Genesis vs TurboGrafx Parallax. How do they compare?

[sheath]

Oh I didn't notice that distinction in Schleussinger's vdcdox.txt, but yeah sprite mirroring only for the PCE. That ought to make it challenging to have nice non-repetitive backgrounds without taking up too much ROM space. It might explain why the System Card 1 Altered Beast CD has less background detail than the HuCard version as well.

[Kamahl]

Huh? How could they pack-in Gate of Thunder in 1989? (or as a hucard at all?)

Blazing Lasers or Legendary Axe probably would have been the best of the launch titles to pack-in.

You're assuming everyone got it at launch. I only found out about it a few years ago, and the first game I saw was bonk's adventure.
And yes, those 2 games would have been great choices, for quality I'd say Blazing Lazers but since a platformer is usually the pack in, I'd go for Legendary Axe.

[Black_Tiger]

Oh I didn't notice that distinction in Schleussinger's vdcdox.txt, but yeah sprite mirroring only for the PCE. That ought to make it challenging to have nice non-repetitive backgrounds without taking up too much ROM space. It might explain why the System Card 1 Altered Beast CD has less background detail than the HuCard version as well.

Altered Beast isn't much different, but it does pause mid-stage to load. Daisenpu is a good example of having less detail in the CD2 version-


CD <------------------------------------> Hu Card









But tile mirroring or not, there's only so much that can be done with 1/2 a meg of space. Of course there are still many nice stage-by-stage CD2 games like Spriggan, Download 2 and Valis IV.


Here's something Tomaitheous once said about a full screen background for a PCE game being developed-

Even though PCE lacks mirroring, that pic could be stored as just half an image/tileset, and manually expanded/mirroed upon writing to vram.

So maybe some PCE game do use tile mirroring when appropriate?

You're assuming everyone got it at launch. I only found out about it a few years ago, and the first game I saw was bonk's adventure.
And yes, those 2 games would have been great choices, for quality I'd say Blazing Lazers but since a platformer is usually the pack in, I'd go for Legendary Axe.

They did pack-in Gate of Thunder as soon as it became available. It was only sold as a pack-in with the Duo or optional with the mail-away System 3 card.

I think that R-Type would have been the best pack-in with the TG-16 at launch from the games that NEC did bring over here at the time.

[Chilly Willy]

But tile mirroring or not, there's only so much that can be done with 1/2 a meg of space. Of course there are still many nice stage-by-stage CD2 games like Spriggan, Download 2 and Valis IV.

That's the problem with SEGA CD/CD32X games as well - only 512/256 KB of ram for data versus 4MB for a cart. The 32X is even more constrained, only having 256 KB of ram to use with the CD.

So maybe some PCE game do use tile mirroring when appropriate?

Not possible for background tiles. As I mentioned above, the PCE isn't capable of tile mirroring on the background. However, if they use a layer made of grouped sprites, they could use tile mirroring on that.

[Zebbe]

the PCE isn't capable of tile mirroring on the background.

Pathetic! Even the Master System can do that.

[Black_Tiger]

Pathetic! Even the Master System can do that.

See five posts ago.

It's only for saving space/stretching unoriginal art. Genesis SSFII had 8 more megs than the SNES version of the same game and the hardware has "pathetic"-free tile mirroring.

The Genesis only has a single sound channel for samples like the SMS and NES, but I wouldn't call it pathetic.

[sheath]

and SMS can flip BG tiles but cannot flip sprites :P

Does that mean that the Master System needs to have every frame of sprite animation facing both ways? That sounds a lot worse than not being able to flip background tiles as far as ROM goes.

[Chilly Willy]

Does that mean that the Master System needs to have every frame of sprite animation facing both ways? That sounds a lot worse than not being able to flip background tiles as far as ROM goes.

Yeah, I'd rather have sprite flipping than background flipping.

[Kamahl]

See five posts ago.

It's only for saving space/stretching unoriginal art. Genesis SSFII had 8 more megs than the SNES version of the same game and the hardware has "pathetic"-free tile mirroring.

The Genesis only has a single sound channel for samples like the SMS and NES, but I wouldn't call it pathetic.

The Genesis has 2, don't forget it has the SMS channel as well

[Zebbe]

See five posts ago.

It's only for saving space/stretching unoriginal art. Genesis SSFII had 8 more megs than the SNES version of the same game and the hardware has "pathetic"-free tile mirroring.

The Genesis only has a single sound channel for samples like the SMS and NES, but I wouldn't call it pathetic.

It's a well known fact that Capcom always made an half-assed effort with their Mega Drive games, and your example is good since they didn't compress much in the SSFII port (which sucks ass to be a 40 meg game).

As far as I know, the SMS has no sample channel. But if it has, like you claim, the Mega Drive has two, since it contains the Texas PSG chip the Master System has, and one DAC in the FM chip.

[Kamahl]

The SMS has a white noise channel.... that can "sort-of" be used as a sample channel, some genesis games used it, afterburner did I think.

[Curryman123]

What the hell is BG mirroring? Can anyone give me a example?

[Kamahl]

What the hell is BG mirroring? Can anyone give me a example?

Notice how the background is mirrored both horizontally and vertically.
The PCE cannot do this, in the sense that you can't just throw one version into VRAM, and tell the VDC to draw it someplace else mirrored.
You can store only 1 version on cart and then write it mirrored into VRAM though, that saves space, but not VRAM or bandwidth.

[sheath]

Oh, I was only thinking of applications with individual 8x8 pixel tiles. I guess this is the same thing but over four quarters of the screen. Neat!

[awack]

But tile mirroring or not, there's only so much that can be done with 1/2 a meg of space. Of course there are still many nice stage-by-stage CD2 games like Spriggan, Download 2 and Valis IV

Also Terroforming, Shockman 3 and Macross 2036 in my oppinion.

Its pretty crazy that Valis III, spriggan, Download 2 and Terroforming only loads from CD once per level, like Daisenpuu, but compare the diversity to Spriggan, in Daisenpuu you have like three enemy sprites and a puny, single weapon, now look at Spriggan with its larger array of large enemies and weapons....of course i don't know if the 64k of sound memory was used for graphics.

Valis III and IV(Super Valis) if anything are better than the cartridge counter parts, yet valis III and super Valis for the genesis and snes are between 9 and 10 megs, we have to take into account that they are long games and have cutscenes.