I would expand that statement to any triple A game developer actually, no matter the time frame. The extreme optimization of this era is absolutely fascinating stuff but I'm sure programmers nowadays must also use some clever tricks to come up with such complex game mechanics, graphic details and online multiplayer gaming.
I highly suggest you watch interviews of how uncharted games were made. Specifically the train and boat. Absolute genius programmer's of the modern day
Any chance of an updated video where that process is updated? I've read through a few comments and it seems like there's some neat things going on there that would be interesting to see explained!
Hey, I was wondering... Do you think you could do a video where you look at how developers would use 2D sprites within 3D environments? You know, something like the tires in Crash Team Racing or several background/hazard elements in Pac-Man World. Just putting an idea out there. You can reject if you don't think it's interesting.
There's a really weird crash in Sonic 2 in Hilltop zone where if you hit one of the Rexon's at full speed vertically it crashes the console. It has always been a nagging mystery to me as to why in this particular instance out of the whole game there is a crash, there is assembly documentation as to what happens but its beyond my understanding as I am not familiar with the console. I would love to see you do a breakdown of what causes the crash. Not sure that's something that would peak your interest, but anyway as always I love your content!
Not trying to be a grammar nazi, but it's 'pique' instead of peak. You seem smart and articulate, so I thought you'd want to know. Feel free to correct any errors I may have made. 😄👍
Ashley Coleman Acually It was in the first revision the bug exist. If you jumps and breaks a stone and after at the Rexor so it start points to final boss sprite and crashes.
Sonic 2's source wasn't reverse engineered entirely until long after it was widely pirated. I mean, people were hacking it specifically because of the emulation scene long before even that.
These are always fantastic! I’d love to see one about the S3&K Blue Spheres special stage! Just like Sonic 2, I have some ideas how it was done, but I always enjoy your explanations. 🤗
It's not quite as complex, it uses palette swapping. Stealth goes into some detail in his proof of concept for a Sonic 3 port hcstealth.tumblr.com/post/100311283757/sonic-3-knuckles-20th-anniversary
That one is mostly palette swapping, like what was done in mickey mania. There are animation frames for rotating the screen but since everything is moved by 90 degrees, it can be mirrored. Spheres are given a couple of sizes too.
S3 used a simpler tecnique using fast palette color swaps, everything else is just different sized sprites with different palletes and the same chaos gem with different colors and 4 different sprites. Wich is also loaded once the stage is finished (that's why the orbs dissapear, to free space for the gem sprites. It's simpler but makes for a more fun bonus stage
Pretty mind-blowing for its time for sure. I've still a love-hate relationship with this special stage, though; it's the only one where I need save states to beat. Harumph. :c
I directly thought of colour cycling, like used for the Sega logo animation in another of your videos and that I first saw in deluxe paint on an Amiga 1000 bank in the mid 80s
This is incredible stuff as always - it’s amazing how ingenious programmers had to be with such limited resources, making the consoles of the time do things that on the surface they shouldn’t be able to. I’m glad that game making is so open to all just now with Unity and so on, but we’re taught to get in the habit of just stretching our legs out and taking all the memory we need :)
Developers in the old days were freaking coding magicians. Achieving so much with so very little of ressources. I really enjoyed it, how in the 3DS port of the game, they seemed to have re-created this special stage with actual 3D graphics and actual depth, while perfectly keeping the original look.
@@Rokabur Sadly, this is very true. Today developers don't even optimize their games anymore, often being programmed very sluggish, since they have so many ressources to waste.......
Wow, this is nuts...another thing that always got me in these bonus stages is the huge sprites. Sonic and Tales were giant for their day. It's something you didn't see very often back then. When you did it was generally for bad games like China Warrior (TG-16) or Sword of Sodan (GEN) that centered around huge characters while everything else suffered...or it was a quick gimick like some of Castlevania VI's (Snes) bosses. In Castlevania's case the boss would shrink the second you hit him. In Sonic The Hedgehog 2's case both characters run around the play field as giant sprites throughout the duration of the stage. The rings are large and numerous as is the bombs.
This is a fantastic video! I find it super interesting how they achieved this using the different palette blocks instead of individual frames of animation. Also. I would love to maybe see a video on the game Star Cruiser one day, as its graphics are incredible for the mega drive.
Back then, Sonic games were made by the best programmers in the industry. Nowadays, Sonic games are made by the best programmers of the FAN COMMUNITY (Sonic Mania).
Insane the amount of tricks they did to get visuals down to the KB's to save cartridge space. Meanwhile, today we're going to render a video that's GB's large and upload it to UA-cam like it's nothing.
I figured out the checkpoints were ring graphics ages ago when I lost rings just before a checkpoint. All the rings I lost started to flash different colors as the palette cycled for the checkpoint!
I've been playing and replaying Sonic 2 for no joke the last 20 years of my life and I have never, ever noticed that there are checkpoints of different colour in the special stages. Videos like these are the most interesting, just seeing the different tricks programmers used to get a particular thing to work in their game with limited hardware.
The NGPC's native resolution is only 160x152, and SPA's version of the special stage uses even fewer colors for the tube (I count 5), so it might actually have been easier to do than on the Genesis.
@@abraveastronaut The NGPC can handle less colors per tile, but it also has less VRAM than the Mega Drive. The Mega Drive special stage tube graphics are actually 128x112, you can see Sonic, Tails and the BG have twice the resolution. That alone makes the NGPC version higher res. The NGPC also doesn't have separate layers for foreground and background so the blue gradient is fused with the tube tiles. It's not as easy as it seems.
Game developers are seriously magicians. I love that they always manage to give us graphics and effects that are actually beyond a consoles capabilities :)
I have no experience actually doing code, but i've tried to learn as much as i can about it casually. Your videos have been the best for that, as they show me whats possible with just a little bit of creativity. It makes me want to study the various compression and memory saving techniques from both 2D and 3d games
Thank you for making Coding Secrets its own channel. Super fascinating stuff. The video you did on how Sonic R's fading effect was programmed has turned out to be a serious resource for Saturn homebrewers. As for new videos, you could look at all the crazy things going on in VectorMan and VectorMan 2. Or if you're willing to share some more of your Sega Saturn knowledge, analyze some of Sega's fighting games, like Fighting Vipers or Last Bronx.
I think the only way they could have achieved a smoother and higher-resolution version of the special stage without using too much memory would be with elaborate color palette changing, like in the special stages of Sonic 3 or the moose chase stage in Mickey Mania. A basic version of this would have to leave out any turns or hills in the halfpipe, but perhaps they could add a few frames for these that also utilize constant color palette changing.
If you ever find time you should check out the Pico-8. It's a software fantasy 8-bit console written in LUA. You've got something like 2 million CPU cycles per second to work with, a tiny drop of RAM, and it uses all the classic 2D systems like sprites and background layers. People have already made some 3D stuff in it including a flight sim. As a bonus you can look at the code, graphics, and audio of any game. Games can be completely created on the Pico-8.
This LUT with all the possible pixel combinations being used to create this level bg sound very similar to what Jan Sloot's compression method was supposed to be
Considering the horizontal rows are blocks and blocks of solid color it would seem to suggest investigating some sort of run length encoding. Heck, since the colors always follow the same pattern, I doubt you would even have to add colors, just a fixed number of columns. Toss in some pre-calculated huffman encoding for lengths and you could likely really shave down the size. While best for pixel mapping, it might still have a benefit with tile maps.
I really love your videos man. You explain things so good and with examples of my childhood. Now, years later, I create mods, learn to write code a bit which amazes me even more to picture the whole thing. And I really love the background music. In combination with your smooth voice its just perfect. Thanks man! Keep it up!
Excellent video as always! Now please do one on sonic 3's as clearly it has to be generated because of the blue spheres mode. Sonic 3's special stage always amazed me as a kid. Well, that and the toy story 3d level you already covered.
I really wonder how they figured out the block combinations to use. Probably some brute force algorithm to check each rendered frame? In any case, fascinated as always about this tech. Great video and thank you!
Imagine going in and doubling the frames of animation now. Its nice to imagine that its technically possible to improve this further, while keeping additional memory to a low
This was always my favourite Sonic Special Stage. While it looks bad these days (unless you have nostalgia glasses on), at the time this blew me away with how I thought it looked 3D
"However, the track obviously isn't drawn in real-time 3D, as the machine doesn't really have the power to do that" But it does have the power to do this: ua-cam.com/video/LcT1XIrklhQ/v-deo.html Of course I'm aware that running an actual video game is very different than running a demo, but you'd think there'd be a way to make it work, if only for show.
Demos are nowhere near as complex as games as they do not contain the gameplay logic that will gobble up cycles. When he says "The machine doesn't really have the power to do that" he is obviously speaking within the context of a game with thousands of lines of logic code. They are completely different uses of the technology.
It could technically be possible using precalculated lookup tables so the CPU can find the answer to trigonometric equations instead of having to do the calculations itself, saving on cycles, the downside being the table itself will take up a fair amount of ROM and requires an extreme level of foresight from the developer to predict all the calculations the engine will attempt, because the Titan demo is on rails I could imagine this is the method they went with (though I haven't looked at the source code if it's available so I can't say for sure) as they know already what's going to be rendered. I must state that the Motorola 68000 is no slouch, compared to the Ricoh 5A22 of its competitor its night and day (I'm restraining myself from going too in-depth or this comment will be novel-length), it can certainly handle calculating 3D worlds, but not exactly at reasonable framerates, look at LHX Attack Chopper for example, it's impressive but on the border of what some people deem playable, and apparently the developers leveraged the Z80 sound controller for extra support in calculations, though that may only be a rumor.
The game Another World (or the game Flashback) have even more impressive intros, given the hardware limitations but the problem lies more in the realm of memory limitations than anything else. I think they didn't repeat it in Sonic 3 just to make more variations, so it wasn't always the same, I wonder if some md programmes could do a better sonic 2 bonus stage demo fully payable...🤔
What about the crazy parallax scrolling and sprite layering in thunder force 4? Also can we take a moment to appreciate the shading and lighting on the sprites. That silver robot (Orn Faust) in stage 5 looks slick
If you modify your Mega Drive with a 68010 CPU swap, the special stage speeds up slightly, increasing difficulty. I would not recommend doing this hardware mod to your main console, as there can be unwanted behavior in some games, including crashes (Sonic 3 doesn't even get past the title screen), but for other games it can significantly improve performance.
I wonder if they could have used palette swap animations to handle the looping animations (reducing 4 frames down to 1) and maybe gotten it smoother and a bit higher resolution. There is still a matter of the animations leading into corners, tho.
It makes me wonder a lot more about the design process for making a game. Did they more often come up with ideas and figure out how to implement them, or did they experiment with clever effects and figure out how to make game stages out of them?
Have you ever thought about applying some of your tricks to games that didn’t do as nice of a job at it? Like updating the scaling on Space Harrier 2 or Thunder Blade to see how much better those games could be on the original hardware? I think it would be fascinating to see.
This is amazing! Interesting how special stages in main sonic games were so unique. What puzzles me more in classic sonic games is other stuff. In sonic 3 (or it was sonic 2?) there is a unused object in debug mode, a sphere made of spheres, rotating and zooming, and this effect usually put the framerates very low, so it was cool but too taxing on performance
Pretty sure that was from Sonic 3 and was a leftover from testing the spherical special stages, rather then something designed to be used in normal levels.
I feel like this all harkens back to a more intelligent world, but I am probably just stupid, and can barely comprehend the minds of computer scientists from 30 years ago.
I think it was overly complicated. Those animations were simple with low color count and most of the time there were very few changes between frames. it should be possible to simply store just key-frames as 8x8 pixel chunks, where a lot of them would repeat. Then store what changed in next frame, which would update just 10-40% of 8x8 chunks. Anyway as for retro programming goes, I'm most familiar with MS-DOS PCs, where redrawing whole screen was costly, but CPUs were fast, there was a lot of RAM and games weren't that constrained in size. 4-12 MB was the usual size of floppy based games.
Reduced Character set, spread similar characters that could use different colors across the 256 chars/4x16 color palettes to gain/reuse colors and RLE for the character map in the ROM. You shrink the screens to roughly 512 bytes each by stretching everything as seen, you can easily fit the whole animation into 32K. The other 32K of the VRAM could be used for sprites and a simple background pattern. The whole animation on it's own with no sprites, once set up needs about 2-3 raster lines at most. Plenty of time to do some sprite-stretching in realtime even. There are multiple approaches for the sprites, since the CPU is not busy at all with the animation. You could actually re-do the whole thing on a Commodore 64 and there are games like Rigor that do exactly that.
Working on budget around hardware limitations requires through understanding of target hardware I wonder if Sega supplied programmers with documentation about this or let them figure out tricks themselves either way I am amazed how they created visually stunning graphics using under 2MB and the tricks they used is nothing short than coding marvels.
I was always very impressed by the Sonic 2 Special Stage back in the day. To me they should have expandad it somehow in the sequels instead of repeating the sonic 3 bonus stage from them on. i love this kind of video thank you
Great Video, we will eagerly await for your analysis of S3&K bonus levels! Now on a side note what is your opinion on Saturn Sonic Blast S2 inspired bonus levels?
Not related to the method itself, but I just noticed that "TALES" is written between quotes, like this, while SONIC is not. It never caught my attention before, but it does make sense in the games lore since Tales is just his nick name.
I think that the background of the tube the - blue is not animated. I think they used some sort of masking technique for the mid circle shadow and the darker shadow. The mask maybe animated.
So, theoretically, if Sonic wasn't locked in place when the checkpoint came by, and he touched the rings on top, would it still register them as rings?
The animation looks like it'd span compress really well . There's such a low number of colours & resolution and with the slow frame rate you'd probably be able to render the next frame on the cpu. But a video hardware is better solution.
It's insane what they had to do to get this stuff working on the consoles at the time. What more, it's not like the computers were much to brag about either. People today could probably get more out of the Genesis/SNES etc with modern methods but back then the PCs just didn't have the grunt or the more open/universal software. Nevermind getting around the memory limitations which, today don't seem to be a consideration at all with at least 4 of the games on my PC nearing 100GB.
I’m not sure how well-versed you are in sound programming on the Genesis, but if you know enough to break down Jesper Kyd’s music, such as the soundtrack for The Adventures of Batman and Robin, I think that would be fascinating. His compositions sound like nothing else on the console, with Tommy Tallarico maybe coming close. Supposedly, his works utilized extra sound channels in a novel way to produce music that shouldn’t have really worked.
The original Sonic the Hedgehog had superior special stages. In fact I would play an entire game of just those courses. First the original courses from the Sonic game and then tons more just like them to get through, getting progressively larger and more labyrinth like as they go. That would be a lot of fun.
Programmers during the 8 and 16-Bit golden age were superhuman. All of this is next level innovation to me, and it's almost 30 years old.
Same.
Pretty sure there was something in their coffee.
I would expand that statement to any triple A game developer actually, no matter the time frame. The extreme optimization of this era is absolutely fascinating stuff but I'm sure programmers nowadays must also use some clever tricks to come up with such complex game mechanics, graphic details and online multiplayer gaming.
I highly suggest you watch interviews of how uncharted games were made. Specifically the train and boat. Absolute genius programmer's of the modern day
Restriction breeds creativity
So apparently, it doesn't use horizontal interrupts to squash the screen, but horizontal scroll registers instead. Approx the same result.
Any chance of an updated video where that process is updated? I've read through a few comments and it seems like there's some neat things going on there that would be interesting to see explained!
Every Nth video (every 8th video maybe?) just issue a bugfix video :P
Hey, I was wondering...
Do you think you could do a video where you look at how developers would use 2D sprites within 3D environments?
You know, something like the tires in Crash Team Racing or several background/hazard elements in Pac-Man World.
Just putting an idea out there. You can reject if you don't think it's interesting.
When the two smartest kids in class have differents answers^^
Its a pity you didn't work on N64, you would've performed miracles on a tiny 8MB cartridge.
There's a really weird crash in Sonic 2 in Hilltop zone where if you hit one of the Rexon's at full speed vertically it crashes the console. It has always been a nagging mystery to me as to why in this particular instance out of the whole game there is a crash, there is assembly documentation as to what happens but its beyond my understanding as I am not familiar with the console. I would love to see you do a breakdown of what causes the crash.
Not sure that's something that would peak your interest, but anyway as always I love your content!
Not trying to be a grammar nazi, but it's 'pique' instead of peak. You seem smart and articulate, so I thought you'd want to know. Feel free to correct any errors I may have made. 😄👍
Thank you for pointing this out! This is why I am a computer science teacher and not an English one!
@@Killadey English is my first language and I didn't even know that, thanks!
@@Killadey this is the most diplomatically phrased correction I've ever seen. 10/10
Ashley Coleman Acually It was in the first revision the bug exist. If you jumps and breaks a stone and after at the Rexor so it start points to final boss sprite and crashes.
Game companies: "Damn, our source code has been leaked. Now anybody can pirate our games!"
Programmers: "Oh, nice, new literature."
Sonic 2's source wasn't reverse engineered entirely until long after it was widely pirated. I mean, people were hacking it specifically because of the emulation scene long before even that.
Nintendo right now*
@@mechashadow correct
mechashadow Yeah.. but Sm64 wasn’t Leaked fully just some useless files
These are always fantastic! I’d love to see one about the S3&K Blue Spheres special stage! Just like Sonic 2, I have some ideas how it was done, but I always enjoy your explanations. 🤗
palette
It's not quite as complex, it uses palette swapping. Stealth goes into some detail in his proof of concept for a Sonic 3 port hcstealth.tumblr.com/post/100311283757/sonic-3-knuckles-20th-anniversary
That one is mostly palette swapping, like what was done in mickey mania. There are animation frames for rotating the screen but since everything is moved by 90 degrees, it can be mirrored. Spheres are given a couple of sizes too.
S3 used a simpler tecnique using fast palette color swaps, everything else is just different sized sprites with different palletes and the same chaos gem with different colors and 4 different sprites. Wich is also loaded once the stage is finished (that's why the orbs dissapear, to free space for the gem sprites. It's simpler but makes for a more fun bonus stage
FX chip: I'm best known for 3d on 16 bit consoles
Sonic 2: hold my 3d
It'd be quite interesting to know in details how the Phantasy Star 3D labyrinth ( Master System) was done...
I recently played it for the first time and was very impressed by it. It's simple, but stunning, and definitely gorgeous for the time (and system).
Pretty mind-blowing for its time for sure. I've still a love-hate relationship with this special stage, though; it's the only one where I need save states to beat.
Harumph. :c
I always found pausing the game on and off really helped, albeit was a cheap move.
I directly thought of colour cycling, like used for the Sega logo animation in another of your videos and that I first saw in deluxe paint on an Amiga 1000 bank in the mid 80s
Yes, I think you could get a similar effect from some sort of colour cycling for some of it for sure
I had no idea how they did this until now tbh. It's insane that they pulled this off on the Genesis.
0:39 omg they forgot to flip one of the ring frames so the rings are wiggling instead of spinning.
Well seen.
This is incredible stuff as always - it’s amazing how ingenious programmers had to be with such limited resources, making the consoles of the time do things that on the surface they shouldn’t be able to. I’m glad that game making is so open to all just now with Unity and so on, but we’re taught to get in the habit of just stretching our legs out and taking all the memory we need :)
I got crazy when I saw the Bonus Stage for first time as a kid... I instantly knew I had the best console in my hands! :D
This level absolutely charmed me as a kid. It felt so immersive. Baffling to have that known in kb.
That is ingenious. To think of it for a star, and then be able to actually do it with the limitations of the hardware. Amazing.
I can not imagine thinking in such a way that you could dream this up. It's insane.
Developers in the old days were freaking coding magicians. Achieving so much with so very little of ressources.
I really enjoyed it, how in the 3DS port of the game, they seemed to have re-created this special stage with actual 3D graphics and actual depth, while perfectly keeping the original look.
Limitation breeds inspiration. Having limits will encourage you to get creative to maximize what you can do.
@@Rokabur Sadly, this is very true. Today developers don't even optimize their games anymore, often being programmed very sluggish, since they have so many ressources to waste.......
This is some insane thinking process going on. So fascinating seeing how games I enjoy were made and the breakdown of them. That's just awesome.
Wow, this is nuts...another thing that always got me in these bonus stages is the huge sprites. Sonic and Tales were giant for their day. It's something you didn't see very often back then. When you did it was generally for bad games like China Warrior (TG-16) or Sword of Sodan (GEN) that centered around huge characters while everything else suffered...or it was a quick gimick like some of Castlevania VI's (Snes) bosses. In Castlevania's case the boss would shrink the second you hit him. In Sonic The Hedgehog 2's case both characters run around the play field as giant sprites throughout the duration of the stage. The rings are large and numerous as is the bombs.
This is a fantastic video! I find it super interesting how they achieved this using the different palette blocks instead of individual frames of animation.
Also. I would love to maybe see a video on the game Star Cruiser one day, as its graphics are incredible for the mega drive.
Back then, Sonic games were made by the best programmers in the industry. Nowadays, Sonic games are made by the best programmers of the FAN COMMUNITY (Sonic Mania).
Insane the amount of tricks they did to get visuals down to the KB's to save cartridge space.
Meanwhile, today we're going to render a video that's GB's large and upload it to UA-cam like it's nothing.
I figured out the checkpoints were ring graphics ages ago when I lost rings just before a checkpoint. All the rings I lost started to flash different colors as the palette cycled for the checkpoint!
I've been playing and replaying Sonic 2 for no joke the last 20 years of my life and I have never, ever noticed that there are checkpoints of different colour in the special stages.
Videos like these are the most interesting, just seeing the different tricks programmers used to get a particular thing to work in their game with limited hardware.
I wonder how they managed to port this special stage to the Neo Geo Pocket for Sonic Pocket Adventure.
The NGPC's native resolution is only 160x152, and SPA's version of the special stage uses even fewer colors for the tube (I count 5), so it might actually have been easier to do than on the Genesis.
@@abraveastronaut The NGPC can handle less colors per tile, but it also has less VRAM than the Mega Drive. The Mega Drive special stage tube graphics are actually 128x112, you can see Sonic, Tails and the BG have twice the resolution. That alone makes the NGPC version higher res.
The NGPC also doesn't have separate layers for foreground and background so the blue gradient is fused with the tube tiles. It's not as easy as it seems.
July 24th, 2020: Coding Secrets has 22.1K subscribers.
Don't mind me! Just making my mark before he hits a few hundred thousand!
The original developers at Sonic Team were really efficient in the way they managed to solve problems pertaining to using space on the Genesis.
I have this game in a original cartidge. I thought it's various backgrounds added to the screen to make the animetion. But THIS, is EVEN BETTER. WOOOW
Game developers are seriously magicians. I love that they always manage to give us graphics and effects that are actually beyond a consoles capabilities :)
I have no experience actually doing code, but i've tried to learn as much as i can about it casually. Your videos have been the best for that, as they show me whats possible with just a little bit of creativity.
It makes me want to study the various compression and memory saving techniques from both 2D and 3d games
Thank you for making Coding Secrets its own channel. Super fascinating stuff. The video you did on how Sonic R's fading effect was programmed has turned out to be a serious resource for Saturn homebrewers.
As for new videos, you could look at all the crazy things going on in VectorMan and VectorMan 2.
Or if you're willing to share some more of your Sega Saturn knowledge, analyze some of Sega's fighting games, like Fighting Vipers or Last Bronx.
I think the only way they could have achieved a smoother and higher-resolution version of the special stage without using too much memory would be with elaborate color palette changing, like in the special stages of Sonic 3 or the moose chase stage in Mickey Mania. A basic version of this would have to leave out any turns or hills in the halfpipe, but perhaps they could add a few frames for these that also utilize constant color palette changing.
I never even noticed the coloured rings on top to signify a checkpoint
I always noticed they were scaled up... but never knew how they did it.
Great explanation!
My favourite special stage in any Sonic game. Still blows me away today from a technical standpoint and is really fun to play.
If you ever find time you should check out the Pico-8. It's a software fantasy 8-bit console written in LUA. You've got something like 2 million CPU cycles per second to work with, a tiny drop of RAM, and it uses all the classic 2D systems like sprites and background layers. People have already made some 3D stuff in it including a flight sim. As a bonus you can look at the code, graphics, and audio of any game. Games can be completely created on the Pico-8.
Weird that after seeing all the releases I never saw/was recommended a video with new content. Great video!
Coding Secrets - Contra: Hard Corps (USA)/Contra: The Hardcore (魂斗羅ザ・ハードコア, Japan)/Probotector (Europe, Australia)?
Saga is really good at making pixels look like animations. Very impressive.
This LUT with all the possible pixel combinations being used to create this level bg sound very similar to what Jan Sloot's compression method was supposed to be
Considering the horizontal rows are blocks and blocks of solid color it would seem to suggest investigating some sort of run length encoding. Heck, since the colors always follow the same pattern, I doubt you would even have to add colors, just a fixed number of columns. Toss in some pre-calculated huffman encoding for lengths and you could likely really shave down the size. While best for pixel mapping, it might still have a benefit with tile maps.
I really love your videos man. You explain things so good and with examples of my childhood. Now, years later, I create mods, learn to write code a bit which amazes me even more to picture the whole thing. And I really love the background music. In combination with your smooth voice its just perfect. Thanks man! Keep it up!
Sonic 2 was my introduction to Genesis. These special stages impressed me GREATLY.
Back then anything that seemed 3D blew my mind.
Really interesting video! Would have been nice to learn how they made Sonic and Tails look 3D. That was absolute insanity for video games back then.
Excellent video as always! Now please do one on sonic 3's as clearly it has to be generated because of the blue spheres mode. Sonic 3's special stage always amazed me as a kid. Well, that and the toy story 3d level you already covered.
This was really impressive to watch, actually.
Can't wait to see what you bring up next!
I really wonder how they figured out the block combinations to use. Probably some brute force algorithm to check each rendered frame?
In any case, fascinated as always about this tech. Great video and thank you!
Maybe! I wonder if they could tell the artists what colours could be next to others, so they could avoid some colour combinations that way
Imagine going in and doubling the frames of animation now.
Its nice to imagine that its technically possible to improve this further, while keeping additional memory to a low
This was always my favourite Sonic Special Stage. While it looks bad these days (unless you have nostalgia glasses on), at the time this blew me away with how I thought it looked 3D
"However, the track obviously isn't drawn in real-time 3D, as the machine doesn't really have the power to do that"
But it does have the power to do this: ua-cam.com/video/LcT1XIrklhQ/v-deo.html
Of course I'm aware that running an actual video game is very different than running a demo, but you'd think there'd be a way to make it work, if only for show.
Demos are nowhere near as complex as games as they do not contain the gameplay logic that will gobble up cycles. When he says "The machine doesn't really have the power to do that" he is obviously speaking within the context of a game with thousands of lines of logic code. They are completely different uses of the technology.
It could technically be possible using precalculated lookup tables so the CPU can find the answer to trigonometric equations instead of having to do the calculations itself, saving on cycles, the downside being the table itself will take up a fair amount of ROM and requires an extreme level of foresight from the developer to predict all the calculations the engine will attempt, because the Titan demo is on rails I could imagine this is the method they went with (though I haven't looked at the source code if it's available so I can't say for sure) as they know already what's going to be rendered.
I must state that the Motorola 68000 is no slouch, compared to the Ricoh 5A22 of its competitor its night and day (I'm restraining myself from going too in-depth or this comment will be novel-length), it can certainly handle calculating 3D worlds, but not exactly at reasonable framerates, look at LHX Attack Chopper for example, it's impressive but on the border of what some people deem playable, and apparently the developers leveraged the Z80 sound controller for extra support in calculations, though that may only be a rumor.
The game Another World (or the game Flashback) have even more impressive intros, given the hardware limitations but the problem lies more in the realm of memory limitations than anything else. I think they didn't repeat it in Sonic 3 just to make more variations, so it wasn't always the same, I wonder if some md programmes could do a better sonic 2 bonus stage demo fully payable...🤔
amazing effects, but virtua racing (genesis version not 32x version) uses an extra chip in the cartridge to show real 3d enviroments.
_Race Drivin'_ would beg to differ.
10 FPS, yes, but it _is_ a fully-3D environment of sorts.
I didn't understand most of what you explained but all I know is that it's really cool what Sega did.
Watching this again and I still think that is sorcery.
What about the crazy parallax scrolling and sprite layering in thunder force 4? Also can we take a moment to appreciate the shading and lighting on the sprites. That silver robot (Orn Faust) in stage 5 looks slick
If you modify your Mega Drive with a 68010 CPU swap, the special stage speeds up slightly, increasing difficulty.
I would not recommend doing this hardware mod to your main console, as there can be unwanted behavior in some games, including crashes (Sonic 3 doesn't even get past the title screen), but for other games it can significantly improve performance.
You mean the game was lagging the whole time in the special stages?
I wonder if they could have used palette swap animations to handle the looping animations (reducing 4 frames down to 1) and maybe gotten it smoother and a bit higher resolution. There is still a matter of the animations leading into corners, tho.
great video. Would love more Sonic 2 stuff!
It makes me wonder a lot more about the design process for making a game. Did they more often come up with ideas and figure out how to implement them, or did they experiment with clever effects and figure out how to make game stages out of them?
Waccoon Depends on the company.
welp magics gone rip childhood
Have you ever thought about applying some of your tricks to games that didn’t do as nice of a job at it? Like updating the scaling on Space Harrier 2 or Thunder Blade to see how much better those games could be on the original hardware? I think it would be fascinating to see.
This is amazing! Interesting how special stages in main sonic games were so unique.
What puzzles me more in classic sonic games is other stuff. In sonic 3 (or it was sonic 2?) there is a unused object in debug mode, a sphere made of spheres, rotating and zooming, and this effect usually put the framerates very low, so it was cool but too taxing on performance
Pretty sure that was from Sonic 3 and was a leftover from testing the spherical special stages, rather then something designed to be used in normal levels.
Thanks for the tip! I found the video of the spheres ... wacky!
ua-cam.com/video/pnZEdZRXz_g/v-deo.html
I love what YT brought to me today, new sub!
Sonic's Special Stages are really SPECIAL.
Today programers don't go that far to achieve much of a machine.
I feel like this all harkens back to a more intelligent world, but I am probably just stupid, and can barely comprehend the minds of computer scientists from 30 years ago.
There's actually very little changing on the screen frame to frame. The floor, for example, rarely changes at all
Adaptive resolution on Genesis. My admiration for these games just keeps on growing.
I always knew the special stages looked too sophisticated for a cartridge game.
8 and 16-Bit programmers were fucking mathematical wizards.
I think it was overly complicated. Those animations were simple with low color count and most of the time there were very few changes between frames. it should be possible to simply store just key-frames as 8x8 pixel chunks, where a lot of them would repeat. Then store what changed in next frame, which would update just 10-40% of 8x8 chunks.
Anyway as for retro programming goes, I'm most familiar with MS-DOS PCs, where redrawing whole screen was costly, but CPUs were fast, there was a lot of RAM and games weren't that constrained in size. 4-12 MB was the usual size of floppy based games.
i used to love playing these stages the music was awsome, same with all the dots
a video like this on sonic 3D would be super cool
Reduced Character set, spread similar characters that could use different colors across the 256 chars/4x16 color palettes to gain/reuse colors and RLE for the character map in the ROM. You shrink the screens to roughly 512 bytes each by stretching everything as seen, you can easily fit the whole animation into 32K. The other 32K of the VRAM could be used for sprites and a simple background pattern. The whole animation on it's own with no sprites, once set up needs about 2-3 raster lines at most. Plenty of time to do some sprite-stretching in realtime even. There are multiple approaches for the sprites, since the CPU is not busy at all with the animation.
You could actually re-do the whole thing on a Commodore 64 and there are games like Rigor that do exactly that.
Working on budget around hardware limitations requires through understanding of target hardware I wonder if Sega supplied programmers with documentation about this or let them figure out tricks themselves either way I am amazed how they created visually stunning graphics using under 2MB and the tricks they used is nothing short than coding marvels.
I was always very impressed by the Sonic 2 Special Stage back in the day. To me they should have expandad it somehow in the sequels instead of repeating the sonic 3 bonus stage from them on.
i love this kind of video thank you
Great Video, we will eagerly await for your analysis of S3&K bonus levels!
Now on a side note what is your opinion on Saturn Sonic Blast S2 inspired bonus levels?
Not related to the method itself, but I just noticed that "TALES" is written between quotes, like this, while SONIC is not. It never caught my attention before, but it does make sense in the games lore since Tales is just his nick name.
I've always loved how they put so much love in games (minus E.T.) back then unlike today's games.
So good I watched it twice
So great to have you making new breakdowns
I think that the background of the tube the - blue is not animated. I think they used some sort of masking technique for the mid circle shadow and the darker shadow. The mask maybe animated.
I have great appreciation for the programmers of old who could do so much with so little!
I wonder how the playfield on Xtreme racing on the Amiga was generated consdiering similar limitations.
So, theoretically, if Sonic wasn't locked in place when the checkpoint came by, and he touched the rings on top, would it still register them as rings?
No, they just use the same Sprite. They aren't actually the same object
The animation looks like it'd span compress really well . There's such a low number of colours & resolution and with the slow frame rate you'd probably be able to render the next frame on the cpu. But a video hardware is better solution.
I absolutely love seeing this kind of thing, this is exactly why I subscribed and shared your videos to some friends.
I was unsubscribed from you it seems. Love this stuff! Those guys were wizards!
It's insane what they had to do to get this stuff working on the consoles at the time. What more, it's not like the computers were much to brag about either. People today could probably get more out of the Genesis/SNES etc with modern methods but back then the PCs just didn't have the grunt or the more open/universal software.
Nevermind getting around the memory limitations which, today don't seem to be a consideration at all with at least 4 of the games on my PC nearing 100GB.
Amazing the kind of workarounds they had to pull off to fit their games into a cartridge back then.
These videos are great! I get ideas on how to save memory sometimes in web applications from watching these. Thank you!
This is my favorite special stage of the Sonic games I've played.
“Let me know if you can think of a better way for them to do this.”
Me “I like turtles”
I’m not sure how well-versed you are in sound programming on the Genesis, but if you know enough to break down Jesper Kyd’s music, such as the soundtrack for The Adventures of Batman and Robin, I think that would be fascinating. His compositions sound like nothing else on the console, with Tommy Tallarico maybe coming close. Supposedly, his works utilized extra sound channels in a novel way to produce music that shouldn’t have really worked.
Or konami games, Both Rocket Knigh adventures and Castlevania sound very unique and produce sounds you don't get in any other genesis game
Had this sort of content been available in the 90s we would have far more people interested in math. Context helps. A lot.
Have you seen the dissassemblies on github of the MD/Gen games? Might help when analysing these games.
The original Sonic the Hedgehog had superior special stages. In fact I would play an entire game of just those courses. First the original courses from the Sonic game and then tons more just like them to get through, getting progressively larger and more labyrinth like as they go. That would be a lot of fun.
the legend from travelers tales, hes back
I stand mesmerized.
I always thought they just used tile maps, and all the solid color area used the same tile.
How about when you run into the log at the start of angel island zone? That’s some wizardry
That horror music in the background though...
it's supposed to have a thought-provoking/investigative tone..like L's theme and other songs from DeathNote
"Special low resolution of 256x224"
LOL, that's close to the SNES native resolution...
Been a game developer for 15 years and damn your videos make me feel incredibly inept!