TG-16 vs Genny vs Snes.... Animation?

Which system was capable of the best sprite animation? I love sprite art, but I love sprite animation better, and some games in the 16 bit era really did amazing things with animation. Sega had Aladdin, any game with multi jointed sprites, Snes and Sega had earthworm Jim, flashback, blackthorn.

Turbo had gates and lords of thunder, and the arcade card. I know there were a ton of different techniques, but what system really displayed what it could do with sprites? Could any achieve SNK or Capcom levels of animation with the right techniques? Lets forget about the arcade card as that adds the ability to do some great things......well in terms of compared to the other 16 bitters. Could the arcade card handle any of the later Neo games, like king of fighters 94, or metal slug?

Your thoughts?...

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Lets forget about the arcade card as that adds the ability to do some great things......well in terms of compared to the other 16 bitters. Could the arcade card handle any of the later Neo games, like king of fighters 94, or metal slug?

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The arcade card was just more "cart space" for CD projects. Well, a lot more than the previous card. But it adds nothing hardware wise. Just temp storage.

For sprite animation itself, I'd say they are all somewhat equal. SNES and Genesis have DMA to assist in getting that sprite animation update to vram. The PCE(tg16) doesn't have this. But it has something the other two systems don't; it can write to vram at any time during active display. The SNES/GEN have to do updates during non active part of the display (thus the need for a DMA). Some SNES/GEN games make the display height shorter, to allow more DMA time.

For something like Metal Slug, it's more than just animation that's going to be a problem. All the systems are going to have problems with this one. The PCE probably being the most visually cut because there won't be any multiple BG layers. Though detail and color wise in tiles, it should be great (it has a ton of subpalettes similar to the Neo Geo). ALL the consoles are going to have a problem with sprite scanline limit too. The Neo Geo is a monster compared to these other systems, for sprites on a single scanline. The SuperGrafx could probably pull it off closer than all three PCE/SNES/GEN. It has twice the vram and twice the sprite per scanline limit as those three. But out of the main three, Genesis would probably best for optimizing sprite per scanline limit (because of the flexible 8x8 cell management/increment). Though the SNES could optimize mode 1 to use the 3rd BG layer (2bit) for explosions and what not. Cutting down in the sprite scanline limit.

I don't really know much about king of fighters 94. But If it's just a 1 one 1 fighter like the other ports to these home systems, I'd say all three systems could put something comparable out.

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Originally Posted by tomaitheous

The arcade card was just more "cart space" for CD projects. Well, a lot more than the previous card. But it adds nothing hardware wise. Just temp storage.

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Wouldn't that be relevant for sprite animation, though?

SNES can have 16KB of VRAM used for sprites, and you cannot update VRAM at all during active display without getting lovely GFX glitches. There is DMA so you can do realtime updating like lot of games do. There can only be 2 sizes of sprites IIRC.

MD can have whole VRAM used for sprites, you can update VRAM during any part of the display, but its not fast in active display, and there won't be any glitches happening in any condition. You also have DMA to update things. And you can have sprites with 16 sizes.

PCE should be having whole VRAM usable for sprites, and you have constant update rate throughout the frame with no consequences like MD. How many sprites sizes there are is unknown to me as of now... Tom, feed me with knowledge :P !!!

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Originally Posted by tomaitheous

For something like Metal Slug, it's more than just animation that's going to be a problem. All the systems are going to have problems with this one. The PCE probably being the most visually cut because there won't be any multiple BG layers. Though detail and color wise in tiles, it should be great (it has a ton of subpalettes similar to the Neo Geo).

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A little off topic, but something I've been wondering about for a while: Does the Neo Geo use 16-color/4-bit or 256-color/8-bit subpalettes?

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Originally Posted by tomaitheous

Some SNES/GEN games make the display height shorter, to allow more DMA time.

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So that explains why games like Street Fighter II use only 200 lines of resolution. It makes the PAL version of the game look like a widescreen movie.

Sticking with Street fighter 2, considering that the first Snes port was 16 mbs, couldn't they have taken the extra four megs they used for turbo and just add back the animation from the arcade that was cut? They already had the data and storage for the bosses, all they did was make them playable and add some new color and reverb.......

Genny was set at 24 megs, so I wonder why they needed 8 more for the same detail? Plus, looking at alpha 2 on snes, they could have definitely used the arcade sprite size and detail, why not just use a 32 meg board from the start?

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Originally Posted by Keiosquad2

Sticking with Street fighter 2, considering that the first Snes port was 16 mbs, couldn't they have taken the extra four megs they used for turbo and just add back the animation from the arcade that was cut? They already had the data and storage for the bosses, all they did was make them playable and add some new color and reverb.......

Genny was set at 24 megs, so I wonder why they needed 8 more for the same detail? Plus, looking at alpha 2 on snes, they could have definitely used the arcade sprite size and detail, why not just use a 32 meg board from the start?

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Cost factors?

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Originally Posted by Da_Shocker

Cost factors?

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For nintendo, maybe. Not with Sega, at least, I'd like to think not..... It just sucks that true to the arcade ports were not done even though the hardware may have been capable, especially with the Genny, as the arcade sf2 is running off a glorified genesis.....(or basically a neo, take your pic).

I find it hard to believe that a Genesis/Snes is about the same as Capcoms CPS1 hardware..

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Originally Posted by Keiosquad2

Sticking with Street fighter 2, considering that the first Snes port was 16 mbs, couldn't they have taken the extra four megs they used for turbo and just add back the animation from the arcade that was cut? They already had the data and storage for the bosses, all they did was make them playable and add some new color and reverb.......

Genny was set at 24 megs, so I wonder why they needed 8 more for the same detail? Plus, looking at alpha 2 on snes, they could have definitely used the arcade sprite size and detail, why not just use a 32 meg board from the start?

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The problem is that there is a limit to the number of sprites that can be copied from ROM to VRAM per second. This limit is dictated by the DMA transfer bandwidth. Judging from the fact that SF2 used only 200 lines of resolution to increase the DMA time, the game was probably already close to the maximum the consoles could deliver. Adding back the missing frames of animation, i.e. more sprites per second, would have caused a lot of slowdown.

SF Alpha 2 on the SNES is an exception in that it had a special decompression chip on board (S-DD1), which meant that the sprites in ROM could be smaller and thus require less DMA bandwidth per sprite to copy to VRAM. This means more sprites in total and more sprites per second. The reason why earlier SF games didn't use this chip should be obvious - such a chip would have been ridiculously expensive in 1992-1994, whereas SF Alpha 2 was released in 1996 when it was more cost-effective.

the chip only decreases space consumption, the DMA bandwidth requirement does not decrease... you're transferring decompressed data not smaller compressed data...

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Originally Posted by TmEE

the chip only decreases space consumption, the DMA bandwidth requirement does not decrease... you're transferring decompressed data not smaller compressed data...

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Ehhh, yeah that makes sense. The chip does not change anything about the SNES' internals, so the cart still has to send uncompressed sprite data through the DMA channel to VRAM. So I guess SF Alpha 2 doesn't have smoother animation than the earlier SNES SF games?

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Originally Posted by TmEE

SNES can have 16KB of VRAM used for sprites, and you cannot update VRAM at all during active display without getting lovely GFX glitches. There is DMA so you can do realtime updating like lot of games do. There can only be 2 sizes of sprites IIRC.

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I'm pretty sure you can choose which 16k bank (there are two banks) a sprite is pointing to in the SNES sprite table (it's actually two tables - a split table. Funky). But you're right. It's not as flexible as having a SAT entry point to *anywhere* in vram like the Genesis/PCE. And yeah, only two sizes of sprites onscreen at the same time (the sprite size selection though is greater than two). I'd choose the first set to be 8x8 size and the second set as 16x16. You'd definitely need the large 128 entry SAT for building out large objects like that.

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PCE should be having whole VRAM usable for sprites, and you have constant update rate throughout the frame with no consequences like MD. How many sprites sizes there are is unknown to me as of now... Tom, feed me with knowledge :P !!!

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PCE uses 16x16 sprite cells; 16x16,16x32,16x64,32x16,32x32,32x64 are the sprite sizes.

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A little off topic, but something I've been wondering about for a while: Does the Neo Geo use 16-color/4-bit or 256-color/8-bit subpalettes?

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4bit color cells. Smallest cell, IIRC, is 16x16. And IIRC, it has 256 subpalettes (4096k of ram). It also has two banks of these subpalettes. You can switch the subpalette bank on a scanline basis, but not on a cell basis.

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Wouldn't that be relevant for sprite animation, though?

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Oh, definitely. But in a similar way of having a larger cart size would for a cart project. In the same way the Neo Geo CD needs 8megs of ram for "cart space".

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Originally Posted by Keiosquad2

For nintendo, maybe. Not with Sega, at least, I'd like to think not..... It just sucks that true to the arcade ports were not done even though the hardware may have been capable, especially with the Genny, as the arcade sf2 is running off a glorified genesis.....(or basically a neo, take your pic).

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Other than having the same CPU i'm pretty sure they used different graphic chips.