Hello Matt, Good to see you again and Happy New Year to you and the family bro. 8^) Great, now we start to go deeper into the series of Neo-Geo development with the graphics. I really want to listen in more on this because I was a gamer growing up on how graphics are why they said in advertisements that the Neo-Geo was "Bigger, Badder,, Better" than the rest. This will be a real treat for sure. 8^) I posted this up on the Neo-Geo thread over on the forums at AtariAge for others to take notice on what you will be informing us about Matt. Thank you for sharing this and looking forward to your next video for sure. 8^) Anthony..
Hey Anthony, glad you're enjoying the series. Yeah it's starting to get more interesting. From here on out I think the videos will cover more deeper and lesser known stuff
Very neat stuff! I've mucked wirh Neo-Geo Reverse Engineering for a while and would love more in-depth stuff like this. What tools do ya suggest for really getting in to a games guts? Up till now ive been using Mame which is sick but something more tailor made for Neo-Geo games and feature rich would be sick
I've been making my own tools. When they become polished enough I'll release them. I am pretty sure the people at neo-source.com have a lot of tools though. I've never used them myself, but it's worth a shot. For MAME I am working on a plugin that shows the guts of neo geo games better, but it's super raw as I just started it yesterday :)
I've put out a simple MAME script that visualizes VRAM. I talk about it here: neo-geo.com/forums/index.php?threads/mame-script-to-visualize-sprites-fix-layer.270980/#post-4501810 I'm also working on a neo geo rom hack. I plan to eventually do a video on how I made it, but that probably won't be for a while. Turns out MAME's debugger is really powerful. I definitely recommend checking it out.
I do have a question about palettes. I am aware of a CLUT (Color Look Up Table), does that mean there can only be 16 palettes at a given time per scene? This question is asked because TRU FUN Games introduced me to this principle as he was showing Mortal Kombat being ported to the Atari Jaguar. From what was explained thus far, you have an array of 256 colors that can be fit into one scene-each entry can be up to 16 colors. Once recalled Joe Redifer of Game Sack saying how Rayman put the NeoGeo to shame; but hopefully that will change soon. Looking forward to that development environment for the NeoGeo! Just hope it doesn’t end up the same fate as the Sega Master System Game Maker.
Each palette has 15 colors, and there's a max of 256 palettes at a time. So the Neo Geo can put a maximum of 3840 colors onto the screen at once without resorting to any advanced tricks. I'm not familiar with the Jaguar, but generally all systems have slightly different limitations on colors, palettes, etc.
Quite fascinating. Reminds me of the early 8bit machines, only much more powerful and versatile. Would love to port some of my games to the Neo Geo one day.
Like commercial games back in the day? Man I wish 😊 I am making a game right now, I showed a bit of it in this video. It doesn't look that great yet, but it's got a long way to go
Hi Matt. Could you make a version of Samurai Shodown 2 with the life bars in yellow instead of green? I was never convinced by the green color when in Samurai Shodown 1 it looks great in yellow. Having 2 like this would be great. Besides something more complex which is to remove the NEOGEO logo from the moon that appears in a stage, I think it takes away from the seriousness of the game and I see it out of place. With only these two changes, Samurai Shodown 2 would be perfect and in total harmony with the first one, since both are similar aesthetically and as a game. After the work done in KOF94TE I suppose it will be super easy for you. I have another idea with KOF98. Also change the color of the life bar which is again green... Since yellow could not be used because it is used in EXTRA mode, then the same light orange color that the life bars had for the first time in KOF97 could be used in ADVANCE mode. What do you think? To make KOF98 perfect in my opinion, you should make the stages reserved for the penultimate round, such as the Iori stage train stage or the Takuma, Heidern and Saisu temple stage in Japan, come out from the first round with their respective characters and also when they are random characters. I mean, you should also equip the CPU with random characters so that the game, if you choose, is fresher. To top it off, I would put the commentator's voices like in Survivor mode, where they introduce the characters by name before saying what round it is and Ready Go! That way it would be as cool as the KOF96 commentator. If you did all this, you would make me very happy, bro 😊
Mortal Kombat ran at a higher resolution (400x254 versus the Neo Geo's 320x224) and had more colors. But I am sure a very good port of MK to the Neo could be done, it'd be similar to the Genesis port but probably much better.
And 3 years later AtariJaguar did away with tiles and palettes. You have a large background buffer with 16 bpp. Then a sprite can pull from any rectangle region ( 4px for memory alignment). I still cannot believe that artist like to deal with palettes. If you want fancy effects, software can do a lot. Archimedes introduced cheap and fast ARM CPUs into the consumer market. I guess that Neo Geo has the better controller.
@ the DSP in Jerry only has direct access to audio (and IO)? The documentation is not clear about the “system bus”, but looking at this priority thing, I can’t believe that any pins on the chip are involved when the DSP sends the next sample to the DAC. Jerry has 8kB of RAM. So the minimal thing to expect of a game is unsynced music whose code and data fit into 8kB. It hurts me to stick to 4kB on the GPU for graphics and physics, but in the end . Maybe code it dynamic. When the player mutes the game, upload other code into the DSP?
Hello Matt,
Good to see you again and Happy New Year to you and the family bro. 8^)
Great, now we start to go deeper into the series of Neo-Geo development with the graphics. I really want to listen in more on this because I was a gamer growing up on how graphics are why they said in advertisements that the Neo-Geo was "Bigger, Badder,, Better" than the rest. This will be a real treat for sure. 8^)
I posted this up on the Neo-Geo thread over on the forums at AtariAge for others to take notice on what you will be informing us about Matt. Thank you for sharing this and looking forward to your next video for sure. 8^)
Anthony..
Hey Anthony, glad you're enjoying the series. Yeah it's starting to get more interesting. From here on out I think the videos will cover more deeper and lesser known stuff
Very neat stuff! I've mucked wirh Neo-Geo Reverse Engineering for a while and would love more in-depth stuff like this. What tools do ya suggest for really getting in to a games guts? Up till now ive been using Mame which is sick but something more tailor made for Neo-Geo games and feature rich would be sick
I've been making my own tools. When they become polished enough I'll release them. I am pretty sure the people at neo-source.com have a lot of tools though. I've never used them myself, but it's worth a shot.
For MAME I am working on a plugin that shows the guts of neo geo games better, but it's super raw as I just started it yesterday :)
oh yeah, my tile viewer is usable: neospriteviewer.mattgreer.dev/
I've put out a simple MAME script that visualizes VRAM. I talk about it here: neo-geo.com/forums/index.php?threads/mame-script-to-visualize-sprites-fix-layer.270980/#post-4501810
I'm also working on a neo geo rom hack. I plan to eventually do a video on how I made it, but that probably won't be for a while. Turns out MAME's debugger is really powerful. I definitely recommend checking it out.
@@MattGreer I've worked with it before, but this is definitely interesting! Will have a look, cheers 👍
@@yoshinpixels9924 I've started gathering my scripts here: github.com/city41/ngDebugScripts
I do have a question about palettes. I am aware of a CLUT (Color Look Up Table), does that mean there can only be 16 palettes at a given time per scene? This question is asked because TRU FUN Games introduced me to this principle as he was showing Mortal Kombat being ported to the Atari Jaguar.
From what was explained thus far, you have an array of 256 colors that can be fit into one scene-each entry can be up to 16 colors. Once recalled Joe Redifer of Game Sack saying how Rayman put the NeoGeo to shame; but hopefully that will change soon. Looking forward to that development environment for the NeoGeo! Just hope it doesn’t end up the same fate as the Sega Master System Game Maker.
Each palette has 15 colors, and there's a max of 256 palettes at a time. So the Neo Geo can put a maximum of 3840 colors onto the screen at once without resorting to any advanced tricks. I'm not familiar with the Jaguar, but generally all systems have slightly different limitations on colors, palettes, etc.
Quite fascinating. Reminds me of the early 8bit machines, only much more powerful and versatile. Would love to port some of my games to the Neo Geo one day.
Very interesting, did you work on any NeoGeo games?
Like commercial games back in the day? Man I wish 😊 I am making a game right now, I showed a bit of it in this video. It doesn't look that great yet, but it's got a long way to go
subbed! im getting into neogeo coding as we speak, any discords?
Hi Matt. Could you make a version of Samurai Shodown 2 with the life bars in yellow instead of green? I was never convinced by the green color when in Samurai Shodown 1 it looks great in yellow. Having 2 like this would be great. Besides something more complex which is to remove the NEOGEO logo from the moon that appears in a stage, I think it takes away from the seriousness of the game and I see it out of place. With only these two changes, Samurai Shodown 2 would be perfect and in total harmony with the first one, since both are similar aesthetically and as a game. After the work done in KOF94TE I suppose it will be super easy for you.
I have another idea with KOF98. Also change the color of the life bar which is again green... Since yellow could not be used because it is used in EXTRA mode, then the same light orange color that the life bars had for the first time in KOF97 could be used in ADVANCE mode. What do you think? To make KOF98 perfect in my opinion, you should make the stages reserved for the penultimate round, such as the Iori stage train stage or the Takuma, Heidern and Saisu temple stage in Japan, come out from the first round with their respective characters and also when they are random characters. I mean, you should also equip the CPU with random characters so that the game, if you choose, is fresher. To top it off, I would put the commentator's voices like in Survivor mode, where they introduce the characters by name before saying what round it is and Ready Go! That way it would be as cool as the KOF96 commentator.
If you did all this, you would make me very happy, bro 😊
Sorry man, I just don't have time for that. This sounds like a great opportunity for you to learn about hacking and try this yourself.
Could Neo Geo do Morta KOMBAT?
Mortal Kombat ran at a higher resolution (400x254 versus the Neo Geo's 320x224) and had more colors. But I am sure a very good port of MK to the Neo could be done, it'd be similar to the Genesis port but probably much better.
And 3 years later AtariJaguar did away with tiles and palettes. You have a large background buffer with 16 bpp. Then a sprite can pull from any rectangle region ( 4px for memory alignment). I still cannot believe that artist like to deal with palettes. If you want fancy effects, software can do a lot. Archimedes introduced cheap and fast ARM CPUs into the consumer market.
I guess that Neo Geo has the better controller.
Jugular couldn't do shit though many games had no music 😂
@ the DSP in Jerry only has direct access to audio (and IO)? The documentation is not clear about the “system bus”, but looking at this priority thing, I can’t believe that any pins on the chip are involved when the DSP sends the next sample to the DAC. Jerry has 8kB of RAM. So the minimal thing to expect of a game is unsynced music whose code and data fit into 8kB.
It hurts me to stick to 4kB on the GPU for graphics and physics, but in the end . Maybe code it dynamic. When the player mutes the game, upload other code into the DSP?