This proves that when programmed properly the Sega Saturn...

i actualy met dominic (meisner?) and i think ezra (and one or two more, i cant't remember) of lobotomy in an electronics botique near downtown seattle, wa. kinda strange, actualy, had a short conversation about death tank and death tank t-shirts (the home-made ones). this was post saturn quake and pre crave buyout of lobotomy. i was surprised at how "regular guy" they were. i would have pictured them to be much more over the top.

was this in "real" sprite mode of in "psx sprite" mode (textured screen facing quads)? not that it really matters, i guess... the difference is purely technical and not important to the end user.

 

The "psx sprite" (really three different primitives: 8*8 and 16*16 scaling sprites plus the free size/no scaling sprite primitive) could be blitted in both 4 and 8 bit CLUT mode. IIRC they all handled the 15-bit direct mode as well.

 

32x definetely had a lot of 2d muscle, but in my design knuckles chaotix's art direction sucks hard in comparision to sonic 3 and knuckles by so much that it completely overshadows the technical superiority it has. Knuckles Chaotix did have better sprite scaling and rotation than the snes though, too bad the game was pretty bad. Wasn't that hummingbird game the best looking 2d 32x game though? And NBA Jam and Mortal Kombat 2 both had areas where they were inferior to the SNES versions. I think MK2's was just for some animations(did it use a smaller cart size?) whereas NBA Jam was overall inferior. I don't recall any 32x game with really good sound though, but that may have been due to the low production values on almost all its games.

 

mk2 has "32x" characters but the backgrounds were rendered in nice genesis 64 color splendor. the characters were actualy pretty good looking, overall, with only a little missing animation and an impressive amount of colors overall. i do remember some of the ending animation looking rather choppy on the 32x, but it's been a while since i've played it. the sound on mk2 was pretty decent, too. nothing spectacular, but much nicer range than the snes (and gen, of course) port.

yoshi's island had an fx2 chip in it to help the snes with all of that scaling and rotation.

 

The FX chips were still an advantage the SNES had over the Genesis, just as the Neo Geo's advantage was larger cart sizes and the n64 had a disadvantage in small cart sizes, and the playstations a disadvantage in slow access to the game media. I would almost count the genesis add ons as well, except they segmented the user base.

BTW, super mario world 1 and many other snes games had sprite scaling and rotation(often at a lower quality or slower speed) without the use of an fx chip.

 

Nope, just background planes masquerading as sprites. And sprites masquerading as background planes.

 

Oh yeah, forgot about that...oh well, it still worked well enough for me. Sprite scaling and background rotation or background scaling and sprite rotation? I'm guessing the former, hmm, so bowser in super mario world was a background...and a sprite since I think the system used scaling and rotation so it alternated between the two?

 

I seem to rember that most Megadrive games ran at a higher resolution than most SNES stuff. 256 x 224 (or thereabouts) was the standard SNES-res (as seen in the Marios and Zelda), and while the MD used this sometimes too, the majority of it's games used 320 x 224 (like the Sonic games). Both machines could go higher, but I can't rember more than one example for either machine where this was the case.

Regarding sound, I think the MD only had a single stereo sound channel that had to be shared for music and sound effects.

I personally think the MD was a more impressive machine for it's time than the SNES, though both machines were home to many years of superb software.

 

Seiken Densetsu 3 on the SFC runs, as far as I can tell, at 512x224.

 

No, just background. Sprites couldn't either scale or rotate, only the mode 7 background. The problem was that the chip didn't allow for any more background planes while using mode 7, so one had to build some (often rudimentary) background graphics from sprites.

 

So...
http://www.skytopia.com/games/snes/fzero6.jpg
http://pocketmedia.ign.com/media/news/image/otherstuff/gbarock/1/supermariokart_2.jpg

Are there sprites posing as backgrounds here, or did mode 7 games avoid that problem? Perhaps the sky is just a sprite?

 

Straying further off-topic into the land of good ol' raster based coding here... There was no problem to switch between the various graphic modes at any line of the screen. So, the sky here is a normal tiled background plane, then you switch to mode 7 to create some amazing 3D graphics.

The SNES had a very nifty feature called HDMA, ie. horizontal DMA, which could be used for all kinds of line-based effects by automatically storing new values into various registers each raster-line. For a typical mode 7 racing game you set up the HDMA channels to set the rotate/zoom-registers for the perspective effect, maybe one to do a depth-cue palette effect, and one to switch graphic modes mid-screen. With only the CPU you would have had no chance of accomplishing many of the trademarked SNES effects, so I'd say HDMA is something of an unsung hero of the SNES hardware.

 

Is that how the line scrolls were done on the ground in fighting games? IIRC, SFA on the PS1 didn't have that, nor did MKTrilogy on the N64.

 

Not really - the FX chips provided extreme limited performance, especially when it came to 3D.

On the other hand, the Genesis had the SVP chip used in Virtua Racing. Now that was impressive - it was only used once, the 32x was release soon after.

Not including the 32X, Virtua Racing was the single most impressive game of the entire Gensis/SNES 16-bit generation system wars.

Unless someone can think of something better... but that's impossible.

 

Mmmm don't know about that, i had the Genesis version of Virtua Racing and while very impressive for the time, being one of the first fully 3D games, i really have played games that made me go "wow" more than VR ever did.

 

more "wow" on a purely technical level?

 

The SNES's FX chips were limited by the 65816's clockspeed. Nothing is allowed to bypass any of the system's built in hardware.

 

Exactly.

I don't see how any game could be more "wow" than VR.

 

Donkey Kong Country.

To me, the single most amazing game of the 16-bit era. At the time, it was a revolution in graphics. Even 3D0 games didn't look that good.

And to think it came out on SuperNES... Hell, DKC looked like it was on an entirely new generation of consoles.

I think it still looks pretty good today.

 

Sorry for the double-post. Technical problem; board gave me an error message, but wound up taking my first post anyway.