MrCunningham
Member
It's the Genesis version. The Sega CD game is nothing more than a driving game with original animated cut scenes in between levels.
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Cool visual effects in 16bit console games.
- Thread starter nkarafo
- Start date
It's the Genesis version. The Sega CD game is nothing more than a driving game with original animated cut scenes in between levels.
Which shmup is that from? It looks hella cool.
Also, best arcade game ever.
[/QUOTE]
Rayforce baby. It is hella cool. And really good.
it's also called layer section, galactic attack and gunlock.
Here's another gif I made of it a while ago.
[IMG]http://i.imgur.com/Zt9KzxA.gif
Soltype
Member
Rayforce baby. It is hella cool. And really good.
it's also called layer section, galactic attack and gunlock.
Here's another gif I made of it a while ago.
Just made these
https://gfycat.com/ImpressionableGracefulGilamonster
https://gfycat.com/FrailRegalDogwoodtwigborer
Shambalakan
Member
Comix Zone had lots of amazing visual effects. from going into other panels to the hand that drawing enemies. from comic words above the characters to tearing papers. it was fantastic!
Absolutely loved that game. Heartbroken when the local arcade got rid of it. Iconic, "my car!" scream when you first shoot out the window: https://youtu.be/_RqqaqUHsuU
Here's the two side by side and 200%:
I just wish I knew how that effect on the left was produced
What's the output source of the image on the left to begin with? And, was the
image on the left jpeg compressed slightly, because I see some new colors in
there. Is it a screendump? I have a theory about the left one, but need some
more information.
Apart from this, I also think the right image was dithered by hand, because
the dither structure would be much more regular when being placed by a
computer. It seems that some patterns contain some jitter, which could be
done by the artist.
Cute Dragon Here
Member
Speaking of implementing the linescroll effect in pixel shader form, I finally managed it - and it'll even adjust how quickly and how much the shifting occurs depending on time and the effective pixel size. There's even a toggle for changing between doing it smoothly, taking advantage of the native resolution the game is being rendered on, and doing it one "big pixel" at a time as if the game's rendering to a 240p resolution (though no resolution reduction is taking place). It's added since I've noticed that having it be too smooth tends to look "wrong" and dizzying.
There are still some differences, though, as it operates on the frame buffer - it won't show things beyond the screen boundaries, and I still haven't figured out how to spare the sprites from the same warping fate.
Though, well, my eyes are kind of seeing weird things now that I've stared at it animating on a lot of things...
It only has the horizontal movement component for now, though. Seems like if I were to do the vertical movement component (still shifting entire rows) I'd get unwanted interpolation...
Now I'm pondering about other cool 16-bit era visual tricks that could use a pixel shader implementation for 2D games and the like. They just appeal to me in a big way
There are still some differences, though, as it operates on the frame buffer - it won't show things beyond the screen boundaries, and I still haven't figured out how to spare the sprites from the same warping fate.
Though, well, my eyes are kind of seeing weird things now that I've stared at it animating on a lot of things...
It only has the horizontal movement component for now, though. Seems like if I were to do the vertical movement component (still shifting entire rows) I'd get unwanted interpolation...
Now I'm pondering about other cool 16-bit era visual tricks that could use a pixel shader implementation for 2D games and the like. They just appeal to me in a big way
Use a modulo operation. What gets out of the screen to the right maps back to
the left of it.
Could be that they display the image in interlaced image format. (Perhaps set image alignment to one line lower, so the each interlace lines hit different source pixels, thus creating the 'blur'.)Yes, I want to know how the hell that effect in the *images* was produced, because the game looks different. As in your screenshots the pixels are "square".
See this enlargement:
These two are taken from the above image, they are the exact same sprite. On the right you see what the game looks like, on the left you see this weird dithering that I think looks exceptionally good. Instead of using that default matrix of a big square made by four pixels, it instead uses a 1x2 pixels kind of cell, with two horizontal pixels one next to the other.
I wonder how the hell it was achieved, because it's the best dithering effect I've seen and it greatly improves the look (outside of blurry text).
http://amiga.lychesis.net/knowledge/ScreenModes.html
Dithering itself is done by hand, some guys were ridiculously good at working dithered images.
dr. apocalipsis
Banned
This image summarizes perfectly what I said before about Starfox not being a real 3D game unlike homebrew versions on Megadrive. Check out how buildings and objects are made with just 2 polygons (single rectangle) until they are close enough and get upgraded to 4 full polygons (2 rectangles). A real 3D engine should be rendering all visible faces of the object with appropiate perspective instead of faking them.
Star Fox and stunt race FX gifs get posted all the time, but what really deserves recognition is Virtua Racing on the Genesis. It gets overshadowed by the great 32X version, but considering the hardware, Virtua Racing is an incredible port. And it pushes way, way more polygons than anything else of that time.
Sure, but it can still be a real 3d game engine (considering the blocks etc.).
In general, with increasing distance from the camera the perspective effect
drops. It's difficult to judge perspective for objects far away, and this has
nothing to do that objects also do shrink with distance. Two different things.
Now for objects far away one can use parallel projection and switch back to
perspective one once the objects are closer. What gives? It save the
perspective divide for objects/points being far away not having a big
influence on perspective as all the closer ones have.
Hence, it seems to be an optimization done to the game to have more objects on
the screen seen in the distance.
But of course, if you say that everything which gets parallel projected isn't
real 3d, you are right according to this definition. But the game can still
be fully 3d from the inside and just uses some performance optimization.
nkarafo
Member
This gif doesn't show all the frames but anyway, the way Sketch jumps from panel to panel was the coolest thing i had seen in games for a while. Such a creative game....
So they're essentially LoD billboards? I find that pretty clever and novel on a 16-bit system, actually.
angelic
Banned
I recorded the gif at 30FPS, but the game may be running at 25FPS. I think Soul Star runs at the same frame rate as well.
They were ported by different teams, but just by looking at the character sprites for MK1 on the Genesis and SNES, the character sprites may have actually been converted by Acclaim/ Midway and handed off to both groups to keep a consistency between ports.
The sprites for both the Genesis and SNES game are identical to each other in pixel resolution, but much smaller in resolution to the original Arcade game:
The person(or people) responsible sprite conversion to the SNES didn't take into account that the lower horizontal resolution would make the sprites look very wide on a standard 4:3 aspect ratio which would also affect the screen playing field. Something that was corrected for the MK2 port. There were quite a few early SNES ports that had the wide sprite issue.
I see, well if youve checked into that then thats a good theory too. A lot of those old games were just ported 'by eye', but I think acclaim would have paid a pretty penny for the MK license (I was about 15 when it came out, it had a huge campaign in the UK), so they could well have been given an asset dump from Midway. In fact they probably were.
It was rubbish on the megadrive btw, probe were a crap studio long before this, they have a long history of terrible c64/amiga/ST stuff, as soon as I knew it was them I knew it would stink, and it did.
More Star Fox than Stunt Race FX actually and the reason being it's popularity, it was in fact the first polygonal game to sell millions of units.
Cute Dragon Here
Member
Sounds like I probably should see if I should do it via modulo vs keeping things as is.
(Is there theoretically a way to extend the renderer juuuuuuuuuuuust wide enough to have it always get you valid graphics data on screen?)
Outside of the PC Port, the Sega CD Version of MK1 is the best version, and it's basically a souped up port of the Genesis port. The Genesis port is better than the SNES version by the mere fact that it plays correctly - the SNES version has completely botched gameplay. All the combos are missing, and even basic stuff - like an uppercut beating a jumping punch or jumping kick - is missing.
The Sega CD version takes the correct gameplay of the Genesis version, fixes all the audio problems thanks to the Sega CD software, and even improves the visuals by adding back in all the missing frames of animation and completely uncensoring the game, including The Pit. Probably the best port probe ever did.
The probe ports were certainly ugly and didn't come close to using the genesis to the best of it's visual and audio capabilities, but at least they played right. MK2 gets much less of a pass, though, because Sculptured Software stepped their game up with the SNES port of MK2.
It had a massive DSP on the cart though, IIRC.
Of course. But so does Star Fox and Stunt Race FX and all the other Super FX games.
The Genesis can do Star Fox without a math co-processor. With a math co-processor, you get Virtua Racing.
Sega's SVP destroys the Super FX in performance, aven the Super FX2 which operates at a similar clockspeed.
Yes, I want to know how the hell that effect in the *images* was produced, because the game looks different. As in your screenshots the pixels are "square".
See this enlargement:
These two are taken from the above image, they are the exact same sprite. On the right you see what the game looks like, on the left you see this weird dithering that I think looks exceptionally good. Instead of using that default matrix of a big square made by four pixels, it instead uses a 1x2 pixels kind of cell, with two horizontal pixels one next to the other.
I wonder how the hell it was achieved, because it's the best dithering effect I've seen and it greatly improves the look (outside of blurry text).
No effect can make pixels smaller than the maximum an hardware can do, effects only change pixels' color, not their dimension, the first arrow's resolution is double compared to the other, it also has jpeg artifact or similar(the other too though)
What you see is either a game rendered at double the resolution with some kind of blur effect or an image at 2x resolution and jpeg compression or similar.
Diablohead
Member
These were captured from real hardware apparently and aren't sped up.
looks like how I remember, I own the cart but it's a pal model so guessing it was slightly slower overall, it's been years since I was able to play it as my megadrive broke.
A lot of colours were done by dithering so the bridge looks really awful on emulators
dr. apocalipsis
Banned
One thing is a logical performance trick, one entirely different is faking completely 3D. All is precalculated towards an on rail fixed camera. You could argue that games like Outrun 2006 or Panzer Dragoon are doing this same thing being on rails too, and you would be right to an extent, since many objects perspective on those games would break if game let you turn around camera. Difference being those games could actually turn around camera and show you a different angle, unlike Starfox wich lacks an entire axis.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YUZpF2JLF4s
As novel as any raster road racer. Just without road and substituting [scaling] sprites with flat polygons (cheaper). As I see it, D0mark racing games were both more complex (polygons+sprites+scaling+raster and shadow effects) and faster once you consider same fixed perspective limitations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkcTtW-qzC0
Don't get me wrong. They were able to make a polygonal game when hardware on Snes wasn't there, SFX included. And a pretty enjoyable one, but lets call thing by its name.
He's not assuming this is dithering from the native resolution, he's asking precisely what filtering went into that image on the modern pc to produce that type of banding. Those half-tones aren't jpeg artifacts. It indeed looks like some form of a bilinear filter.
dr. apocalipsis
Banned
Yes, I want to know how the hell that effect in the *images* was produced, because the game looks different. As in your screenshots the pixels are "square".
See this enlargement:
These two are taken from the above image, they are the exact same sprite. On the right you see what the game looks like, on the left you see this weird dithering that I think looks exceptionally good. Instead of using that default matrix of a big square made by four pixels, it instead uses a 1x2 pixels kind of cell, with two horizontal pixels one next to the other.
I wonder how the hell it was achieved, because it's the best dithering effect I've seen and it greatly improves the look (outside of blurry text).
I would say that is interlaced mode + deflickering filter.
My PAL cart doesn't run anymore neither
Polygonal plane is 15 colours only + backplane+hud plane.
angelic
Banned
Yeah, I agree with virtually all of this, 15 year old me was quite savvy, if a bit spotty, and I had a super wild card 32 snes disk system - I still bought carts..expensively imported too, no PAL bullshit for me, just back in that time there were certain games I felt were just not worth a cart purchase. MK1 was one of them...graphics were beautiful, movement and gameplay completely off. LIke you say, no combos, jump arcs were wrong, priorities etc were all crap. So I played it off my disc system - however I did buy MK2 on cart, which I still have.
I'd be interested to play the CD port, although surely the sprite sizes are still wrong, the backgrounds still poorly drawn etc. Although thank god they realised that it was important to have the names inside the energy bars for that MK look, which sculptured forgot to do in MK2.
As I added in my comment:
"What you see is either a game rendered at double the resolution with some kind of blur effect or an image at 2x resolution and jpeg compression or similar."
It can also be a screen taken from youtube while the arrow was going down or the screen was scaled vertically a little more than horizontally.
Those are definitively artifacts of some kind or some kind of blur effect at best imo.
I'd be interested to play the CD port, although surely the sprite sizes are still wrong, the backgrounds still poorly drawn etc. Although thank god they realised that it was important to have the names inside the energy bars for that MK look, which sculptured forgot to do in MK2.
Actually, believe it or not, they changed many backgrounds in the Sega CD version. This is because they had so much space on the CD, that they weren't concerned with reusing tiles. Some of the art is better, and there is way more animation now. The crowd in the courtyard now cheers and moves, for example, and Shang Tsung's head follows you in the throne room. The pit stage is entirely redrawn, both the bottom and the skyline.
Funny you posted a picture of Goro's lair, because it's also a level that got redrawn in the Sega CD version.
The sprites are still smaller though, yeah.
Worth noting that the Sega CD had like 6 months extra dev time.
Indeed. If the camera is fixed, much more optimization can be done.
It's just mathematics, from wikipedia:
" (Amiga)Resolutions vary from 320×200 (up to 32 colors) to 640×200 (up to 16 colors) for NTSC (704×484 overscan) and 320×256 to 640×256 for PAL (704×576 overscan.)[10] "
now let's look at the image:
Let's say that 320x200 was the resolution of perihelion, that image is 1280x800... so apparently everything is ok, each image is 640x400, exactly double the resolution... but there are also white bands separating the images, meaning that the actual size of a single screen is less than 640x400, hence the blur/artifacts, it that isn't enough the image is a jpg so even more blur/artifacts are present.
" (Amiga)Resolutions vary from 320×200 (up to 32 colors) to 640×200 (up to 16 colors) for NTSC (704×484 overscan) and 320×256 to 640×256 for PAL (704×576 overscan.)[10] "
now let's look at the image:
Let's say that 320x200 was the resolution of perihelion, that image is 1280x800... so apparently everything is ok, each image is 640x400, exactly double the resolution... but there are also white bands separating the images, meaning that the actual size of a single screen is less than 640x400, hence the blur/artifacts, it that isn't enough the image is a jpg so even more blur/artifacts are present.
dragonyeuw
Member
Sega Genesis
angelic
Banned
I'm going to have to see if I can play this somehow, I've never managed to really get an ISO working with an emulator, i'll have to have a go. I guess it plays cd audio too for each stage, i'm not really sure how the sega CD works, ie: giving more ram to play voice samples in and so on for the moves.
MK2 snes gets a lot of love too, but thats got quite a lot of problems for me, small sprites and the collision is messed up, not as sharp. Like you do Shang Tsungs standing high kick, and the 'hit' on the opponent doesnt come from the tip of his foot, it comes at the animation frame previous to his foot connecting. The sound is horribly low quality aswell. BUT it does incorporate the arcade AI trick of ducking, then jumping back, and having the opponent follow, which is the only reliable way to beat the single player.
Or use the &-trick if your size is a power of two, i.e. i%j = i&(j-1) if j is
a power of two.
Yes.
Out of my head...
Guess you have an effect resp. mapping which will distort the screen. When
going over the output screen (a subset of the range of said mapping) while
using the inverse mapping of the given one, then you will find for each pixel
(x,y) on the screen the corresponding pixel in the domain of the mapping, i.e.
in your undistorted image, which, unter said mapping, gets distorted to the
(x,y) position you're currently at.
Nothing new so far.
But now imagine you inverse-map all the boundary points of the screen, then,
given that the inverse mapping is sound in the first place, you will find a
bounded set in the domain. Computing the bounding box of this set of points
will give you the maximal extent you need to render to cover each point of the
screen under the given mapping/distortion.
So for example. Say you already have an image of your rendering of a given
size and you want to have a lens (a faked one, 2d) rolling over said image.
Such a lens only does some radial scaling, basically. However, if the scaling
is large enough, then the inverse mapping will address points outside of your
rendered image with you having to set these pixels black (whatever). But now
the lens has some finite extent on your rendered image. It's a circle, usually.
If you re-project this circle, you will find the extent you need to render
your image at, to address every pixel reached by the lens (by the inverse
mapping).
Edit:
I think we should switch over to the indie thread on this.
Edit II:
Regarding the lens, the inverse mapping of the lens' boundary (depending on
the scaling/magnification factor) may actually turn out to be a pretty huge
region in the domain of the mapping, leading to a huge render target degrading
performance. Hence, either a limit needs to be set for the maximum render
target or the lens' scaling/magnification factor needs to be limited if you
won't have a lens displaying black pixel inside of it. What I wanna say is;
the approach described above won't work without any bounds. However, it all
depends on the mapping.
The Sega CD has a Ricoh RF5c68 sound chip that provides 8 channles of PCM voices at a variable bitrate, meaning it can handle samples very well. Because there were no storage limitations, all the speech from the arcade game is present and in the same sample quality. The background music is 44 khz redbook audio.
Which is all to say it sounds exactly like the arcade game. Only difference is some of the music is swapped around.
Final plug for the Sega CD version - it includes the Mortal Monday music video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9bQZ_5oeDOA
(Ironically, all the footage is from the SNES version, so if you play the Sega CD version of MK1, you can literally see an SNES game running on Genesis hardware via FMV lol)
blu
Wants the largest console games publisher to avoid Nintendo's platforms.
That's called guardband clipping, and is normally a matter of hw support, but on older display hw could be actually tricked via things like setting a given fb geometry and then forcing the scan to start scanning from further in/sooner out, by, e.g, driving their DAC inputs or routing their palette/gamut lookups astray.
angelic
Banned
I see, very interesting. So when you say all present, was it pulling the samples off the disc each time (which I would assume prohibitively slow) or did it have more ram to store the sounds (while playing the redbook audio I presume it can't be loading at the same time). great contributions mate, love the thread.
DeepEnigma
Gold Member
The only thing that bothered me the most about the Sega CD version, was the delay (pause) for Fatalities since it was using the arcade music (best Fatality Music ever is in MK1) and had to access the CD .wav files. Compression was horrible back then.
The colors and backgrounds were definitely improved.
I was blown away by this game when I rented it from blockbuster back in the day.
These were captured from real hardware apparently and aren't sped up.
I remember the clerk telling me when I pulled it off the shelf: "That's a really great choice. It's a cool game."
When I brought it home and turned it on and saw it on my CRT, it felt like I was seeing some sort of witchcraft. It was totally unexpected to see polygons (not that I knew what polygons even were back then). I just knew it was unlike anything I'd ever seen previously and it felt like some sort of simulation at the time more so than a video game.
Of course, this version of the game hasn't really aged well, but the effect at the time was definitely shocking to say the least.
DeepEnigma
Gold Member
I had the exact same reaction with this game, lol.
These were captured from real hardware apparently and aren't sped up.
Yup. I also remember it running like this.
Bloody amazing port for the hardware. Remember spending ages just slowly moving and rotating my car in that mountain vally bit looking at the graphics .
Was a little bummed that the big wheel didnt actually rotate though.
And was this the first game\3d racer to have mirrored tracks?
These were captured from real hardware apparently and aren't sped up.
That's incredible. I love this thread.
The Real Abed
Perma-Junior
Then why the hell isn't it called "Batman and Robin's Racing Adventures"?Sega CD is nothing but this:
And cutscenes.
Also, it still looks like fun.
Also, now I wish I had the Genesis version too.
nkarafo
Member
I think the game has some standard/generic 2D brawler sections.
These were captured from real hardware apparently and aren't sped up.
The difference between this and SuperFX games is really quite massive. Too bad the SVP chip was so expensive, who knows what else it could've been used for on the Genesis, like how Yoshi's Island made excellent use of the SFX2 despite being a 2D platformer.
nkarafo
Member
I wonder how well would this SVP chip handle DOOM. SFX SNES Doom was barely playable but still very impressive for the console. I wonder it the SVP version would be closer to something like the GBA version.
Wasnt it the megadrive game placed between the cd batmobile sections?
The Real Abed
Perma-Junior
You guys are going to make me hook up my Genesis/CD, aren't you? Stuff like this makes me wish I was a classic video game reviewer.