good, even though I would never alter an original box myself.

This Mode 7 was "lame" or "retarded" stuff is laughable. If you were 10 or 12 years old or whatever, you thought Mode 7 was awesome and it impressed the hell out of you. Hindsight is 20-20. If you had a Genesis and your friend had a SNES, you were jealous of "his Mode 7." Case closed.

I honestly never thought Mode 7 was great or impressive. There are some games that use it well, but for the most part I don't like it. I don't get how other people aren't bothered by everything being flat. The first time I played F-Zero, I wondered why lines on the ground affected hover cars.

Mode 7 is mostly impressive technically because of the framerate and the fact that it can turn 360 degrees when they use it for floors. Aside from that it convinced Nintendo fans the world over that the SNES was as powerful as the NEO GEO and Super Scaler Arcade games. Somehow they never noticed that "sprites" only scaled in empty scenes, or that the screen throw in Turtles in Time is just a three frame animation.

Mode-7 in it's 3D floor usage was pretty impressive. When it was used in shit like the rotating level in SC4 I just wanted it do die horribly. All other effects I could tell something was off, I used to think the SNES couldn't scale sprites without using a ton of processing power since the backgrounds always turned to shit hahaha.

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Originally Posted by DarkDragon

This Mode 7 was "lame" or "retarded" stuff is laughable. If you were 10 or 12 years old or whatever, you thought Mode 7 was awesome and it impressed the hell out of you. Hindsight is 20-20. If you had a Genesis and your friend had a SNES, you were jealous of "his Mode 7." Case closed.

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I feel the same way, I still think that mode 7 is cool, even if it is lower res than the rest of the game.

Cool mod-7 trick,
If you face your hand wide open in front of you. Then slowly bend it backwards, you well have mode 7 right in front of you!

This Genesis Does 2.0 commercial with star fox md, bad apple video, red zone, p cotton, peir solar and other stuff with no additional hardware will get Nintendo freaks riled up. Can't wait.

I posted these before, they might mention something we forgot. Or if you just want to read out of boredom they are a good read.

http://www.racketboy.com/retro/sega/...graphics-sound
http://www.racketboy.com/retro/games...-limits-part-1
http://www.racketboy.com/retro/games...-limits-part-2

Little off topic but

"All The Games That Could Have Been – The 32X was killed off very early in its life and there were a number of promising games that were slated for the 32X. Some examples are Alien Trilogy, Alien vs Predator, Castlevania V, Darkstalkers, and Virtua Hampster."

I was never jealous of SNES owners, I owned a SNES... and Genesis and TG-16. Mode 7 3D stuff when done well was cool, but taken for granted. The SNES just did it, so it was no big deal. I was more impressed by quality graphic art. Superfluous Mode 7 and transparency effects, the kind that screamed tacked on/forced, or were poorly implemented only hurt the games they appeared in.

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Originally Posted by Vector

This Genesis Does 2.0 commercial with star fox md, bad apple video, red zone, p cotton, peir solar and other stuff with no additional hardware will get Nintendo freaks riled up. Can't wait.

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Unless it contains Genesis ports of Yoshi's Island, Chrono Tigger, Super Mario Kart, Donkey Kong Country 3, etc, then none will care.

The only games that I really liked the Mode-7 in were Contra III (the giant jumping/flying spider boss thing, overhead) and F-zero.

It was a odd choice to use if for 3D racing tracks and such on its own as the walls and such would appear flat. *cough* Mario Kart *cough*

The overhead levels in Contra 3 ruined the game. Give me hard corps any day.

Never said they were any good, just that it was one of the few times mode-7 scaling and rotation wowed me :P

Back then I hadn't even heard about Hard Corps but we did play a lot of Shatterhand and Vectorman.

What I find funny is that all Nintendo needed to do to make road side objects not "flat" is use animated Sprites just like other line scroll racers. With the SNES' supposed sprite limit being so high there should have been plenty of sprites to put on that Mode 7 floor for characters and for road side objects. Even though they wouldn't scale, with enough frames of animation the effect would have been very good. I guess Mode 7 wasn't that resource friendly though.

It could've been almost as impressive as Soulstar :B

But it would most probably be a bit choppier in the scaling department.

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Originally Posted by sheath

What I find funny is that all Nintendo needed to do to make road side objects not "flat" is use animated Sprites just like other line scroll racers. With the SNES' supposed sprite limit being so high there should have been plenty of sprites to put on that Mode 7 floor for characters and for road side objects. Even though they wouldn't scale, with enough frames of animation the effect would have been very good. I guess Mode 7 wasn't that resource friendly though.

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Mario Kart did do road side objects, just not many of them. It's definitely a matter of ROM space, and also remember that the pixel format of the SNES and the CPU performance made compression difficult too, especially if you didn't want load times. (the decent amount of work RAM gives you some leeway for "slow" decompression to buffer into, but the issue of load times meant that wasn't often used -plus DRAM is slower than ROM in later games so the VDP should DMA faster from ROM in those cases)
And, of course, practically speaking, the SNES's sprite capabilities aren't really better than the MD at all, even more so if you want to optimize around animation with a large number of sizes. (only 2 sizes and must be square, so a LOT of trade-offs for "small" to "large" scaled objects -tons of wasted pixel bandwidth and VRAM for mostly transparent large sprites or using more small sprites to build up larger ones) :p

Actually, it might have been really neat to see a Super FX game using mode 7 for the track and a bunch of realtime scaled animation rendered to sprites. (or polygonal models rendered to sprite cells for that matter) That probably would have looked and played a lot better (at least to most people) than Stunt Race FX or Dirt Trax.
And you'd have all 8 sprite palettes to work with rather than a 15 color framebuffer later. (albeit Stunt Race, Dirt Trax, and Doom used the 8-bpp tilemap modes rendering a painful 8 bitplanes . . . though the Super FX probably has some optimization for dealing with planar graphics at least, it would still take 2x the bandwidth to render and without any of the advantages of chunky pixels -too bad there's no Super FX games rendering to a mode 7 buffer -8-bit chunky pixels- to compare things)

And OTOH, roadside objects can ruin some racing stages if the hit detection isn't forgiving for players. (you can get stuck behind dense rows of objects in BC Racers and it's really painful in a couple stages)

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Originally Posted by Vector

And I stated a snes demo is being made of it, but it's fully functional and great on md.

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Oh, Gunstar Heroes. There's a ton of stuff in that game (or any MD game with decent -let alone heavy- optimization around the hardware's strengths) that couldn't be done as well on the SNES . . . or at all in some cases. (it definitely won't be able to pull off sprites in the same way without more flicker/tearing, and resolution will be lower) And on vanilla SNES hardware, there's even more than you'd probably have to compromise, and even more if you limited ROM size, and even more still if you limited ROM speed. (3.58 vs 2.68 MHz makes a real difference)

That has nothing to do with "mode 7" style effects though.

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Originally Posted by sheath

Yep, the NCS Masaya logo in Target Earth has a code that lets you scale and rotate and stretch it. It only gets to a certain size, so there is no direct comparison with something like SNES Mode 7. Still, it's cool they let you do that, it at least proves that it is real time scaling, rotating and distorting.

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I'm sorry, but what you describe doesn't prove anything, but that you can control what appears on screen. It could still be partially or completely prerendered, though I'd tend to lean towards realtime scaling (or software rendered animation frames loaded/buffered ahead of time -but the lack of load time says probably not) and rotation being animated. (so a bunch of animation frames with realtime scaling) The slowdown as the image gets bigger would also imply software scaling, and being limited to a specific size could imply only shrinking (like Neo Geo or System-16) and also a fixed (small) framebuffer size. And animating just the rotation wouldn't waste that much ROM, especially for compressed animation. (and decompressing could easily be much less intensive than software rotation)

There's nothing specific to disprove realtime rotation either, but it's just hard to say either way. Now, if there were examples of hacks that replaced that insignia with another texture (and not a series of prerotated animation frames) and THAT showed similar rotation, then we'd certainly be sure. ;)

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Originally Posted by Kamahl

Mode-7 in it's 3D floor usage was pretty impressive. When it was used in shit like the rotating level in SC4 I just wanted it do die horribly. All other effects I could tell something was off, I used to think the SNES couldn't scale sprites without using a ton of processing power since the backgrounds always turned to shit hahaha.

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How about the way Super Mario World used it. :p

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Originally Posted by kool kitty89

How about the way Super Mario World used it. :p

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"I used to think the SNES couldn't scale sprites without using a ton of processing power since the backgrounds always turned to shit hahaha"
;)
To be fair though, SMW already used the "use sprites as the background" trick which looked ok, but it's one of the few games that can get away with it. Yoshi's Island and Mr Nutz could too.

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Originally Posted by kool kitty89

Oh, Gunstar Heroes. There's a ton of stuff in that game (or any MD game with decent -let alone heavy- optimization around the hardware's strengths) that couldn't be done as well on the SNES . . . or at all in some cases. (it definitely won't be able to pull off sprites in the same way without more flicker/tearing, and resolution will be lower) And on vanilla SNES hardware, there's even more than you'd probably have to compromise, and even more if you limited ROM size, and even more still if you limited ROM speed. (3.58 vs 2.68 MHz makes a real difference)

That has nothing to do with "mode 7" style effects though.

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It doesn't have to, I just added it to list for Genesis Does 2.0 commercial :cool: Any recommendations for it besides ones we typed ?

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Originally Posted by Kamahl

"I used to think the SNES couldn't scale sprites without using a ton of processing power since the backgrounds always turned to shit hahaha"
;)
To be fair though, SMW already used the "use sprites as the background" trick which looked ok, but it's one of the few games that can get away with it. Yoshi's Island and Mr Nutz could too.

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Yoshi's island also did a lot of Super FX rendered scaling/rotation effects.

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Originally Posted by kool kitty89

Yoshi's island also did a lot of Super FX rendered scaling/rotation effects.

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But bowser is a mode-7 effect.

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Originally Posted by Kamahl

But bowser is a mode-7 effect.

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I hadn't really scrutinized it before, but yeah, there's several bosses that use mode 7 . . . or at least probably do. (I haven't checked them all) Hookbill Koopa looks like it probably does that, and Raphael The Raven must be using mode 7. (it's a solid rotating full-screen BG, probably one of the better examples of that gimmick too, especially since it rotates FAST, unlike the painfully slow and choppy examples like Castlevania IV and a few others -and it's a boss battle, not a long stage segment)

Also interesting to note that the example with the Raven is something both the Jaguar and Sega CD would have struggled with in terms of framerate. (a full 256x224 rendered frame with a rotated texture -Jaguar might have been able to manage 30 FPS using over 70% of the bus time for just that BG, but Sega CD would be screwed at that screen size due to the DMA bandwidth constraints it'd be 4 FPS tops in H32 . . . you'd DEFINITELY want to clip the screen for something like that)

I don't think this has been addressed yet - Can someone explain to me why most games clip the first row of tiles when the famous "wobble" effects are used? I guess it must have something to do with masking corrupted tiles or something similar.

Wobble? You mean the "tilt" effects done with column scroll combined with animation? (like Angel Island in the Knuckles Mecha Sonic fight or Cheshire Cart boss in Batman and Robin, etc)

I can't really think of there consistently being missing rows of tiles as you describe, though. (there are some games that clip the screen, but nothing directly related to column scroll -clipping the screen is mainly due to increase vblank time and thus increase bandwdith for updating VRAM, hence why ASIC-heavy Sega CD games, several animation-heavy fighting games, and several 3D games on the MD do that -including Virtua Racing)

No, the first column (not row) of tiles on the left is missing whenever this effect happens. It's because these tiles get glitchy if they don't mask them.

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Originally Posted by Joe Redifer

No, the first column (not row) of tiles on the left is missing whenever this effect happens. It's because these tiles get glitchy if they don't mask them.

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Thanks for the explanation - and it looks like I wasn't being entirely clear aside from my confusing rows with columns (which I do far too often. :p). What I meant was graphics tilting or seesawing, such as the robot shaking the train in Contra Hard Corps, the diplodocus strage in Chuck Rock 2, or the floor tilting while fighting the zeppelin cannons in The Adventures of Batman & Robin. Clearly, there are "wobble" effects where this doesn't happen such as the Cheshire cat fight or the wobbly balloon animal in Dynamite Headdy.

Joe already answered, there's a bug on the VDP for the first column. Notice that cheshire cat isn't fullscreen, so the first column isn't affected.

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Originally Posted by Kamahl

Joe already answered, there's a bug on the VDP for the first column. Notice that cheshire cat isn't fullscreen, so the first column isn't affected.

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Huh, I thought Stef mentioned this was only a problem in H32, not H40. (in the Star Fox topic)

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Originally Posted by kool kitty89

Huh, I thought Stef mentioned this was only a problem in H32, not H40. (in the Star Fox topic)

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Might be, still, it's only the first column that's affected.

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Originally Posted by kool kitty89

Also interesting to note that the example with the Raven is something both the Jaguar and Sega CD would have struggled with in terms of framerate. (a full 256x224 rendered frame with a rotated texture -Jaguar might have been able to manage 30 FPS using over 70% of the bus time for just that BG, but Sega CD would be screwed at that screen size due to the DMA bandwidth constraints it'd be 4 FPS tops in H32 . . . you'd DEFINITELY want to clip the screen for something like that)

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Yoshi's Island used the 20mhz superfx2 though. That was the main reason why that game run just so damn fast with all the advanced graphics. It also did a lot of other type of clever things, like using raster fx for the walls that smash you instead of polygons. That effect would've looked awful if they tried doing it with polygons.

I'm pretty sure that I remember at least one Megadrive game doing the Touch Fuzzy effect, though.

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Originally Posted by kool kitty89

Huh, I thought Stef mentioned this was only a problem in H32, not H40. (in the Star Fox topic)

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Nope, the problem also exists in H40 mode but then i can easily hide it as i would keep the 256x160 rendering resolution.
In H32 mode i have to reduce the horizontal resolution to hide it.

In H40 mode the overscan should mask most of that problem. I don't think I have seen many games that showed any game content within the first thirty or so pixels on the left side.