Sapiens
Member
Flashback QFI was great
Fun fact: flash back used a tiny little cd rom in the cartridge to do these effects.
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Cool visual effects in 16bit console games.
- Thread starter nkarafo
- Start date
Fun fact: flash back used a tiny little cd rom in the cartridge to do these effects.
WHAT? That's amazing! Any info on this?
He's joking. The tagline used in US ads for flashback was "The first CD-ROM game on a cartridge!" because it had vector graphics cutscenes that looked quite a bit like FMV on the CD systems at the time.
Flashback was originally an Amiga game distributed on floppy disks.
hmmmm how to class the pc engine / turbografx-16
it's got an 8-bit cpu but a 16-bit graphics chip........
Intro space invaders fukkatsu
parodius da! blue bell power up
Metamor Jupiter
HuZero - homebrew f-zero clone game for pc engine
Nexzr
Afterburner II - scaling
Dragon Spirit - ending
Parasol Stars
Terraforming
it's got an 8-bit cpu but a 16-bit graphics chip........
Intro space invaders fukkatsu
parodius da! blue bell power up
Metamor Jupiter
HuZero - homebrew f-zero clone game for pc engine
Nexzr
Afterburner II - scaling
Dragon Spirit - ending
Parasol Stars
Terraforming
Dr.Sanchez
Neo Member
HuZero - homebrew f-zero clone game for pc engine
Heh, this is really misleading. It implies the demo is a mode 7-like effect, when really it has more in common with Master System and Genesis racing games like Hang On or Outrun (as in the console ports, not the Super Scalar arcade versions).
If anyone is curious I can go into more detail about how those kinds of psuedo-3D road generation techniques work when I'm back at a keyboard.
But it runs imo a lot smoother than those games you mentioned.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEp7niIP4Qw
http://www.chrismcovell.com/creations.html
no it doesn't, because it uses the exact same technique as the other games. Hang On on the master system runs exactly the same way:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=czvFRvCLxqI
It's a really old trick that can fly even on really weak hardware. It's neat, but it's not F-Zero and that GIF certainly gives no indication that it's not mode-7
nextgeneration
Member
Awesome thread! Brings back so many fond memories.
Hahaha, well dang, I must be tired
magicalsoundshower
Member
Parasol Stars is actually pretty damn impressive all around, it has colors and sprites out the wazoo and yet I hardly ever see anyone talk about it.Parasol Stars
Plus, can someone explain how the stage transitions work? They really make it look like the game has a true background and foreground (even though the PC Engine only has a single BG layer) and the platforms in the foreground even scroll vertically and diagonally while the background "parallaxes", so line scrolling trickery is out of the question. The only logical explanation would be that the platforms are sprites but I've played the game quite a bit and never seen them break up/flicker when there are too many sprites on screen.
Nexzr
Yeah! This kind of warping effect is imo the coolest effect from this era.
There are other games that do it really well, but I can't remember right now.
Hey I really like the pc engine so I'm going to be a little biased
Although I thought this was a somewhat poor port I was kinda impressed the way they did the road sides.
Special Criminal Investigations - pcengine
Jacky Chan's action kung fu - pce, I wished this effect was used a lot more throughout the whole game.
Terraforming - pc engine I really like the layered scrolling here.
Download 2 - pce, a very short game but the effects and art design is interesting.
Bomberman 94' - pce, looks simple but effective
Magical Chase - pce, probably a very easy trick but I love that shadow effect. I guess I am easily impressed
Those are animated background tiles. It's an old method to fake parallax. Metal Storm on the NES and Turrican on the C64 are examples of other games that do that trick too. In this case, there are
They draw each frame of scrolling for each tile as a separate graphic, which animates at a fixed rate. By scrolling the actual level at a different rate than the animation, it makes it appear that there are two scrolling planes.
sixteen-bit
Member
I will 5th, or 6th the lava in Rocket Knight.
Especially because of how it worked for the level design, and the way it appears to cling to and go around the rocks.
I never noticed that detail of them clinging to the cracks
This is repeated a lot but it's not really true. Treasure and the Axelay team share precisely one dude and he wasn't really a key player in either company.
Most of the games made by soon-to-be-Treasure people were b-tier and/or licensed games--Laser Invasion, the first Castlevania Game Boy game, both versions of Bucky O'Hare--but some of the more important guys did play a role in both Super Castlevania IV and Contra 3.
The Axelay team did make a few other cool games around the same time, including the SNES Sparkster and the Sharp X68000 Castlevania game (the one ported to PSX).
It's not intentional. Part of that trick is an h-blank palette change - old systems like the Sega Genesis were timed according to CRT television hardware. The way those types of TVs work is that they have a gun inside the screen that physically draws a single row of scanout onto the screen from left to right. Once it reaches the right side of the screen, the gun turns off, then moves back into position so it's on the left side of the screen, and down one row (well, two if you're running an interlaced mode) to begin drawing the next line.
Now, it takes actual time for the gun to move back into position, and that period where it's not drawing to the screen but moving back to position is called a blank. There are two types of blanks, hblank, for when the gun moves horizontally back into position, and vblank, where it moves from the bottom of the screen to the top of the screen. hblanks are short, where vblanks are long. The nature of the timing between the console and the TV is so precise that you can actually mathematically figure out the number of CPU cycles you have available during this time.
Blanks are useful to these old consoles because they have no form of multitasking, so you uses these periods where nothing is being drawn to the screen to do many types of functions that need to appear instant and concurrent; for example joystick polling is done during one of these blanks.
The way the lava in RKA works is that, during these hblanks, they adjust the palette of the genesis to make it draw different colors. This trick is widely recognized as the way Sonic the Hedgehog would fake water transparency. Well, if you play the old Sonic games, specifically Sonic 1 and Sonic 2, you probably notice these little splash marks on the screen when water is being drawn:
See the 5 little splashes drawn at the water line? Those are sprites - in game, they flash rapidly at 60 hz across the screen. On real hardware, this creates a flickering, translucent effect that sort of looks like wave tops. While they look neat, they actually serve a functional purpose - the hblank palette swap is an imperfect trick. It shouldn't be possible to change all the palette values quickly enough in just 1 hblank to make the effect seemless. That is what you are seeing in Rocket Knight Adventure when you think the lava is sticking to the rocks - it's not. What you are really seeing is that it's taking 2 or 3 hblanks to fully change the palette, and certain colors are changing sooner, which makes the darker shade in the background change first, which to you guys looks like lava sticking to the rocks.
Here are the same type of artifacts in Angel Island Zone in Sonic 3, which doesn't use flickering sprites to mask them:
See how some palette colors don't change until several rows after some other colors? That's because it's taken multiple hblanks to change all the palette entries.
Galactic Fork
A little fluff between the ears never did any harm...
Out of this world was full of them. This was one of my favorites:
ipukespiders
Member
Axelay
Yeah, I just threw on Super Hang-On because of that gif. I binged on master drive versions of OutRun last summer, and my god is Super Hang-On just as fucking good. Those side swipe animations at high speed are pure excellence.
magicalsoundshower
Member
That is the AGA version, though, it wouldn't run on the "classic" range of Amigas such as the 1000 or the 500. While it wasn't the huge upgrade Amiga fans had hoped for at the time, it did pack a decent punch for the time and had a lot higher clock speed than both the SNES and the Genesis.
Soltype
Member
Incredible, I miss stuff like this in games.The way the lava in RKA works is that, during these hblanks, they adjust the palette of the genesis to make it draw different colors. This trick is widely recognized as the way Sonic the Hedgehog would fake water transparency. Well, if you play the old Sonic games, specifically Sonic 1 and Sonic 2, you probably notice these little splash marks on the screen when water is being drawn:
See the 5 little splashes drawn at the water line? Those are sprites - in game, they flash rapidly at 60 hz across the screen. On real hardware, this creates a flickering, translucent effect that sort of looks like wave tops. While they look neat, they actually serve a functional purpose - the hblank palette swap is an imperfect trick. It shouldn't be possible to change all the palette values quickly enough in just 1 hblank to make the effect seemless. That is what you are seeing in Rocket Knight Adventure when you think the lava is sticking to the rocks - it's not. What you are really seeing is that it's taking 2 or 3 hblanks to fully change the palette, and certain colors are changing sooner, which makes the darker shade in the background change first, which to you guys looks like lava sticking to the rocks.
Here are the same type of artifacts in Angel Island Zone in Sonic 3, which doesn't use flickering sprites to mask them:
See how some palette colors don't change until several rows after some other colors? That's because it's taken multiple hblanks to change all the palette entries.
Dragon1893
Member
He's joking. The tagline used in US ads for flashback was "The first CD-ROM game on a cartridge!" because it had vector graphics cutscenes that looked quite a bit like FMV on the CD systems at the time.
Flashback was originally an Amiga game distributed on floppy disks.
Is that you Ready at Dawn?
Since someone else named it Brian the lion background rotations on the amiga without fancy chips, no gif sadly.
Too bad no other amiga game did it.
Agony did some subtle effects, but the whole game aestethics are really spectacular
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ujVscbKDH4
_05.gif)
It was constantly on the bottom of the screen in world minimap of Fire and Ice(it also has horizontal distorsion)
Other games had it but now i don't remember
Too bad no other amiga game did it.
Agony did some subtle effects, but the whole game aestethics are really spectacular
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ujVscbKDH4
Oh i loved that kind of water effect
sorry if already posted
It was constantly on the bottom of the screen in world minimap of Fire and Ice(it also has horizontal distorsion)
Other games had it but now i don't remember
Star Falcon
Member
Super Turrican 2 had some awesome effects, not sure if they are all that impressive technically but from an art PoV i never forgot them.
People miss it a lot just due to the existing graphics in the foreground, but the 3D effect in DKC2's background in the 'submerged ship' levels was amazing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6T5j_HiwTQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V6T5j_HiwTQ
MrCunningham
Member
I stand corrected, my apologies. It appears Kazuhiko Ishida is the only Treasure member that was involved with it.
nkarafo
Member
Hey thanks for the gif, looks great!
Sonic team makes a really good use of this effect.
nkarafo
Member
There's another cool visual trick in Earthworm Jim 2 In the second level (Lorenzo Soil).
Don't know how to explain it correctly with my not so perfect English but i will try. Basically, you are digging your way through but the soil particles from above, as you dig your way above, don't disappear. Instead they accumulate below and that elevates the floor which allows you to go upwards.
It's not a particularly great looking effect, but it looks convincing and i imagine it must have been a nightmare to program. Maybe captain Krejlooc can explain how it's done? I never seen something similar in other games from that era at least.
Edit: Sorry, double post
Don't know how to explain it correctly with my not so perfect English but i will try. Basically, you are digging your way through but the soil particles from above, as you dig your way above, don't disappear. Instead they accumulate below and that elevates the floor which allows you to go upwards.
It's not a particularly great looking effect, but it looks convincing and i imagine it must have been a nightmare to program. Maybe captain Krejlooc can explain how it's done? I never seen something similar in other games from that era at least.
Edit: Sorry, double post
Brianimaniac
Banned
So many of these examples are so much more pleasing to look at than modern games. It's always interesting to see clever tricks used to create an illusion instead of things being portrayed in a very straightforward way.
dr. apocalipsis
Banned
You can disagree as much as you want, but it is like things work now.
An average Amiga 500 has 1MB of RAM, upgradable to 2MB. That would be enough to hold fully on RAM your average 16-bit era cartridge. Sure cartridges had their own advantages, but all of them nullified when you have enough RAM available. For comparison, Snes has 128kb of RAM, so you had to pay a lot everytime you bought a game because of an expensive storage media instead of one time for a large pool of RAM and then cheap optical/magnetic discs. MegaCD has 512 KB and that was enough to do straight ports. Sure, you would have to chop some frames on fighting games, but you had to remove more on cartridges anyway for the lack of storage.
Cartridges hold 16bit consoles a lot since including more stuff like samples was actually pretty expensive.
In the case of SNES you had worst of both worlds, slow, tiny and fragmented RAM paired with tiny slow cartridges. Not in vain, it was maybe the only cartridge based console with load times and certain inability to DMA stuff on the fly.
nkarafo
Member
I don't remember games being fully loaded to RAM. It's not how it worked. I only remember constant disc swapping and loading from the floppies. Also, i'm pretty sure the 500 had 512KB of RAM and later games required the 1MB upgrade.
That doesn't make sense.... These carts were fully loaded with assets and animation frames for each game. Of course you had to pay for them every time you bought a new game... These were fully loaded ROMS, not empty RAM, lol. This is what the floppies lacked and you had to have multiple of them in oder to store later 16bit games that were larger than 1MB.
dr. apocalipsis
Banned
That's why I said average. Earlier models were sold with 512kb, but everyone upgraded them, including myself, and latter revisions included 1MB stock.
Then whatever it was done on the era and what could be done are 2 different things. All arcade/console ports were managed by a team of 2 guys at most (1 guy managing code and GFX, one other doing a couple of music tracks) with some few weeks of development time and most of the times without the source code. A port like SSF2 for SNES took a full inhouse team 6 months of work.
dr. apocalipsis
Banned
1 Amiga floppy can hold 880 KB. Enough for Sonic 2 for a fraction of the price. I'm not saying floppies were a better game medium that cartridges, but they clearly trade blows. In the case of a personal computer like Amiga, it makes no sense even to think about it and the convenience of floppies over cartridges.
Then, you have to think Nintendo had an actual line of business manufacturing physical cartridges, and that was part of the history after N64 using them instead of CDROMs. Not a single technical reason.
What game is this and why is there a Gunstar Heroes boss in it?
I'll contribute with the Mystical Ninja boss who's head grows bigger every time you hit it. Couldn't find a GIF. Loved that boss.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqnwRhNypM8
Sapiens
Member
Alien Soldier by Treasure. For the Megadrive. The only game on record to have set an actual 68k processor on fire. If you play the game perfectly, the processing can actually do damage to your MD.
nkarafo
Member
Barely. Sonic 2 was 1 MB. But yeah, 880KB was good enough early on.
But carts got bigger eventually. Bigger carts brought better graphics, "expensive" prerendered assets and many more animation frames for 16bit games. Plus, due to the instant access solid state ROMs had, there wasn't loading even with the bigger, 4MB carts. Floppies just couldn't compete later on with those standards, no matter how you dice and slice it. Devs had to choose between many floppies but lots of loading and swapping or fewer or single floppies with less swapping but then the game would have to sacrifice graphics, animations and even whole levels, characters, etc.
Carts were much more expensive, sure, but you got what you paid for.
The only realistic solution for the Amiga would have to be the hard disk. Just install all these floppies there and never swap again, plus the hard disk had faster loading too so that's another bottleneck removed. But how many games did this? It wasn't the standard, especially for the Amiga 500, plus a hard disk would have been prohibitively expensive back then, which means very few people would have it, thus very few game devs would create games with this feature in mind.
I never really understood how the SNES handled the cut-scenes in Out of this World/Another World (and Flashback for that matter). I know AW uses a virtual machine, but I don't know how that worked on the SNES exactly. If you load it up in an emulator everything is displayed on a single layer. I don't believe Flashback uses a VM, but I'm not sure.
In any case, OOTW was probably the most mindblowing experience I had back on those days.
In any case, OOTW was probably the most mindblowing experience I had back on those days.
dr. apocalipsis
Banned
Floppies too. High density floppies were able to hold 1,44MB on PC and 1760 KB on Amiga. Truth to be told, Amiga ecosystem never adopted this massively since it required an external drive since not even Amiga 1200 stock FDD was able to read them natively. All said, by the time cartridges become bigger, Amiga market was long time dead.
Then, while machines like Megadrive were able to use light compression schemes on the fly, having large pools of RAM to preload stuff allows to use heavier compression methods. So more stuff fits in any given kb. Cartridges were a niche media that served its purpose to keep piracy away and royalties in check. But in retrospective, they were just a tool to mantain their platforms closed. Just like toys or printers, they allowed to sell a cheap base and make a bigger profit on consumables.
....
In any case, OOTW was probably the most mindblowing experience I had back on those days.
Played it first on the Amiga. Such a unique atmosphere!
Here's a good article that discusses the OOTW engine: http://fabiensanglard.net/anotherWorld_code_review/
dr. apocalipsis
Banned
dr. apocalipsis
Banned
To add something to the discussion, even when not my favourite series, Road Rash games used real scaling on Megadrive:
Sadly, they did it around a choppy gameplay that makes it hardly noticeable though.
Sadly, they did it around a choppy gameplay that makes it hardly noticeable though.
MrCunningham
Member
To add something to the discussion, even when not my favourite series, Road Rash games used real scaling on Megadrive:
Sadly, they did it around a choppy gameplay that makes it hardly noticeable though.
Toy Story on the Genesis has some really smooth scaling:
It honestly looks like textured map polygons to me with some software scaling sprites. Though I am not really sure. It is also interesting to note that this stage is not seen in the SNES version, it's only in the Genesis game.
The first person stage is also really smooth as well:
This stage is in the SNES game too and it looks just as good but with more colours.
Thanks! I'll give it a read later on.
Player input or not, they aren't really videos, are they.
nkarafo
Member
I like how the road is textured and not just a flat color.Toy Story on the Genesis has some really smooth scaling: