Has anyone ever pulled up the COLOR TEST on California Games for the Mega Drive / Genesis? It shows a grid of 224 colors on the screen. That's all the proof I ever needed that this system can use tricks to put more than 64 colors on the screen at once.
I just did a color test on California Games, and the COLOR TEST screen displays 224 colours on screen. That's the highest on-screen color count I've yet seen for a Sega Mega Drive game. Nice find.
Yes, I meant just games. There's a Sega Mega Drive demo that displays the entire 1536 colour palette (including Shadow/Highlight colours) on screen. And that 1536-color demo even has background scrolling.
Russell Thompson I heard that there was a wa s a trick that programmers could use that allows Genesis to use 128 colors! And another that allows programmers to use all 512 at once!!!
Yeah. California Games used 3 simple tricks. Mid-frame color swapping,shadow mode and highlight mode are combined together to display up to 225 colors on screen but this will slowdown the gameplay a bit
64 colors is just what the color RAM (a portion of the VRAM) can hold at any one time. It doesn't mean that's all it can display on screen at any one time. Sonic 2, for example, displays 75 colors on screen in the Aquatic Ruin Zone. It does this using a mid-frame palette swap technique, which allows it to exceed the 64-color limit in the same frame. The Sega Mega Drive also has a shadow & highlight effect that triples the colors, up to 192 colors on screen. A number of games use this effect, like Vectorman and Toy Story. Sega used a similar effect in its 16-bit arcade systems (for example, extending the Sega OutRun system from 4096 to 12,288 colors on screen). If you combine the shadow & highlight mode with the mid-frame palette swap technique, you can get up to 225 colors on screen on the Mega Drive. But no Mega Drive games actually do this, since it would cause significant slowdown. Hackers have also unlocked a hidden lo-res, 160x224 resolution, direct-color mode, where it can display 512 colors on screen (i.e. extending the color RAM by sacrificing half the resolution). The only known Mega Drive game to use this mode is a fan-made port of Wolfenstein 3D, which displays 256 colors on screen (like the PC original). And finally, if you enable shadow & highlight with direct-color mode, you can display 1536 colors on screen. You can't use it for any actual games though, and the only Mega Drive ROM that does this is a simple color test ROM with a static image.
"If you combine the shadow & highlight mode with the mid-frame palette swap technique, you can get up to 225 colors on screen on the Mega Drive. But no Mega Drive games actually do this, since it would cause significant slowdown." California Games???
Hello ! Can you give links for these demos. Except the hidden low-res, all other possibilities are tricks to me to render special effect. I'm still wondering for some of theses how they can do more than 512 colors, as the RGB definition is coded 3:3:3. Maybe displaying two colors rapidly on the same pixel, so the human eye appy a mix or see some kind of transparency. But there are always counter-parts to this.
@Manveru31 yes, and we must say that this is done with 4 pals, it is another restriction. but I've read that there's a "hidden low-res" that allow to go up to 512 colors (see info about titan 2 demo)
What Sonic does is a mid-frame Palette Swap. Basically you send a Horizontal Interrupt telling it to change the palettes being used beyond a certain point of the frame while it's drawing. If you want to go for pure color counts it's possible to display 512 colors using this effect. There is also Shadow and Highlight which can change the intensity of a color without costing a palette entry. This can triple on screen color counts. So combining the two it's possible to display 1532 colors.
Wasn't really the CPU, just the way it was designed. SNES actually had a slower CPU, but could display more colors. Which is why many SNES games (especially early ones) tended to have quite a bit of slow-down. I believe the graphics chip used in the Genesis was an upgraded version of the one used in the older Master System, I think. Nice little forum here explaining in a bit more detail: segaxtreme . net/community/topic/18697-genesis-colour-specs/ (take out the spaces) And thanks for watching!
Toy Story and Vectorman are up there. It's really hard to say, depends on what you think is impressive. Virtua Racing certainly pushes way more polygons than StarFox and at a much higher framerate. Red Zone has super smooth, full screen FMV, Ristar pushes insane color. My picks though would be Thunderforce 4, Phantasy Star 4, Shining Force 2, and Streets of Rage 2.
Even when it goes below the 61 color limit (keep in mind 3 colors are transparent so they don't count), Toy Story looks really nice for a 16-bit game. Have you ever measured Ranger-X's color output? That was supposed to produce 128 colors using a hold and modify technique similar to what was used on the Amiga.
Just like the Genesis, the Super Nintendo also had a more limited color palette during gameplay and could display a higher number of colors on still images. As standard, Super Nintendo games were at a lower resolution with higher number of colors while the Sega Genesis standard was higher resolution with less colors. However, both consoles could increase or decrease resolutions with lower or higher number of colors accordingly.
sure it can. as with many 2d consoles, there is a h-blank interrupt. when the display ray reaches the right end of your tv, there is a short amount of time where you could swap palettes. so you could easily display 64 colors on the upper half on the screen and 64 completly different colors on the lower half (for instance). you could actually use this trick on after every scanline
One technique programmers used was dithering It involved taking advantage of a quirk (banding artifacts) of composite NTSC signals. When 2 or more colors are interlaced together, they give the illusion of more colors. Examples of this can be found in Super Hang On, Space Harrier II, Outrun and Afterburner II . You end up with games that appear to show more colors that what is actually rendered.
@@avideogamemaster Are you talking about shaders ? I Tried dozens on various emulators in the past but only a few select of them look ok with no distortion and none have the desired end result in regards to pov effects such as transparency simulation and I can only imagine they need some time based fading blur (in miliseconds) instead of frame by frame clean blur. Not sure it's a tricky thing to try to replicate how a CRT works.
@@avideogamemaster Nope, while it is possible to download additional filters, none atempt to mimick CRT's like some of those you'll find on MAME. The closest I could get was enabling VSync, 50% scanlines, TV Mode (CVBS), and brighten. Any other render plugin is trying to make the pixels look finer or less angular in higher res. In MAME, one of the shaders tries to add a small bloom effect which is what you should be looking for as brighter pixels emit more light which in turn bleed their color on adjacent pixels including vertically over and on top of the scanline as the light bounces in the glass layer. This is what gives a slight anti-aliasing effect around contrasted sprites which then add themselves to the next image frame as the persistance of vision effect fades.
Fascinating video. I can't say it really surprised me much, as there were certain tricks to make Genesis display a little more than 64 colors, I think mostly by using lighter or darker shades of the same color or something. It just a shame the Genesis couldn't show more, considering the older PC-Engine (TurboGrafx-16) could display even more colors at once than the SNES. Even though its palette was the same as the Gen. The most colorful games I remember were the Sonic series and Gunstar Heroes
There had to be SO much beam racing in Vectorman and Toy Story. I'm impressed Vectorman pulled that off, and at 60fps on the hardware too! Toy story they *really* had some highly optimized palettes for most of the game and then on the cutscenes they spared no cycle on putting as many colors on screen as they could.
Vectorman the title screen already goes up to 82 colors and in-game from the stages you played up to 88 colors. poa9s, your videos are well made, can you do others ones on the same subject?
Eternal Champions looks way more colourful to me than Vectorman, which honestly looks a little drab. Shows that numbers are not the be all and end all.
love the epic music. cracked me up. Honestly, you look at these games (especially Vectorman & Eternal Champions) & both games still prove they could kick SNES's butt even with so many less colors available on screen at once (64 colors vs. SNES's 256 colors). Ultimately it comes down to how you use the colors; not how many you have. Tons of Genesis titles proved that.
+Garrett Williamson Mid palette color swaps. Other tricks..Not a trick per say but the Genny had built in Shadow an HL mode..This is why it could dispplay more than it 64 color limit which i think think one of those was transparent. Good programmers will go above and beyond what the system could do. Or find was around the system limitations.
Right, pre-rendered graphics. Doesn't make it more colorful. Personally I think Sonic 3 is a FAR more colorful game and takes advantage of its color way better than Donkey Kong Country did. Donkey Kong Country is revolutionary and looks great for 16-bit nevertheless. What they did was a super cool idea and it worked amazingly; I have nothing against the game. However, Sonic 3 took advantage of its style and did it better than almost any other game around the time. It's just way more colorful than Donkey Kong Country, tbh.
Color count is not so important on this context because is possible port a 256 (or more) colors image to 64 colours without loss of detail using palette optimization. That is, the image will look as the same even when is using less colours. The trick is that each tile don't goes beyond than 16 colours, color depth was the same on video game machines back on time.
@Nettikturbo Yeah Sega CD is totally a possibility. I'm actually working on another video right now. You can suggest videos, however it does take a little bit to do these and a nice chunk of HD space (which I seem to always get low on), and I get busy doing other things, so no guarantee I'll get to them. But I do try.
Are you going to do more color analysis? I'm looking forward to it! If someday you do it again, please do for Ristar, Sonic 2, Sonic 3 & Knuckles, Sonic 3D Blast and The Lost World: Jurassic Park (That one that has some 3D stages)! I saw in one forum someone doing a color analysis upon some static pictures of these games, where sonic 2 and 3 reached 75 colors, Ristar reached 80 colors and Jurassic Park reached 84 colors! I wonder if in other cenarios of those games they could reach even more
Oh, no, I used uncompressed and lossless compression to do these. It's usually pretty easy to tell if compression was used. Even using as little lossy compression as possible on a simple scene, will make the color count go really wild.
@koolkitty8989 Thats an error on my part actually. I accidentally typed in the value to one of it's cutscenes, rather than the value of the picture (holding the toy in that machine) when I was making the end result titles. Nice catch, I didn't see that until after it had been uploaded unfortunately.
My question is this: is one counting over a composite connection (which dithers bands of colors together), or over something like s-video or native RGB?
Travelers Tales had a nice trick, they used the background layer, foreground layer, and sprite layers together to make the cutscenes pictures, since each could use their own pallet plus pallet swapping on scanline breaks, they really pumped out the color display.
It's not the case that the Megadrive can't show more than 64 colors: It's that it can't (realistically) achieve more than 64 AT ONCE. By rewriting the palette on the fly you can show more colors, but the maximum at any time is effectively 64. Infact the Mega Drive has 512 colors available, 1536 if you want to include shadow and highlight variants.
The CPU often has less to do with the theoretical capabilities of the system than the video display circuitry. It's that, rather than 2mhz CPU speed difference that marks the true difference between a Megadrive/Genesis & Sega's System 16 arcade board.
In this case you're better to compare like to like: There are a whole tonne of other systems based around the Motorola 68000 which show what effect the processor clock speed actually has on the output. The Neo Geo and the Amiga/Atari ST are excellent points of reference.
My point is that the Neo Geo's resolution isn't substantially different from that of Megadrive. It's advantages are access to a ludicrous amount of memory space and a much nicer video display processing setup. The extra 4mhz of clockspeed is undoubtedly nice, but what it's used to do is shuttle some of extra data around the display, resulting in very fluid animations. The Amiga (500/+) and ST are also quite resentative of this because the two machines are near as dammit identical in terms of the broad hardware specs, but the Amiga is generally considered to be a slightly more powerful machine because: yes, video hardware output. You could have the nicest, fastest processor in the world, but if your VDP only lets you draw 32 colors on screen, your game is still gonna look a little crap.
You're not wrong in the sense that a faster processor should give better results, but it's not clearly equated to an increase in visual fidelity because at some point you have to take those 1's and 0's in RAM and turn them into a display signal. What arcade hardware has is dedicated hardware exactly for that job. To again use the Amiga chipset as an example, it has a single custom co-processor designed specifically for the job of making block copies of memory, which is ideal for getting data onto the screen. And that's from a commercial computer hardware design from 1985. An arcade manufacturer can afford to spend a whole lot more on it's dedicated boards. Also, I'm not sure how I'd go about comparing the superior number of enemies in the Sega CD port of Final Fight to the Sega CD version ;) I will say though, that the Sega CD version of Final Fight does have a noticably diminished number of onscreen colors versus the arcade version. Well dithered, to hide the reduction, but still noticable.
Have you ever tried more Mega Drive games with great graphics (apart from Ranger X)? I'm thinking of Flink, Thunder Force IV, Streets of Rage 3, Street fighter II'... Just curious about them!
the genesis pushes more colo(u)rs because some devs used raster effects instead of vector essentially doubling or even quadrupling the colo(u)rs onscreen from 64 to 128 or (possibly) even 256 the same amount as the SNES.
NB, did I miss something? Actual playback, Toy Story (outside of the cutscenes) peaks at 66 colours (which may be an unintentional glitch, even - a palette change that was supposed to happen between frames but happened midframe by accident, maybe with a temporary half frame showing messed up colours) ... but at the end, the countdown says 105? Where did the other 39 come from?
Fucking awesome vid well done mate.Also i beg you to do the megadrive/genesis sonic games that would be very interesting(i know theyve not got an amazingly high colour count but would sill be intersesting)
one thing I have noticed on my Mega Drive: very often when there are some color changes in the display there is that disturbing garbage in the border (usually right down corner but can be anywhere really), emulators do not output that but the real systems do...
Yeah, indeed. The cart racing sections are even smoother on the actual console or emulator than the video shows, as the video has a cap of 30fps. Really impressive what they managed to do in this game.
Oops I just saw your ranger x video. It barely went beyond the threshold the actual threshold was supposed to be 61 but ranger x used a lot of well done dithering which gave many the thought that it went far beyond the 61 limit. Also back then the scanlines in. CRTs further blended this well done dithering between color values
+HotNavyStud Oh yeah totally. Not only did they blend, but if you arranged pixels in such a way it'd cause interference when displayed on a CRT (using composite cables). When watching tv/movies you'ld want to avoid these kind of errors, cause it usually made the image look bad. But it could be taken advantage of in games to create new effects/colors. For instance, in Sonic 2 the glass pipes you would travel thru were just simple vertical/striped pixels since the genesis couldn't do transparency. If looked at in an emulator or rgb output (such as this example), it looks like this www.chrismcovell.com/gotRGB/screenshots/Son2CRGB.jpg . But when viewed on a CRT with normal composite cables, it looks like this www.chrismcovell.com/gotRGB/screenshots/Son2CComp.jpg . Pixels get blurred together to create a transparency effect, but you also get interference errors which actually create new colors over the glass tube. It's really quite amazing.
+poa9s > but you also get interference errors which actually create new colors over the glass tube. It's really quite amazing. The jail bars of rainbow color you see over the glass tubes are actually present in repeating patterns over the entire screen, they're just more noticeable on solid colors and bright colors. The rainbow jail bars is actually a hardware problem with the video encoder chip on many Model 1 Genesis / Megadrive system versions.
@Da1shocker Yup, as the analog output from those old systems would introduce noise (and other such things) which would mess with the results. So emulation was the only way to go.
Blast Processing at it's finest... Even though "Blast Processing" just meant that the Sega Genesis had a faster CPU than the SNES, which is what allowed the Sonic games to have fast-moving backgrounds. But that still sounds better than "The Genesis has a 7.6MHz CPU, while the Super Nintendo has a 3.6MHz!".
InfinityCraft Color palette, yes. Resolution, no. While the SNES had a 512x448 resolution mode, very few games ever used it, because it significantly reduced the performance, colors, and other features. Most SNES games only used the default 256x224 mode. On the other hand, most Sega Mega Drive games used the 320x224 mode as default, running at a higher resolution than most SNES games. In addition, the Mega Drive's resolution could be increased to 320x448 without any reduction at all in the performance, colors, or other features, like in Sonic 2's two-player mode. The Mega Drive had the clear resolution advantage.
InfinityCraft THe sound isn't better actually, it depends on your "design specification". Back in those days Memory was an expensive thing to have, and Sample based would take up far more than an FM based solution. Also if you choose your coefficients right, you can make some very realistic instruments on the FM chip of the Megadrive, and some really non realistic but awesome sounding ones as well ;). It could do a great distortion effect for instance ;).And if you really wanted to sample, there were software engines out there that could split the PCM channel up into 4 voices, granted it would be a bit of a stretch to use that though, especially since you had better options. As even Square waves (something FM chips often have problems with ) are taken care of via the inclusion of Legacy Master System hardware :). And if you REALLY REALLY REAAAAAALLY wanted more sound capabilities (which for it's time was a bit silly as good programmers could make the Megadrive sing ;))... there is a sound line going through the cart that was never used (Okay the SVP chip adds 2 PWM channels I think) which allows for mixing another signal into it ;).Face it sound wise Meg was very well designed :).Basically an Arcade system ;).
According to a video titled "more efficient Sega genesis" which coincidentally is under related videos to your very own video. The titan o erdrive demo can display at once the full 512 color pallette of the genesis. Its all in the description of his video.
@Alianger I actually havn't played Panorama Cotton yet, I've seen it has some very nice pseudo 3d scrolling effects however. Much like Traveller's Tales managed to achieve on a couple of the Toy Story levels.
I know Toy Story and Vectorman uses shadow/highlight mode so it's able to go above 64 colors. The maximum number of colors will be slightly lower for all systems as 64 colors is really 63 colors and 256 is really 255, 16 is really 15 for example.
I love this guy and his channel. This is exactly what I would have done if i found the right programs, and then I went to his channel and saw, Lucas with his Vision T-shirt from The Wizard. YES! LOL
The Genesis could utilize a trick known as 'hold and modify' to increase color limits, but was restricted to backgrounds only if I recall, thus the reason the Toy Story cutscenes had more colors than the actual gameplay.
I do have one question. Did you run the color analysis on a compressed video? Any compression artifacts will introduce colors that weren't there. I've seen many articles looking into this, and most of the false reports of over 64 colors are only due to image or video compression. The Genesis could use an overlay color, like underwater in Sonic, that does potentially introduce more than the standard 64 colors, but that's kinda cheating since it can't be used but on a portion of the screen.
That's an interesting method used ! What emulator is used ? Most of them do not emulate Shadow/Highlight mode right and will give higher values than reality. Eternal Champions is a weird choice IMO, I would have takes something like Ristar istead.
What, there was a question over it? It's a paletted system that can alter its palettes midscreen. Of course it can show more than the static-palette max. I think you can do it just casually using shadow-and-highlight mode anyway. Certainly there was a bit of that going on with at least some of both the over-64 and sub-64 scenes shown in this video. Thing is, shoving new colours into the palette registers takes bus and CPU time, so if you've got something that's already extremely processor intensive like Virtua Racing, of course it's not really going to bother increasing the colour count if it doesn't need to... Still, as both systems show, it's not necessarily how many colours you can display at once, but what you do with them that counts...
@SegaFanatic5188 Yeah, I'd actually like to see that. The technique of switching the palette (or something to that effect) mid frame is pretty interesting.
Have you already seen Stephane Dallongeville's (by now year old) conversion of the 'Bad Apple' video to Genesis ROM? /watch?v=2vPe452cegU I immediately thought back to Red Zone. It isn't pushing the number of colors used, but is impressive for the framerate.
No single game really comes to mind. A number of games did show off some pretty impressive stuff, especially when it comes to sprite count. Like Batman & Robin, Gunstar Heroes, Vectorman and Ranger-X. I can't think of any single game for the Genesis, like Yoshi's Island 2 was for the SNES (although that did use an FX chip), that really shows the Genesis at it's max potential. Maybe someone who knows of one will reply.
what gave the genesis its 64 colours,was it the 68000 cpu and why did the neo geo/arcade games have 4000 when it used the same processor? awesome vid btw very interesting
The technical interest of your videos is not as high as high as its quality. You have selected some recent games to test them ok, but it was obvious that virtua racing is not color full. Using Sonic 3 or sonic and Knuckles would have been a better choice for example.
On side note, I really would like to see Sega make one last Sega Genesis game using todays tech and development tools. Really go out on it, use maximum ROM size and maybe an extra chip or two to help with processing. And release it as an official genesis cart (same style case and instruction booklet). It'd surely be a money-loss for Sega, so there's no way they'd do it. But it'd be interesting to see...
I believe the genesis could only address up to 32mb (megabit), but if using bank switching or some mapper (I can't remember), it has a theoretical limit of either 128 or 256mb. That fan made Pier Solar for instance is 64mb.
What software is that you are using? Also, The Sega Genesis was the PINACLE of 16 bit gaming. No other 16 bit system (including the snes) could touch it. It was EXTREMELY capable of doing more than people thought it could. Including display more colors, scalling and rotation with the right programming. Keep in mind, the Genesis was faster than a Macintosh computer at the time.
virtua racing has hardware in the cartridge no? so wouldn't it be an exception, aswell as wouldn't an early 3d game be like worst choice ever when showcasing colors on an old console?
The hardware in the cartridge is not video hardware, it's a co-processor. Stock MegaDrive/Genesis features need to make do for the video output. But yes, it's pretty weak regarding colour, for that reason.
I have never heard the claim that blast processing was a trick to display colours but even that is true it was used for marketing since the ads were clearly implying that blast processing made the system faster. The ad with a TV displaying a Genesis game on a race car and a TV displaying Super Mario Kart on the back of a slow moving van like veachile was clearly not advertising that the Genesis can display more than 64 colours, In fact that ad never even mentioned the term colour. Also an add for Sonic 2 mentioning that blast processing made him faster than ever clearly shows what direction Sega was going since the term colour was not mentioned there either.
It could brute force the effect in a sense, through good software programming. To me though mode 7 looks like shit. I'm more impressed with effects like you see in games like Dynamite Heady or Thunderforce where tons of layers of parallax or sprites are used to create and illusion of 3D. Toy Story's cart racing section not only has a mode 7 esque floor, but scales sprites all at a smooth framerate. It makes me wonder if some carts actually overclocked the CPU to 13Mhz or something.
Race Drivin and Steel Talons (run faster on SNES) for the actual 3D polygon. As for 2D polygons, you have Flashback. But since you like to use something completely unrelated to color : Please show me Megadrive games that does cool mode 7 effect (Something that goes over the horizontal interruption so me talk more than moving left/right).
@@Zekium race drivin on SNES runs at a lower framerate with less detail, and steel talon has a full 3d map on Genesis while SNES uses a static image ground with very little 3d on screen. So one example you gave, the Genesis absolutely mogs the SNES and the other example is extremely cut down on the SNES. Flashback intro video for the Genesis is running at a higher frame rate, as it outpaces the snes once you get to the part where he jumps on the hoverbike. If you want to see mode7-like effects on Genesis, it's easy to find games that have features as such, like contra hard corps
@@archive3do769 You asked for polygon like Genesis, I did (and one that run faster). And your example about contra hard corps is quite limited : Can't find one with full rotation involved instead of stuff even the game boy can perform (go check street racer) ? I kinda remember mode 7 involve zoom and full 2D rotation (the 3D effect is done using vertical interruption upon it) and the only example I have in mind that copy it is the intro of James Pond 3 on Megadrive (all the frames are stored in memory ?).
there,re several way's to virtualy display more colors onscreen. 1 change color pallet per frame. 2 digital color dithering. 3 use shadow licht. 4 rely on rf or composite video signal. that way, you can virtualy view up to 256 colors onscreen. no wonder that genesis games graphically comes close to the snes games,like super streetfichter 2,earth worm jim2,the lion king,etc,,, etc,,,
Problem is, that the amount of colors per frame is irrelevant. You can change color palettes from one frame to another or even mid-frame and introduce a flickering effect, which the human eye will not notice because it is too slow to realize this, hence you actually see more. There is a theoretical thing: Every Horiz. INT you get enough cycles to change 3 CRAM words. This would mean that you can display 61 + 3 * 232 colors in total, if I'm correct (THEORETICALLY)
Toy Story had to use front background,shadow background, highlight background, and sprite background thus making a beautiful picture.TAKE THAT NINTENDO!!!!!
Has anyone ever pulled up the COLOR TEST on California Games for the Mega Drive / Genesis? It shows a grid of 224 colors on the screen. That's all the proof I ever needed that this system can use tricks to put more than 64 colors on the screen at once.
I just did a color test on California Games, and the COLOR TEST screen displays 224 colours on screen. That's the highest on-screen color count I've yet seen for a Sega Mega Drive game. Nice find.
If you're referring to just games then probably yea, but Titan Overdrive has a screen with the full 512 colour palette visible.
Yes, I meant just games. There's a Sega Mega Drive demo that displays the entire 1536 colour palette (including Shadow/Highlight colours) on screen. And that 1536-color demo even has background scrolling.
Russell Thompson I heard that there was a wa s a trick that programmers could use that allows Genesis to use 128 colors! And another that allows programmers to use all 512 at once!!!
Yeah. California Games used 3 simple tricks. Mid-frame color swapping,shadow mode and highlight mode are combined together to display up to 225 colors on screen but this will slowdown the gameplay a bit
64 colors is just what the color RAM (a portion of the VRAM) can hold at any one time. It doesn't mean that's all it can display on screen at any one time.
Sonic 2, for example, displays 75 colors on screen in the Aquatic Ruin Zone. It does this using a mid-frame palette swap technique, which allows it to exceed the 64-color limit in the same frame.
The Sega Mega Drive also has a shadow & highlight effect that triples the colors, up to 192 colors on screen. A number of games use this effect, like Vectorman and Toy Story. Sega used a similar effect in its 16-bit arcade systems (for example, extending the Sega OutRun system from 4096 to 12,288 colors on screen).
If you combine the shadow & highlight mode with the mid-frame palette swap technique, you can get up to 225 colors on screen on the Mega Drive. But no Mega Drive games actually do this, since it would cause significant slowdown.
Hackers have also unlocked a hidden lo-res, 160x224 resolution, direct-color mode, where it can display 512 colors on screen (i.e. extending the color RAM by sacrificing half the resolution). The only known Mega Drive game to use this mode is a fan-made port of Wolfenstein 3D, which displays 256 colors on screen (like the PC original).
And finally, if you enable shadow & highlight with direct-color mode, you can display 1536 colors on screen. You can't use it for any actual games though, and the only Mega Drive ROM that does this is a simple color test ROM with a static image.
"If you combine the shadow & highlight mode with the mid-frame palette swap technique, you can get up to 225 colors on screen on the Mega Drive. But no Mega Drive games actually do this, since it would cause significant slowdown."
California Games???
Thank you, your comment holds the information I was looking for.
@@solarflare9078 Static screen? Because then slow down is of no concern.
Hello ! Can you give links for these demos. Except the hidden low-res, all other possibilities are tricks to me to render special effect. I'm still wondering for some of theses how they can do more than 512 colors, as the RGB definition is coded 3:3:3. Maybe displaying two colors rapidly on the same pixel, so the human eye appy a mix or see some kind of transparency. But there are always counter-parts to this.
@Manveru31 yes, and we must say that this is done with 4 pals, it is another restriction. but I've read that there's a "hidden low-res" that allow to go up to 512 colors (see info about titan 2 demo)
What Sonic does is a mid-frame Palette Swap. Basically you send a Horizontal Interrupt telling it to change the palettes being used beyond a certain point of the frame while it's drawing. If you want to go for pure color counts it's possible to display 512 colors using this effect. There is also Shadow and Highlight which can change the intensity of a color without costing a palette entry. This can triple on screen color counts. So combining the two it's possible to display 1532 colors.
Force refresh every frame, stuff we did on C64.
Wasn't really the CPU, just the way it was designed. SNES actually had a slower CPU, but could display more colors. Which is why many SNES games (especially early ones) tended to have quite a bit of slow-down. I believe the graphics chip used in the Genesis was an upgraded version of the one used in the older Master System, I think.
Nice little forum here explaining in a bit more detail:
segaxtreme . net/community/topic/18697-genesis-colour-specs/
(take out the spaces)
And thanks for watching!
Great video quality
Toy Story and Vectorman are up there. It's really hard to say, depends on what you think is impressive. Virtua Racing certainly pushes way more polygons than StarFox and at a much higher framerate. Red Zone has super smooth, full screen FMV, Ristar pushes insane color. My picks though would be Thunderforce 4, Phantasy Star 4, Shining Force 2, and Streets of Rage 2.
Even when it goes below the 61 color limit (keep in mind 3 colors are transparent so they don't count), Toy Story looks really nice for a 16-bit game. Have you ever measured Ranger-X's color output? That was supposed to produce 128 colors using a hold and modify technique similar to what was used on the Amiga.
Just like the Genesis, the Super Nintendo also had a more limited color palette during gameplay and could display a higher number of colors on still images. As standard, Super Nintendo games were at a lower resolution with higher number of colors while the Sega Genesis standard was higher resolution with less colors. However, both consoles could increase or decrease resolutions with lower or higher number of colors accordingly.
sure it can. as with many 2d consoles, there is a h-blank interrupt. when the display ray reaches the right end of your tv, there is a short amount of time where you could swap palettes. so you could easily display 64 colors on the upper half on the screen and 64 completly different colors on the lower half (for instance). you could actually use this trick on after every scanline
One technique programmers used was dithering It involved taking advantage of a quirk (banding artifacts) of composite NTSC signals. When 2 or more colors are interlaced together, they give the illusion of more colors. Examples of this can be found in Super Hang On, Space Harrier II, Outrun and Afterburner II . You end up with games that appear to show more colors that what is actually rendered.
this is lost on emulation. Same with transparency effects using flicker with persistance of vision.
@@TheSliderW Fusion/Video/Tv Mode (CVBS) and there you go, the best effect
@@avideogamemaster Are you talking about shaders ? I Tried dozens on various emulators in the past but only a few select of them look ok with no distortion and none have the desired end result in regards to pov effects such as transparency simulation and I can only imagine they need some time based fading blur (in miliseconds) instead of frame by frame clean blur. Not sure it's a tricky thing to try to replicate how a CRT works.
@@TheSliderW but have you tried that with Kega Fusion? I think it looks pretty good
@@avideogamemaster Nope, while it is possible to download additional filters, none atempt to mimick CRT's like some of those you'll find on MAME.
The closest I could get was enabling VSync, 50% scanlines, TV Mode (CVBS), and brighten. Any other render plugin is trying to make the pixels look finer or less angular in higher res.
In MAME, one of the shaders tries to add a small bloom effect which is what you should be looking for as brighter pixels emit more light which in turn bleed their color on adjacent pixels including vertically over and on top of the scanline as the light bounces in the glass layer. This is what gives a slight anti-aliasing effect around contrasted sprites which then add themselves to the next image frame as the persistance of vision effect fades.
Fascinating video. I can't say it really surprised me much, as there were certain tricks to make Genesis display a little more than 64 colors, I think mostly by using lighter or darker shades of the same color or something. It just a shame the Genesis couldn't show more, considering the older PC-Engine (TurboGrafx-16) could display even more colors at once than the SNES. Even though its palette was the same as the Gen.
The most colorful games I remember were the Sonic series and Gunstar Heroes
This really is one of the better produced videos on YT.
There had to be SO much beam racing in Vectorman and Toy Story. I'm impressed Vectorman pulled that off, and at 60fps on the hardware too! Toy story they *really* had some highly optimized palettes for most of the game and then on the cutscenes they spared no cycle on putting as many colors on screen as they could.
Damn I didn't even know you could do a test like that that was really cool thanks man!
Vectorman the title screen already goes up to 82 colors and in-game from the stages you played up to 88 colors. poa9s, your videos are well made, can you do others ones on the same subject?
Eternal Champions looks way more colourful to me than Vectorman, which honestly looks a little drab. Shows that numbers are not the be all and end all.
Happy SpaceInvader Just an illusion. The colour pallet they chose is more vibrant than on vectorman.
@atm9333 Or to clarify, the software i used to analyze I wrote, but I used after effects to put it all together.
That's why Toy Story and Vectorman loved crash on my Sega. (especially Toy Story on 3d stage)
love the epic music. cracked me up.
Honestly, you look at these games (especially Vectorman & Eternal Champions) & both games still prove they could kick SNES's butt even with so many less colors available on screen at once (64 colors vs. SNES's 256 colors). Ultimately it comes down to how you use the colors; not how many you have. Tons of Genesis titles proved that.
+Garrett Williamson Mid palette color swaps. Other tricks..Not a trick per say but the Genny had built in Shadow an HL mode..This is why it could dispplay more than it 64 color limit which i think think one of those was transparent. Good programmers will go above and beyond what the system could do. Or find was around the system limitations.
+Garrett Williamson lol was not expecting to see you here
True-ish, though I can't say the same about Sonic 3. Sonic 3 & Knuckles is a far more vibrant game than Donkey Kong Country.
Right, pre-rendered graphics. Doesn't make it more colorful. Personally I think Sonic 3 is a FAR more colorful game and takes advantage of its color way better than Donkey Kong Country did.
Donkey Kong Country is revolutionary and looks great for 16-bit nevertheless. What they did was a super cool idea and it worked amazingly; I have nothing against the game.
However, Sonic 3 took advantage of its style and did it better than almost any other game around the time. It's just way more colorful than Donkey Kong Country, tbh.
+Garrett Williamson HI GARRETT
Color count is not so important on this context because is possible port a 256 (or more) colors image to 64 colours without loss of detail using palette optimization. That is, the image will look as the same even when is using less colours. The trick is that each tile don't goes beyond than 16 colours, color depth was the same on video game machines back on time.
Indeed, the mode-7 type effects were really impressive.
@poa9s
What program did you use to analyze the amount of colors on screen frame-by-frame?
@Nettikturbo Yeah Sega CD is totally a possibility. I'm actually working on another video right now. You can suggest videos, however it does take a little bit to do these and a nice chunk of HD space (which I seem to always get low on), and I get busy doing other things, so no guarantee I'll get to them. But I do try.
It's amazing how well Blue Sky used the Genesis's capabilities. Heck, I'd say Vectorman looks even better than Donkey Kong Country.
Could you do this with the Titan Overdrive demo?
+crativ3 Oh interesting, never seen that demo before. It should probably work.
The demo looks to push the genesis to its limits I think... it looks good and sounds great (music by strobe)
We used all 512 colors at once in Overdrive 😛
alkenstein How?
No one You know that’s still a mystery I guess :) can anyone figure it out?
Are you going to do more color analysis? I'm looking forward to it! If someday you do it again, please do for Ristar, Sonic 2, Sonic 3 & Knuckles, Sonic 3D Blast and The Lost World: Jurassic Park (That one that has some 3D stages)! I saw in one forum someone doing a color analysis upon some static pictures of these games, where sonic 2 and 3 reached 75 colors, Ristar reached 80 colors and Jurassic Park reached 84 colors! I wonder if in other cenarios of those games they could reach even more
Oh, no, I used uncompressed and lossless compression to do these. It's usually pretty easy to tell if compression was used. Even using as little lossy compression as possible on a simple scene, will make the color count go really wild.
@atm9333 The software i used was actually one i wrote myself. And yeah the genesis was totally a pretty impressive system for its time.
@koolkitty8989 Thats an error on my part actually. I accidentally typed in the value to one of it's cutscenes, rather than the value of the picture (holding the toy in that machine) when I was making the end result titles. Nice catch, I didn't see that until after it had been uploaded unfortunately.
My question is this: is one counting over a composite connection (which dithers bands of colors together), or over something like s-video or native RGB?
How to measure , what software you used ?
That was the Mega-CD version of Eternal Champion who had more than 64 colors.
The last bench screen show a wrong in-game value for Toy Story. (150 instead of 66)
Yeah, I didn't catch that until a bit after I had uploaded it. I accidently entered the wrong value on the last screen. :\
Awesome video! Nobody else is doing this! Can u do SNES games? I would like to know how many colors they actually used!!!!! Please! Thank you!
Travelers Tales had a nice trick, they used the background layer, foreground layer, and sprite layers together to make the cutscenes pictures, since each could use their own pallet plus pallet swapping on scanline breaks, they really pumped out the color display.
The Laughing Rabbit there was a drawing tool for the commodore 64 that incorporated sprites, FLI and other tricks to overcome a similar limitation.
It's not the case that the Megadrive can't show more than 64 colors: It's that it can't (realistically) achieve more than 64 AT ONCE. By rewriting the palette on the fly you can show more colors, but the maximum at any time is effectively 64.
Infact the Mega Drive has 512 colors available, 1536 if you want to include shadow and highlight variants.
Colors displayed at once is what he meant. The NES also had a color palette of 56 colors, but could only display 16 at once.
The CPU often has less to do with the theoretical capabilities of the system than the video display circuitry.
It's that, rather than 2mhz CPU speed difference that marks the true difference between a Megadrive/Genesis & Sega's System 16 arcade board.
In this case you're better to compare like to like: There are a whole tonne of other systems based around the Motorola 68000 which show what effect the processor clock speed actually has on the output.
The Neo Geo and the Amiga/Atari ST are excellent points of reference.
My point is that the Neo Geo's resolution isn't substantially different from that of Megadrive. It's advantages are access to a ludicrous amount of memory space and a much nicer video display processing setup. The extra 4mhz of clockspeed is undoubtedly nice, but what it's used to do is shuttle some of extra data around the display, resulting in very fluid animations.
The Amiga (500/+) and ST are also quite resentative of this because the two machines are near as dammit identical in terms of the broad hardware specs, but the Amiga is generally considered to be a slightly more powerful machine because: yes, video hardware output.
You could have the nicest, fastest processor in the world, but if your VDP only lets you draw 32 colors on screen, your game is still gonna look a little crap.
You're not wrong in the sense that a faster processor should give better results, but it's not clearly equated to an increase in visual fidelity because at some point you have to take those 1's and 0's in RAM and turn them into a display signal.
What arcade hardware has is dedicated hardware exactly for that job. To again use the Amiga chipset as an example, it has a single custom co-processor designed specifically for the job of making block copies of memory, which is ideal for getting data onto the screen. And that's from a commercial computer hardware design from 1985. An arcade manufacturer can afford to spend a whole lot more on it's dedicated boards.
Also, I'm not sure how I'd go about comparing the superior number of enemies in the Sega CD port of Final Fight to the Sega CD version ;)
I will say though, that the Sega CD version of Final Fight does have a noticably diminished number of onscreen colors versus the arcade version. Well dithered, to hide the reduction, but still noticable.
@poa9s Any possibility of doing any Sega CD games, or a short list of games maybe that we could recommend?
I wish I could make a game for the sega genesis. It has a lot of potential.
+brainstar64 There are some indie devs still making games for it..Contact one of them im sure they can look for programmers testers and coders..
Have you ever tried more Mega Drive games with great graphics (apart from Ranger X)? I'm thinking of Flink, Thunder Force IV, Streets of Rage 3, Street fighter II'... Just curious about them!
the genesis pushes more colo(u)rs because some devs used raster effects instead of vector essentially doubling or even quadrupling the colo(u)rs onscreen from 64 to 128 or (possibly) even 256 the same amount as the SNES.
NB, did I miss something? Actual playback, Toy Story (outside of the cutscenes) peaks at 66 colours (which may be an unintentional glitch, even - a palette change that was supposed to happen between frames but happened midframe by accident, maybe with a temporary half frame showing messed up colours) ... but at the end, the countdown says 105? Where did the other 39 come from?
Not exactly sure how you missed the Sonic series, but ok. Nice stats edits.
Look at some of the Sonic games while your at it. I've heard some of the water levels break the 64 color limit.
That's the power of mid-frame register writes.
Fucking awesome vid well done mate.Also i beg you to do the megadrive/genesis sonic games that would be very interesting(i know theyve not got an amazingly high colour count but would sill be intersesting)
one thing I have noticed on my Mega Drive: very often when there are some color changes in the display there is that disturbing garbage in the border (usually right down corner but can be anywhere really), emulators do not output that but the real systems do...
Sega Does indeed.
Yeah, indeed. The cart racing sections are even smoother on the actual console or emulator than the video shows, as the video has a cap of 30fps. Really impressive what they managed to do in this game.
Oops I just saw your ranger x video. It barely went beyond the threshold the actual threshold was supposed to be 61 but ranger x used a lot of well done dithering which gave many the thought that it went far beyond the 61 limit. Also back then the scanlines in. CRTs further blended this well done dithering between color values
+HotNavyStud Oh yeah totally. Not only did they blend, but if you arranged pixels in such a way it'd cause interference when displayed on a CRT (using composite cables). When watching tv/movies you'ld want to avoid these kind of errors, cause it usually made the image look bad. But it could be taken advantage of in games to create new effects/colors.
For instance, in Sonic 2 the glass pipes you would travel thru were just simple vertical/striped pixels since the genesis couldn't do transparency. If looked at in an emulator or rgb output (such as this example), it looks like this www.chrismcovell.com/gotRGB/screenshots/Son2CRGB.jpg . But when viewed on a CRT with normal composite cables, it looks like this www.chrismcovell.com/gotRGB/screenshots/Son2CComp.jpg . Pixels get blurred together to create a transparency effect, but you also get interference errors which actually create new colors over the glass tube. It's really quite amazing.
+poa9s
> but you also get interference errors which actually create new colors over the glass tube. It's really quite amazing.
The jail bars of rainbow color you see over the glass tubes are actually present in repeating patterns over the entire screen, they're just more noticeable on solid colors and bright colors. The rainbow jail bars is actually a hardware problem with the video encoder chip on many Model 1 Genesis / Megadrive system versions.
@Da1shocker Yup, as the analog output from those old systems would introduce noise (and other such things) which would mess with the results. So emulation was the only way to go.
Sheeeeet! Vectorman is intense at the intro!
Blast Processing at it's finest... Even though "Blast Processing" just meant that the Sega Genesis had a faster CPU than the SNES, which is what allowed the Sonic games to have fast-moving backgrounds. But that still sounds better than "The Genesis has a 7.6MHz CPU, while the Super Nintendo has a 3.6MHz!".
Well, the SNES has better hardware capabilities in pretty much any other aspect though. Color palette, resolution, etc.
InfinityCraft
Color palette, yes. Resolution, no.
While the SNES had a 512x448 resolution mode, very few games ever used it, because it significantly reduced the performance, colors, and other features. Most SNES games only used the default 256x224 mode.
On the other hand, most Sega Mega Drive games used the 320x224 mode as default, running at a higher resolution than most SNES games. In addition, the Mega Drive's resolution could be increased to 320x448 without any reduction at all in the performance, colors, or other features, like in Sonic 2's two-player mode.
The Mega Drive had the clear resolution advantage.
***** Oh. Guess I kinda misread something lol.
Sound is better on the SNES, too. Sample based, though.
InfinityCraft THe sound isn't better actually, it depends on your "design specification". Back in those days Memory was an expensive thing to have, and Sample based would take up far more than an FM based solution. Also if you choose your coefficients right, you can make some very realistic instruments on the FM chip of the Megadrive, and some really non realistic but awesome sounding ones as well ;). It could do a great distortion effect for instance ;).And if you really wanted to sample, there were software engines out there that could split the PCM channel up into 4 voices, granted it would be a bit of a stretch to use that though, especially since you had better options. As even Square waves (something FM chips often have problems with ) are taken care of via the inclusion of Legacy Master System hardware :). And if you REALLY REALLY REAAAAAALLY wanted more sound capabilities (which for it's time was a bit silly as good programmers could make the Megadrive sing ;))... there is a sound line going through the cart that was never used (Okay the SVP chip adds 2 PWM channels I think) which allows for mixing another signal into it ;).Face it sound wise Meg was very well designed :).Basically an Arcade system ;).
DehnusNorder The Mega Drive / Genesis was based off the Sega System 16, wasn't it? Or quite similar to it.
According to a video titled "more efficient Sega genesis" which coincidentally is under related videos to your very own video. The titan o erdrive demo can display at once the full 512 color pallette of the genesis. Its all in the description of his video.
@Alianger I actually havn't played Panorama Cotton yet, I've seen it has some very nice pseudo 3d scrolling effects however. Much like Traveller's Tales managed to achieve on a couple of the Toy Story levels.
Those shadow and light modes are fire.
Cool! I'm really Curious about all the other Genesis games
Amazing how they did 3d polygon graphics on a 7MHz processor
wow I never knew toy story had such good graphics
I know Toy Story and Vectorman uses shadow/highlight mode so it's able to go above 64 colors. The maximum number of colors will be slightly lower for all systems as 64 colors is really 63 colors and 256 is really 255, 16 is really 15 for example.
I love this guy and his channel. This is exactly what I would have done if i found the right programs, and then I went to his channel and saw, Lucas with his Vision T-shirt from The Wizard. YES! LOL
Great video
The Genesis could utilize a trick known as 'hold and modify' to increase color limits, but was restricted to backgrounds only if I recall, thus the reason the Toy Story cutscenes had more colors than the actual gameplay.
What program are you using for get the color on real time?
Wow at first I thought vectorman was kicking ass with its colors, then the toy story cutscenes came in...
You made with interlaced off , we can see vertical stripes in vectorman scenario , probably it will scored more high with plugin "mstsc.rpi
Wow, I never knew that about Jurassic Park. I'll have to take a look at that some time.
I do have one question. Did you run the color analysis on a compressed video? Any compression artifacts will introduce colors that weren't there. I've seen many articles looking into this, and most of the false reports of over 64 colors are only due to image or video compression. The Genesis could use an overlay color, like underwater in Sonic, that does potentially introduce more than the standard 64 colors, but that's kinda cheating since it can't be used but on a portion of the screen.
That's an interesting method used ! What emulator is used ? Most of them do not emulate Shadow/Highlight mode right and will give higher values than reality.
Eternal Champions is a weird choice IMO, I would have takes something like Ristar istead.
I'm not the biggest fan of the music over the top, but great video!
What, there was a question over it? It's a paletted system that can alter its palettes midscreen. Of course it can show more than the static-palette max. I think you can do it just casually using shadow-and-highlight mode anyway. Certainly there was a bit of that going on with at least some of both the over-64 and sub-64 scenes shown in this video.
Thing is, shoving new colours into the palette registers takes bus and CPU time, so if you've got something that's already extremely processor intensive like Virtua Racing, of course it's not really going to bother increasing the colour count if it doesn't need to...
Still, as both systems show, it's not necessarily how many colours you can display at once, but what you do with them that counts...
@SegaFanatic5188 Yeah, I'd actually like to see that. The technique of switching the palette (or something to that effect) mid frame is pretty interesting.
There are actually a number of SNES games that do that trick too. Level 4 of Axelay immediately comes to mind. It looks gorgeous.
Have you already seen Stephane Dallongeville's (by now year old) conversion of the 'Bad Apple' video to Genesis ROM? /watch?v=2vPe452cegU
I immediately thought back to Red Zone.
It isn't pushing the number of colors used, but is impressive for the framerate.
No single game really comes to mind. A number of games did show off some pretty impressive stuff, especially when it comes to sprite count. Like Batman & Robin, Gunstar Heroes, Vectorman and Ranger-X. I can't think of any single game for the Genesis, like Yoshi's Island 2 was for the SNES (although that did use an FX chip), that really shows the Genesis at it's max potential. Maybe someone who knows of one will reply.
Nice show :) Amiga computers also know those tricks :)
what gave the genesis its 64 colours,was it the 68000 cpu and why did the neo geo/arcade games have 4000 when it used the same processor? awesome vid btw very interesting
The technical interest of your videos is not as high as high as its quality. You have selected some recent games to test them ok, but it was obvious that virtua racing is not color full. Using Sonic 3 or sonic and Knuckles would have been a better choice for example.
Like what graphic effects (apart from more colours and a higher screen res)?
On side note, I really would like to see Sega make one last Sega Genesis game using todays tech and development tools. Really go out on it, use maximum ROM size and maybe an extra chip or two to help with processing. And release it as an official genesis cart (same style case and instruction booklet). It'd surely be a money-loss for Sega, so there's no way they'd do it. But it'd be interesting to see...
sorry, but may i ask what you used to preform this test. how do you count the colours on-screen?
Oh no prob, I actually wrote some software to get the color count and palette.
that's awesome, i wish i could do something like that.
thank you for replying.
Arctic FoxX :)
without making a video could you just tell me how many color display thunder force 4 and flink please ??......both are known for this
I believe the genesis could only address up to 32mb (megabit), but if using bank switching or some mapper (I can't remember), it has a theoretical limit of either 128 or 256mb. That fan made Pier Solar for instance is 64mb.
@localhbci
What if its overclocked? I have 2 model 1's that I overclocked. One runs at 10mhz and the other 13.5..
The rom cartridges can come with hardware inside to display more colors
Vectorman is like "OH HEIL NO,THE GENESIS CAN DISPLAY MORE THAN 64 COORS,C DAT?"
Now this is interesting.
What software is that you are using?
Also, The Sega Genesis was the PINACLE of 16 bit gaming. No other 16 bit system (including the snes) could touch it. It was EXTREMELY capable of doing more than people thought it could. Including display more colors, scalling and rotation with the right programming. Keep in mind, the Genesis was faster than a Macintosh computer at the time.
virtua racing has hardware in the cartridge no? so wouldn't it be an exception, aswell as wouldn't an early 3d game be like worst choice ever when showcasing colors on an old console?
Virtua Racing barely has 16 colours on screen at once if i recall.
The hardware in the cartridge is not video hardware, it's a co-processor. Stock MegaDrive/Genesis features need to make do for the video output.
But yes, it's pretty weak regarding colour, for that reason.
I have never heard the claim that blast processing was a trick to display colours but even that is true it was used for marketing since the ads were clearly implying that blast processing made the system faster. The ad with a TV displaying a Genesis game on a race car and a TV displaying Super Mario Kart on the back of a slow moving van like veachile was clearly not advertising that the Genesis can display more than 64 colours, In fact that ad never even mentioned the term colour. Also an add for Sonic 2 mentioning that blast processing made him faster than ever clearly shows what direction Sega was going since the term colour was not mentioned there either.
It could brute force the effect in a sense, through good software programming.
To me though mode 7 looks like shit. I'm more impressed with effects like you see in games like Dynamite Heady or Thunderforce where tons of layers of parallax or sprites are used to create and illusion of 3D.
Toy Story's cart racing section not only has a mode 7 esque floor, but scales sprites all at a smooth framerate. It makes me wonder if some carts actually overclocked the CPU to 13Mhz or something.
This is amazing! Great job! 😁👍
@poa9s Really cool software. I had tried to do some of those color counts but only with still frames.
You should check out some 32X games and see how many even came close to that 32,768 color limit.
Honestly idk why people debate the colors. Show me an SNES game that does 3d polygons like the genesis without the cartridge chip.
Race Drivin and Steel Talons (run faster on SNES) for the actual 3D polygon.
As for 2D polygons, you have Flashback.
But since you like to use something completely unrelated to color : Please show me Megadrive games that does cool mode 7 effect (Something that goes over the horizontal interruption so me talk more than moving left/right).
@@Zekium race drivin on SNES runs at a lower framerate with less detail, and steel talon has a full 3d map on Genesis while SNES uses a static image ground with very little 3d on screen. So one example you gave, the Genesis absolutely mogs the SNES and the other example is extremely cut down on the SNES. Flashback intro video for the Genesis is running at a higher frame rate, as it outpaces the snes once you get to the part where he jumps on the hoverbike. If you want to see mode7-like effects on Genesis, it's easy to find games that have features as such, like contra hard corps
@@archive3do769 You asked for polygon like Genesis, I did (and one that run faster).
And your example about contra hard corps is quite limited : Can't find one with full rotation involved instead of stuff even the game boy can perform (go check street racer) ? I kinda remember mode 7 involve zoom and full 2D rotation (the 3D effect is done using vertical interruption upon it) and the only example I have in mind that copy it is the intro of James Pond 3 on Megadrive (all the frames are stored in memory ?).
What software is that you are using?
there,re several way's to virtualy display more colors onscreen.
1 change color pallet per frame.
2 digital color dithering.
3 use shadow licht.
4 rely on rf or composite video signal.
that way, you can virtualy view up to 256 colors onscreen.
no wonder that genesis games graphically comes close to the snes games,like super streetfichter 2,earth worm jim2,the lion king,etc,,, etc,,,
Problem is, that the amount of colors per frame is irrelevant. You can change color palettes from one frame to another or even mid-frame and introduce a flickering effect, which the human eye will not notice because it is too slow to realize this, hence you actually see more.
There is a theoretical thing: Every Horiz. INT you get enough cycles to change 3 CRAM words. This would mean that you can display 61 + 3 * 232 colors in total, if I'm correct (THEORETICALLY)
you should do a color analysis on Sub-Terrannia from ZYRINX.
if anyone could achieve max color depth it'd be them...
Interesting. I'd love to see Ecco II and Ranger X.
The game highly regarded as the game that went beyond the color limitation is ranger x its compared to psx games
Sega Genesis used true color where Snes used old and now defunct static color scheme.
Toy Story had to use front background,shadow background, highlight background, and sprite background thus making a beautiful picture.TAKE THAT NINTENDO!!!!!
Hey, what about Ristar?