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[Ulthwe]

This was done in hardware. People don't have to consider anything, this is automatic.
(...)
In fact, this is how I used my game gear the most. I picked up an SMS converter immediately after picking up my game gear and actually rarely bought actual game gear games. I had a huge SMS library and considered the thing a portable SMS.

Of course I forgot about the SMS - GG converter, that's why the scaling it's built in the GG.

Another note about the Sega 8-bit design, because many likely do not realize it - it was a very common design. The MSX, and Colecovision, and SG-1000 (the system that the Master System and Mark 3 eventually evolved out of) were all essentially the exact same machines with different memory locations. In fact, it is trivial to get games running between systems. In fact, someone even managed to build an adapter that let them play MSX games on their Game Gear, because all Sega 8-bit hardware is backwards compatible.

The game gear was merely the final revision of a very long line of hardware from Sega. I really do love the Sega 8-bit line of hardware, awesome library of games.

Wow, more insighful info. This thread keeps on delivering!

Reading The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers and watching From bedrooms to billions made me realize how little I know about the history of computers, processors, microchips and the way they evolved. Do you know any book to recommend in that regard?

 

[Krejlooc]

Of course I forgot about the SMS - GG converter, that's why the scaling it's built in the GG.


Wow, more insighful info. This thread keeps on delivering!

Reading The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers and watching From bedrooms to billions made me realize how little I know about the history of computers, processors, microchips and the way they evolved. Do you know any book to recommend in that regard?

The only books I could recommend are things like reference manuals and opcode manuals. I am familiar with certain consoles and microprocessors because I have spent time coding for them.

 

[Branduil]

Actually, playing the SMS version of Sonic 2 on a game gear is waaaaaay better than playing the actual game gear version. Even though all the graphics are much smaller this way, you can see way more ahead and behind you.

Which is good considering how much trial-and-error BS is in that game. But then, even the SMS version still can't totally fix that, which is why I have such a low regard for its atrocious level design.

 

[Krejlooc]

Which is good considering how much trial-and-error BS is in that game. But then, even the SMS version still can't totally fix that, which is why I have such a low regard for its atrocious level design.

the SMS version has different level layouts

 

[Branduil]

the SMS version has different level layouts

I've played both and don't remember a lot being different other than the wider view and the first boss going from insanely random to a cakewalk.

 

[Doctor_Thomas]

I really like the SMS Sonic games.

 

[Krejlooc]

I've played both and don't remember a lot being different other than the wider view and the first boss going from insanely random to a cakewalk.

Well, they are. There are numerous changes to the level design.

 

[Branduil]

I really like the SMS Sonic games.

Sonic 1 for GG/SMS is legit good. Even on the GG, outside of a couple levels like Sky Base Zone where the small view area will legit get you killed. But it's the last zone so it gets a bit of leeway.

Sonic 2 8-bit is bullshit from start to finish with endless blind leaps and countless death traps and pits. Being generous with 1-ups excuse the sadistic level designs. I mean, what the heck.

Well, they are. There are numerous changes to the level design.

I'm not saying you're wrong, but going off of memory and looking at wikis, I'm not seeing/remembering any major changes except for bosses due to resolution differences.

 

[Krejlooc]

Sonic 1 for GG/SMS is legit good. Even on the GG, outside of a couple levels like Sky Base Zone where the small view area will legit get you killed. But it's the last zone so it gets a bit of leeway.

Sonic 2 8-bit is bullshit from start to finish with endless blind leaps and countless death traps and pits. Being generous with 1-ups excuse the sadistic level designs. I mean, what the heck.

Sonic 2 isn't that bad and there aren't really any more blind leaps in the SMS version than there was in Sonic 1.

 

[MrCunningham]

It took me forever to get past the first boss in the Game Gear version of Sonic 2 when I was a kid. The very small margin for error was pretty ridiculous for a first level boss in a Sonic game. I would imagine that this sequence is much easier in the SMS version of the game. But once you get past that hurdle, the game isn't that bad. It is actually pretty decent.

The Game Gear version of Sonic 1 wasn't so bad with its blind spots, and they added caution signs on the map to compensate for the smaller screen size.

 

[Krejlooc]

It took me forever to get past the first boss in the Game Gear version of Sonic 2 when I was a kid. The very small margin for error was pretty ridiculous for a first level boss from a Sonic game. I would imagine that this sequence is much easier in the SMS version of the game. But once you get past that hurdle, the game isn't that bad. It is actually pretty decent.

Even excusing the screen size difference, the GG version of that boss is outright harder. In the GG version, the balls bounce at 3 random heights and different speeds. In the SMS version, they all bounce at the same height and speed - the lowest height in the game gear version.

The whole game is much better balanced in the SMS version. Another good example is the platform and spring placement in Green Hills Zone act 3. In the game gear version, they're all changed so you have to actually maneuver in-air to land on them and keep going. This is the "blind leaps" spoken of above. In the SMS version, however, what were spires with springs on them in the Game Gear version become large fields of springs in the SMS version, and they're positioned so that, if you just hold right the entire time, you can't miss any of them.

 

[Branduil]

It took me forever to get past the first boss in the Game Gear version of Sonic 2 when I was a kid. The very small margin for error was pretty ridiculous for a first level boss in a Sonic game. I would imagine that this sequence is much easier in the SMS version of the game. But once you get past that hurdle, the game isn't that bad. It is actually pretty decent.

That boss is inexplicably way easier on the Master System, not only because of the wider view, but also because all the balls bounce exactly the same.

 

[Ulthwe]

Retrogamer's book on NES/Master System has a great overview on the SMS Sonic games, detailing the series history.

The only books I could recommend are things like reference manuals and opcode manuals. I am familiar with certain consoles and microprocessors because I have spent time coding for them.

Thx, I'll keep on looking for info in this regard.

 

[lazygecko]

As time marches on, technology improves. The Game Boy was also more powerful than the NES, even though you wouldn't be able to tell due to its monochrome screen.

Ironically Game Boy visuals also got a bit of an edge over NES visuals precisely due to the lack of colors. Sprites and backgrounds could make more liberal use of shading/shadows and highlights when they didn't have to worry about using multiple colors, which resulted in a more detailed look on things

And yet some multi platform games look better on the Genesis/Mega Drive compared to the SNES because the limited colors forced the developers to use more contrast. I remember one of the Street Fighter games had better contrast because of the good use of limited colors and Earthworm Jim looks much more vibrant on the Genesis as well as the SNES version looks more washed out, with lower contrast and smoother gradients. These smooth gradients may look better on more "CGI looking" games (like Donkey Kong Country) but i prefer higher contrasts in my cartoony looking games.

The color dithering sucked some times though...

Glad I'm not the only one who notices this. The higher color amount on the SNES meant that developers (Japanese ones seemed especially prone to this) could afford to give just about every object their own dedicated palettes. So if you had a sprite that was primarily, say, purple, that usually meant that they made the darkest shadows and outlines a darker purple, and highlights would be a bright purple. This approach applied on a wider scale resulted in a softer, more washed out look. Whereas with a more limited amount of colors you would typically reserve some colors, like a grayscale, for more universal purposes. So a sprite would instead use black for outlines/shadows and white for highlights. This made for a sharper, more contrasted look, and often a more thematically cohesive one which really pays off if the artist knows what they're doing with their color theory.

Street Fighter 2 still didn't look that great though due to Capcom's shoddy porting efforts. Pretty sure they mostly just relied on conversion algorithms to transfer the palette rather than doing things manually (for example Ken's hair has multiple color slots actually using the same colors, making it look like it has less colors than it technically does).

 

[LincolnSixVacano]

Why does the Playstation 2 have better graphics than the Playstation 1? Same question. 5 years of better tech, 5 years of more experience in building and designing hardware.

In technology, results tend to get better over time. Just get used to it

 

[Celine]

What in your opinion is the most impressive Game Gear/Master System game?

Aladdin:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xH1gHd_Nniw

 

[MrCunningham]

Ironically Game Boy visuals also got a bit of an edge over NES visuals precisely due to the lack of colors. Sprites and backgrounds could make more liberal use of shading/shadows and highlights when they didn't have to worry about using multiple colors, which resulted in a more detailed look on things

I don't really know if the original GB was much better than the NES, it seems like a wash to me. Obviously the GB was newer technology and probably did offer some under the hood improvements, but both of those machines have their strengths and limitations. Both machines are limited in the same way when it come to implementing colour. Sprites are limited to 3 colours and one transparency, background tiles are limited to four colours per object. The Gameboy just does it all in greyscale.

The Gameboy Colour is a better machine than either the GB or NES. The GBC is still limited to the same colour tile limitations as the NES and GB, but it can display more palettes on screen (apparently 56. So 14 different colour palletes of 4, or possibly less given the sprite transparency)and uses the same 15bit colour selection as the SNES.

 

[Krejlooc]

Why does the Playstation 2 have better graphics than the Playstation 1? Same question. 5 years of better tech, 5 years of more experience in building and designing hardware.

In technology, results tend to get better over time. Just get used to it

Except the playstation 2 isnt basically the same machine as the playstation. The game gear and master system are just different revisions of the same hardware.

 

[Krejlooc]

I don't really know if the original GB was much better than the NES, it seems like a wash to me.

There is absolutely no question that the gameboy was a much more capabale system than the nes. The cpu in the ganeboy was more than twice as fast as the one in the nes - 1.7 mhz vs 4.1 mhz. And the ppu in the gameboy was much more advanced, it can display more sprites per scanline (10 vs 8), and it includes inturrupt polling natively in the hardware - the nes uses external mappers to do this. Plus the more powerful cpu of the gamebou allows you to do sprite multiplexing to display as much as 80 sprites at once, more than the 64 hard limit on the nes.

There is nothing the nes can do that the gameboy cannot, except display color, while there is plenty the gameboy can do that the nes cannot.

 

[Branduil]

To be fair color is kind of a big deal. I did always think it was neat how the Super Game Boy/GBC managed to make Game Boy games more colorful by assigning different color palettes to the different grayscale objects.

 

[MrCunningham]

There is absolutely no question that the gameboy was a much more capabale system than the nes. The cpu in the ganeboy was more than twice as fast as the one in the nes - 1.7 mhz vs 4.1 mhz. And the ppu in the gameboy was much more advanced, it can display more sprites per scanline (10 vs 8), and it includes inturrupt polling natively in the hardware - the nes uses external mappers to do this. Plus the more powerful cpu of the gamebou allows you to do sprite multiplexing to display as much as 80 sprites at once, more than the 64 hard limit on the nes.

There is nothing the nes can do that the gameboy cannot, except display color, while there is plenty the gameboy can do that the nes cannot.

Ahh, I assumed that the NES's video processor might have compensated for the weaker CPU making it somewhat closer to the performance of the original GameBoy. The Game Boy seems to be CPU driven and doesn't seem to have a seperate video display processor like the NES. I guess it would be embedded into the GameBoy CPU? Which probably did help give the system a long battery life. Though I guess the GameBoy does have more video and system memory too.

But I guess when you look at GameBoy home brew projects, there's no way that a NES could do this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rm8Pg3gzloI.Which is really quite impressive.

To be fair color is kind of a big deal. I did always think it was neat how the Super Game Boy/GBC managed to make Game Boy games more colorful by assigning different color palettes to the different grayscale objects.

The Super Gameboy only assigned four colours total. But the GBC and onwards could assign up to 12 colours total for some games (or maybe 10). Four colours for the BG layer and four colours each for the two sprite layers. I noticed that some of the Nintendo made games seem to have their own custom palettes on the GBC/ GBA. Metroid II, Kid Icarus, SML1 and SML2 all look pretty good on the GBC/GBA.

 

[sixteen-bit]

Newer hardware

 

[Saladinoo]

Because of its bigger colour machine!

 

[iidesuyo]

Aladdin:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xH1gHd_Nniw

Forgot about that game. Yes, that was awesome, it even had some little 3D effects.

 

[celsowmbr]

Forgot about that game. Yes, that was awesome, it even had some little 3D effects.

Do not forget Ristar:

 

[Grimmrobe]

Thread title sounds like the start of a bad joke. Can't think of a punchline though...

 

[Devenport]

Pretty much this. Here is something I posted before:

GameGear:

Master System:

Both these games are roughly displaying the same amounts of colour on screen, but the Game Gear game looks superior (not so much in resolution) because the developers had a much larger pool of colours to choose from.



GG Shinobi II - The Silent Fury looks great to me. It really shows off the GG's colour palette.

WOW! Looks quite identical...

 

[cireza]

WOW! Looks quite identical...

Yeah no... Game Gear palette offers some very nice gradients, and the games that use it correctly are very nice to look at.