Most powerful 2D arcade board?

[old man]

Every system made since the NES could do parallax scrolling. I think it was mostly done with pointers and register tricks, but it ultimately landed on the skill of the programmer to implement. Battletoads for the NES had it in the second and third levels, also check out Recca: Raging Fire for some cool effects. PcEngine programmers could also pull it off. Air Zonk had it a lot and it can also be seen really well at the start of Lords of Thunder's second level. I'm sure there are more, but that's all I can think of off the top of my head. I don't doubt that the Neo could have pulled off some slick parallax as well if the programmers had been up to it.

[j_factor]

Every system made since the NES could do parallax scrolling. I think it was mostly done with pointers and register tricks, but it ultimately landed on the skill of the programmer to implement. Battletoads for the NES had it in the second and third levels, also check out Recca: Raging Fire for some cool effects. PcEngine programmers could also pull it off. Air Zonk had it a lot and it can also be seen really well at the start of Lords of Thunder's second level. I'm sure there are more, but that's all I can think of off the top of my head. I don't doubt that the Neo could have pulled off some slick parallax as well if the programmers had been up to it.

Even pre-NES systems can do parallax scrolling. Commodore 64 has a game appropriately titled Parallax that does it, and Atari 5200 has a port of Moon Patrol that successfully copies the parallax effect from the arcade game.

[kool kitty89]

This was basically my main point the whole time. Ok, the Neo Geo can do parallax scrolling, but developers didn't really focus on the feature on it. To me it says something. But how many scrolling layers can the Mega Drive and SNES do in comparison?

The Genesis has 2 background scroll layers (planes), the SNES has various graphics modes with varying number of planes (see wikipedia's SNES page), but the only ones with more than 2 BG planes are stuck with 4-color tiles. (mode 0 with 4 planes, all 4-colors and rarely ever used; and mode 1 with 2 16-color layers and one 4-color layer -4-color often used for status bars and such)
Plus sprites could also be used to represent parts of the background.

Now, these are only independet planes/layers, "parallax scrolling" can be acheived in a single layer as well (otherwise PC Engine and earlier consoles wouldn't have it). You can have it in a single plane, scrlling different rows of tiles at varying speeds. And of course, you can have a scrolling background without parallax as well. (everyting scrolling at the same rate)

On top of that there's the possibility for software or blitter generated scroll layers, though I doubt that's often the case for consoles with hardware scrolling capabilities. (I think the Atari 7800 relys of software scrolling, I'm not sure about the C64)
Pretty much any PC game (and many other home computers) had to rely on software generated graphics (several of the 8-bit home computers did have sprites and the Atari 8-bit series did have hardware assistance as well -from ANTIC, plus the Amiga had both sprites and a blitter to manipulate the bitmap display)
Any 2D game on the 32x not relying on Genesis for backgrounds is simulating background layers in software. (in Kolibri's case, multiple background planes)

[Joe Redifer]

In Super Castlevania 4 for the SNES, there is one part in round 2 where there is the foreground you are walking on, but the background is composed of a regular plane with a transparent plane of different graphics on top of it scrolling at the same speed. When you start to go down the waterfall, you can see the 2 backgrounds slide vertically away from each other if you look closely. For that reason I think that the 3rd BG can have more than 4 colors.

[tomaitheous]

This was basically my main point the whole time. Ok, the Neo Geo can do parallax scrolling, but developers didn't really focus on the feature on it. To me it says something. But how many scrolling layers can the Mega Drive and SNES do in comparison?

Just because it's not overly used on the system, doesn't mean the system is weak in "x" department. The SNES can do more complicated scroll effects than the Genesis, and yet you don't see the SNES focusing on this. This effect isn't going to "break the bank" either. Instead, (using the same HDMA channels) the snes focuses on scaling, and/or color transparency effects (like updating the color of the "color window" to get vertical gradients), and such.

Woah, thats pretty efficient use of hardware right there. Can the Neo Geo do the same thing?

The NES, Gameboy, GG, SMS, etc can all do linescrolls. It's not *that* impressive. What the Genesis has over 8bit systems; is that it has 2 BG layers. So you can do multiple overlapping points. But there are limitations. If you watch that video, all those scrolling "layers" can't be scrolled up/down overlapping into other parts. I.e. you can't have more than 2 overlapping parts. But looking at the video, you think it could. That's the illusion.

The Neo Geo has a 1536 pixel scanline limit. That's 4.8 layers before something gets dropped. You can easily do 3 overlapping layers and ~1.8 sprite layers. Put the system in 304 pixel mode, and you've got 5 layers. And because you can chain sprites, you can use long sprites as a *single* sprite entry in the SAT. So that 384 sprites in the SAT is a lot more than you think. So.. the Neo Geo can do more complex parallax than the Genesis. Any choppiness you see in NG scrolling, solely lands on the programmer and his code.

I can only speculate as to why the Genesis is populated with a bunch of games that focus quite a bit on multiple layers of parallax. Besides being incredibly easy to do on the MD, I suspect is has to do with the lower color count and *lack* of other effects that may or may not be like the SNES ones. It needed something to distinguish itself from other consoles (8bit as well as 16bit) and make up for the limited color abilities. Scrolls on the Megadrive was "its" special FX, and they really pushed showing them. There are *plenty* of other much more capable arcade systems with games that didn't push multiple parallax as often like that on the MD. Usually 2 independent BG layers is sufficient looking enough for more games, and 3 layers adds a little spice/eye candy - without doing such scrolls like in TFIV ocean side level. The PCFX has 7 BG scrolling layers, and I think only one games really shows anything close to that (that one action/fighting game, in the city level as one example).

In Super Castlevania 4 for the SNES, there is one part in round 2 where there is the foreground you are walking on, but the background is composed of a regular plane with a transparent plane of different graphics on top of it scrolling at the same speed. When you start to go down the waterfall, you can see the 2 backgrounds slide vertically away from each other if you look closely. For that reason I think that the 3rd BG can have more than 4 colors.

Well, it's 4 colors per tile. Not the whole thing. That would be pretty limited. There are 8 subpalettes for the BGs to use.

[TmEE]

The thing is, there's no maintaneance needed to do linescrolls and stuff on MD, you have a lovely scroll table, which all other setups lack... update the values once, and they get shown... on other systems you're forced to do realtime updating at right places to get your effect. Of course I'm going to do lot of parallax if I can do it that easily with no headache or overhead at all

[tomaitheous]

The thing is, there's no maintaneance needed to do linescrolls and stuff on MD, you have a lovely scroll table, which all other setups lack... update the values once, and they get shown... on other systems you're forced to do realtime updating at right places to get your effect. Of course I'm going to do lot of parallax if I can do it that easily with no headache or overhead at all

Actually, on the SNES it uses tables just like on the MD. But HDMA doesn't have to be called on every scanline and can update other registers as well. The HDMA logic reads from a table defined by the cpu/code. So on some stuff, if you need linescroll or whatnot in only a specific area - it's actually less resource to do. Where as the problem with the MD scroll table, you have to fill out every entry and on both planes, regardless if you only want selected areas and at fine single line resolution. Same on the PCE (less overhead in situations where you need per line resolution/steps, but not all scanlines need updating). I *still* think the scroll table is more of a makeup for the 68k 44-50cycle overhead per interrupt call. But on the other end, you can still call interrupts and have the 68k do manual updates from a table built in vblank (it could potentially be less overhead than having to do all those entries for both planes). The NES/SMS and such systems, it's more resource intensive because of the clock speed of the processor - more than anything else.

Joe: The snes also has a color window. It can do color transparency effects *without* using a BG layer, albeit only in vertical steps (a single color change/add/sub/etc per scanline - for the whole scanline). Think of it as its own layer (which technically it is).

[kool kitty89]

In Super Castlevania 4 for the SNES, there is one part in round 2 where there is the foreground you are walking on, but the background is composed of a regular plane with a transparent plane of different graphics on top of it scrolling at the same speed. When you start to go down the waterfall, you can see the 2 backgrounds slide vertically away from each other if you look closely. For that reason I think that the 3rd BG can have more than 4 colors.

Again, parts of the background (or foreground) could be sprites as well, particularly with a setup like: sprite generated foreground (parts of background that scroll on top of some/all other sprites), then 1 BG scroll layer depicting the background, and the 2nd BG plane creating the far background. Plus you could also have sprites contributing to the background on top of the 1st scroll plane.

I think Earthworm Jim 2 does this, or at least the SNES version. (Anything but tangerines appears to have 4 scroll layers, 2 for the foreground/background moving at the same rate, which I assume are both sprite generated, plus 2 colorful further BG planes scrolling at different rates)
I think the Genesis version might use sprites as well, at least for the foreground, but has a much simpler background.


Another one that I'm not sure of is Donkey Kong country: looking at the first level, there definitely seem to be at least 3 scroll planes, and the furthest back is simple enough to use 4-color tiles, but that would mean all of the rest are made of 16-color tiles and it looks pretty colorful for that, but maybe they just really optimized the graphics and carefully selected the subpalettes. (the primary background really seems like it could have been 256 colors though, but that would mean only 1 BG plane in addition to the 256 color one, which wouldn't allow for the far BG plane)



Edit:
I just checked EWJ2 and DKC and both must be using mode 1 with 2 16-color layers and 1 4-color layer, and none of the BG/foreground uses sprites either. (I didn't realize you could set-up parts of a BG plane to have priority over sprites and have them scroll over the sprites while other parts of that plane scroll behind). Additionally, both games use non-black colors for the solid background behind the sprite/bg planes. (and in DKC's case it also uses color swapping between scanlines and flicker to create a varying color gradient)

One other thing is I think only some of the SNES's graphics modes allow scrolling of individual tiles (for that single plane paralax using rows of tiles scrolling independently), assuming wiki is correct, only modes 2, 4, and 6 support this, with mode 2 being the closest to what the Genesis does. (2 16-color layers; the differences being with the SNES's multiple subpalettes and lower horizontal resolution compared to MD in H40 mode, the same 256 pixels wide in H32 though)

[GriskaGyoran]

The PCFX has 7 BG scrolling layers, and I think only one games really shows anything close to that (that one action/fighting game, in the city level as one example).

That was Zenki a horribly rare game that I don't think anyone has. The only PC-FX game that didn't revolve around hentai and whatnot to attract customers.

[Pulstar]

Interesting debate on parallax but it seems consoles not arcades have become the area of contention. Anyway, what arcade game is deemed the most impressive in terms of 2D trickery? Radiant Silvergun, or Guilty Gear on Naomi/Atomiswave? Or something else entirely?

[j_factor]

Radiant Silvergun and Guilty Gear aren't on "dedicated 2D" boards. Probably the last "dedicated 2D" board was the CPS3.

[Pulstar]

We still have a terminology confusion here. Let's take an example from the PC industry. The Matrox Mystique is a 2D chipset but it can do 3D geometry in software, whereas the 3dfx Voodoo is a 3D-only chipset with advanced 3D functions. The ST-V can push a lot of polygons but it doesn't handle them the way dedicated 3D chipsets do.. But according to what I read here it handles 2D the same way it handles 3D calculations, like the PS1.

So eliminating either candidate due to criteria mismatch, what do you think is the most impressive 2D game done on 2D arcade hardware?

[17daysolderthannes]

Every system made since the NES could do parallax scrolling. I think it was mostly done with pointers and register tricks, but it ultimately landed on the skill of the programmer to implement. Battletoads for the NES had it in the second and third levels, also check out Recca: Raging Fire for some cool effects. PcEngine programmers could also pull it off. Air Zonk had it a lot and it can also be seen really well at the start of Lords of Thunder's second level. I'm sure there are more, but that's all I can think of off the top of my head. I don't doubt that the Neo could have pulled off some slick parallax as well if the programmers had been up to it.

Metal Storm had some of the nicest parallax to be seen on the NES. Such an unfairly overlooked game in its day. IMO, it easily stands against Contra and Mega Man and beats both in variety and creativity.

[kool kitty89]

We still have a terminology confusion here. Let's take an example from the PC industry. The Matrox Mystique is a 2D chipset but it can do 3D geometry in software, whereas the 3dfx Voodoo is a 3D-only chipset with advanced 3D functions. The ST-V can push a lot of polygons but it doesn't handle them the way dedicated 3D chipsets do.. But according to what I read here it handles 2D the same way it handles 3D calculations, like the PS1.

THe Saturn/ST-V didn't handel 2D the same way the PSX does, the PSX either uses the "sprite mode" of the GPU (which generates rectangular tiles), textured polygons paired into quadrilaterals, and/or software generated graphics. The Saturn/ST-V uses quadrilaterals as the geometric primitives (opposed to triangles), and somewhat like the PSX, uses textured primitives as "sprites," but in this case there's also a second VDP entirely dedicated to 2D work: generating background scroll layers and manipulating tiles from VDP 1. (iirc it can be used for scaling and rotation of VDP1 output)

[TmEE]

A polygon on Saturn is a sprite, at least one with a texture on it... Saturn is a 2D machine, all 3D is made of sprites... IIRC, there's room for 16384 sprites in the command list.