Why didn't Sega bother porting System 32 games to the 32X?

http://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=709

Games like Arabian Fight and GA:RODA could've used the Team Player to give us 4 player beat em ups something we never had during the 16-Bit days. Other than Yu Yu Hakusho but that game never made it here. Instead Sega ported older games such as Space Harrier and After Burner 2 great games but were around 6 years old and we had decent ports on the Genesis already. Alot of these gamers were 1 to 2 years old and had no chance at making good ports on the Genesis.

And after seeing how well DKC did for the SNES would it not hurt for Sega to can Chaotix and go the CGI route with a real Sonic game for the 32X. Sega said that the 32X was 40X faster than the Genesis. I don't know how true that was or what variable factored in but logic says whip this game up and you can probably move alot of units since Sonic was the best selling series on the Genesis by far.

"Space Harrier and "After Burner" were already taxing the 32X hardware to begin with; especially AF which was reduced to 30FPS for the 32X port (from the coin-op's 60 FPS). System 32, being Sega's most powerful 2D arcade board and easily outstripping Capcom's CPS boards and SNK's Neo-Geo hardware, was too much for the 32X to handle. Unless Rutubo Games (who developed the aforementioned 32X ports of SH and AF) could pull off a miracle, but they barely got SH and AF running at near-arcade perfect on the 32X.

Sega Saturn was the console that was inspired by the 2D monstrocity that was System 32, and thus was the best console suited to play System 32 ports.

The 32X was originally going to be designed on a system like the System 16 or 18 and for it to use dual 68000 CPU's they ended up chaging that

looking at the hardware specs http://www.system16.com/hardware.php?id=709

There's no reason why 32X couldn't run those games, other than Sega rush released mostly all the 32X games.

Look at the spec closer:

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Board Features : 4 BG planes and technically infinite sprites of arbitrary size, BG planes can all be scaled and linescrolled, alpha blending, global RGB brightness control.

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The 32X would have a hard time dealing with a game making widespread use of those features. The 32X has one plane which is mixed with the two BG planes and one sprite plane from the Genesis. It doesn't say how much memory it had, but for the above quote to be true, it had to have had much more memory than the 32X. Porting the games would have been difficult if the games used all those BG planes, sprites, and memory. It's not the processor that's the problem, it's everything else.

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Originally Posted by Chilly Willy

Look at the spec closer:



The 32X would have a hard time dealing with a game making widespread use of those features. The 32X has one plane which is mixed with the two BG planes and one sprite plane from the Genesis. It doesn't say how much memory it had, but for the above quote to be true, it had to have had much more memory than the 32X. Porting the games would have been difficult if the games used all those BG planes, sprites, and memory. It's not the processor that's the problem, it's everything else.

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So 32X was more of a 3D machine than a 2D sprite power house. Am I correct?

Maybe they would've had to cut sum shit out but I still think we could've gotten good solid ports.

if the backgrounds would have mostly put onto the MD VDP shoulders and sprites for 32X, things could work out.

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Maybe they would've had to cut sum shit out but I still think we could've gotten good solid ports.

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You don't understand. The 32x has very little memory. Sprite frames and BG tiles can really eat up memory. Those sprites are using 254 colors (0= transparent, 255= end of horizontal line). The 32x only has 256k of memory. You're not going to be able fit all that. If you start offsetting some stuff to the Genesis VDP, you're going to have lots color loss in those areas. Accessing ROM is *extremely* slow and isn't really a viable option - especially in those cases. It's not as simple as having the second CPU fetch from the ROM when needed. The master SH2 might have priority over the secondary SH2, but it can't stop the secondary SH2 in a middle of a instruction.

Space Harrier and After Burner have very little overall sprite data. The 32x can scale them in realtime so it's not so much a big deal and saves tons of space. But even with that given muscle, the games were still running at 30hz and offsetting a BG layer to the Genesis VDP.

You're not going to get exact ports. Or even ports that just "cut sum shit out". One way or another, there's going to more than just 'sum' stuff cut out.

Given the limited amount of ram on the 32x, it's strength lies in mostly flat shaded or non textured polygon engines (and probably what the 32x was original designed for, if you go with the theory that it was an upgrade to the virtual racing chip).

So basically the 32X was just a faster SNES when it comes to 2D games?

The 32X was a 32X. You can't really compare it to other consoles because it's not like other consoles. That's probably why many of its games aren't nearly as good as they could be - they were just ports with devs trying to tell themselves: The 32X is just like a faster SNES.

If you want to know what the 32X is like, it's like a Genesis with a 32X add-on.

Hey Tom I don't think there was much on the screen if anything at all from the Genesis in After Burner. Maybe the score. I know the hand on the joystick in the title/demo is Genesis.

The 32X is wicked sick and all you need is a RAM cart and it can do anything. :)

We have an article that speculates on this very topic. Ah, what could have been...

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Originally Posted by Joe Redifer

Hey Tom I don't think there was much on the screen if anything at all from the Genesis in After Burner. Maybe the score. I know the hand on the joystick in the title/demo is Genesis.

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I think you're right on After Burner. It was Space Harrier that has the additional mountains in the far back layer, right?

Yes, Space Harrier had the mountains/BG (both layers) made by the Genesis but not the color gradients of the sky itself. Oh, and all of the text was made by the Genesis using blast processing.