The advancement of Genesis

What megadrive lacked in sound was reverb and such.. If it had that, the FM synthesizer would sound much nicer. I prefer the sound of the FM synthesizer in Megadrive over the sampled playback that the Snes did.

And did even a single game on Snes use the higher res than normal resolution? I think only one game did it. Overall, i.e. 99.99% of the Megadrive games had higher resolution than on Snes.
 
What megadrive lacked in sound was reverb and such.. If it had that, the FM synthesizer would sound much nicer. I prefer the sound of the FM synthesizer in Megadrive over the sampled playback that the Snes did.

And did even a single game on Snes use the higher res than normal resolution? I think only one game did it. Overall, i.e. 99.99% of the Megadrive games had higher resolution than on Snes.
I always saw it that the genesis had greater finer detail while the super nes had more colors.

And yes, I think your last sentence was right, from the way things look to me.
 
I'm going by memory here, but I think MD SF2 used the MD's low res mode - effectively the SNES normal resolution. This would have allowed Capcom to use recoloured SNES sprites for the MD game, saving them a packet no doubt.

One thing going for MD SF2 was the music: it was far, far better and far closer to the arcade machine than the SNES games. Although the sound samples (which seemed to multiplex the MD's single 22khz sample capable channel) were bloody awful!

Games who's art was properly designed to work with the MD's limited colour palette (like the Sonic and Streets of Rage and Phantasy Star games) did look really good though, and yes, the extra resolution did help them!
 
SF2 is interesting. Judging from early screenshots from back in the day and the beta ROM, it seems as if Capcom had been developing a Megadrive specific port from the arcade but then dropped it in favour or porting the assets from the Snes. It had better animation than the final product too.
 
Indeed. The specific version you speak of is very similar to the PC Engine version of the game. Colour and animation seem very close, and music has some reverb unlike the released Genesis SF2:SCE.

The unreleased SFII Turbo (for that was what it was going to be called) Lacks the arcade intro just like the SNES version of the game, and in it's unfinished state, many sound effects. Voices however, are better than SFII:SCE. I believe that the Genesis version of SFII Turbo may be linked to the PC Engine SFII:CE as they have the same similarities with regards to colour and animation.

There is an unfinshed rom available for download on the net, not that I would condone such an action. But it shows what could have been if work had continued.
 
SF2 is interesting. Judging from early screenshots from back in the day and the beta ROM, it seems as if Capcom had been developing a Megadrive specific port from the arcade but then dropped it in favour or porting the assets from the Snes. It had better animation than the final product too.
I know that capcom originally intended to release it in may 93, but waited till september, b/c capcom cares about releasing the best product possible. Having a history, since I probably can't remember when, of releasing their games in January, is indicative of that.

I wish sega had followed that strategy with Sonic 2, but they had to have it released on Sonic 2sday, November 17, 1992.

I know that the version they intended to release in may 93, had black borders, looked awful in other ways, and wasn't a full 24 megabits, which proves an earlier poster's post that genesis games needed larger rom sizes to be better technically. Both released Genesis street fighters were the biggest carts at time of their release, and SSF2 remained the largest genesis game ever. It was was bigger than any u.s. super nes game. However, some later Super Famicom games in Japan were 48 megabits, or 6 MB.

Indeed. The specific version you speak of is very similar to the PC Engine version of the game. Colour and animation seem very close, and music has some reverb unlike the released Genesis SF2:SCE.

The unreleased SFII Turbo (for that was what it was going to be called) Lacks the arcade intro just like the SNES version of the game, and in it's unfinished state, many sound effects. Voices however, are better than SFII:SCE. I believe that the Genesis version of SFII Turbo may be linked to the PC Engine SFII:CE as they have the same similarities with regards to colour and animation.

There is an unfinshed rom available for download on the net, not that I would condone such an action. But it shows what could have been if work had continued.
I somewhat remember an EGM article on the turbo duo SF. Although I can't remember if Capcom ported it. I know that SF2 on the Genesis was the 1st time Capcom ported one of their arcade games to the Genesis. I remember that SF2's release for the genesis was just 4 months or so, after the last capcom arcade game that Sega ported, which was the Sega CD version of Final Fight. My personal favorite version, including the Arcade version, but damn, were the colors awful, except in the 1st awesome looking tt stage, which was only in the sega cd version.

I remember both Sega and NEC ported Forgotten Worlds to their respective systems in 89 (maybe the turbo cd one came later,) and it wasn't until 2 or 3 years later that Nintendo quit dictating who their 3rd parties could work for.
I know Capcom and all the others preferred working for Sega over nintendo, due to all of the awful things nintendo had always done to them, many of which they continued for a long time after the mid super nes days. I think those awful things included high royalty fees and more expensive rom chips (although the super nes carts' pcb and rom chip quality were superior to the genesis carts, I assume) as well as not letting them work for anyone else, constant censorship, punishing them by denying them rom chips when they need them most, and placing many other restrictions on them that sega didn't.

Also, what was the size (i.e., ROM size) of the PC-engine version of SF2?

I also forgot what the colors were like of all 3 mentioned (the original gen sf2, the turbo duo one, and the released sf2) other than the released genesis one wasn't comparable to the super nes, at least in terms of colors.

The turbo duo, iirc, had a 512 color palette like the genesis (not including raster/dac tricks,) but much lower res, although it could display close to 512 colors, which was more than the super nes' max onscreen count of 256. However, the turbo duo's limit of 512 colors in its palette kept games looking dark, usually, like genesis games were. However, in FMV, the extra on screen colors helped the turbo duo out tremendously. I couldn't imagine rondo of blood's anime looking very good on the sega cd. It looked excellent on the Turbo Duo. Just like Sherlock Holmes looked great on the turbo duo, while the sega cd one looked like crap, due to the low onscreen color limit of the genesis.

The super nes sf2 turbo, had EXCELLENT, vibrant colors , as was typical of super nes games. I remember nintendo had a VERY weak 1993 (especially in comparison the the succeeding 1994), which made it so many people said that it was the best super nes game of 1993, even though it was an upgrade of the original which was released in 7/92, 1 year and 1 month earlier.

I remember they released at least 2 special controllers for the PC-engine, since the regular controller was basically an nes controller.
 
Also, what was the size (i.e., ROM size) of the PC-engine version of SF2?

I believe the cart size of the PC Engine version is 20Mbits, same as the SNES SFII Turbo.

I also forgot what the colors were like of all 3 mentioned (the original gen sf2, the turbo duo one, and the released sf2) other than the released genesis one wasn't comparable to the super nes, at least in terms of colors.

The turbo duo, iirc, had a 512 color palette like the genesis (not including raster/dac tricks,) but much lower res, although it could display close to 512 colors, which was more than the super nes' max onscreen count of 256. However, the turbo duo's limit of 512 colors in its palette kept games looking dark, usually, like genesis games were. However, in FMV, the extra on screen colors helped the turbo duo out tremendously. I couldn't imagine rondo of blood's anime looking very good on the sega cd. It looked excellent on the Turbo Duo. Just like Sherlock Holmes looked great on the turbo duo, while the sega cd one looked like crap, due to the low onscreen color limit of the genesis.

The super nes sf2 turbo, had EXCELLENT, vibrant colors , as was typical of super nes games. I remember nintendo had a VERY weak 1993 (especially in comparison the the succeeding 1994), which made it so many people said that it was the best super nes game of 1993, even though it was an upgrade of the original which was released in 7/92, 1 year and 1 month earlier

The PC Engine version had in some cases superior colours to the SNES version. For example the life bars (inc timer), parts of the foreground and background, had more colours giving increased vibrancy to the procedings. E.Honda's stage and Zangief's comes to mind. The colours in many places seemed closer to the arcade original on the PC Engine, mainly due to using more colours than the SNES game.

Detail however is less in some places, with increased amounts of colour being used to hide the lower amount of sprites on screen. Or so it looks that way. In addition the PC Engine SFII also had a bigger border at the top of the screen, which extented to behind the life bars, much like the EGM prewiewed Genesis version. The later Genesis game however had the border removed and detail in place of it, same as the SCE released game.
 
There was a trick which I didn't see until very late in the Genesis' lifetime, but I don't think any game actually used. Which involved turning off the screen and using DMA to write repeatedly to the background color. The net result was you got a bitmapped 16bit color screen in RAM with no borders but it wasn't quite 1 color/pixel, some colors would cover 2 pixels. And like many Atari ST effects it was extremly timing dependant, so getting it working on one hardware rev required slightly different incantations than getting it working on a different rev. I wrote a proof of concept 3D maze game demo using it, but it just wasn't worth it.

Wouldn't that only give you a 512-color screen, not full 16-bit, or was there some other trickery involved to extend beyond the original palette?
 
Wouldn't that only give you a 512-color screen, not full 16-bit, or was there some other trickery involved to extend beyond the original palette?

Genesis color palette entries were 16 bit, but several bits were unused, for some reason I think it was 12 used bits , which gives you 4K colors.
The trick repeatedly DMA'd to the background color (a single palette entry) so you could get all 4K on screen at once.
 
Genesis color palette entries were 16 bit, but several bits were unused, for some reason I think it was 12 used bits , which gives you 4K colors.
The trick repeatedly DMA'd to the background color (a single palette entry) so you could get all 4K on screen at once.

I'm not very familiar with Genesis hardware, but I found this while reading about it:

"Sega Mega Drive/Sega Genesis used a 9-bit RGB palette (512 colors, 1536 including shadow and highlight mode)"

So about ten-and-a-half bit color in total... :D
 
I'm not very familiar with Genesis hardware, but I found this while reading about it:

"Sega Mega Drive/Sega Genesis used a 9-bit RGB palette (512 colors, 1536 including shadow and highlight mode)"

So about ten-and-a-half bit color in total... :D

Yeah it's been a long time since I wrote a genesis game.
Your right it was 3 bits per gun not 4, but it was still packed into a 16 bit word.
 
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