Games That Push the Limits of the Sega CD
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- Опубліковано 8 чер 2024
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The Sega CD a.k.a. The Mega CD, the long awaited cup holder addon for Sega's 16 bit console.
Once again I'm taking a look at some of the games that push it to the limits and talking a little bit about how it all works too.
Games featured:
00:00 Intro
00:29 Sonic CD
05:11 The Adventures of Batman and Robin
09:44 Jaguar XJ220
11:17 Formula 1 Championship: Beyond the Limit
12:51 Silpheed
15:06 Racing Aces
17:13 Soul Star
20:25 Batman Returns
21:35 Patreon Thanks - Ігри
Cliffhanger with the snowboard I have to say this system was pretty impressive back in the early nineties when I got it the only thing that blew me away after that was Tomb Raider
I give Lunar Eternal Blue an honorable mention. The full motion animations were very well done.
Lunar was and still is my favorite game of all time.
One of the systems I still own from my childhood. Had to replace the disc moter 4ish years ago. Love your 'Games that push the limit of [X]'
Motor? Or did you mean something else?
@@goeland4585 yes, keyboard mistyped.
@@jackmyowl keyboards don't mistype 😄
@@EikottXD on phones they can, lol.
@@EikottXD Auto correct on phones is just the worst.
That’s very interesting about the Mega CD being bandwidth limited, I hadn’t realised that. I wonder if that’s why Sega went with overlaying the 32X’s graphics via the pass through video cable?
Must be part of it, at least (and the other part being that the 32X would be able to avoid constructing sprites out of tiles or having to be limited by the Mega Drive's colour palette). The 32X could use the Mega CD, and if both the Mega CD and 32X were trying to push complicated graphics into the Mega Drive's RAM you'd end off with 5 frames per second :)
@@3rdalbum i still think they were bonkers to think 32x-cd games could ever be financially viable, not even taking into account how hard it must have been to program such a game
@@3rdalbum 32x cd is even more difficult to program most likely than the saturn and even the jaguar. Would overal/underlay Cram cache ram work to increase the background colors?
Exactly. That and the color limitation.
@@goeland4585 not to mention customers with both i only had the 32x never heard of the CD until recently.
For soul star the sprites are indeed scaled in real-time. Sarah Jane Avory wrote up some article in how she did it. In most sprite heavy levels the background itself is just a set of looping prerendered image compressed to tiles often flipped in X Y to save tile memory and have less data to transfer. And on top of that is the real-time scaled sprites that then are transferred to the Megadrive (shared vram space with background tiles if I am not wrong)
That is also the reason they can wobble. As you can do this effect with the sprites themselves it’s done on the mega Cd before sending it to megadrive and be rendered using regular sprites.
Core Design really did seem to have the best handle on the Sega CD's capabilities and how best to utilize them. I feel Thunderhawk or Battlecorps deserved a mention.
The Mega CD wasn't around for long enough for developers to 'push the system'.
Pushing a system to and often beyond its official limits generally comes later in a system's lifespan such as can be seen with Toy Story on the Mega Drive and Donkey Kong Country on the SNES. The Mega CD simply wasn't around long enough and neither did it have the overwhelming backing by developers to run the usual and expected course of system pushing.
@@bigbabatunde1218 Third party devs had it from 1991-1995, or four years. SEGA of Japan had it for six years.
And? Doesn't mean a thing if they aren't supporting it.
It was essentially just a storage expansion device anyway. What would you have them do with it?
@@bigbabatunde1218 You said that it wasn't around long enough. SEGA had specs and tools on their own hardware for six years.
@@MaxAbramson3 See previous post
I remember EGM claiming at the time claiming that Silpheed was a genuine honest-to-god fully-polygonal game. Admittedly it pulls off the illusion quite well (as did the SCD port of Starblade, though the dithering there gave it away more frequently).
Not entirely incorrect since all the all the actual gameplay elements are real-time (or quarter-time?) polygons.
@@StraightOuttaJarhois Per the video (and I've read this elsewhere) the gameplay elements like the ship and so on are actually pre-rendered sprites. They do seem to be made up of a limited number of animation frames-for example, spinning objects have a short cycle of repeated frames instead of moving smoothly with a large set of different angles depending on the perspective, as one would expect from fully polygonal models.
@@TheFancifulNorwegian I had Silpheed, and I remember reading somewhere back in the 90's that the Sega CD's hardware had limited 3D capabilities: No textures and a max of about 100k polygons on screen (or was it 10k...) and Silpheed was one of only two titles that took advantage of the 3D features, the other being Stellar Fire. Silpheed's entire game was supposedly all generated in realtime with polygons, which is believable IMO. When I worked at Funcoland in the mid-90's we used Silpheed and Stellar Fire in our SCD display unit to attract attention to it.
@@misterjonestech1611 That's a bit complicated. IIRC, the Genesis could texture up to 1,000 in software, while the 12.5MHz 68000 "sub-CPU" in the Sega CD could add another 2,000. That's not far off from Virtua Racer (100 polygons at 30fps at a time when characters could be 10-30 polygons), but worse than the 5-20,000 of PlayStation launch titles. However, adding the powerful ASIC-DSP graphics chip, much larger quads could be scaled, rotated, and warped to provide the appearance of much larger, more ambitious 3D.
And the CD-ROM's FMV capability sucked b***s for straight video, but could work well for either the background or foreground layer, ala Silpheed.
There are other techniques like color cycling and changing the location of the background x- and y- each scanline that consume very little CPU time, but provide effective Mode 7 appearance for both sky and ground.
It's heartbreaking that Sega never tried to convert any of their popular super scaler games like Hang On, Outrun, Afterburner, Space Harrier, Power Drift etc I know they wouldn't be arcade perfect but I imagine they would be better than the cartridge versions.
Super Hang On was on Genesis
@@HistoryandReviews he's talking about converting them to Sega CD to use its scaling capabilities. Galaxy Force II and Super Thunderblade had far superior arcade versions that could've made use of the Sega CD's power. Hell, the Sega CD could've been the perfect platform for arcade conversions at the time, and gave the SNES (mode 7) a run for its money.
Space Harrier would be interesting to see how close they could get. I imagine it would look a bit wobbly on SEGA CD also the colors would be dull
Having had never even seen one of these in person, thanks for sharing these titles.
The effects at 19:34 really do show what it was capable of and it's a shame Sega didn't put effort into titles for the system. At the end of the day, it's about games and that's truly what makes or breaks a system's success.
This continues to be one of the top quality video game series on UA-cam.
Finally you made this vid, I thought you were waiting for Nintendo to make one.
out of the scalers, batman returns and soulstar really rock.However battlecorps deserves a mention.
Big 3 of scaler sega cd ports. Best of the best.
Core design in general should have a special video on their development on Mega CD. They were the only developer properly playing with the capabilities of the system instead of just porting mega drive games with a 30 second CG clip and some sound. Or make generic FMV games.
That F1 game should have been a lot smoother. In Japan they called it Heavenly Symphony 😂😂😂
And AH3.
It blows my mind that in the 90's there was like one and a half console generations where devs all just decided that frame rates didn't matter.
The 32-bit/64-bit generation and the PS360Wii generation had the worse frame rates. I remember so many PS1 and N64 games that were between 10 and 20 fps. The PS360Wii tried to aim for 30fps but failed most of the time except for COD and Halo.
Surprisingly the DC/PS2/GC/Xbox had the best frame rates of any 3D console generations. The PS2 has the most 60fps 3D games unless you count the backwards compatibility of the PS5 and Xbox Series consoles.
I'm guessing the jump to HD was a bigger demand than expected. I'm really hoping this new gen prioritizes framerate over 4k or god forbid 8k.
@@BurritoKingdom On the current generation it seems to be pretty common to offer both a 60 fps performance mode and a 30 fps "cinematic" mode. I wonder if anyone genuinely uses the latter though, other than for screenshots.
I was a young person during this era and no one cared about this kind of stuff then (in terms of kids anyway) I wouldn’t have even known what fps meant 😂 if the game seemed to run slowly you just accepted that was the way that the game was…the only thing that really mattered is if it was fun to play
Frame rates didn't matter until the 360 PS3 era. I grew up in the 80/90s and video game reviews almost never mentioned framerate.
@@BubblegumCrash332 oh god no. Framerates weree shit during the PS360 era. Most of the 16bit era were 60fps since it was 2D. That's why it was noticable when games caused slow down like in R-Type 3 for the SNES or any 3d games of that era.
Framerates turned into shit for the start of the 3d era but return to mostly 60fps for the PS2/Xbox/GC/DC era. Than went back to shit during ps360.
The Batman games and Soul Star do look rather playable. One thing that puts Soul Star in the far lead is the fading colors in the distance, something you'd see done on F-Zero with HDMA. It does look like they actually knew what they were doing which can't be said for the other games.
Yeah. Here it’s done just with using the CPU to update the hardware color registers each h blank.
The developer Sarah Jane Avory is amazing. Recently she has starting to make indie games on the Commodore 64
They looked horrible. I couldn't imagine a batman game where your in a car the whole time.
Batman gives a competent and detailed 3D world (mostly) which seems out of reach of the Sega CD. Soul Star just destroys expectations and goes leauges beyond what
people thought was possible
Sega's trio of machines should have been marketed as an arcade cabinet in your living room. The Genesis, Sega CD, and 32X together were capable of having near arcade perfect ports of every single Sega arcade game until the Model 2 board came out.
And a pc Isa or external add-on for pcs. Even built-in with the sega teradrive and amistrad pc variant or enhanced megadrive mode for both PCs.
Genesis 32x cd mini will be great right after the Mega Drive 2 mini.
The Mega CD didn't have enough RAM for arcade ports for the most part. It's why the WWF wrestling games didn't feature tag matches or battle royales, the meagre 512KB RAM(the other 256KB was reserved for the CD streaming media buffer) that everything had to fit into wasn't enough to hold the sprites for more than 2 wrestlers at once. It's why Final Fight, rather than Street Fighter 2, was the Capcom arcade game to be ported. There were other issues too, but the main one is a CD drive just can't load data fast enough to keep up, so it was useless for anything beyond some ports of basic cartridge games with CD audio, or FMV video stuff.
@@fattomandeibu Batman Returns, Soul Star, and Samurai Showdown would beg to differ with your statement. Arcade ports of Sega System 16, 18, and 32 games are totally capable of being ported to the Sega CD/32X CD
@@AnthonyRiddle Never tried the others, but Samurai Shodown alone shows all the sacrifices that had to be made. Dropped animation frames, much smaller sprites, lots of background and foreground graphics being completely missing, poor, unresponsive controls. The list goes on. How can that be considered "near arcade perfect"?
@@fattomandeibu I never said Neo Geo ports could be near arcade perfect. I said Sega System arcade games could be though
You can actually get more colors on the screen, by changing the palet between scan lines. It is also used for some translucency effects, like in the sonic series? How it does the water color change.
Soul Star's sprites are rendered on the Genesis? I wonder how they did that underwater effect. Horizontal interrupts and line-by-line adjustment of all sprite positions?
I'm pretty sure that they just let the Sega CD do the hard work. That's what it looks like to me, anyway.
Oooh I'm gonna love this. My uncle had the JVC or whatever version of the sega cd. He had a fee games and I always looked forward to going to his house to play
It was called X'Eye.
Just had a marathon last night of re-watching about 8 or 9 of your original videos from years ago and here you are in my latest videos from channels I subscribe to!! Kick ass!! 💪
12:53 pure unadulterated blast processing in action
The Sega CD had some great RPG's on it you know...
Thank you for the insights on Silpheed. On other videos and their comments, there's still a lot of uncertainly as to how the graphics were made up. I've always thought that the backgrounds probably use run line encoding, and the smaller objects fully use polygons, but the 4 frame updates on the sprites is something I'd never picked up on. I wonder if the older home computer versions of Silpheed also did this.
An unmentioned trick that Silpheed used was constant colour cycling, like parts of backgrounds that pulse between red and black for example, that in motion adds to the impression that there's a bit more animation and more colours than there really is, helping to disguise the use of pre-rendered backgrounds.
I've always thought that Batman Returns looked better than Batman and Robin. Partially because I don't think the cartoon look pairs well with sprite scaling. But also because Batman Returns has so much more going on with sparks occurring during collisions, flames appearing on vehicles, and massive explosions with lots of scaling, rotating debris flying everywhere. Most of all Batman Returns deserves more recognition for its physics though.
Perhaps the Mega CD could still have been pushed much further, using some of these tricks in combination. But not before the newer consoles came along, able to do all these things but better and with so many more colours.
The backgrounds on Silpheed really are interesting. As I said in the video I'm just not good enough at reverse engineering to really find out what's happening.
The sprites update out of sync with the backgrounds, it's one frame after, maybe during the next vblank. But they do all change together.
I hate Silpheed using FMV to simulate real action. Just dishonest bullcrap to be blunt.
As far as the "3D" scaling goes, Sonic 2 did that an entire year before the CD came along.
In 1992 and super smooth in those half pipe bonus stages.
Honestly, if SEGA had just built the original stock Genesis with the faster 12MHz 68000 (from the Sega CD) and doubled the RAM and VRAM to 128KB, the system could've launched at $249, and the Sega CD and 32X wouldn't have been necessary. Why? Because, after the overhead of processing game input, they'd go from 1 MIPS to 2 MIPS available (so wouldn't need the extra Z80 and 8KB audio RAM bolt on), could've added a 4,096 color mode, and could even have handled scaling, rotation, and polygons in software. Arcade ports like Hard Drivin play at 4-5 frames per second on the Genesis. Overclocked to 10MHz, that goes up to 8-10fps. And at 12MHz, you've got a smooth 12fps, all with the VDP still displaying what it has at 60fps.
The 1,000+ stock Genesis/Megadrive titles like Sonic 2 could've done much smoother scaling and 3D animation, arcade ports would've looked much better, and we likely wouldn't have suffered through the Sega CD, 32X, SVP Lock On, Neptune debacle of 1994-96.
Shame you missed out battlecorps, again by core! - a mech almost slow walker doom type game....soulstar does look better but battlecorps had amazing explosion and particle like effects.
20:29 This blows starfox away, looks fantastic.
I've always found Thunderhawk's tilting horizon oddly impressive. I don't think any SNES mode 7 game ever did that.
I think you could fake a tilting horizon in Mode 7 by using one edge of a tilemap. But you would have to severely restrict the player's movement to prevent the left and right edges (from the player's POV) from coming into view, because otherwise the whole thing would look like a weird flat earth where the ground just suddenly terminates in a big void. So you would practically be limited to forward and backward scrolling with a little bit of left and right movement, as opposed to the free roaming in Thunderhawk. Also I'm not sure it would be viable to pull off the calculations needed to keep the perspective correct.
I think the tilting horizon in Thunderhawk is actually the Megadrive's VDP column scrolling feature, which would suggest that the MegaCD's graphics chip is drawing the "Mode 7"-like landscape in traditional way and passing those tiles the VDP which then does the tilting.
@@julianregel This seems right given the way the tilting effect comes close to breaking up at the extremes of the allowed movement, which is typical of the column scrolling since it was limited to 16-pixel strips. The SNES also had column scrolling that was theoretically better than the MD's implementation-it worked with 8-pixel strips and could therefore be "tilted" further before the image started to break up-but it only worked in a few background modes and Mode 7 wasn't one of them. Star Fox used the effect for its horizons, but it's not as impressive as Thunderhawk since it's only applied to a traditional flat background layer.
Well done! I love the Sega CD and it is one of the reasons why I am a retro gamer today. The Adventures of Batman & Robin looks like something you would find on the PS1 and Soul Star and Silpheed still look amazing. It is so sad that the game engine for Batman & Robin wasn't used more in other games such as being used to bring home all the amazing 32-bit super scaler games Sega had in the arcades. That fact is made even worse when you consider they did the same thing with the 32X. Space Harrier and Afterburner on the 32X are amazing. A proper arcade port or sequel to Super Manoco GP using that engine or a refined version of the Beyond The Limit game engine would have been amazing. This game engine would have been amazing for a Super Thunderblade game. It is a crime the game engine of Soul Star was not used more. Again, the Sega CD is one of my favorite consoles and it is one of those game systems that look better via composite cable connection. Keep up the great work! Here is hoping that some indie developer would make system limit pushing games for the Sega CD & 32X. They could even leverage their costs by selling them on Steam but I know I and many others would fork over the money to buy physical releases for the Sega CD and 32X.
I'm also hopeful that indie developers will start making Sega CD and 32X games, but it's not going to happen in large numbers unless SGDK gets updated to support those devices.
In case you don't know, SGDK is a development tool that is used to make most modern indie games for the Genesis. It allows developers to make their games using the C programming language rather than the much more difficult Assembly language.
Hopefully the makers of SGDK add in support for Sega CD and 32X in the near future, as the potential of that hardware was never truly realized imo. While a few developers have tried making games for those platforms without such a tool (like the improved port of Doom for the 32X), most indie developers wouldn't tackle such a project.
@@GreyMatterShades I'm actually trying to get SGDK to work on my system. I'm good at writing performance code in Assembly, but many people have had problems trying to get SGDK to actually compile the included example code or even download all of the components. Much worse is the fact that those old systems (like System 16/Genesis) are alien to modern software developers, and most don't really have the time to get into it.
@@MaxAbramson3 Yeah in my experience SGDK is pretty finnicky to get going. I used info from the youtube channels Pigsy's Retro Game Dev Tutorials and MatteusBeus Retro Sega Game Dev. Pigsy's channel has a playlist for SGDK development and one of the early videos refers people to Matteus' video on setting it up. Once it's going it works pretty well, it's just the initial setup that's tricky.
Most modern developers wouldn't bother to try making a Genesis game, as it would require learning a bunch of new skills and working within extreme constraints, when they could just make a 16-bit style retro game using modern software with much fewer limitations. For me as someone who's never made a game but always wanted to, the idea of making something for the Genesis is appealing because of the constraints. I'm hoping that working with limited hardware will force me to simplify and focus the design around what's possible for the system, meaning I'll wind up with a simpler game of a more manageable scope.
And other developers have used SGDK to make some pretty impressive modern Genesis games like Demons of Asteborg and Life on Mars. I'm sure if Sega CD and 32x support were added to SGDK, some developers would be thrilled to make games for those platforms. It would definitely be a small niche of indie developers, but they could probably produce some amazing stuff!
@@GreyMatterShades Yeah, I've made a few games over the years. I've worked on many systems, but the Genesis is supposed to be easy to develop for. My think is limit pushers. I want to see if that powerful VDP can be pushed even a bit harder, maybe in 320x448 mode.
@@MaxAbramson3 Yeah hopefully in the coming years we'll see people push the Genesis further than its gone before. There are people putting up test videos doing 3D graphics on it without any sort of extra hardware like the Super FX chip for the SNES, so there's promising stuff happening. I really hope it translates into some great games too.
I think the internet helps a lot as well. I got the impression that back in the 90's developers weren't as open about sharing tips, techniques, and experiments, but these days most people are happy to share what they're working on and how they accomplished it. Especially in niche indie communities like modern Genesis development.
Worst mistake they made with the Sega CD is not boosting the color count. Genesis had several advantages over SNES, but the on-screen color palette always hurt it in side-by-side comparisons, and they waited until the goofy 32X to boost the colors.
Core obviously got the most out of this system, well done to them for Soul Star.
The Sega CD could supply enough data to use the 320x448i mode or even 3,375 colors with Shadow/Highlight Mode, as with Toy Story. There are even color mixing tricks that could push the color palette into the thousands for active gameplay.
I can't imagine how difficult it must have been to program this thing to the best of its capabilities:
1. It would be easy to program the Mega Drive to do most things and just utilise the Mega CD for storage, but then you'd just have a game that looked no better than the Mega Drive.
2. Or, it would be easy to program the Mega CD to do most things and just utilise the Mega Drive as a glorified video output device, but then you'd run into bandwidth problems and have a super low framerate.
3. Or you could program the Mega CD and the Mega Drive to work in conjunction with eachother. Essentially be programming two different systems at once, keeping them synchronised, passing data and code from one system to the other, programming in stamps and background layers on one and programming in sprites and tiled background layers in the other; making sure you don't overwhelm the bus or the Mega Drive's memory bandwidth... it must have been very challenging indeed and it's not surprising that most developers seemed to pick option 1 or 2, rather than option 3.
I've looked at Sega's official docs from the 90's about the system and they are not good. If that's all they had to work with I'm not surprised developers found it hard going. Sony apparently did way better with the PlayStation in that regard.
@@Sharopolis And this problem would further plague the 32X and Saturn, resulting in hundreds of subpar third party efforts that had to be rushed out giving SEGA a bad rap. ATARI pushed this poor support approach to the limit, and even SONY didn't really hit their stride until late 1996-97.
I love the Sega CD, the fmv trash is fun sometimes (Marky Mark 😂) but the Lunar games are 10/10
And Snatcher. Snatcher is incredible.
Jaguar XJ220 May have been basic, but it was fun and has a killer soundtrack that I still enjoy.
The Batman Driving games showed that a very good port of Outrun was possible on the Sega CD.. Shame they didn't use it for some arcade sprite scalers, and no, not the terrible Afterburner version. It was a beefy little system.
Many complain about the lack of Outrun port but the way I see it, back when the Mega CD was released, the likes of Outrun and Afterburner were knocking on for half a decade old. If ports of these games had been released that were closer to the arcade (low framerate notwithstanding) I don’t think they would have made any difference to the fortunes of the add on. Also releasing ports of old arcade games would’ve gone against Sega’s marketing campaign about the Mega CD offering next level gaming.
That’s not to say I wouldn’t have loved the Super Scaler games to be released for it, it’s just I can see why they weren’t.
Irony is that arcade scaling could be pulled off using superscaling hardware or through prerendering and loading 20-60 prescaled sprites onto a CD-ROM, then decompressing and loading them into system memory. SEGA could've just made a $150 addon with a 2x CD-ROM and just had developers do all of their scaling, rotation, and 3D graphics ahead of time. Or, they could've just added the ASIC-DSP and 12MHz 68000 to the stock Megadrive/Genesis (and filled out the original 128KB of VRAM) and gotten 90% of their good games onto 16-40 megabit cartridges.
Oops.
This was excellent and taught me a lot I didn't know. I always wondered why the scaling and rotation was so choppy compared to SNES mode 7... I just thought they used a weak powered chip for it... didn't consider it was a bandwidth issue with the Genesis. I owned a Mega CD a year before it came out in the USA.
Developers were using the Genesis cpu.
Most games used the 12MHz 68000 sub-CPU on the Sega CD for scaling, rather than the more powerful but poorly documented ASIC-DSP. It looks like some choppier games even just prescaled their tiles and loaded them right from the CD itself.
What a waste.
Now, TIME FOR HOMEBREW
Edit- and in PAL, you can DMA 16K per frame, or double using the special 128K graphics mode that was never used. Same on NTSC you can jump from 7K to 14K this way, or all the way up to 25K if you’re willing to shrink the screen down to 320x200.
If you don't mind napping the VDP and switching to DMA moves, you can get a lot more than that at 320x160, and many TVs automatically increase the height. Starfox DMA has also shown what most of us knew, that the whole Virtua arcade series could've been done on bone stock Genesis.
Still got my original front loading mega CD.
I feel like Popful Mail looks pretty good for 16bit. It also makes good use of the CD functions of the system with voice acting and video animations. The limited color is noticeable in the Videos, but they still look pretty good for the day. Popful Mail is not only my favorite Sega CD game, its one of my all time favorite games period.
Would love to see games like Outrun, Power Drift, Galaxy Force 2 attempted on the MCD, or a remake of Panorama Cotton.
So even B&R and BR are 20 FPS only?
"Only 20fps." You punk kids these days don't know how good you've got it!
I believe that it's due to the difficulty in loading the original tiles to the stamp maps, scaling them, then moving those tiles to the Genesis VDP. I don't believe that it's easy (maybe not even possible) to perform all three at the same time, and the documentation from SEGA doesn't really help programmers.
SEGA really should've just released this hardware as a standalone console with all of the info, software tools, and coursework.
The Sega CD was the best game system i ever played in my life, as a matter of fact this was the last game system i owned the rest were all let downs up to the present. The damn thing had actual movie actors. American Laser Games were as real as u can get. Love it. Hope i find another one someday.
Still the most underrated channel on the toob.
Thanks!
@@Sharopolis Thank YOU for all of the top tier content, friend :) Do you play VR? I'd be happy to gift you a game on Steam if you're looking to try some CoOp, you can always join our little group!
@@Sharopolis I enjoy your channel. Is it possible you can dive deep into underrated enhancement snes chips such as SR7110, SDD-1 and 32-bit st018?
@@maroon9273 Yes! That's something I've been thinking about. The ST018 is especially interesting, but there's so little information out there. I don't think it has even been emulated. But that and the other odd ball enhancement chips are really fascinating. It's is on my list of things to cover definitely.
@@Sharopolis great idea to make a video to promote more curiosity of this first 32-bit enhancement cpu chip for the snes which is armv3 cpu.
Cliffhanger for SegaCD had some very smooth snowboarding sections iirc..
The 1990s was a wild time.
✏
The reason there's a 16 colour limit on the scaling/rotating backgrounds is because the Megadrive's 64 colour palette is split into 4 16 colour sub-palletes (making the actual pixel data four bit per pixel, 2 pixels per byte). Each background tile and each sprite can only draw from one of the four sub-palletes. For normal backgrounds you can have several sub-palletes in use but as soon as you start rendering 3d (software or using external hardware), the tile boundaries don't line up with anything meaningful, so it's near impossible to use multiple palettes without causing ugly ZX spectrum style colour clash. Same thing would apply with FMV.
16 colors for the background, 15 for the foreground (0 is reserved for transparency), 15 for the sprite layer, and 15 more for the window. And you can change some or all of those on every scanline, so you can theoretically get 512 out of 512, though 100 seems to be the practical limit on games. Using Shadow-Highlight Mode, Toy Story is able to display 145 out of 3,375 colors. Using color blending, one could theoretically get about 1,000 out of 20,000 colors photos, though no games actually pushed those limits.
You could also use a special interlaced mode drawing 320x448i to the screen, making Saturn-like 2D theoretically possible.
@@MaxAbramson3 Yeah. I'm assuming if you're doing fmv or scaling/rotating, that would normally go on the background layer, so practically you'd get 16. You could probably improve fmv a great deal by updating the palette per scan line, but I'm pretty sure there's not enough time in hblank for a full palette update, and I assume FMV decoding already uses most of the CPU anyway
@@birdrun4246 The Genesis and even the Master System could update one color palette during HBlank if you don't waste time with interrupts. In fact, I believe that we did the math and found that even the Master System had 227 cycles available per scanline, and either system could operate the CPU even while the VDP is actively drawing pixels.
@@birdrun4246 You don't have to use hardware interrupts to do it. NES games had to have code running in parallel on the 6502 and its own version of the VDP. Actual limit pushers need to keep all of a system's processors (four on the Mega/Genesis, plus two more on the Sega CD, IIRC) running at the same time. There are a lot of techniques like color cycling and DMA moves from cart to VRAM that don't consume a lot of CPU time, though DMA moves can monopolize the bus stalling the CPU.
@@MaxAbramson3 That would be interesting -- since you're usually only using one palette (16 colours) for FMV, you'd have time to do a full update every scanline. Might do good things for video with the right precalculations.
Been waiting for this one
Commenting before watching but I better see plenty 0f core design in here buddy lol
One of my favourite systems and very underrated thanx to crappy fmv games.
I can remember days coming home from school and playing willy beamish on my Sega CD and I loved the amazing Spider-Man.i miss sega
Thunderstike/Thunderhawk was really great as well! 👍
Looking at Lunar 2 or Popful Mail videos would be interesting, because they are custom implemented. Robo Aleste uses several special effects, not sure how interesting they can be, but there is zooming, rain, lighting and probably others. Also worth noting are the SamSho and Fatal Fury ports. These are ports that retain the full size of sprites. I always found them interesting because even though you lose the ability to stream animations from the cartridge, you still get 786KB of RAM. So these games demonstrate the ability of the MegaDrive to handle pretty big sprites. Sprite size were always limited by the ROM size, otherwise the MD would have pushed much more impressive ports, so these ports are nice. Snatcher is worth mentioning for the sound design I think.
People crap on this addon but its the 2nd most successful addon after the pc engine cd and then after those you have the famicom disk and the atari super charger. They all gave you games you could not get on the original system. What about the gba card reader and the DD 64, they were way more useless. Then you have stuff like the xbox hd dvd drive which had no games at all.
Reason that the scaling planes are only 16 colors is the framebuffer they are copied to is just the tile ram for PF1 or PF2 And as each tile can only have 16 color that is what creates the restriction.
15, since 0 is reserved for transparency.
I didn't know I needed this.. but I needed this. Awesome video!
I love my Sega CD back in the day so many games I had for it
Thunderstrike always impressed me. It seemed well beyond the Genesis' ability and pretty close to the 32X. Heck, it was more impressive than most 32X games.
Yep. SEGA needed to advertise great 3D games like these.
another amazing technical video! I love this type of content. Soul Star is v a ery very impressive title until today....the same for 2 the Batman titles...
Unfortunatelly Sega failed to impress the media on the Sega CD launch, and the system was consudered just a CD Player that adds a CD quality audio to the standart Genesis ....
Greetings from Brazil!
Great video on what the megacd could do
4:33 unless you're Traveler's Tales!
Than u have the 32x, which is the only sega system I'm missing in my collection, but unlike the sega cd, the 32x was supposed to enhance graphics! and all of that, but what sega wasn't realizing what they were doing, They were competing with themselves in the sales, I'll get the 32x eventually but there are more depressing stories, than good ones
Not true. When you get it but Tempo, kolibri, Afterburner, and if you can find it Darxide. There are 40 official releases for 32x. Over half of them are definitively worth playing. The version of Virtua Fighter that runs on 32x actually plays really well, also. The version of MK 2 is really solid, Shadow Squadron is good, Virtua Racing on it is the best version of the era. So yeah, it’s pretty cool!
@@Thor-Orion ok, because a lot of ppl 💩 on it
I want it because they also showed the good games, but as a MAJOR SEGA COLLECTOR I need it and a 💩 load of games for it as well...oh BTW thank u for defending it because the shit I saw plus I played volleyball games from it starwars 32 it was great
Sonic CD also used the Sega CD's audio hardware. It adds additional audio capabilities on top of the Genesis' FM synthesis and PSG audio. In the "past" stages, rather than playing CD audio, it uses sampled instruments to create the music, not unlike the Super Nintendo.
wolfteam's devastator may not be a ..............great game but it's still definitely impressive for the system with the surprisingly lenghty fmv sequences and occasional use of sprite scaling like with the stage 2 boss make it stand out imo
Yes, Boss! SoulStar is deserving of its own brand of max absorbency underpants. I loved playing it on release and i stumbled about my hometown all those years ago shouting its praises at passing cars, pedestrians, and police officers. My parole officer thinks the game is pretty good too, the clod. He probably champions Racing Aces as the better game. BC Racers is a bit easier to play. Core Designs!
CORE = awesome
I got Junklord Van Damme, rather than Jean-Claude and was imagining some kind of epic 80s action throwback musician.
Fantastic vid like normal. Great content, underrated channel. Keep it up!
Considering you had to spend more than twice what the console costs (THREE TIMES that at launch) for something that attaches to the console you should EXPECT the damn thing to be able to pull off something more impressive than just audio/video playback.
Found an interesting post about this on Sega-16
"The megacd architecture is basicaly showing its limit on sonicCD special stage... Even sega couldn't master the system... Also, the documentation says that the "aritmetic chip was finaly designed for non-real time displays, like golf games""
"Criminally underused" is right. SEGA of Japan's decision to release the 32X and ditch the Sega CD--after we'd paid $300 for the addon--is what drove off the company's loyal enthusiasts. Every salesman working at a game shop made like $6-8 bucks an hour, and SEGA just throwing your money away on two underreported add-ons was a harbinger of things to come.
And SEGA screwed over 9 million more with the Saturn and another 9 million suckers with the Dreamcast.
A few fantastic M2 titles showed that SEGA could've carried their fan base to the late 1990s with the Sega CD alone.
I didn't mean to come across as mean spirited. However, I shelled out $229 for this beast and never saw a single TV ad showing the Sega CD's powerful 3D capabilities. Not one.
And some gamers spent $300 for this and never got anything better than another one of those lazy ports. Why not at least bring over the arcade backgrounds for Golden Axe and others? Why not add a bit of scaling to Streets of Rage, or improve the ground and scaling/rotation of enemy planes in After Burner?
Sega should've made the Sega cd a standalone console with better color pallette and backwards compatible with the genesis/megadrive.
It would have been way too expensive in 1991 to sell a system like that and probably very expensive for Sega to simply try and make people buy a new console so soon even with backwards compatibility.
Or instead of the Genesis/Megadrive.
Is it ever explained why there are full-grown trees growing in the streets in Batman and Robin?
I wondered that, it's from Poison Ivy's stage so I think she's supposed to be sending them to attack Batman.
I remember there being mini segments on some sidewalks that had a stand with trees in them as well as a trash can.
I absolutely love these hardware pushing videos on all consoles 🤘🏾
Thank you, Thank you, Thank you, Thank you! I've been meaning to do a video covering WHY super scalers are a pipe dream and you've explained it perfectly :) Scaling wise bog basic estimates updating the entire screen 7FPS PAL / 8FPS NTSC and updating half the screen 13 FPS PAL / 16FPS NTSC. Many factors could increase/decrease this estimate by a few frames such as: SUB CPU, ASIC use, etc, etc. The less unique tiles scaling on screen the higher the framerate...
A few things you may or may not know:
0:32 - The Sonic CD bonus stage was recently hacked to run at a higher frame rate but the guy who did it removed the video from UA-cam :(
5:12 - Batman & Robin was pushing the CD to it's absolute limit there was no more bus capacity left in the tank.
9:45 - Sarah Jane Avory has noted Jaguar XJ220 used the Sega CD CPU for scaling and not the ASIC.
Thanks for the interesting insight!
I'd love to see the hacked version of Sonic, I wonder why he took it down?
I actually attempted to message Sarah Jane Avory when I was researching this vid, but she never got back to me.
Quite a lot of games seemed to stay away from the ASIC, it must have been hard to work with. The only documentation I could find about it was Sega's own docs from that 90's and they aren't great.
@@Sharopolis Not sure if you've seen it, but the Service Manuals for the MegaCD has a block diagram of the 315-5548 chip (referred to in the docs as the Gate Array, and commonly call the ASIC) and the graphics components is only a small, single block within the chip called the "Rotation Interface". The rest of the chip seems to be about interfacing with the various buses and the bus selector logic that allowed different components to access different memory at the same time. While this obviously doesn't translate to how much die space was dedicated to graphics, I thought it was interesting that the "custom graphics ASIC" does a lot more than just the graphics.
Great video btw, really interesting. Thanks!
@@Sharopolis Yeah, the tech documentation from SEGA not only explains very little, but provides few code examples and is partly in Japanese! No wonder the Sega CD saw so few arcade superscalers. SEGA should've just made the original Megadrive with the 12MHz 68000 and 128KB of RAM and VRAM. Scaling and rotation can be done in software if you have the horsepower to do it (like the 32X, btw). There'd be no need for the Sega CD had they gone this route... unless you REALLY have a hankering for those s***y FMV games.
Also, the data transfer rates (according to Tech Specs posted on Sega Retro) show the same 6.25MB/s and 1.34MB/s during active display as what you could get from a cartridge ROM. But only 128KB are accessible at one time, you say? Yes, but that's one megabit, plus the 64KB in VRAM and another 64KB in RAM, more than the assets that would be found in a single stage of a game.
Jesper Kydd makes great music as in B&R or Borderlands 2 for that matter.
Great video. What’s the music in the background intro? Thanks.
I was so glad they added scaling and rotation but It still boggles my mind why Sega didn't bother increasing the amount of colors it can display onscreen which is the biggest weakness that the genesis compare to the SNES.
The bone stock genesis could draw 256 colors onscreen and use Shadow Highlight Mode for a palette of 3,375 colors. It also could use 320x448i mode for much crisper graphics.
I dont think Sega ever pushed the limits of this machine, and it was a mistake to make the 32X at all.
I've been saying this from day one. The criminally underused Sega CD was what really killed SEGA's credibility. No one bought their hardware after that.
Part of me really feels like it would be interesting to see homebrew developers mess about with the 32XCD format.
I know that the 32XCD is possibly the least practical platform in real life, but if you're emulating the ROM I think that you could have some fun pushing the limits of what such a weird piece of hardware could achieve in theory.
Maybe you could use the FMV codec as an animated background layer with the Mega Drive and 32X freed up to display more complex sprites in the foreground and supplement audio coming from the CD
Actually, there were, IIRC, five Sega 32X-CD games, all of which were upscaled Sega CD FMV games showing off how much bigger and better the video could be using the horsepower of the Hitachi SH2. That system was hard to push to its limits, too, but at least SEGA would've had something out on shelves and getting pushed to its practical limits a year before the PS1 came out. We've talked about making of version of Doom Resurrection for the 32X CD, perhaps moving all of the music and sound effects to the Sega CD to free up the 32X for pure rendering and a higher frame rate.
If Sega had made this the genesis 2 with backwards compatibility with the genesis I believe it would have crushed all challengers especially moving game publishing to cd and saving on cartridge costs
Thunderstrike/Thunderhawk should have made the list
In retrospective, a slightly better mega CD might have actually sold okay if the 32x wasn't released.
We need a hack of both games being joined. The genesis and the sega cd, with the alternace of platform and car stages
Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if instead of Sega doing the Sega CD and 32X add-ons had they stuck to their tradition of creating an all new platform that's backwards compatible to the last would it have fared better with consumers? But then again no companies were thinking about a 3D ready consoles back in 1991 when the Sega CD was developed. But even had they released this mythical system in 1993, Sega would have felt the pressure by both the Playstation and Ultra 64 being announced by early 1994 anyway causing them to move onto something like the Saturn.
Except Atari, they did thought about making a 3D console with the Panther, which would be dropped in favor of the Jaguar in 1991 (ironically the year the Panther was supposed to come out).
The Sega CD's ASIC-DSP was really designed to handle 3D graphics and handled it pretty well. Only a handful of games actually used it, though.
ua-cam.com/video/xcpy8g5kKWU/v-deo.html
Sega should have called the Batman devs to make the Sonic CD bonus round. lol
Battlecorps by Core Design was a well made mech game from 1994. Managed a decent frame-rate despite very much being in 3D.
Whats the background music for the intro
I always called it Slipheed... "Check six" means look behind you ("Six o' clock" being behind you, "12 o' clock high would be in front and above you). Would love to add the console to my collection but prices are getting crazy (especially for good games like Soul Star). Oh, and Sarah Jane Avory is now pushing the C64's limits with games including shoot 'em up Soul Force and RPG The Briley Witch Chronicles.
Whooaah i never know the sega CD was that limited in terms of frames rates,but it could view mode 7 at full resolution and it can de sprite scaling,something the snes could only do trough software.
YES! Much appreciated!
Thanks!
4:55 Ironically this is where the PAL Megadrive is better. It has enough bandwidth for 25 FPS full screen animation. If the Mode 7 part occupies half the screen only, even 50 FPS might be doable.
Can you link your water dispenser, nice 😀
Nobody talked about frame rates back then. The generation after with ps1 and n64 was arguably worse. I was amazed though playing f zero x for the first time.
Sega made the best FZero game.
I loved my Mega CD. Still kept my old UK games, including Snatcher and others. Also, I have some Japanese ones
Hang on to Snatcher. It's worth over 1,000 Pounds.
So many brilliant games on the Mega/Sega CD. It really is a much maligned system considering how solid so much of its library is.
It got a bad reputation due to FMV games but arguably these pushed the system too especially later ones that ran full screen with better frame rebates and more colours.
Good list - I’d add Thunderhawk/Thunderstrike which while limited to less colours had smooth rotation, lots of enemy sprites and foliage etc and tilted the landscape - something more 7 couldn’t do.
Battlecorps - again just really good use of the chipset
Starblade - it’s a brilliant conversion considering the source material.
Also - arguably the 1-on-1 fighters such as Eternal Champions, Faral Fury Soecial and Samurai Shodown considering the memory limitations and bandwidth issues. Pretty solid all round.
Good video though. The system had some brilliant games if you delve into the library including ones that weren’t just ports of the cartridge version - Terminator CD or Shining Force CD (remakes of the Game Gear games) and Jurassic Park for example or were exclusive or made for the system - Keio Flying Squadron, Snatcher (in terms of an English release) , Cobra, the Core games, the Lunar games, Final Fight etc magnificent oddities like Panic/Switch etc or were upgraded ports of the cartridge version such as Mickey Mania, the Ecco games, Eternal Champions (effectively a sequel really) Batman Returns, Cliffhanger etc
I think for the most part rather than actually pushed the limit of what the system could do most of these just utilised what it could do to a high level. If more games were released for it and it had far more Sega first party developed titles on it then maybe stuff would have really pushed what it could do.
You missed Thunderhawk easily the best looking mega cd game
The problem with Sonic CD is that Sonic 3 is sitting there, being superior in every possible way, on the original non-CD hardware.
The stamps thing blew my mind... 1st time I heard of it . Also how the Sega CD pushes the images to the Genesis vram limits for frame rate issues.. I swear some scaling games are smoother than 20fps.. but it makes sense now..
The Genesis Video Display Processor just displays the sprites in its 64KB VRAM according to the contents of the Sprite Attribute Table, IIRC. A stamp map, according to the Sega CD documentation, just takes a large image array and uses the powerful Coordinate Conversion Function to scale, rotate, or warp these stamps at runtime. The Genesis VDP simply reads 128KB of that at a time (using the DMA/Blast Processing, I think) and displays that to the output. I haven't actually looked at the documentation in over a month, so I don't recall the exact details. However, contrary to what's been spread on UA-cam, bandwidth wasn't really the problem, and the ASIC-DSP could scale massive sections of the screen and still keep up with a fairly high frame rate.
That's why so many 3D games for the Sega CD look so damned good.
I just double checked the tech docs. The Genesis VDP uses the same DMA transfer from the Sega CD RAM as it does the cartridge and at the same rate.
Gonna be a short video!
13:44 there's no way that's 15 FPS. Sure, the FMV might be that, but how can 15 FPS be that smooth? Look at the ships and the projectiles. There's no way that's 15 FPS, therefore the game is actually a higher framerate with a background that updates at a lower framerate.
Edit: Cool, the one time I commented before finishing the video... Don't laugh too hard. 😂
And sega learnt their lesson and went on to the Sat- oh hello 32x... :|
I bought one for 25quid from a second hand shop when I was 14ish good times. Ps1 just came out
It really should have been a more affordable CD-ROM drive only add on OR its own independent system, which it basically was. It has its own CPU, memory, graphics chip... there was no such thing as "combining" the power of the two processors. As cool as that would have been, and I'm no programmer or developer here, I'm willing to bet that it's damn near impossible to do so in any meaningful way, if at all. Instead, what we got was an absurdly priced system that required you to own a Genesis/Megadrive, complete with all the already incredibly outdated color pallet and bleep bloop sound limitations that Nintendo fanboys were, rightfully so, laughing at. So it can add CD audio sound playback in game, whopdee-f*kg-doo. Don't even try to tell me about the scaling and rotation abilities, they're a joke (example A: Sonic CD) outside of a few stand out examples done by Core Design. Unfortunately they forgot that those were supposed to be GAMES that are, you know, actually fun an entertaining, not tech demos.
This is the most constructive criticism I have seen about the system so far. By more affordable CD-ROM, you meant like the PC Engine (Super) CD-ROM² was, right?
Yup. $500, and 2/3 of Sega CD games were either lazy ports or not even interactive. Had they just released the Sega CD as a standalone console instead of the Megadrive, things would've turned out better.
Wait what emulator did u use for these Sega CD games?
It's Bizhawk.
tasvideos.org/BizHawk
It's a really good multi system emulator, it does loads of systems with high accuracy.
I've used it loads making these videos.
@@Sharopolis I'm amazed it can display the layers for tiles(sprites and backgrounds) separately for the Sega CD. Thanks yo🙏🏿
i wanted a mega cd, but my parents thought it was too expensive and i never got it. besides i quickly learned that there were no games interesting to me aside from sonic cd. said sonic cd also didn't look really cutting edge to me and so it never happened. but i was the only kid on the block to have a snes and a mega drive
Oddly enough Jaguar XJ 2000 is software scaling. Per the dev it was faster to do in software per early tests and later discovered there was a mistake. Hardware should have been faster.. the final game uses software.
Most Sega CD games didn't use the powerful ASIC-DSP at all. It was too much to learn, poorly documented (with no examples that I can find), and few software tools were available, so everything had to be done custom in house. That's what killed development for the 32X and the Saturn. If SEGA had spent the same money marketing the Sega CD and developing software tools for it, we'd have seen limit pushers in 1994-95 that looked better than most PS1 launch titles.
Jean-Claude, Van Damme!!!!