cireza
Banned
This would have enabled at least two better ports : Castlevania and Doom.
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Why did Mega Drive/Genesis games not have special chips in them? Á la Snes
- Thread starter Spunky Monkey
- Start date
Sir Abacus
Member
The Doom port was just entirely fucked up from the start. It was a bad PSX conversion that was rushed to shit.
cireza
Banned
I know this very well. But the PSX version running in 256 * 224, the engine would have run better it was not forced to run in 320 * 224 (on top of being ported like shit and not taking into account the strengths of the Saturn).
s_mirage
Member
Yeah, I was a bit wrong about that. The Sega CD's CPU only needs to be halted if the Genesis CPU is accessing the Sega CD's 512K of program RAM, not the 256K area of Word Ram used for storing graphic data.
No, DKC games don't use additional chips.
It's all stock SNES doing.
Blackpuppy
Member
It's all samples that come from the cart. There are no built in sounds.
The SNES sound system contains its own 8 bit processor and boot rom and 64k of ram. It's quite independent from the rest of the system, so much so that if the gamecode crashes, the music will keep on playing. Also, there were no tonal differences between pal and ntsc systems unlike most other systems at the time that would pitch their music down for PAL releases.
On the negative side, all of your samples and code had to fit in that small ram space and it wasn't possible to change samples on the fly. You had to pause the sound, flush the memory and reupload new samples/code and play again.
Futaleufu
Member
Every time you fire a charged shot in Super R-Type the game slows down. You can actually use this to your advantage.
Test Drive 2 got a very late port to both Genesis/MD and SNES in 1992. The MD version resembles the home computers the best, the gameplay is a simulation and the game engine renders the course in 3D while keeping the cars in 2D.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkvBZotKUqE
The SNES port, on the other hand, is its own game: its an arcade racing game, using the usual sprite/tile scaling of the era. Faster, but also a lot more simple.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gpXZ8A_Frg
Test Drive 2 got a very late port to both Genesis/MD and SNES in 1992. The MD version resembles the home computers the best, the gameplay is a simulation and the game engine renders the course in 3D while keeping the cars in 2D.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TkvBZotKUqE
The SNES port, on the other hand, is its own game: its an arcade racing game, using the usual sprite/tile scaling of the era. Faster, but also a lot more simple.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2gpXZ8A_Frg
nope, the only of era sound chip that did that was on the Amiga
Blackpuppy
Member
To Far Away Times
Member
What is this sorcery? That's incredible.
Talking about impressive sound, an FM only song composed by Tim Follin for the cancelled Time Trax for genesis
However, I think the choice by nintendo for the sound chip used did allow for the sound common on the NES to be even better
I partically misread your post: The SNES only has one PCM channel, like the genesis. Not a lot of games used much for samples past short simple things for cart size reasons, and even then it was usually reserved for sound effects
However, I think the choice by nintendo for the sound chip used did allow for the sound common on the NES to be even better
Blackpuppy
Member
Seriously?
Have you only played American Games or something?
Try some Renovation:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQbitmR_YBY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IqxUe27KFyk
Or Treasure:
https://youtu.be/KuGNzc56zqo?t=10m45s
Or Konami:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9wSrGfmkwO0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6s9gFb03suo
Or Technosoft:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkMXOWFgB5M
Or Vic Tokai:
https://youtu.be/uzPOwwNSOQM?t=5m36s
Or Factor 5:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70DLsXjGE4I (All of this music is just freaking Awesome! Chris Huelsbeck as always nailing it
)Or just plain SEGA:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gW0mOqSizYM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHuRXIKn0zw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciZmUZRmEcw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dn_onEJ82rk (YES THAT IS SINGING! Considering the memory constraints that isn't half bad
)Or just the great homebrew developer songs for Meg:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s36tWHZbN5s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ebjuiajg6mI (After a while this song get's really good
)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dk1M2MCCCys
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SfOJYcChDk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqCqkCtI7uM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qAFShX4Pxy0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMZJ6oQayAU (A guy that linked his keyboard and computer to the YM2612
. Gilgamesh Theme sounds soo awesome, but them FM is great in doing the Rock Organ that Eumatsu likes so much .https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQCya6yn73o (Same guy
)https://youtu.be/OQCya6yn73o?t=5m25s
I can go on forever, not to say that the SNES was bad but only idiots and the uninformed say :"Shut up, Meg!".
Now:
And inform yourself!
.Yeah, I'm wrong and I blame like every game using the same samples for it. Even so, I doubt the added size of a few samples would result in cut down animation as much as reduced cart sizes due to nintendo charging more
Actually it wasn't bad from the start. According to the programmer he had it running at a high framerate(60 fps even, apparently) until he was forced to use only the saturn's CPUs to render everything.
John Carmack really didn't like how it looked when he sent it in for approval.
https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/519828531950665728?lang=en
And possible on Meg!
Meg fans should unite against the people that shout "Shut Up, Meg".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5M5Cic1MFk
(So no Emulated with interpolation filters removed like most of the stuff linked online from the SNES
. I love the SNES but come on, be fair in your comparison )https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M8HAzcsCrg4
Never shut up, Meg
.
Sapiens
Member
That's pretty insane. How big was that cart?
Ummm no. And that sound chip was not cheap when the system launched TWO YEARS before snes. Actually there were things that chip still did way better. Like bass.
iirc it's one of the biggest along with Star Ocean? Sounds like 48 Mb.
IrishNinja
Member
Of course you can change samples on the fly. The interface between CPU and the SPC700 is pretty weird and complicated so it's easier to just send a whole batch but there's no reason you can't do it. The Tales of Phantasia opening is a good example where they stream in samples for the lyrics
socksfelloff
Member
This.
In all seriousness I'm going to say it was a difference of design. Nintendo's idea to prolong the life of the SNES was similar to the NES with on cartridge chips.
Segas idea to prolong the life of the genesis was to create actual console add ons.
6 MB (48 Mbit).
Another nice song on SNES with lyrics (albeit short and looped):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TAQVE2e3u8o
cireza
Banned
Thanks for posting all those. I did not knew about this youtuber.
Sound quality is definitely the same as if playing on the real console. Going to check everything that he has uploaded.
For example, I listened to some Beyond Oasis, and it sounded perfect. While every time you search for OSTs of this game, you end up on emulator rips, and the sound is way too scratchy.
Here, it sounds smooth just as if it was the real thing.
All this talk of Phantasia and I would really love the full story of the development of that game. All I know is that Telenet, the parent company, struck a contract with Namco to be an outside publisher, and Namco wanted to see changes to the game which made a lot of staff members leave the company because of the constant disputes, and those staff members would go on to create Tri-Ace. After that, the team was re-staffed keeping only some old staff or employing others who went freelance (Motoi Sakuraba).
We all know the rest of the story though, Wolf Team would continue to make Tales games and then Namco would assume majority control of the studio and rename them to Namco Tales Studio.
If only I was a fly on the wall then.
Probably my favorite track from the game, Hydropolis. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBEzqu2J8lY
The SNES OST of Phantasia is so nice and warm sounding, with low, mid and high tones in plenty of tracks. The remakes, the OST has just degraded, the PS1 version is more generic sounding with its real instruments, it's all on the higher end of the spectrum with its notes and very little variety, much like you come to expect of the music in Tales games even today.
We all know the rest of the story though, Wolf Team would continue to make Tales games and then Namco would assume majority control of the studio and rename them to Namco Tales Studio.
If only I was a fly on the wall then.
Probably my favorite track from the game, Hydropolis. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBEzqu2J8lY
The SNES OST of Phantasia is so nice and warm sounding, with low, mid and high tones in plenty of tracks. The remakes, the OST has just degraded, the PS1 version is more generic sounding with its real instruments, it's all on the higher end of the spectrum with its notes and very little variety, much like you come to expect of the music in Tales games even today.
MrCunningham
Member
I made posts like this quite a few years ago that cover this:
Genesis/ Mega Drive and SNES sprite/ resolution comparison of Mortal Kombat 1 and 2: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=185103989&postcount=233/
Screen resolution comparison of Street Fighter II for the SNES and Genesis/ Mega Drive: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=185125658&postcount=249
Comparison between the cutscenes in Toy Story between the SNES and Genesis: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=210309135&postcount=319
polyh3dron
Banned
It really suffered with PCM audio though. Compare the voice samples of SNES's SF2 Turbo with the Genesis's SF2 Champ Edition.
It was really limited to a certain timbre. I'm not denying that some truly epic music was composed for it like THIS, but again, it could not stack up in its PCM playback abilities at all.
D.Lo
Member
The reason is the Mega Drive is a Mark III with some lower powered System 16 board chips added. It has hardware backward compatibility.
And the Master System/Mark III is just a SG1000 (Colecovision/MSX1) with an extra video mode.
SNES was also a double clocked Famicom with a bunch of fancy subsystems (like the entirely separate sound system), but planned cart upgrades from day 1 (a launch game had a DSP chip!).
PC Engine is the best designed hardware of the generation, small, elegant and well engineered with quality plastic too. It was the Gamecube of that gen.
Terrible_Majesty
Member
A better question would be why is there no mini sega genesis slash mega drive
7DollarHagane
Banned
Nintendo planned their system around expandable hardware on cartridges and saved some money up front on the build cost.
Sega the hardware more capable from the beginning. They focused expansion on hardware upgrades like CD and 32x.
Also cpu-based effects are easier and cheaper to add on to a cart than pallete expanding or sound chips would be for genesis. Basically it was easier to "fix" the shortcomings of the SNES by using add on chips in the cart than it was for genesis.
You can't really have part of the color pallete handled by one chip in the cart and one part by the chip in the console, you'd need to have a chip that does it all in the cart and that would get expensive and probably higher power draw from the console, etc.
Sega the hardware more capable from the beginning. They focused expansion on hardware upgrades like CD and 32x.
Also cpu-based effects are easier and cheaper to add on to a cart than pallete expanding or sound chips would be for genesis. Basically it was easier to "fix" the shortcomings of the SNES by using add on chips in the cart than it was for genesis.
You can't really have part of the color pallete handled by one chip in the cart and one part by the chip in the console, you'd need to have a chip that does it all in the cart and that would get expensive and probably higher power draw from the console, etc.
D.Lo
Member
There are several, they have been around for years and are garbage. Tectoy has been selling F-grade build quality built-in-games Segas for 20 years.
MrCunningham
Member
AtGames has been making Sega Genesis plug and play systems for over a decade now. There are a lot of different variations.
They are planning on releasing a new MD/ Genesis mini that will be designed to look like the model 1 unit:
http://www.seganerds.com/2017/04/05/could-atgames-new-mini-megadrive-actually-rival-the-nes-mini/
They claim that they will fix the horrible audio/ compatibility emulation for this unit. It might be decent.
Years ago I remember reading an interview in a retro mag/column and the developer had said if the SNES main cpu was clocked at 5-5.6 mhz a massive chunk of the slowdown that plagued some games would have been eliminated. Perhaps they felt it would be easier to reduce the cpu by half for BC but of course it never happened.
PC engine is neat for the time it was released but it's way behind the others of that generation. It's more like the Dreamcast in that regard. Having just a single BG layer makes it quite a lot more limited.
Also the SNES is really nothing like the NES apart from the CPU. I don't really buy the oft repeated notion that the CPU was chosen because they planned NES BC. There's no real source for it and if true the plans must have been scrapped very early on, early enough for them to change CPU if they wanted. The way the SNES handles graphics is completely different from NES. There's a pretty good reason why the SuperGameboy exists but NES player doesn't actually
cireza
Banned
Great posts. So actually, it was only MK II that used the technique of reducing the size of the sprites.
You probably already know this, but for info : concerning Toy Story, those cut-scenes also go beyond the 64 simultaneous colors on screen by switching palette on the fly (a common practice with the Genesis, for water effects or any effects that divides the screen in two horizontally).
For a pretty long time, I thought that Street Racer on Genesis was actually using this method because of how incredibly colorful the game is. You could split the screen horizontally where the tracks appears. But it seems that it is not the case. Simply a very masterful use of the color palette.
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(SNES for comparison, pretty great use of the colors of the system)
Putting pictures of those two games side by side actually shows well the differences between both consoles. Also, you can see the differences between the track layouts in the upper left corner.
Agree with this. Worst limitation of this otherwise fantastic system.
the megadrive can do high quality PCM playback, it was just really tough to pull off because you would have to feed the PCM channel data at a constant rate (as there was no sound ram for it ) the short micro pauses between feeding data to the chip is why a lot of PCM channels were low quality on the MD. you could pull off higher quality by dedicating the z80 to just feeding in and managing the PCM data then using the 68k for the rest of the audio management, Audio programming on the MD is a complex beast
and its largely why the sound quality varies so much between games on the MD.
MrCunningham
Member
I think it was an oversight on Midway's part. I think they resized the sprites in house and sent those assets out to two different developers. But they didn't take into account that the SNES game would make them look fat and chunkier. Mortal Kombat 2, 3 and Ultimate MK3 had horizontally compressed sprites.
The Earthworm Jim games had this issue too. With Earthworm Jim 1, Shiny used the same resolution sprites for both games, which made the sprites in the SNES port of EWJ1 look fat and chunky. But with EWJ2, they made the sprites in the SNES game slightly compressed horizontally as well just to make them the same aspect as the Genesis sprites.
Yeah, it also uses the highlight and shadow colours as well. It is pretty impressive.
For a pretty long time, I thought that Street Racer on Genesis was actually using this method because of how incredibly colorful the game is. You could split the screen horizontally where the tracks appears. But it seems that it is not the case. Simply a very masterful use of the color palette.
(SNES for comparison, pretty great use of the colors of the system)
Putting pictures of those two games side by side actually shows well the differences between both consoles. Also, you can see the differences between the track layouts in the upper left corner.
I never would have guessed that Street Racer was on the Genesis back then, maybe it was only released in Europe? Yeah, the SNES game used Mode 7, but this version does use an interesting colour pallete swap routine to create a textured map look. Really neat, actually.
Going back to Toy Story, it had an impressive driving stage like this too..
But this one also seems to use textured mapped polygon graphics to some extent. This stage was never in the SNES game as well.
Blackpuppy
Member
I'd like to hear what Byuu's take is on the two systems. He's currently working on a Genesis emulator and he knows the SNES inside and out.
Let me just look in a mirror and repeat: Byuu.. Byuu... Byuu!
Let me just look in a mirror and repeat: Byuu.. Byuu... Byuu!
6 Megabyte, one of the largest releases.
Not much impressed by Toy Story racing segment, yes on the sides the objects scale but the road and curves are faked like in Outrun.
The unreleased Wacky Races is more impressive, there the road rotates when you turn:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ly8FqQQ2HIQ
ResidentDante
Member
Great posts. So actually, it was only MK II that used the technique of reducing the size of the sprites.
You probably already know this, but for info : concerning Toy Story, those cut-scenes also go beyond the 64 simultaneous colors on screen by switching palette on the fly (a common practice with the Genesis, for water effects or any effects that divides the screen in two horizontally).
For a pretty long time, I thought that Street Racer on Genesis was actually using this method because of how incredibly colorful the game is. You could split the screen horizontally where the tracks appears. But it seems that it is not the case. Simply a very masterful use of the color palette.
(SNES for comparison, pretty great use of the colors of the system)
Putting pictures of those two games side by side actually shows well the differences between both consoles. Also, you can see the differences between the track layouts in the upper left corner.
Agree with this. Worst limitation of this otherwise fantastic system.
Here's a nice side-by-side video of Street Racer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRzmWBs02AQ
I actually think the MD version looks better here.
For funsies, here's the Saturn vs. PS1 versions:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c49xKd-C7FA
Byuu is making a Genesis emulator?!?
One of the rare case of a multiplatform (PS1/SAT) 3D game which is clearly superior on Saturn (due to the heavy use of the VDP2).
Out of those the MD version is a 2D racer (like outrun), while the others are full 3D racers. The big difference is not only the graphics, but there's for example no racing line in 2D racers. No matter if your are on the outside or the inside of a curve the length is the same.
That's the revelation that where the Mode7 racers on SNES. Proper 3D racing at good framerates. Only on a plane with some sprites, but light years ahead of 2d racers in terms of gameplay.
socksfelloff
Member
Rare truly were the naughty dog of their era.
I'm loving all this MD vs Snes talk. It brings me right back to being a kid on the playground!
ResidentDante
Member
That's true, didn't think of the MD version actually being a 2D game.
Psyrgery ES
Member
Heh, if it only had twice the colours it had it would have been godlike!
Team Mega Drive all the way