The 32X framebuffer is capable of displaying either on top or below the Genesis, but not both; this is part of the reason why most developers had backgrounds handled by the Genesis, as displaying it below the 32X would be the easiest solution.
@@ToxicAtom Indeed; technically you *could* replicate the loop effect by putting a sprite on top of the area the characters go behind (in fact, the final Chaotix has an unused sprite for this very purpose), however water is basically impossible.
@ToxicAtom well...the water in Sonic games are usually done by using the scanlines to draw the top half of the screen with the normal palette, then render the bottom half of the screen with the palette for the underwater section. This is done when in HBlank, where the system is told to draw what left of the screen in a completely different palette than what it was using before. So when the beam gets ready to draw the rest of the image it draws the screen with the underwater palette instead. I probably did a shit job a describing that but whatever. I don't really know if the 32X has H/VBlank or not but if it does then I'm sure they could have done it.
Another reason is to offload all the heavy lifting of parallax scrolling and background info to the much more 2D-oriented Mega Drive/Genesis hardware. Since the 32X essentially draws everything in software with dual alternating frame buffers (much like a PC of the era), pure 2D is way too much for the 32X to handle on its own. Take a game like Pitfall the Mayan Adventure which uses the 32X for most of the background detail, and it barely hits a 20fps target, with some lovely screen tearing and glitching thrown into the mix. Meanwhile, Knuckles Chaotix offloads more to the Genesis, leaving the character sprites, hud and rings up to the 32X to render. It was just way easier to achieve better performance on the ol' mushroom turd this way. There are some games which do break from this mold (like Kolibri), but the Genesis/32X hardware functions more like an undercooked Sega Saturn: the Genesis is to Saturn's VDP2, which the 32X is to Saturn's VDP1
For the record, Sega of America did not *know* there was another console around the corner. The Saturn was an internal secret and they didn't find out about it until a Japanese game journal brought it to their attention, right before the 32X launch.
Sega in part undermined it's own company's success due to SEGA USA / SEGA Japan not communicating and treating each other like competitors instead of co-branches.
@@TheLionAndTheLamb777 Nakayama literally forced SoA to surprise launch the Saturn to beat the PlayStation to market, same man who ordered Saturn get a second CPU as a panic response to the PSX. No wonder Kalinske jumped ship. Fighting a stupid, arrogant and uncooperative higher-up from day one
The Kalinske-Nilsen-Hector-Miller SEGA of America plan was pretty simple: Continue bringing games out for the Sega CD, itself a bit overpowered for 1992-93 games then bring out the $49.95 SVP Lock On cart. Although they'd have to replace the SAMSUNG SVP with the HITACHI SH2, the four games--Daytona USA, Virtua Racing, Virtua Fighter, and Star Wars Arcade--had already been developed and were ready to be shipped out for sale. In fact, a Sega CD+SVP with a bit more RAM would've been more capable than the Genesis+32X and for the same overall price. Using the 320x448i and Shadow Highlight Mode for games, they'd have effectively 256 out of 3,375 colors available, making the machine a viable powerhouse for games well into the mid-90s. I would even argue that such a beast would've made the $400 Saturn unnecessary for most of the world market since that machine could render over 90,000 flat shaded polygons per second or 20,000 Gauroud shaded and textured.
i'm surprised that so much of Knuckles Chaotix is actually rendered by the Sega Genesis, kinda makes me think that they should have made the game just on the sega genesis instead
I always love seeing what's rendered by the Genesis and what's done by the 32x. I remember seeing a video that Motocross on the 32x was rendered entirely by the 32x itself *except* for the Sega logo at the start.
This is some awesome stuff! One minor recommendation would be to backlight the TV and console rather than front light it. That'll eliminate glare and should record a clearer image on your camera.
3:10 that's not just the 32x, it's a known problem with all Genesis hardware, at least in NTSC. The Retrotink 2X's documentation explicitly calls out the Genesis as something that might not work right through the composite input--but this also affects other scalers like the Framemeister. It is, however, uncommon. I own a few dozen Genesises and I've only seen it happen with maybe two of them.
This is probably what it is, I also have the same color issue when using a RetroTink 2X (in my case a Mini), but it's only with the 32X attached. The Mega Drive itself works fine through the RetroTink and the 32x works fine on all the TVs I have.
@@TheEPICMarioBros2 mostly I wanted to fuck around with, understand and document all of the different revisions. Plus have multiples of each one to compare modded vs unmodded. After a while it just became retail therapy I guess lmao. There was a period where I wanted to repair and flip them but the gap between broken and working consoles is so narrow that eBay's cut and shipping eats it all up, so I gave up on that.
I've sometimes wondered if using a {VCR or TV Tuner box} to filter/re-modulate/recondition the signal could solve those compatibility problems. I had one of those Nintendo-on-a-chip (NOAC, pretending to be an INTV) that also had non-standard NTSC-adjacent modulation which didn't work on any analog CRT I tried. But I did find that running the signal through the most 'basic' VCRs I had would restore it to functionality from its 'antenna' output (while the 'broadcast quality' ones couldn't). I think that the NOAC was using digital timing to fake/emulate analog modulation; And the basic VCR I had was -crudely- minimally demodulating the signal with a high/low cutoff that it could inject its monochrome overlay without needing more sophisticated circuitry; So when the VCR "re"-modulated the combined output it rounded off the sharp edges of the NOAC signal that was upsetting the screens. -- While CTV's decommissioned broadcast VCRs were _tuned_ to reject noise and very specifically only accept a 'real' NTSC signal, which the NOAC's signal was not (like most of the consumer AV equipment my high-school had at the time too actually...). IIRC: My _set-top_ cableTV tuner (with remote control and onscreen overlay) also fixed the signal; but I only kept the VCR because I found it far more useful in general because that VCR consistently suppressed dot crawl without messing up the colour balance as digital broadcast equipment took over.
Now I wonder what would happen if you made a Y-cable, feeding the 32X output into its own input. Would it make one of those trippy 80s and 90s music video effects?
Doom could have been a great candidate for that. They could have had PC quality sound / music at the very least and at best possibly offloaded some of the level data to the CD so there was the full three episodes.
This is definitely something i would have done if i had a 32X as a kid. I wonder if you could plug the AV output for a camera into it. Or mix the signals for 2 consoles
Wicked! I'd love to see more 32X experiments at some point, it's a really interesting piece of hardware and deserves in-depth analysis and appreciation. Have a nice day, Matt!
This was a very fascinating video . I grew up with the 32X with Doom , Brutal , and BC Racers . I always figured it was a handshake more or less with the Genesis and 32X with the way the games would be and when I had issues with my video cables as the years went on and played still. Makes a lot of sense why this homebrew Genesis hack of doom looks very good too in some ways speaking of
The scale of internal conflict at Sega between Kalinski vs Sega of Japan is almost difficult to believe in hindsight. They shot themselves in the foot with the internal squabbling, and squandered the critical advantage that they had in the early 90s. Ultimately the blame falls squarely on the shoulders of the CEO and the Board, who should have made a final decision about either going with the 32X or the Saturn, but not both.
The irony was that SoA didn't realize that they were embroiled in an internal civil war! That's right, Nilsen and Kalinske both said that they just couldn't understand why SoJ was making these crazy decisions for them. It wasn't until years later that it became apparent that SoJ's continuous market failure was driving Japanese management up the wall.
@@MaxAbramson3In Kalinski's mind, it was inconceivable that a company would personally come and find you to revitalize their company, exceed past those lofy expectations, only to then be barked at and man handled for doing too well. Japanese business culture and American business culture don't mix. You don't backstab or undermine your own allies or branch companies like Nintendo did to Sony or Sega to SoA in the US. It's just bad business. Why create enemies out of allies?
There are actually 6 commercially released 32X CD games. A 32X version of Surgical Strike had a small print run of 500 copies released in Brazil. It has become one hell of a collectors item.
The way I think about the 32x is like a 3d accelerator for the genesis, as it requires patching the genesis video through it, like how a 3d accelerator for a pc used to require patching the 2d card through it.
That video feed thing is legitimately what happened to me. Got a 32X for Christmas and thought it was broken. We returned it. Later on in my life I realized what the problem was. However it wouldn't have mattered, my TV only had a Coax input. So I would have been SOL anyway.
What does happen if you have two Genesis + 32X setups and connect the video output of the Genesis of one setup to the video input of the 32X of the other setup and the same viceversa? Also, I want to mention that there's a least some kind of video signal on the cartridge slot but is just solely an indicator of when the furthest Genesis background is being drawn (You know, the one that's just a plain color). That's how they're able to layer Genesis graphics on top of 32X graphics, it's not that the 32X is using processing power to punch holes. Though it takes the entire Genesis output as a single plane, so you can't layer 32X output above or below of only some of the Genesis elements, it's above or below all of the Genesis elements (You'll notice this with how the fighters in Virtua Fighters can actually obscure the health bars).
I always wondered if farming off backgrounds like in Knuckles Chaotix & Knuckles let them sidestep palette limitations on one or the other, letting the backgrounds be independent of the two Chaotix members, who probably share quite a few colours.
The 32x has three palette modes, two of which are 256 colors on screen out of a 15 bit color palette. The last is a full 15 bit color palette at the cost of screen resolution. This blows the Genesis VDP away, which has a limit of 64 on screen colors out of a 512 color palette. These are of course without doing complicated hardware tricks. The reason Knuckles Chaotix uses the Genesis for the background is because it frees up processing power for the rest of the game. While the 32x specs sound good on paper, what they don't tell you is that both SH2 CPUs are crippled on a 16 bit bus, with heavy bus contention and high latency main memory. There is also no hardware acceleration, everything is done in software on one or both of the SH2s.
The graphics on the 32x is entirely software driven. Updating the scroll registers and nametables on the Megadrive VDP is much faster than drawing the background onto the 32x framebuffer. Drawing everything on the 32x would just have been too slow.
As I understand it that's pretty common in 32X games, yeah. The standard megadrive/genny VDP supports 64(ish) colours that need to be divided between characters, backgrounds etc. By letting the 32X handle character graphics, the entire megadrive palette can be used for the background, near doubling the effective colour depth.
@@birdrun4246 That's not how the VDP works in the Genesis. The color lookup table is 64 entries, which is further divided into four palettes of 16 colors each. When you place a sprite or tile on screen, it has to use one of these four palettes. The palettes can be changed in real time to cycle between colors, but the palette can only be 16 colors. In practice though, this is reduced to 15 colors because one color is used as a bitmask for transparency. Just because you don't use the sprite or foreground layers, doesn't mean that the background layer is suddenly allowed to use all 512 colors. There is still a 64 entry CLUT, and the limit of any given tile in the tilemap to use one of four 16 color palettes. Games that "break the limit" to display more than 64 colors on screen use complex programming and hardware quirks.
@@GGigabiteM True, but in a normal Genesis game, those four sub-palettes need to be split between player characters, level backgrounds and geometry, UI and so forth, meaning the tile layers (level geometry and background) typically only get to use two of the four sub-palettes, maybe three if you're being clever. If the 32X is doing the player characters and enemies, as in Chaotix, the background layers can have all four palettes. Each individual tile can still only use one, of course, and you're still not breaking 64 total colours from the Genny. Admittedly, I've not looked at any of these games in emulation/debugger tools to see how much they actually take advantage of any of this, but the 32X games that work this way definitely look like they're using more colours for backgrounds than the average standalone Genny title.
Seeing the graphics in the racing games from the beginning of the video... they almost look as good as Gran Turismo 2 for the PS1! That's not bad at all, I'd say. Especially in the case of the 32X.
I'm curious about the usefulness of offloading background graphics to the Genesis; it seems like it makes the coding much more complicated (you're essentially programming two different consoles at the same time!) while only freeing up a comparatively small amount of CPU time on the 32x. And then you have the limitations of Genesis tile-based graphics and the Genesis color palette, and the speed limitations of blasting tile data through the cartridge slot. And then adding the CD onto it would be like programming three different consoles at the same time... And managing two different buses. Did 32X developers have to write all the code that ran on the Genesis and handled cross-communication or did the 32x itself provide the basic code to manage the Genesis and the programmer would only need to program the 32x CPU?
From the viewpoint of SEGA and Genesis developers, not so much. The Genesis/Mega Drive already had four layers that had to be drawn independently: Background, Foreground, Sprite, and Window. Drawing to those two background layers was almost its own separate project.
There were examples shipped with the docs, which was as close to OS support as you could get on no-OS hardware. Mind you, this was already how sound CPUs worked on both base MD and SNES, so this wasn't considered nearly as zany as you seem to imply.
The "poked holes through the 3D graphics" thing DOOM does is actually a hardware thing: the cartridge port has a pin which lets the 32x know if it should render over or under the graphics the MD gives it.
I just thinked: What would happen if you have two genesis plus 32x playing different game, but you're having the first genesis connected to the 32x of the second genesis, would it make like a blend of the two differents games?
It looks like old scrambled cable (which is not surprising because in NTSC land this usually worked by messing with the sync pulses or other timing information).
Super cool video about a super interesting add on! I got one last year & I’ve enjoyed playing Virtua racing deluxe on it. Knuckles chaotix is quite the doozy though. The last couple special stages were awful & the cpu was not making the main game any easier to play
I think it could be interesting to mix into the signal not the console itself, but an external source so we can have half game, half whatever we want. Dunno how possible thatd be though.
I used to have this exact same TV when I got my Mega Drive (as a second-hand gift...) Good times, good TV. Wish it were still around, it bonked me in the head once.
The limitations of the Mega drive hardware are the reason why I've always considered the 32X a mistake. For as cool a concept as it is, it was NEVER going to compete with the N64, Saturn or PlayStation. Ultimately, if the Saturn hadn't been there, we'd have lost SEGA before the we were blessed with the Dreamcast.
I'm no old school video game programmer, in fact I'm not a great programmer in general, but surely they could've used the genesis itself for more than just a skybox in Virtua Racing?
looking at the game I can't really think of anything. the rest of the game is either the fully 3D playing field (which has to be done by the 32X) and the HUD (which has to display on top of the 3D field) in theory you could do the HUD on the Genesis side using that cutout technique Doom uses, but I doubt there's much of a performance hit from drawing the actual HUD instead of drawing just the cutout (because yes, it still has to be drawn even if just as a cutout)
@@Shadownnico I guess I'm just so used to old school programmers squeezing every last drop of hardware potential out of a console that it would seem strange to not do anything more with it, even if it was tiny Although as I'm writing this comment I realise they probably pulled extra processing power from the Genesis wherever possible Anyway, I'm basically the guy writing tweets to NASA pointing out how they shouldn't forget about space radiation, like no shit Einstein they probably know what they're doing lol
Knuckles chaotix BARELY uses the 32x. For a better example, see Tempo, or even Web of Fire. Edit: The 32x can put it's graphics behind AND in front of the genesis display.
MD VDP cannot do anything useful instead of drawing or preparing to draw, and it can keep drawing the same simple thing, including nothing, with no continuous maintenance. So this is for once something 32X has no problem with.
Wait, so the *composite* out of the 32X works, without getting the composite in from the Genesis? It's definitely wired there and I could swear my modded genesis with no composite would only work through the 32X with RGB. Since it already gets RGB and sync, I had assumed it needed composite for the colorburst, but maybe not!
The video mixer output would be fed to the composite video encoder, so there should be no problem using a modded genny without composite. Colorburst is the same no matter what you're displaying, and that would be added by the composite video encoder.
@@RetroDawn you want the color sub carrier to be phase locked to your horizontal sync, otherwise you will get moving artifacts that are much more distracting than stationary ones. Hsync is derived from the Genesis master clock and the color subcarrier normally is as well. The 32X does not have access to MCLK, only VCLK. Since VCLK is MCLK/7 but SBCR is MCLK/15, I guess you could theoretically do a fractional conversion
@@RetroDawn but that then begs the question: why is composite even wired as an input on the 32x at all? It's connected to the VIN pin which is shown on a block diagram to go to the VCXO
@@rfmerrill Correct, the color subcarrier needs to be phase locked to the horizontal sync. For mixing the two video signals (underlay/overlay), the 32X has a RGB genlock (not composite), which would use the external HSync and VSync from the Genesis, which should be derived from the CSync pin of the Genesis A/V cable. This HSync would then be used for syncing the colorburst and the color subcarrier is in turn synced to the colorburst. It would be extremely odd for the composite signal of the Genesis A/V cable to be used by the 32X. The only thing I can think of would be if the 32X video encoder did not include a colorburst generator and they instead stripped it from the composite input from the Genesis. That would require a similar or greater amount of circuitry, though, and why not use an OTS video encoder, all of which included colorburst generation long before the 32X. I'll check the system diagram.
@@RetroDawn RGB to composite conversion that tries to multiply hsync to get the subcarrier never seems to work too well. Especially true with the Genesis signal where the relationship between them is wrong (subcarrier has 228 cycles per hsync period instead of 227.5)
The 32X framebuffer is capable of displaying either on top or below the Genesis, but not both; this is part of the reason why most developers had backgrounds handled by the Genesis, as displaying it below the 32X would be the easiest solution.
This is also why there are no loops or water in Knuckles' Chaotix iirc
@@ToxicAtom Indeed; technically you *could* replicate the loop effect by putting a sprite on top of the area the characters go behind (in fact, the final Chaotix has an unused sprite for this very purpose), however water is basically impossible.
Is it possible to use scanlines and VBlank to have the 32X display in front for one half of the screen but display behind on the other half?
@ToxicAtom well...the water in Sonic games are usually done by using the scanlines to draw the top half of the screen with the normal palette, then render the bottom half of the screen with the palette for the underwater section. This is done when in HBlank, where the system is told to draw what left of the screen in a completely different palette than what it was using before. So when the beam gets ready to draw the rest of the image it draws the screen with the underwater palette instead. I probably did a shit job a describing that but whatever. I don't really know if the 32X has H/VBlank or not but if it does then I'm sure they could have done it.
Another reason is to offload all the heavy lifting of parallax scrolling and background info to the much more 2D-oriented Mega Drive/Genesis hardware. Since the 32X essentially draws everything in software with dual alternating frame buffers (much like a PC of the era), pure 2D is way too much for the 32X to handle on its own. Take a game like Pitfall the Mayan Adventure which uses the 32X for most of the background detail, and it barely hits a 20fps target, with some lovely screen tearing and glitching thrown into the mix. Meanwhile, Knuckles Chaotix offloads more to the Genesis, leaving the character sprites, hud and rings up to the 32X to render. It was just way easier to achieve better performance on the ol' mushroom turd this way. There are some games which do break from this mold (like Kolibri), but the Genesis/32X hardware functions more like an undercooked Sega Saturn: the Genesis is to Saturn's VDP2, which the 32X is to Saturn's VDP1
For the record, Sega of America did not *know* there was another console around the corner. The Saturn was an internal secret and they didn't find out about it until a Japanese game journal brought it to their attention, right before the 32X launch.
Truly a testament to SEGA's "amazing" management. Good grief.
But why 32x works like 0,5 saturn tho? If it really was internal secret i think it would be more different internally
Sega in part undermined it's own company's success due to SEGA USA / SEGA Japan not communicating and treating each other like competitors instead of co-branches.
@@TheLionAndTheLamb777 Nakayama literally forced SoA to surprise launch the Saturn
to beat the PlayStation to market, same man who ordered Saturn get a second CPU
as a panic response to the PSX. No wonder Kalinske jumped ship.
Fighting a stupid, arrogant and uncooperative higher-up from day one
The Kalinske-Nilsen-Hector-Miller SEGA of America plan was pretty simple: Continue bringing games out for the Sega CD, itself a bit overpowered for 1992-93 games then bring out the $49.95 SVP Lock On cart. Although they'd have to replace the SAMSUNG SVP with the HITACHI SH2, the four games--Daytona USA, Virtua Racing, Virtua Fighter, and Star Wars Arcade--had already been developed and were ready to be shipped out for sale. In fact, a Sega CD+SVP with a bit more RAM would've been more capable than the Genesis+32X and for the same overall price.
Using the 320x448i and Shadow Highlight Mode for games, they'd have effectively 256 out of 3,375 colors available, making the machine a viable powerhouse for games well into the mid-90s. I would even argue that such a beast would've made the $400 Saturn unnecessary for most of the world market since that machine could render over 90,000 flat shaded polygons per second or 20,000 Gauroud shaded and textured.
i'm surprised that so much of Knuckles Chaotix is actually rendered by the Sega Genesis, kinda makes me think that they should have made the game just on the sega genesis instead
It was pitched on base MD first before ending up on 32X for one reason or another. Google Sonic Crackers.
I always love seeing what's rendered by the Genesis and what's done by the 32x. I remember seeing a video that Motocross on the 32x was rendered entirely by the 32x itself *except* for the Sega logo at the start.
This is some awesome stuff! One minor recommendation would be to backlight the TV and console rather than front light it. That'll eliminate glare and should record a clearer image on your camera.
"UA-cam's algorithm is broken" then explain how it served me up this quality video.
A broken clock can be right two times a day.
@@TheSonicDBZoh my god tag that analogy is so perfect it’s shocking
3:10 that's not just the 32x, it's a known problem with all Genesis hardware, at least in NTSC. The Retrotink 2X's documentation explicitly calls out the Genesis as something that might not work right through the composite input--but this also affects other scalers like the Framemeister.
It is, however, uncommon. I own a few dozen Genesises and I've only seen it happen with maybe two of them.
This is probably what it is, I also have the same color issue when using a RetroTink 2X (in my case a Mini), but it's only with the 32X attached. The Mega Drive itself works fine through the RetroTink and the 32x works fine on all the TVs I have.
why do you own, with how you've implied it, at least 24 Genesises and Mega Drives? what are your goals?
@@TheEPICMarioBros2 mostly I wanted to fuck around with, understand and document all of the different revisions. Plus have multiples of each one to compare modded vs unmodded. After a while it just became retail therapy I guess lmao.
There was a period where I wanted to repair and flip them but the gap between broken and working consoles is so narrow that eBay's cut and shipping eats it all up, so I gave up on that.
@@rfmerrill your tactics confuse and frighten me, but I mean I guess everyone needs their spare 4 Genesis consoles they carry around as bookmarks lol
I've sometimes wondered if using a {VCR or TV Tuner box} to filter/re-modulate/recondition the signal could solve those compatibility problems.
I had one of those Nintendo-on-a-chip (NOAC, pretending to be an INTV) that also had non-standard NTSC-adjacent modulation which didn't work on any analog CRT I tried. But I did find that running the signal through the most 'basic' VCRs I had would restore it to functionality from its 'antenna' output (while the 'broadcast quality' ones couldn't).
I think that the NOAC was using digital timing to fake/emulate analog modulation; And the basic VCR I had was -crudely- minimally demodulating the signal with a high/low cutoff that it could inject its monochrome overlay without needing more sophisticated circuitry; So when the VCR "re"-modulated the combined output it rounded off the sharp edges of the NOAC signal that was upsetting the screens. -- While CTV's decommissioned broadcast VCRs were _tuned_ to reject noise and very specifically only accept a 'real' NTSC signal, which the NOAC's signal was not (like most of the consumer AV equipment my high-school had at the time too actually...).
IIRC: My _set-top_ cableTV tuner (with remote control and onscreen overlay) also fixed the signal; but I only kept the VCR because I found it far more useful in general because that VCR consistently suppressed dot crawl without messing up the colour balance as digital broadcast equipment took over.
Now I wonder what would happen if you made a Y-cable, feeding the 32X output into its own input. Would it make one of those trippy 80s and 90s music video effects?
I wish there was a proper game that used 32XCD. I'd love to see what it could do
I've always thought the same thing.
Yeah, like imagine how powerful the combo of a Sega Genesis + SegaCD + Sega 32X could be, without wasting it on FMV games!
Doom could have been a great candidate for that. They could have had PC quality sound / music at the very least and at best possibly offloaded some of the level data to the CD so there was the full three episodes.
True
It would be kinda like a Saturn at home
We could finally have DOOM the way that the 3DO guy wanted it, with FMVs and all/j
This is definitely something i would have done if i had a 32X as a kid.
I wonder if you could plug the AV output for a camera into it. Or mix the signals for 2 consoles
Wicked! I'd love to see more 32X experiments at some point, it's a really interesting piece of hardware and deserves in-depth analysis and appreciation. Have a nice day, Matt!
Those empty backgrounds are like creepypasta levels of uncanny.
almost got a heart attack thinking this was a main channel video
I’m a bit confused, this video could be on the main channel!
Wait it ISN'T?
This is the type of content I originally subbed to the main channel for. I kinda don't care about the main channel content at all anymore.
I swear awhile back I was trying to find videos covering specifically what 32X games look like solely through the Genesis lol, thanks Matt 🛐
6:50 MEET THE ENGINEER
I believe I used the 32x patch cable running from a 2nd Genesis once to layer a completely different game under the 32X layers. 😆
Awesome video man that was really cool. Especially the way the Doom menu works. Also nice "smacking the TV to get it working" effect haha
I was surprised when I found out that Tomb Raider is being made for the 32x
This was a very fascinating video . I grew up with the 32X with Doom , Brutal , and BC Racers . I always figured it was a handshake more or less with the Genesis and 32X with the way the games would be and when I had issues with my video cables as the years went on and played still. Makes a lot of sense why this homebrew Genesis hack of doom looks very good too in some ways speaking of
The scale of internal conflict at Sega between Kalinski vs Sega of Japan is almost difficult to believe in hindsight. They shot themselves in the foot with the internal squabbling, and squandered the critical advantage that they had in the early 90s. Ultimately the blame falls squarely on the shoulders of the CEO and the Board, who should have made a final decision about either going with the 32X or the Saturn, but not both.
The irony was that SoA didn't realize that they were embroiled in an internal civil war! That's right, Nilsen and Kalinske both said that they just couldn't understand why SoJ was making these crazy decisions for them. It wasn't until years later that it became apparent that SoJ's continuous market failure was driving Japanese management up the wall.
@@MaxAbramson3In Kalinski's mind, it was inconceivable that a company would personally come and find you to revitalize their company, exceed past those lofy expectations, only to then be barked at and man handled for doing too well. Japanese business culture and American business culture don't mix. You don't backstab or undermine your own allies or branch companies like Nintendo did to Sony or Sega to SoA in the US. It's just bad business. Why create enemies out of allies?
Really interesting, thanks Matt! Also loved the bit of us guessing the colors on stream lol.
There are actually 6 commercially released 32X CD games. A 32X version of Surgical Strike had a small print run of 500 copies released in Brazil. It has become one hell of a collectors item.
MattKC VIOLATES the Geneva Convention on STREAM?? (Cops Called)
Mainstream 32X Content! Let's Go!
knowing nothing about these consoles, and now knowing unique quirks is very enjoyable
The way I think about the 32x is like a 3d accelerator for the genesis, as it requires patching the genesis video through it, like how a 3d accelerator for a pc used to require patching the 2d card through it.
5:57 Six games actually. Surgical Strike was released in Brazil for the CD/32X. :)
That video feed thing is legitimately what happened to me. Got a 32X for Christmas and thought it was broken. We returned it. Later on in my life I realized what the problem was. However it wouldn't have mattered, my TV only had a Coax input. So I would have been SOL anyway.
I had a 32x. I ran it on a CDX, which was not officially supported, but did work. (I also had a 3DO and Jaguar.)
That was a really interesting and cool video. Now I really want to see no-Genesis% speedruns of Knuckles Chaotix and other games in real life.
Panasonic 3DO? More like... Everyone 3DO.
4:38 MIGHTY! ESPIO! (bangs on glass) LEAVE NOW BEFORE YOUR-
... erased for reality.
happy new year matt kleanup man. really interesting vid to end off the year
Oh hey, it's The Lego Island Guy.
Thanks for the quick little video. : ) Weird little things like this are my jam.
That new hair cut looks good man
Pretty interesting stuff. Knuckles’ Chaotix was the bomb! ❤
It definitely blew...
Every time I turn it on, I get a different pallete
32X:WRRRYYYYYYYYY!
What does happen if you have two Genesis + 32X setups and connect the video output of the Genesis of one setup to the video input of the 32X of the other setup and the same viceversa?
Also, I want to mention that there's a least some kind of video signal on the cartridge slot but is just solely an indicator of when the furthest Genesis background is being drawn (You know, the one that's just a plain color). That's how they're able to layer Genesis graphics on top of 32X graphics, it's not that the 32X is using processing power to punch holes. Though it takes the entire Genesis output as a single plane, so you can't layer 32X output above or below of only some of the Genesis elements, it's above or below all of the Genesis elements (You'll notice this with how the fighters in Virtua Fighters can actually obscure the health bars).
I always wondered if farming off backgrounds like in Knuckles Chaotix & Knuckles let them sidestep palette limitations on one or the other, letting the backgrounds be independent of the two Chaotix members, who probably share quite a few colours.
The 32x has three palette modes, two of which are 256 colors on screen out of a 15 bit color palette. The last is a full 15 bit color palette at the cost of screen resolution. This blows the Genesis VDP away, which has a limit of 64 on screen colors out of a 512 color palette. These are of course without doing complicated hardware tricks.
The reason Knuckles Chaotix uses the Genesis for the background is because it frees up processing power for the rest of the game. While the 32x specs sound good on paper, what they don't tell you is that both SH2 CPUs are crippled on a 16 bit bus, with heavy bus contention and high latency main memory. There is also no hardware acceleration, everything is done in software on one or both of the SH2s.
The graphics on the 32x is entirely software driven. Updating the scroll registers and nametables on the Megadrive VDP is much faster than drawing the background onto the 32x framebuffer. Drawing everything on the 32x would just have been too slow.
As I understand it that's pretty common in 32X games, yeah. The standard megadrive/genny VDP supports 64(ish) colours that need to be divided between characters, backgrounds etc. By letting the 32X handle character graphics, the entire megadrive palette can be used for the background, near doubling the effective colour depth.
@@birdrun4246 That's not how the VDP works in the Genesis.
The color lookup table is 64 entries, which is further divided into four palettes of 16 colors each. When you place a sprite or tile on screen, it has to use one of these four palettes. The palettes can be changed in real time to cycle between colors, but the palette can only be 16 colors. In practice though, this is reduced to 15 colors because one color is used as a bitmask for transparency.
Just because you don't use the sprite or foreground layers, doesn't mean that the background layer is suddenly allowed to use all 512 colors. There is still a 64 entry CLUT, and the limit of any given tile in the tilemap to use one of four 16 color palettes.
Games that "break the limit" to display more than 64 colors on screen use complex programming and hardware quirks.
@@GGigabiteM True, but in a normal Genesis game, those four sub-palettes need to be split between player characters, level backgrounds and geometry, UI and so forth, meaning the tile layers (level geometry and background) typically only get to use two of the four sub-palettes, maybe three if you're being clever. If the 32X is doing the player characters and enemies, as in Chaotix, the background layers can have all four palettes. Each individual tile can still only use one, of course, and you're still not breaking 64 total colours from the Genny.
Admittedly, I've not looked at any of these games in emulation/debugger tools to see how much they actually take advantage of any of this, but the 32X games that work this way definitely look like they're using more colours for backgrounds than the average standalone Genny title.
0:03 There's also its codename "Sega Mars" but also an unreleased all in one standalone version, called the Sega Neptune.
dude really timestamped 3 seconds into the video
@@Podzhagitel Yup I did.
From memory, the 32X itself was codenamed Mars as well (and was gonna be its own system, but someone at sega America said that was a horrible idea)
@@KoenDoesThings That is exactly what I said.
@@Nacil_54 you didn't day that Mars became the 32X or even anything about Mars
Seeing the graphics in the racing games from the beginning of the video... they almost look as good as Gran Turismo 2 for the PS1! That's not bad at all, I'd say. Especially in the case of the 32X.
I never knew this! This is really cool
I'm curious about the usefulness of offloading background graphics to the Genesis; it seems like it makes the coding much more complicated (you're essentially programming two different consoles at the same time!) while only freeing up a comparatively small amount of CPU time on the 32x. And then you have the limitations of Genesis tile-based graphics and the Genesis color palette, and the speed limitations of blasting tile data through the cartridge slot.
And then adding the CD onto it would be like programming three different consoles at the same time... And managing two different buses.
Did 32X developers have to write all the code that ran on the Genesis and handled cross-communication or did the 32x itself provide the basic code to manage the Genesis and the programmer would only need to program the 32x CPU?
From the viewpoint of SEGA and Genesis developers, not so much. The Genesis/Mega Drive already had four layers that had to be drawn independently: Background, Foreground, Sprite, and Window. Drawing to those two background layers was almost its own separate project.
I wonder if there could actually be some programming wizard out there who could code a CD32X game
There were examples shipped with the docs, which was as close to OS support as you could get on no-OS hardware.
Mind you, this was already how sound CPUs worked on both base MD and SNES, so this wasn't considered nearly as zany as you seem to imply.
I have watched this video 4 times and I still enjoy it
The "poked holes through the 3D graphics" thing DOOM does is actually a hardware thing: the cartridge port has a pin which lets the 32x know if it should render over or under the graphics the MD gives it.
Groovy stuff! Also forgot there was a 32x port of DooM, hence why few have attempted a vanilla-Genesis port...
NTSC = Never Twice the Same Colour.
kinda unrelated, but i would have loved some gorgeous 2d from the saturn, and i liked the video but i do miss the longer ones lol
I've been following the Portal 64 project and watching this, I can't help but wonder whether the 32x would be up to the task of running Portal haha
In short: no it wouldn't. The N64 already struggles and is much more powerful as it has real 3D HW acceleration, which the 32x doesn't have.
portal 64 has been cancelled there is a video on his channel explaining why
Wow this is really cool and fascinating !!! I loved my 32X (still have it too!)
Developing for this "console" must've been a nightmare
I was hoping you would play it with a video signal coming from something else, so instead of skyboxes it’d be some footage off a DVD or VHS haha
some musician could use this "hack" as visuals for their music
The 32x marketing was crazy! Maybe you could make a video on that!
I always remember the AVGN taking a dump on it, because it all looks like a toilet LOL :)
Very cool and innovative of Sega
Hearing a fellow Aussie call it a Genesis hurts me lol
Wuhhh those caps were really tortured there I hope you did a recap after that.
Every upload of a treasure
2:46 i had that EXACT same model of tv and now im distracted by it
I just thinked: What would happen if you have two genesis plus 32x playing different game, but you're having the first genesis connected to the 32x of the second genesis, would it make like a blend of the two differents games?
Perhaps a blend with a vertical offset if they didn't sync at startup. (There is some cartridge signal involved, it's not just sync on cable.)
I thought he was gonna talk about the Neptune.
It looks like old scrambled cable (which is not surprising because in NTSC land this usually worked by messing with the sync pulses or other timing information).
Super cool video about a super interesting add on! I got one last year & I’ve enjoyed playing Virtua racing deluxe on it. Knuckles chaotix is quite the doozy though. The last couple special stages were awful & the cpu was not making the main game any easier to play
today is the day i learned i need a 32x for my videobending setup.
If only the 32x was designed with the Saturn in mind to have backwards compatibility....
Last KC Byte of 2023
Now image people at Nintendo, Atari and others doing exactly these tests when the hardware came out...
Happy new year dude
Console torture, my favourite!
The Xbox One S I'm desoldering can relate, it just doesn't want to
been wanting to get my hands on one of these for a long time
ok, but what about a second genesis running a different 32x game to layer alongside it?
I think it could be interesting to mix into the signal not the console itself, but an external source so we can have half game, half whatever we want. Dunno how possible thatd be though.
As a suggestion, having two monitors to show the seperate feeds would be a lot easier for us to visualise.
I used to have this exact same TV when I got my Mega Drive (as a second-hand gift...)
Good times, good TV. Wish it were still around, it bonked me in the head once.
The limitations of the Mega drive hardware are the reason why I've always considered the 32X a mistake.
For as cool a concept as it is, it was NEVER going to compete with the N64, Saturn or PlayStation.
Ultimately, if the Saturn hadn't been there, we'd have lost SEGA before the we were blessed with the Dreamcast.
In a way, the MegaDrive, CD, 32X combo was like the first console with a PCI-e slot.
Just upgrade the graphics card and BOOM! More power.
Hi Matt!
I'm so glad consoles have gotten better since then.
Someone is putting tomb raider onto the 32x
Where is the axe and the screwdriver?
Worth a experiment.
This is neat. Now I want to see what happens when you merge the signal from a different game running on a second Genesis into the 32x...
Would you consider the PSVR a console add-on? Or is it an accessory?
Matt really made a new channel just so he didn't have to post Lego Island content
For science! Awesome stuff here.
Funny I have the same crt display I still use today to watch TV :D
torture a sega CD next
Itd be cool to make a dirty video mixer and blend between the two
Hei Matt, when are you going to upload on the main channel?
I'm no old school video game programmer, in fact I'm not a great programmer in general, but surely they could've used the genesis itself for more than just a skybox in Virtua Racing?
looking at the game I can't really think of anything. the rest of the game is either the fully 3D playing field (which has to be done by the 32X) and the HUD (which has to display on top of the 3D field)
in theory you could do the HUD on the Genesis side using that cutout technique Doom uses, but I doubt there's much of a performance hit from drawing the actual HUD instead of drawing just the cutout (because yes, it still has to be drawn even if just as a cutout)
@@Shadownnico I guess I'm just so used to old school programmers squeezing every last drop of hardware potential out of a console that it would seem strange to not do anything more with it, even if it was tiny
Although as I'm writing this comment I realise they probably pulled extra processing power from the Genesis wherever possible
Anyway, I'm basically the guy writing tweets to NASA pointing out how they shouldn't forget about space radiation, like no shit Einstein they probably know what they're doing lol
Knuckles chaotix BARELY uses the 32x.
For a better example, see Tempo, or even Web of Fire.
Edit: The 32x can put it's graphics behind AND in front of the genesis display.
nice video, is there an update on the lego decomp?
Okay hear me out, would it be possible to use two separate TVs to display each output side by side?
It sounds stupid but I’m genuinely curious
I think Digital Foundry did it.
Have you figured out the composite sync issue with the 32X w/o using RGB? I have a solution, but I was curious if anything else was out there.
Wonder if the sync being required also requires something being drawn even if maybe it wasn't any faster overall...
MD VDP cannot do anything useful instead of drawing or preparing to draw, and it can keep drawing the same simple thing, including nothing, with no continuous maintenance. So this is for once something 32X has no problem with.
I made the same mistake when I bought my 32x new.
One minor recommendation is to make more videos so I can watch more of your content please
Wait, so the *composite* out of the 32X works, without getting the composite in from the Genesis? It's definitely wired there and I could swear my modded genesis with no composite would only work through the 32X with RGB.
Since it already gets RGB and sync, I had assumed it needed composite for the colorburst, but maybe not!
The video mixer output would be fed to the composite video encoder, so there should be no problem using a modded genny without composite. Colorburst is the same no matter what you're displaying, and that would be added by the composite video encoder.
@@RetroDawn you want the color sub carrier to be phase locked to your horizontal sync, otherwise you will get moving artifacts that are much more distracting than stationary ones. Hsync is derived from the Genesis master clock and the color subcarrier normally is as well. The 32X does not have access to MCLK, only VCLK. Since VCLK is MCLK/7 but SBCR is MCLK/15, I guess you could theoretically do a fractional conversion
@@RetroDawn but that then begs the question: why is composite even wired as an input on the 32x at all? It's connected to the VIN pin which is shown on a block diagram to go to the VCXO
@@rfmerrill Correct, the color subcarrier needs to be phase locked to the horizontal sync. For mixing the two video signals (underlay/overlay), the 32X has a RGB genlock (not composite), which would use the external HSync and VSync from the Genesis, which should be derived from the CSync pin of the Genesis A/V cable. This HSync would then be used for syncing the colorburst and the color subcarrier is in turn synced to the colorburst.
It would be extremely odd for the composite signal of the Genesis A/V cable to be used by the 32X. The only thing I can think of would be if the 32X video encoder did not include a colorburst generator and they instead stripped it from the composite input from the Genesis. That would require a similar or greater amount of circuitry, though, and why not use an OTS video encoder, all of which included colorburst generation long before the 32X. I'll check the system diagram.
@@RetroDawn RGB to composite conversion that tries to multiply hsync to get the subcarrier never seems to work too well. Especially true with the Genesis signal where the relationship between them is wrong (subcarrier has 228 cycles per hsync period instead of 227.5)
5:46 Most people took one look at this and thought "Oh, God! Did I make it mad?! I think I made it mad. "
I would have loved road rash on the 32x. Not a 3D version. But a Genesis version on steroids
If you plug another source in the 32X can you customize the game?