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.

 

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.

 

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

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.

 

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.

 

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...

 

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.