Those tilting distant backgrounds in Star Fox had me fooled. It's a similar idea to the "Mode 7" effect in a number of Genesis games, that really just rotate the *arrangement* of a bunch of sprites. They can't rotate more than about 10 degrees or it starts to look really warped, and the effect is ruined.
Another interesting Mode 7 misconception is that it can handle shifted perspectives, like what you see in Pilotwings, Super Mario Kart, and actually a whole ton of games. But the reality is, Mode 7 can only perform affine transformations; scale, translate, rotate, shear. Any time you see a Mode 7 background that gets smaller as it's farther away, that's an illusion done with HDMA. Basically the background is properly rotated, but it's still in the process of scaling to different sizes for each scanline that gets drawn.
@@TS-yz3ud "Non-affine transformations" would be the technical term, but yeah, anything that makes it look like part of the image is closer or further away.
Even worse, it can't apply it to individual objects because it's a background mode. Anytime something appearing to be a sprite uses it, like Bowser in SMW, Ridley in Super Metroid intro, it's on the background layer, so they have to use a blank background (Super Metroid disguises this decently with a gradient foreground layer tint). You could probably maybe do tricks to have multiple mode 7 "sprites" transforming separately but yeah.
For more polygons running on stock SNES hardware, check out beloved classic Out of This World. It doesn't use polygons for 3D, but it does lay down a bunch of flat polygons with solid color fills to create all the characters. Supposedly the developer had a version written for the SuperFX that ran at 60fps, but the chips were sadly too expensive.
It goes even further than that, from Rebecca herself: "Since Interplay wouldn't pay for a Super FX chip, I found a way to do it with static RAM on the cart and DMA which got me a great frame rate. Interplay wouldn't pay for the static RAM either, so I ended up using Fast ROM instruction. Interplay wouldn't pay for a 3.6 MHz ROM either. So, frustrated, I shoved my block move code into the DMA registers and use it as RAM running at 3.6 MHz. It worked. I got fast block moves on slow cartridges and made a game using polygons working on a 65816 with pure software rendering." Couldn't use any enhancements or even Fast ROM, and still managed to make it work.
To further clarify the comment at 13:59, the SNES does not actually have any hardware to render polygons built in. But ANY computer is capable of rendering polygons in software, provided you take the time to implement the algorithms (and provided that you have enough leftover CPU cycles to do it at a reasonable frame rate.)
I only vaguely knew mode 7 as "when the SNES does fancy perspective effects", this and the linked wolfenstein video were a great explanation of what mode 7 actually is and isn't, thank you!
The SuperFX chip draws into it's own local framebuffer in the cartridge and this gets sent out to the SNES graphics chip over the pixel buss pins on the cartridge slot and is overlayed on the SNES's background layers. The SuperFX framebuffer is an 8 bit per pixel bitmap, it is not tile based but it does use the SNES's color lookup table.
Jon Burton (Gamehut) has a video that explains a similar if not the same effect as Axelay in his Mickeymania game. He also explains an effect like that one on DKC, done by erasing and drawing horizontal scanlines (or vertical for a wall)
I don't think it's that surprising. A lot of people's understanding of mode 7 amounts to "oh yeah, that's whenever there's 2D scaling and rotation on the SNES, right?" If you know how mode 7 and the 3D rendering in Star fox actually work, you know it couldn't possibly be mode 7, but it isn't really common knowledge even among retro gamers.
I just assumed the SuperFX was doing most of those tricks. For years it never really clicked with me that the tilting of the skybox was done the same way as the pseudo rotation you see in Genesis games... But knowing more now about how the hardware worked, it's actually fairly obvious.
Good video! It's also worth saying outright: as a rule of thumb, if you can see ANY parallax scrolling going on, it's not Mode 7. And totally agree about Dragon View! It's a real hidden gem and is still fun today. Played it a couple years back.
Not entirely true about the parallaxing, because many games horizontally split the screen 2 or sometimes even 3 times and used different modes in each part. Super Mario Kart for example splits the screen to use mode 0 for the skyline and mode 7 for the track, and you can see parallaxing on the skyline. I have Dragon View on the Evercade (Piko Collection 1), it's great and it's a pity it seems to have got lost in the myriad of excellent RPGs the SNES had, but it's definitely worth playing.
Dragon View is one of my favorite games from my childhood. And that's considering the TG16 is my favorite system to this very day. Dragon View always stood out as a great game. Never could get into the first one though. And yeah, I do remember as a kid, we all thought if there was any "scaling" or "rotation" it must be in Mode 7. Once I actually became a part of the homebrew scene, I started to learn more and more about what the 3 main "16-bit" systems could and could not do and what tricks were being pulled. All three of those systems use the frames of animation trick to fake scaling at times. Watching this video makes it obvious. Like TMNT using 3 frames for a scaling effect. And trees in Drakhen 1 and 2. Same goes for rotation. A lot of times, it's just frames of animation. It does make me wonder more about the Sega CD, as I've always felt it rarely used its true power. Looking at Lords of Thunder on Sega CD, and comparing it to the original Turbo CD version shows me laziness on Hudson's part. Its not like the Sega CD is just an add on for bigger games like the Turbo CD. The Sega CD is practically its own system. The only extra boost the Turbo CD got was an extra ADPCM channel. It didn't get more colors(I think it upped the colors), dual axis rotation, faster processor, etc.
Mode 7 also cannot scale sprites. It can scale ONE background layer. Some games give the illusion of it scaling a sprite (like Super Mario World) but that's a trick where the "sprite" is in fact a background layer. The Gameboy Advance and Sega CD are far more versatile, they can scale both the background and sprites.
Loved this video. The per-column scaling in Starfox had me fooled. Having learned retro programming in assembly, I’ve learned to spot tricks like the Axelay background as not mode 7, but the ground surface in Drakken had me fooled too. They were just using good old fashioned CPU rendered polys, eh? Another not-mode-7 item is the floor in Street Fighter 2 which is just changing the scroll amount on each scanline using HDMA.
Always good to see a Nintendo fan who doesn't confuse mode 7 with sprite scaling. Any chance you'll tackle high resolution myths? RPM Racing is the place where dreams go to die, and Kirby 3 is the familiar alternative, but is there anything going on in that third Ranma fighting game?
Interesting idea, though I'm not really sure if there's too many myths surrounding the high resolution mode. RPM Racing is the only game that uses it for gameplay. Basically all other games that use it (which isn't many) like Ranma 1/2: Hard Battle, Smash Tennis, Secret of Mana and Seiken Densetsu 3 only use it for menus or text boxes. Games like Kirby 3 and Jurassic Park use a pseudo high-res mode to create a transparency effect that's different to the regular transparency the SNES could do.
@@WhitePointerGaming Check out the AVGN's video comparing the SNES and Genesis for a painful glimpse into the most popular misunderstandings. Towards the end of the 16-bit wars Nintendo put out an ad (Smashing the Myth) that claimed to compare the two systems fairly, and posed as an article. In reality, it combined the strengths of every SNES graphics mode, hid the weaknesses, then compared that impossible ideal to the Genesis. James cites it as his source, and his viewcount for this misinformation is impressive. As for Ranma, Hard Battle is the second SFC fighting game. The third features detailed backgrounds with far fewer colors. It's a bizarre choice if not required.
Would that be Ranma 1/2: Chougi Rambuhen? I haven't analysed it in detail but from eyeballing it in videos I can tell it's not using the high resolution mode. This required the usage of mode 5 or 6 which restricted the SNES to just 2 or 1 background layer(s) respectively. This game is using 3 background layers, so it's probably using mode 1, and therefore not using the high resolution mode.
@@WhitePointerGaming Ah. I thought they might be using a few PC Engine tricks to get an extra layer. Right now, I'm unable to access anything beyond potato quality video and screenshots...apologies, for that. My real concern was the spread of misinformation. The complexities of SNES weaknesses (for example, the hard limit of two sprite tile sizes per screen, or all the ways the speed issues aren't as simple as standard cpu clockspeed) are several levels beyond mode 7 vs. "blast processing". Even resolution comparison gets odd, when the Genesis lower resolution mode allows fewer sprites than the 320 mode.
I've just put out a new video that talks about the high res modes including pseudo high res, and touches a little on myths such as people believing the SNES is always using a high resolution: ua-cam.com/video/K1DSUHFDmkA/v-deo.html
One thing to keep in mind for mode 7, is that only one layer can be manipulated with its known effects, i found it so silly when DKC2's 3D looking beams was mistaken for mode 7, and specially found it silly what people believed for the Super Star Wars.
Both are common misconceptions, especially the Super Return of the Jedi one. These were all examples I found online of people mistaking these effects for mode 7. It seems like any kind of 3D-ish looking effect on the SNES is often assumed by many to be mode 7 without understanding exactly how it works.
I absolutely love your videos and insights into these old games. It's shocking you have so few subscribers, since these are some the most cleanly narrated and insightful analysis of these concepts I've ever seen. Furthermore they are easy to understand for a non programmer, and the topics are absolutely fascinating. Keep up the great videos! :)
This is such a cool video! I have often wondered what games did and didn't use Mode 7. I also didn't realize the technical wizardry that went into Drakkhen and Dragonview, but Turtles in Time blew my mind! Great video, I subscribed!
I was surprised by the turtles in time revelation of not using mode 7 when throwing the footclans into the screen. But it makes sense, and it is quite visible on a frame by frame basis.
2:01 Well it's not rotation but it is tilting which constitutes some movement in graphics terms, if the background didn't tilt the meshes and ground-dots would misalign and destroy the illusion that the 2D background was contiguous with the polygonal layer. Funny you mention tilting later so the commentary before is a little odd.🤔Admittedly you saw tilting more often on Genesis than SNES Ie. Mode 7-ish alternative, a couple good examples of the same setup on Genesis include the unreleased ResQ flying stages and GASEGA68k's S-F like demos. 6:00 Yeah that one is a funny Mode7 mistake as pretty much every 16-bit platform can do that effect and has in one form or another. I really love how Axelay actually used Mode7 as it makes for a good Boss-sprite enhancement effect imo. 10:22 Uses a lot of image space but it works, yeah quite boring heh. It almost looks like one could do the same thing with raycasting which would have allowed it to be non-looping. 11:00 I was quite keen to hear about that series as its been part of my 3D graphics evolution project. I would have been equally fooled too if I hadn't looked at a bunch of early 3D flight sim and golf games which I affectionately called "flat-land engines".😄 2D vector graphics Eg. Another World was something 16-bit platforms could run quick enough that it made for a good terrain landmark overlay system. Too bad they didn't think of the simple vertical gradient before Dragon View as Drakkhen does look rather plain in comparison.🙁 If you look around DOS games you'll find quite a few of that engine type Eg. Betrayal at Krondor being one of the last I think. I think the TMNT Mode 7 mistake mostly stems from looking at static screen shots more than video footage because when you see it in action there is no scaling size transition Ie. pixel shimmering artifact, it just switches scale fast and pans a bit.
For all the great things mode 7 could do it was very limited video mode which was not suitable for most video games needs. Also you could always do scaling rotation and other tricks in mode 7 if you used your background layer fake it as a sprite which some games did to render very large boss sprites. That’s why mode 1 was the mode that was used the most across many SNES titles. Mode 1 one offered 2 background scrollable layers plus one third layer that could be used as a foreground layer which made it ideal for most games during the era
you can also switch background modes within a frame to, say, draw a HUD or distant background in one mode, and switch to Mode 7 for a perspective ground or rotating level.
This video is deep, it corrects a lot of people including Google, it's too bad Sega couldn't use the same throwing technique in "The Hyperstone Heist" like the SNES did with "Turtles in Time" otherwise it would've been the exact same game and they could have they just didn't.
Yeah I've wondered that myself. It was certainly something the Mega Drive could do and many games did something like it. Why Konami decided not to do it for the Hyperstone Heist is a little puzzling. Not sure if it was just a design choice or there was a technical reason for it. The Mega Drive has 2 background layers (technically a background and a foreground plane) while the SNES is using 3 layers for Turtles in Time, so maybe it's just simply a case of not having enough layers available to do it.
Might have been a exclusivity cause konami had with nintendo. I think they had it where konami made games for snes and these same games could not be ported to other consoles. I think this type of deal was what nec/hudson had with konami on the pc engine dracula x and why it could not be ported to snes 1 to 1. The console makers would not want a game to appear on their competitors console if they could help it.
Yeah, there was some kind of deal in place that meant they put a different game on Sega's console. But that wouldn't have stopped them implementing the mechanic of throwing the foot soldiers into the screen in Hyperstone Heist if they wanted to. Many other gameplay features of the two games are the same.
@@zerobyte802The bonus stages in Sonic are actually just made up of sprites that have been animated to rotate. It's got nothing to do with tile offsets.
@@WhitePointerGaming I was aware of the tiles being rotated but I thought they also used column offset as “in between” to make the effect more smooth. I guess I was mistaken
Minor nitpick. DK2 does use mode 7 on the rare logo, if I recall correctly. Great video overall. I was in my teens when these games came out, had absolutely no programming experience, and understood just through observation how all these tricks were being done (except maybe the Star Fox backgrounds) . That is when I truly understood just how ignorant these professional game reviewers were.
@@WhitePointerGaming DKC3 scales the Rare logo after Dixie and Kiddy bounce on it. The wooden note playing device "forget what those things are called" uses the same effect as Axelay but squishes the image down at both the top and bottom.
I wasn't aware that anyone EVER thought that Starfox was using Mode 7. I have no idea why anyone would even think that. Like, seriously, what about it looks like Mode 7???
4:50 Given how the SuperFX just sends the rendered graphics to the SNES as tile data, this is likely the SuperFX scaling the image. Same way that the SuperFX 2 in Yoshi's Island does sprite scaling and rotation, including for the giant bosses.
Who has ever said that Star fox is using mode 7? I have never once heard anyone make that claim and I am old enough to remember when Star fox first came out. It was heavily advertised that it was using the super FX chip to do 3D.
In the video I provide a number of sources, including Wikipedia, Nintendo Life and ShackNews, that claim the game is using mode 7. The common belief is that the game is using mode 7 in addition to the SuperFX chip to create its effects.
Star Trek Bridge Simulator is another unmodified SNES game that uses polygons all over the place. Genesis also had quite a few flight sims that used actual polygons as well. ua-cam.com/video/qFnThr5icQU/v-deo.htmlsi=OwV4HnWri6Nkarru&t=408
I mean cutscene on rom storage is still impressive. I'm going to assume the SuperFX does the scaling so the small-scale rotating animation could be reused. (that rotating animation might or mightn't use pallete rotations)
Question, in the final cinematic of Final Fantasy 5, there is a moment where the Sprites do a kind of zoom in effect, do you know what kind of effect was used there? I still remember that moment as if it were yesterday, but it’s very beautiful.
In this case it looks like it's switching modes, having the sprite on the sprite layer initially, then putting the sprite on a mode 7 background to zoom it in. The circular spotlight kind of shape is created using windowing/masking.
I always assumed the Turtles throwing soldiers on the screen was Mode 7 because the Genesis game didn't have anything like that. Now Im even more disappointed with the Genesis game that it didn't do that effect in some way
I feel like "It's a background that's been animated to do that," in the Star Fox section, isn't a good explanation of the spinning planet zoom-in? How does it do it in Mode 3? Is it the Super FX chip rendering to a background layer bitmap or something?
Note : that for 20 years i tout that vortex used mode 7 for it’s ground but since i do know that the snes cannot do multiple backgrounds at mode 7 and even cannot do sprite scaling at all,it know theres some other trickery going on.
@@WhitePointerGaming but have you never wondered why the snes lacks sprite scaling??? I do so because if the snes had sprite scaling then they didn’t had to use multiple sprites at different sizes sothat they would,ve more space left for other stuff,take supermario kart for example it uses 10 sprites per character instead of just had,had they implemented sprite scaling in hardware then they could,ve used that extra space for other stuff,also since memory was very expensive,sure they might could,ve tried out sprite scaling trough software instead but it probably would,ve slowed down the performance if the snes, And lastly i tout that that zooming on starfor on the map screen was just a sprite getting scaled by the super fx chip,and i tout that only that planed rotation of that sprite planed was animated and nothing else,was it?
@@johneygdIf mario kart have sprite scaling: * It would need month(s) to write the scaler code. * Scaler code might be same size with all scaled sprites. * Scaler code might need to scale 10 sprites in some cases, framerate would drop to 30 or 15 from 60 stable that is now.
I was wondering....in TMNT IV, the time travel cutscene, if you're playing in two-player mode, there are two independently rotating turtles. How could they do this if mode 7 has only one background layer? Thanks if anyone can clarify this
Good question! I'm not 100% sure, but from what I've been able to determine, it looks like there's 2 mode 7 background images, one for each turtle. If you watch it, one turtle is in the top half of the screen while the other is in the bottom half, so I think there's some trickery going on here by splitting the screen and displaying 2 different mode 7 textures in each half. The SNES could split its screen horizontally multiple times and use different modes in each part, but it could also use the same mode in each part, so I think that's what's going on here.
One turtle is in the top half of the screen and one turtle is on the bottom half of the screen. It changes the mode 7 settings in the middle of the screen.
There are some quirks that I never quite understood about Mode 7 and it's restrictions. Like, during that warp screen in Turtles in Time, there are clearly two independent turtle sprites spinning, but wouldn't that require 2 BG layers to achieve. Also, during the opening and ending sequence of Super Metroid, it looks like the game is using mode 7 to scale and rotate Samus' ship flying towards the space colony and away from planet Zebes. But is everything we see in the background during those sequences actually sprites? Also, can mode 7 BGs be placed on top/ in front of the sprite layer? I've always wondered how this effect was achieved
For the warp screen in Turtles in Time, the two turtles are mode 7 backgrounds, and the screen looks like it is being split about halfway down to show 2 different backgrounds. Yep, Samus' ship in the intro to Super Metroid is a mode 7 background. Yes, everything else you see in the background of those scenes are actually sprites. Sprites can be placed either in front or behind a background, including a mode 7 background.
@@WhitePointerGaming Oh yeah. I honestly didn't even notice that the two turns never actually share a horizontal plane. Thinking back to the split screen of Super Mario Kart, I guess I should've remembered that you can actually do more than one mode at a time if you split the screen Super Metroid mostly puzzled me as there was so much "background" stuff on the screen that I didn't think the SNES could display so many at once.
@@WhitePointerGaming: I like how Axelay's walker section made the background gray to create the illusion of a wall, and used sprites for the vertical (!) features. Very convincing, and with minimal impact on the sprites-per-scanline limit.
I'm not sure, so i think this needs further research, but it could be possible that Turtles in Time indeed uses Mode 7 for the scaling. Of course not while running the main game, but by switching modes in between frames and saving the results in the vRAM. Which would explain why the scaling is not a fluid motion. The thought behind this is that the zoomed foot soldiers are way bigger than the SNES's sprite size limit, and even bigger than what was possible when combining multiple sprites of the biggest sprite size of 64 by 64 pixels (given that there are still sprites on screen and only sprites of two sizes are allowed at any given time). So the foot soldiers must be background images. That however brings up the question why their zoomed versions don't have more detail like they have in the arcade. That shouldn't be a question of cartridge space, since the foot soldiers can be easily re-coloured with a palette-swap, so it only needs one version.
This is all explained in the video, watch from the chapter break or at least from about 15:17. No, the scaled foot soldiers are not sprites, they are background images. They are being drawn to one of the background layers (the same layer as the HUD at the top of the screen) in a couple of different sizes and the game switches between them to fake the scaling. The game stays in mode 1 the entire time during this. Don't compare it to the arcade version because that works differently, that's actually doing proper sprite scaling due to running on more powerful hardware.
@@WhitePointerGaming I wonder why the larger versions are more pixellated if they didn't need to be? Seems like an artistic choice...perhaps even to "fool" the viewer into thinking it was Mode 7. I remember that Mode 7 was a coveted, recognisable feature at the time. I remember being awed by it.
ok, so something i REALLY want to know and have wondered about my entire life - and i've asked MULTIPLE people on youtube about this and thus far no one has been able to figure it out - is how on earth the mode 7 "neon night riders" level in TMNT 4 has what appear to be 2 separate / parallax / independently scrolling mode 7 layers stacked on top of each other, with the lower grid-looking layer and the upper track layer clearly scaling, rotating, and moving independently one above the other. nintendo themselves claimed this dual-layer mode 7 effect was "impossible" on the SNES and this was their reasoning for the GBA f-zero games having this 2-layered effect but not the SNES cause allegedly the GBA was powerful enough to do it but the SNES wasn't. yet it would appear that single level in TMNT 4 is definitely scrolling, scaling, and rotating 2 mode 7 layers on top of each other just fine. what gives?
Hey there, thanks for the question! Wonder no more, the actual answer to this is pretty simple. The grid under the track and the track itself are not two separate layers, they are indeed just a single layer. The grid doesn't actually go under the track, it stops when it touches the track. There's only one mode 7 layer in the stage (with a horizontal split about 1/3 of the way down the screen to display a mode 1 background and the HUD in the top portion). If you look closely and go frame by frame you'll see they actually aren't scaling, rotating or even moving independently, they are together. The mode 7 layer is just angled in such a way to make the effect more convincing. It's basically the exact same thing F-Zero does. You can actually see what's going on more clearly at the end of the stage when it shifts to a side view for the Krang boss fight. Check out the grid in the background, and you can easily see it's moving exactly the same as the track.
@@WhitePointerGamingit looks like there's more going on than just that (all the way to the horizon it is much more double-layered looking than anything f-zero ever did. it even ends in two different horizon lines) - but i will take the time to frame by frame it when i have the time. if you're right it's a WAY better illusion than f-zero.
A classic example of SNES stock-hardware polygon rendering is The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past: the Triforce shown assembling before the title screen appears. That game does also use Mode 7, namely for the world map view. Also, the Star Wars forest example should be pretty obviously not mode 7 for one simple reason: it looks like shit lol
Hi, thanks for explaining this,it’s interesting,no mode 7 and no sprite scaling,BUT have you ever wondered why nintendo did not implemented sprite scaling in the snes??? I do because if they implemented sprite scaling,then game developers didn’t had to waste extra memory space to put 10 identical sprites at different sizes to fake such scaling effect, Also why didn’t they used sprite scaling trough software just to get around such lacking feature on the snes and to save on space,because memory was expensive back then, I found it strange that the gba does have sprite scaling builtin since memory was much cheaper by that time so game developers didn’t had to try hard to save on memory space,it’s just a weird decission from nintendo not add sprite scaling inside the snes don’t you think so???
I'm not the maker of this video, nor am I an expert on this. But I think the reason sprite scaling isn't usually done in software is two-fold. Computing a scaled sprite is not too difficult for the hardware, but then it has break it into "standard" sized sprites and arrange them from RAM into the tile map, which is more costly and can also make it harder to manage the rest of the tile map. This is the kind of thing the SuperFX chip is handling when you see, for instance, those asteroid sprites that scale up when they get closer. All I can say about the GBA is that, while it plays games that look really similar to SNES, it actually has a 32-bit RISC processor, so it can crunch those numbers more efficiently.
GBA and Jaguar have two line buffers and much more time to draw sprites into them. C64 already could scale sprites by 2 because it does not use a linebuffer here. PCEngine should have been king of superscalers! Lynx in 1987? already showed how the GBA should just have used a framebuffer. Nintendo opted for a system with less latency? Check y position of all sprites in every scanline?? The Nintendo DS works in a serial fashion. Control inputs, fast RISC game logic, a special chip only for fast transformation, sort by y. Then draw stuff scanline by scanline as on GBA and DMG. Only then shade vertices and pixels. Could also post pone the x and z ordinate to here with a little more memory. Subpixel precision. Like when we allow some filter for this or the next scanline, the original transformer only needs an epsilon on 1 px.
Price, most likely. There were arcade systems around years before the SNES, or even Mega Drive, came out that had hardware support for sprite scaling, but it was probably considered too expensive for something that most games would not have used. As for software scaling, it was probably just too slow generally.
@@todesziege 1986 IBM introduced chunky mode memory mapped video memory where any 8 bit CPU could scale bitmaps easy at fast. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-Color_Graphics_Array
@@WhitePointerGaming thx for the clarification, these are fantastic videos. Since I watched them, I saw another on YT that on some channel w/"Bits" in the name, and sure enough, it listed Mode 7 and some of the ones that you pointed out were not. Great stuff, loving the channel
Wait at 2:25 the background is clearly rotated, it's not just the white dots. the horizon, the clouds as well as the ground lines are not horizontal and rotate when the ship turns. I know it doesn't use mode 7 but it's not just a static image there's some shenanigans going on for sure.. I'm guessing it's something with the super FX chip ? Or is it the same as for the planet ? As for the others, I think people associated mode 7 with the effects seen in mario kart, the map in secret off mana and f-zero which is a mix of mode 7 and hdma so I can see why they think other hdma effects use mode 7. Oh and the bike scene from star wars is sooo ugly they probably should have went with mode 7 or anything else really XD
The background tilting is explained at around 3:00 in the video (talking about the planet in space, but it's the same effect). It's done using vertical offset-per-tile. It's not a proper rotation, just a tilt.
Not Mode 7... It's Super FX Co-processor 3D graphics. Or Vector Based image processing. Capable of quickly transforming matrices just to scale and rotate sprites and do that sort of crazy shit. Mode 7 is different from this thing because Mode 7 is a very very hardware-based solution without much flexibility... But in essence Mode 7 is also about transforming matrices... But it's usually limited to a single plane... Super FX can do much more... Even polygons... THERE'S NO REASON AT ALL TO USE MODE 7 IF YOU HAVE SUPER FX WHICH IS SUPERIOR IN EVERY WAY!!! If devs used Mode 7 the game would just lag and be less efficient. Not to mention the limitations of Mode 7, you could only do some things with it...
I provide several examples in the video of sources claiming it. The common belief is that it's using mode 7 in addition to the SuperFX. It's especially common to at least believe the zoom in from the map screen is mode 7 (which is a reasonable assumption).
since tmnt snes didnt use mode 7 i wonder why sega's tmnt didnt use the same trick as it was always pretty cool. i wish it had also had fx like how bloodlines and batman had pretty cool things going on while hyperstone heist was a good game but not really a showpiece. really odd not to make it have dazzling fx since according to konami tmnt series was one of their major sellers and would outsell the castlevania series.
It could be as simple as Nintendo having some influence on Konami and keeping that feature exclusive to Turtles in Time. On a technical side, the SNES used three background layers for the game, with the third layer being for the Foot Soldiers. The Genesis had two BG layers, so if they used the effect, they would have had to reserve one of the BG layers for the Foot Soldiers(unless there was some workaround). That would have limited the possibilities for multi-layer parallax. Though, having looked at the game recently, there's not a lot of that kind of parallax in the game, so I wonder if they were initially planning to include that feature.
WTF? Star Fox was FAMOUS for using the Super FX chip. The chip was built for the game, and the super FX chip was HEAVILY featured in marketing. It’s synonymous with the game. NO ONE thought Star Fox used mode 7. Seriously, WTH man? The super FX chip
The common belief is that it's using mode 7 in addition to the SuperFX chip. I provided a number of sources in the video that claim this to be the case. Even the wikipedia article about mode 7 listed the game as using mode 7 at the time this video was made (it has, however, since been removed).
So if the tossing of foot soldiers at the screen was not mode 7, then why did Konami not implement that same technique for the Hyperstone Heist? EGM and other video game magazines docked the Genesis points for not including that gameplay feature. And they also claimed it was mode 7. Shame shame Konami
Good question about Hyperstone Heist, I'm not really sure. It was either a deliberate design decision or some other technical restriction like a lack of available layers, but plenty of Mega Drive games did that kind of faux-scaling so it's a headscratcher. And yeah, when even gaming magazines were getting it wrong it goes to show you how misunderstood the feature was, and still is.
I always assumed it was for space reasons, but to my surprise it turns out they are both 8Mb carts. Hyperstone Heist feels a bit cut-corners graphically in general so it might be a lack of experience then; it was apparently handled by the 'B-team'.
@todesziege The Animation in Hyperstone Heist was definitely better and less choppy than TMNT 4. The colors of course were not as colorful due to some genius at Sega thinking 64 out of 512 was a good idea. The recycled levels with a few cut scenes did make the game feel like a cheap rush job.
@@PrinceRawD I think Heist's colours are mostly fine, if a bit darker, but the backgrounds seem repetitive and bland compared to Turtles In Time or Turtles '89. It doesn't help that they are mostly reused from previous games either. Maybe it is just the choice of backgrounds, then.
The tossing of the Foot Soldiers to the screen was done using the third background layer of the video mode they used for the SNES. It's not possible for that effect to be mode 7 because the game has full backgrounds throughout and that mode only has a single layer. The Genesis could have done the effect just fine, but they would have had to have planned the game for it. Saving one of the two BG layers for that effect would mean they would not have been able to do any parallax other than line scrolling or animated tiles. However, looking at the game again, there is not much multi background parallax in there, so perhaps they wanted to implement that effect and maybe Nintendo convinced them not to. But, to the original point, Konami took advantage of the third BG layer on the SNES. This is most apparent during the first stage when the giant Krang shows up. Krang is then the third BG layer, in addition to the two other BG layers that stage uses. As long as giant Krang in on screen, it is impossible to throw Foot Soldiers at the screen. There are more frames in many of the animations in Hyperstone Heist, but the flip side is that Turtles in Time has a larger assortment of unique enemies with their own frames, so it's a trade off in either case.
I haven't looked into it, but it is possible it is CPU stretched once and then saved in RAM rather than stored on the cartridge. It is a trick used now and then on the MD and PCE, where it can do scaling on the CPU, but it would just be too slow to do in real-time even for a single object.
mode 7 actualy is reffered as a background mode on the official technical doc, it's like the chip that use for the parallax scrolling or other zoom and scaling mode the SNES have 5 dedicated chip for every effect or sprite mode and of course a main CPU.
I explain what all of the background modes are and what they do in this video: ua-cam.com/video/K1DSUHFDmkA/v-deo.html The SNES did not have a chip for parallax scrolling. You don't need a special chip to do that. It did not have dedicated chips for effects or sprites, either. It didn't need to. It was all handled by the S-PPU.
@@WhitePointerGaming i mean by that , the scrolling are hardware accelerated, note like on some NES game that must use a special chip in the cartridge, the SNES have an hardware implementation for a lot of effect, maybe not every game use it, except for some ground effect on street fighter 2 using a kind of raster effect by using some slincing, a lot of zoom or rotation are using the internal chip of the snes.
It was definitely called Starwing in the UK as well, back of box shot of the UK version: www.mobygames.com/game/6629/star-fox/cover/group-36624/cover-99891/
There are people who think the SNES is unfairly maligned for its limitations, but on the flip side there have been many misconceptions about the SNES being more capable than it actually was, such as the various things people have claimed to be Mode 7 that actually weren't. The Foot Soldier thing has been going around for many years. It always showed ignorance about what Mode 7 could actually do. It's just not possible for that to be done that way while still having full backgrounds. You can actually verify just from gameplay that the Foot Soldiers tossed at the screen are using the third background layer. In the first stage, when giant Krang is on the screen, he is the third background layer. As a result, it is impossible to throw the Foot Soldiers at the screen as long as Krang is there, despite being able to do so before and after than sequence.
I think part of the TMNT foot soldier misconception is that the original arcade version actually did have true scaling of them when you threw them into the screen (due to running on more powerful hardware). But this wasn't translated over to the SNES version. I make a joke about it in the video, but the fact that other sources like that trophy seem to be propagating the misconception probably doesn't help.
@@WhitePointerGaming Thanks for replying. The arcade version is true scaling and you can see how smooth it is. I have said this before when I've pointed out this misconception before, I give credit to Konami for the method they used. I call it fake scaling, but it's convincing enough(despite the choppiness compared to the arcade effect) and was likely trivial to implement. It was a good way to do it. I think the rest of the misconception comes from lack of information out there with the internet not getting popular until several years after the game came out, and not a lot of people talking about it from a technical perspective like you do. It takes time to reverse those old thoughts.
The common belief is that it's using mode 7 in addition to SuperFX. I provide a number of examples in the video of various sources claiming this to be the case.
I honestly feel bad for the people who thought some of these things were done with Mode 7, especially when the Foot soldiers would fly towards the screen. It's so obvious, I thought most people moved on from that belief by the time the 20th century was coming to an end, but apparently not.
Lol this episode could be renamed, the times Nintendo borrowed a bunch of techniques the genesis was doing. It was amazing what people did to simulate these effects, it manipulates the 0 and 1 sometimes. You don’t see anything as clever being done today.
Those tilting distant backgrounds in Star Fox had me fooled. It's a similar idea to the "Mode 7" effect in a number of Genesis games, that really just rotate the *arrangement* of a bunch of sprites. They can't rotate more than about 10 degrees or it starts to look really warped, and the effect is ruined.
Interesting nugget. Thanks
Sprites? I thought they were just background tiles being shifted around.
@@TS-yz3ud I think you're right.
I learnt that from Gamehut, when he explained how he got the Pirate Ship to rotate in Puggsy.
@@Gecko1993HogheadIncOfficial I saw it there too!
Another interesting Mode 7 misconception is that it can handle shifted perspectives, like what you see in Pilotwings, Super Mario Kart, and actually a whole ton of games. But the reality is, Mode 7 can only perform affine transformations; scale, translate, rotate, shear.
Any time you see a Mode 7 background that gets smaller as it's farther away, that's an illusion done with HDMA. Basically the background is properly rotated, but it's still in the process of scaling to different sizes for each scanline that gets drawn.
It’s Mode 7 plus HDMA.
Let me guess. By shifting perspectives, you mean when the background tilts, like when starting races in F Zero?
@@TS-yz3ud "Non-affine transformations" would be the technical term, but yeah, anything that makes it look like part of the image is closer or further away.
Even worse, it can't apply it to individual objects because it's a background mode. Anytime something appearing to be a sprite uses it, like Bowser in SMW, Ridley in Super Metroid intro, it's on the background layer, so they have to use a blank background (Super Metroid disguises this decently with a gradient foreground layer tint). You could probably maybe do tricks to have multiple mode 7 "sprites" transforming separately but yeah.
For more polygons running on stock SNES hardware, check out beloved classic Out of This World. It doesn't use polygons for 3D, but it does lay down a bunch of flat polygons with solid color fills to create all the characters. Supposedly the developer had a version written for the SuperFX that ran at 60fps, but the chips were sadly too expensive.
Also known as Another World in PAL regions. Game was developed by Eric Chahi and used rotoscoping.
Mah-toom-bah!
@@marknewellmusic: SNES version was by Rebecca Heineman
It goes even further than that, from Rebecca herself:
"Since Interplay wouldn't pay for a Super FX chip, I found a way to do it with static RAM on the cart and DMA which got me a great frame rate. Interplay wouldn't pay for the static RAM either, so I ended up using Fast ROM instruction. Interplay wouldn't pay for a 3.6 MHz ROM either. So, frustrated, I shoved my block move code into the DMA registers and use it as RAM running at 3.6 MHz. It worked. I got fast block moves on slow cartridges and made a game using polygons working on a 65816 with pure software rendering."
Couldn't use any enhancements or even Fast ROM, and still managed to make it work.
@@SweetBean92
It would be cool if she could find that old code, since it could run on emulators and potentially repro/flash carts.
Me, opening Google Maps Street View and moving through a bunch of photos stitched together: I'm heckin' doin' a Mode 7 rn
To further clarify the comment at 13:59, the SNES does not actually have any hardware to render polygons built in. But ANY computer is capable of rendering polygons in software, provided you take the time to implement the algorithms (and provided that you have enough leftover CPU cycles to do it at a reasonable frame rate.)
I only vaguely knew mode 7 as "when the SNES does fancy perspective effects", this and the linked wolfenstein video were a great explanation of what mode 7 actually is and isn't, thank you!
Thanks, glad you found it useful!
The SuperFX chip draws into it's own local framebuffer in the cartridge and this gets sent out to the SNES graphics chip over the pixel buss pins on the cartridge slot and is overlayed on the SNES's background layers. The SuperFX framebuffer is an 8 bit per pixel bitmap, it is not tile based but it does use the SNES's color lookup table.
Those interior backgrounds in DKC2 are one of the best uses of non-mode-7 3D effects in the era, period.
The effects in Adventures of Batman and Robin on Sega Genesis are good examples too.
Jon Burton (Gamehut) has a video that explains a similar if not the same effect as Axelay in his Mickeymania game. He also explains an effect like that one on DKC, done by erasing and drawing horizontal scanlines (or vertical for a wall)
I can't believe people actually thought StarFox used any Mode 7 at all.
I don't think it's that surprising. A lot of people's understanding of mode 7 amounts to "oh yeah, that's whenever there's 2D scaling and rotation on the SNES, right?" If you know how mode 7 and the 3D rendering in Star fox actually work, you know it couldn't possibly be mode 7, but it isn't really common knowledge even among retro gamers.
Woah... never seen the sack in the wild.
I just assumed the SuperFX was doing most of those tricks. For years it never really clicked with me that the tilting of the skybox was done the same way as the pseudo rotation you see in Genesis games... But knowing more now about how the hardware worked, it's actually fairly obvious.
Good video! It's also worth saying outright: as a rule of thumb, if you can see ANY parallax scrolling going on, it's not Mode 7.
And totally agree about Dragon View! It's a real hidden gem and is still fun today. Played it a couple years back.
Not entirely true about the parallaxing, because many games horizontally split the screen 2 or sometimes even 3 times and used different modes in each part. Super Mario Kart for example splits the screen to use mode 0 for the skyline and mode 7 for the track, and you can see parallaxing on the skyline.
I have Dragon View on the Evercade (Piko Collection 1), it's great and it's a pity it seems to have got lost in the myriad of excellent RPGs the SNES had, but it's definitely worth playing.
Dragon View is one of my favorite games from my childhood. And that's considering the TG16 is my favorite system to this very day. Dragon View always stood out as a great game. Never could get into the first one though.
And yeah, I do remember as a kid, we all thought if there was any "scaling" or "rotation" it must be in Mode 7. Once I actually became a part of the homebrew scene, I started to learn more and more about what the 3 main "16-bit" systems could and could not do and what tricks were being pulled. All three of those systems use the frames of animation trick to fake scaling at times. Watching this video makes it obvious. Like TMNT using 3 frames for a scaling effect. And trees in Drakhen 1 and 2. Same goes for rotation. A lot of times, it's just frames of animation.
It does make me wonder more about the Sega CD, as I've always felt it rarely used its true power. Looking at Lords of Thunder on Sega CD, and comparing it to the original Turbo CD version shows me laziness on Hudson's part. Its not like the Sega CD is just an add on for bigger games like the Turbo CD. The Sega CD is practically its own system. The only extra boost the Turbo CD got was an extra ADPCM channel. It didn't get more colors(I think it upped the colors), dual axis rotation, faster processor, etc.
When I played Star Fox a few decades ago, I wasn't thinking of Node 7 at all. This is even before I watched your video. Thanks for the video.
Mode 7 also cannot scale sprites. It can scale ONE background layer. Some games give the illusion of it scaling a sprite (like Super Mario World) but that's a trick where the "sprite" is in fact a background layer. The Gameboy Advance and Sega CD are far more versatile, they can scale both the background and sprites.
One thing to note is that Mode 7 is frequently combined with H-DMA to make the perspective and similar effects.
Loved this video. The per-column scaling in Starfox had me fooled. Having learned retro programming in assembly, I’ve learned to spot tricks like the Axelay background as not mode 7, but the ground surface in Drakken had me fooled too. They were just using good old fashioned CPU rendered polys, eh?
Another not-mode-7 item is the floor in Street Fighter 2 which is just changing the scroll amount on each scanline using HDMA.
CPU rendering must've been mind-bending, due to the bitplanes format of the graphics...
People generically think any 3d on the Super Nintendo is mode 7.
Pretty much, it seems.
Yeah. Most people have NO idea of how Mode 7 works. Can't blame them though, especially when thinking of games like Wolfenstein 3D.😂
People generally think any 3D on ANY old console is mode 7. Up to and including GBA.
Always good to see a Nintendo fan who doesn't confuse mode 7 with sprite scaling.
Any chance you'll tackle high resolution myths? RPM Racing is the place where dreams go to die, and Kirby 3 is the familiar alternative, but is there anything going on in that third Ranma fighting game?
Interesting idea, though I'm not really sure if there's too many myths surrounding the high resolution mode. RPM Racing is the only game that uses it for gameplay. Basically all other games that use it (which isn't many) like Ranma 1/2: Hard Battle, Smash Tennis, Secret of Mana and Seiken Densetsu 3 only use it for menus or text boxes. Games like Kirby 3 and Jurassic Park use a pseudo high-res mode to create a transparency effect that's different to the regular transparency the SNES could do.
@@WhitePointerGaming Check out the AVGN's video comparing the SNES and Genesis for a painful glimpse into the most popular misunderstandings. Towards the end of the 16-bit wars Nintendo put out an ad (Smashing the Myth) that claimed to compare the two systems fairly, and posed as an article. In reality, it combined the strengths of every SNES graphics mode, hid the weaknesses, then compared that impossible ideal to the Genesis. James cites it as his source, and his viewcount for this misinformation is impressive.
As for Ranma, Hard Battle is the second SFC fighting game. The third features detailed backgrounds with far fewer colors. It's a bizarre choice if not required.
Would that be Ranma 1/2: Chougi Rambuhen? I haven't analysed it in detail but from eyeballing it in videos I can tell it's not using the high resolution mode. This required the usage of mode 5 or 6 which restricted the SNES to just 2 or 1 background layer(s) respectively. This game is using 3 background layers, so it's probably using mode 1, and therefore not using the high resolution mode.
@@WhitePointerGaming Ah. I thought they might be using a few PC Engine tricks to get an extra layer. Right now, I'm unable to access anything beyond potato quality video and screenshots...apologies, for that.
My real concern was the spread of misinformation. The complexities of SNES weaknesses (for example, the hard limit of two sprite tile sizes per screen, or all the ways the speed issues aren't as simple as standard cpu clockspeed) are several levels beyond mode 7 vs. "blast processing". Even resolution comparison gets odd, when the Genesis lower resolution mode allows fewer sprites than the 320 mode.
I've just put out a new video that talks about the high res modes including pseudo high res, and touches a little on myths such as people believing the SNES is always using a high resolution: ua-cam.com/video/K1DSUHFDmkA/v-deo.html
One thing to keep in mind for mode 7, is that only one layer can be manipulated with its known effects, i found it so silly when DKC2's 3D looking beams was mistaken for mode 7, and specially found it silly what people believed for the Super Star Wars.
Both are common misconceptions, especially the Super Return of the Jedi one. These were all examples I found online of people mistaking these effects for mode 7. It seems like any kind of 3D-ish looking effect on the SNES is often assumed by many to be mode 7 without understanding exactly how it works.
@@WhitePointerGaming Pretty much, bet they aren't aware of what even are "modes" or if are there even other modes other than 7.
search for mode 7 extbg
I absolutely love your videos and insights into these old games. It's shocking you have so few subscribers, since these are some the most cleanly narrated and insightful analysis of these concepts I've ever seen. Furthermore they are easy to understand for a non programmer, and the topics are absolutely fascinating. Keep up the great videos! :)
Thank you for the kind feedback, I'll keep doing my best with these :) Spread the word! ;)
Vertical offset, it's an effect commonly used in the Amiga and Genesis to make Mode 7 like effects
Amiga??
@@ArneChristianRosenfeldt Yeah, no, the Amiga can't do vertical offsets (unless its the entire scan line).
This is such a cool video! I have often wondered what games did and didn't use Mode 7. I also didn't realize the technical wizardry that went into Drakkhen and Dragonview, but Turtles in Time blew my mind! Great video, I subscribed!
Always happy to blow some minds :) Thanks for the comment and the sub!
@14:19 the additional colors also helps sell the effect with the improved gradients
I was surprised by the turtles in time revelation of not using mode 7 when throwing the footclans into the screen. But it makes sense, and it is quite visible on a frame by frame basis.
Really good technical breakdown. Thanks for all these in-depth videos.
You say that Wikipedia lied to me? What???
Shocking, I know.
The best console of time
2:01 Well it's not rotation but it is tilting which constitutes some movement in graphics terms, if the background didn't tilt the meshes and ground-dots would misalign and destroy the illusion that the 2D background was contiguous with the polygonal layer. Funny you mention tilting later so the commentary before is a little odd.🤔Admittedly you saw tilting more often on Genesis than SNES Ie. Mode 7-ish alternative, a couple good examples of the same setup on Genesis include the unreleased ResQ flying stages and GASEGA68k's S-F like demos.
6:00 Yeah that one is a funny Mode7 mistake as pretty much every 16-bit platform can do that effect and has in one form or another. I really love how Axelay actually used Mode7 as it makes for a good Boss-sprite enhancement effect imo.
10:22 Uses a lot of image space but it works, yeah quite boring heh. It almost looks like one could do the same thing with raycasting which would have allowed it to be non-looping.
11:00 I was quite keen to hear about that series as its been part of my 3D graphics evolution project. I would have been equally fooled too if I hadn't looked at a bunch of early 3D flight sim and golf games which I affectionately called "flat-land engines".😄 2D vector graphics Eg. Another World was something 16-bit platforms could run quick enough that it made for a good terrain landmark overlay system. Too bad they didn't think of the simple vertical gradient before Dragon View as Drakkhen does look rather plain in comparison.🙁 If you look around DOS games you'll find quite a few of that engine type Eg. Betrayal at Krondor being one of the last I think.
I think the TMNT Mode 7 mistake mostly stems from looking at static screen shots more than video footage because when you see it in action there is no scaling size transition Ie. pixel shimmering artifact, it just switches scale fast and pans a bit.
For all the great things mode 7 could do it was very limited video mode which was not suitable for most video games needs. Also you could always do scaling rotation and other tricks in mode 7 if you used your background layer fake it as a sprite which some games did to render very large boss sprites. That’s why mode 1 was the mode that was used the most across many SNES titles. Mode 1 one offered 2 background scrollable layers plus one third layer that could be used as a foreground layer which made it ideal for most games during the era
BG3 could also be scrolled.
you can also switch background modes within a frame to, say, draw a HUD or distant background in one mode, and switch to Mode 7 for a perspective ground or rotating level.
Surprised you didn’t mention Super Mario World 2 which has a ton of effects that seem to be Mode-7 but are just sprite manipulation by the FX chip.
This video is deep, it corrects a lot of people including Google, it's too bad Sega couldn't use the same throwing technique in "The Hyperstone Heist" like the SNES did with "Turtles in Time" otherwise it would've been the exact same game and they could have they just didn't.
Yeah I've wondered that myself. It was certainly something the Mega Drive could do and many games did something like it. Why Konami decided not to do it for the Hyperstone Heist is a little puzzling. Not sure if it was just a design choice or there was a technical reason for it. The Mega Drive has 2 background layers (technically a background and a foreground plane) while the SNES is using 3 layers for Turtles in Time, so maybe it's just simply a case of not having enough layers available to do it.
@@WhitePointerGamingMaybe.
Might have been a exclusivity cause konami had with nintendo. I think they had it where konami made games for snes and these same games could not be ported to other consoles.
I think this type of deal was what nec/hudson had with konami on the pc engine dracula x and why it could not be ported to snes 1 to 1.
The console makers would not want a game to appear on their competitors console if they could help it.
Yeah, there was some kind of deal in place that meant they put a different game on Sega's console. But that wouldn't have stopped them implementing the mechanic of throwing the foot soldiers into the screen in Hyperstone Heist if they wanted to. Many other gameplay features of the two games are the same.
The early Konami games on MD all had pretty small cartridge sizes, so I'm guessing it was one of the things cut to save space.
Very comphrehensive,great work!
MFs look at line scrolling on the fucking NES and be like "Is this Mode 7???"
Great video... I already knew from a Discussion in a Twitch Chat from 2022 that Starwing does NOT use Mode7
I’ve never known anyone anywhere that thought star fox used mode 7…. This shocked me….
I love how Donkey Kong Country doesn't use any "trickery". It's just extremely well designed from the smallest details to the biggest scenes.
I used to think Mode 7 and Super FX were the same thing!
2:15 But the horizon line and rest of the ground is rotating? Vertical offset again?
Yep, that's vertical offset-per-tile again. It's not a proper rotation, just a tilt.
Per column offset combined with tile animations can achieve a full 360 degree rotation effect- e.g. the bonus stages in Sonic The Hedgehog.
@@zerobyte802The bonus stages in Sonic are actually just made up of sprites that have been animated to rotate. It's got nothing to do with tile offsets.
@@WhitePointerGaming I was aware of the tiles being rotated but I thought they also used column offset as “in between” to make the effect more smooth. I guess I was mistaken
@@zerobyte802 Since the entire maze is built out of sprites they can be moved around freely without the need for row/column offsets.
Minor nitpick. DK2 does use mode 7 on the rare logo, if I recall correctly. Great video overall. I was in my teens when these games came out, had absolutely no programming experience, and understood just through observation how all these tricks were being done (except maybe the Star Fox backgrounds) . That is when I truly understood just how ignorant these professional game reviewers were.
Yeah you're right, mode 7 is used for the logo on startup for DKC2 (and also DKC1, since it's the same effect).
@@WhitePointerGaming DKC3 scales the Rare logo after Dixie and Kiddy bounce on it. The wooden note playing device "forget what those things are called" uses the same effect as Axelay but squishes the image down at both the top and bottom.
I wasn't aware that anyone EVER thought that Starfox was using Mode 7. I have no idea why anyone would even think that. Like, seriously, what about it looks like Mode 7???
4:50
Given how the SuperFX just sends the rendered graphics to the SNES as tile data, this is likely the SuperFX scaling the image. Same way that the SuperFX 2 in Yoshi's Island does sprite scaling and rotation, including for the giant bosses.
Who has ever said that Star fox is using mode 7? I have never once heard anyone make that claim and I am old enough to remember when Star fox first came out. It was heavily advertised that it was using the super FX chip to do 3D.
In the video I provide a number of sources, including Wikipedia, Nintendo Life and ShackNews, that claim the game is using mode 7. The common belief is that the game is using mode 7 in addition to the SuperFX chip to create its effects.
Always thought of Star Fox as using SuperFX rather than mode 7
It is. But many believe it's using mode 7 in addition to SuperFX.
@@WhitePointerGamingOh right? I mean it said Super FX on the cartridge
Star Trek Bridge Simulator is another unmodified SNES game that uses polygons all over the place. Genesis also had quite a few flight sims that used actual polygons as well. ua-cam.com/video/qFnThr5icQU/v-deo.htmlsi=OwV4HnWri6Nkarru&t=408
I mean cutscene on rom storage is still impressive. I'm going to assume the SuperFX does the scaling so the small-scale rotating animation could be reused. (that rotating animation might or mightn't use pallete rotations)
Question, in the final cinematic of Final Fantasy 5, there is a moment where the Sprites do a kind of zoom in effect, do you know what kind of effect was used there? I still remember that moment as if it were yesterday, but it’s very beautiful.
In this case it looks like it's switching modes, having the sprite on the sprite layer initially, then putting the sprite on a mode 7 background to zoom it in. The circular spotlight kind of shape is created using windowing/masking.
What's funny to me is that a lot of these techniques are also in Mega Drive games.
I always assumed the Turtles throwing soldiers on the screen was Mode 7 because the Genesis game didn't have anything like that. Now Im even more disappointed with the Genesis game that it didn't do that effect in some way
In Corneria, how does the background tilt when the ship turns?
It's explained in the video. It's vertical offset-per-tile, the same thing that makes the planet tilt in the space levels.
that was very good... thank you
I feel like "It's a background that's been animated to do that," in the Star Fox section, isn't a good explanation of the spinning planet zoom-in? How does it do it in Mode 3? Is it the Super FX chip rendering to a background layer bitmap or something?
Note : that for 20 years i tout that vortex used mode 7 for it’s ground but since i do know that the snes cannot do multiple backgrounds at mode 7 and even cannot do sprite scaling at all,it know theres some other trickery going on.
Vortex uses the Super FX chip, so it's the same kind of thing as what Star Fox is doing.
@@WhitePointerGaming but have you never wondered why the snes lacks sprite scaling??? I do so because if the snes had sprite scaling then they didn’t had to use multiple sprites at different sizes sothat they would,ve more space left for other stuff,take supermario kart for example it uses 10 sprites per character instead of just had,had they implemented sprite scaling in hardware then they could,ve used that extra space for other stuff,also since memory was very expensive,sure they might could,ve tried out sprite scaling trough software instead but it probably would,ve slowed down the performance if the snes,
And lastly i tout that that zooming on starfor on the map screen was just a sprite getting scaled by the super fx chip,and i tout that only that planed rotation of that sprite planed was animated and nothing else,was it?
@@johneygdIf mario kart have sprite scaling:
* It would need month(s) to write the scaler code.
* Scaler code might be same size with all scaled sprites.
* Scaler code might need to scale 10 sprites in some cases, framerate would drop to 30 or 15 from 60 stable that is now.
I was wondering....in TMNT IV, the time travel cutscene, if you're playing in two-player mode, there are two independently rotating turtles. How could they do this if mode 7 has only one background layer? Thanks if anyone can clarify this
Good question! I'm not 100% sure, but from what I've been able to determine, it looks like there's 2 mode 7 background images, one for each turtle. If you watch it, one turtle is in the top half of the screen while the other is in the bottom half, so I think there's some trickery going on here by splitting the screen and displaying 2 different mode 7 textures in each half. The SNES could split its screen horizontally multiple times and use different modes in each part, but it could also use the same mode in each part, so I think that's what's going on here.
search for mode 7 extbg
One turtle is in the top half of the screen and one turtle is on the bottom half of the screen. It changes the mode 7 settings in the middle of the screen.
There are some quirks that I never quite understood about Mode 7 and it's restrictions.
Like, during that warp screen in Turtles in Time, there are clearly two independent turtle sprites spinning, but wouldn't that require 2 BG layers to achieve.
Also, during the opening and ending sequence of Super Metroid, it looks like the game is using mode 7 to scale and rotate Samus' ship flying towards the space colony and away from planet Zebes.
But is everything we see in the background during those sequences actually sprites?
Also, can mode 7 BGs be placed on top/ in front of the sprite layer?
I've always wondered how this effect was achieved
For the warp screen in Turtles in Time, the two turtles are mode 7 backgrounds, and the screen looks like it is being split about halfway down to show 2 different backgrounds.
Yep, Samus' ship in the intro to Super Metroid is a mode 7 background.
Yes, everything else you see in the background of those scenes are actually sprites. Sprites can be placed either in front or behind a background, including a mode 7 background.
@@WhitePointerGaming
Oh yeah.
I honestly didn't even notice that the two turns never actually share a horizontal plane.
Thinking back to the split screen of Super Mario Kart, I guess I should've remembered that you can actually do more than one mode at a time if you split the screen
Super Metroid mostly puzzled me as there was so much "background" stuff on the screen that I didn't think the SNES could display so many at once.
@@WhitePointerGaming: I like how Axelay's walker section made the background gray to create the illusion of a wall, and used sprites for the vertical (!) features. Very convincing, and with minimal impact on the sprites-per-scanline limit.
They use Mode 2 to do offset per tile?
I'm not sure, so i think this needs further research, but it could be possible that Turtles in Time indeed uses Mode 7 for the scaling. Of course not while running the main game, but by switching modes in between frames and saving the results in the vRAM. Which would explain why the scaling is not a fluid motion. The thought behind this is that the zoomed foot soldiers are way bigger than the SNES's sprite size limit, and even bigger than what was possible when combining multiple sprites of the biggest sprite size of 64 by 64 pixels (given that there are still sprites on screen and only sprites of two sizes are allowed at any given time). So the foot soldiers must be background images. That however brings up the question why their zoomed versions don't have more detail like they have in the arcade. That shouldn't be a question of cartridge space, since the foot soldiers can be easily re-coloured with a palette-swap, so it only needs one version.
This is all explained in the video, watch from the chapter break or at least from about 15:17. No, the scaled foot soldiers are not sprites, they are background images. They are being drawn to one of the background layers (the same layer as the HUD at the top of the screen) in a couple of different sizes and the game switches between them to fake the scaling. The game stays in mode 1 the entire time during this. Don't compare it to the arcade version because that works differently, that's actually doing proper sprite scaling due to running on more powerful hardware.
@@WhitePointerGaming I wonder why the larger versions are more pixellated if they didn't need to be? Seems like an artistic choice...perhaps even to "fool" the viewer into thinking it was Mode 7. I remember that Mode 7 was a coveted, recognisable feature at the time. I remember being awed by it.
ok, so something i REALLY want to know and have wondered about my entire life - and i've asked MULTIPLE people on youtube about this and thus far no one has been able to figure it out - is how on earth the mode 7 "neon night riders" level in TMNT 4 has what appear to be 2 separate / parallax / independently scrolling mode 7 layers stacked on top of each other, with the lower grid-looking layer and the upper track layer clearly scaling, rotating, and moving independently one above the other. nintendo themselves claimed this dual-layer mode 7 effect was "impossible" on the SNES and this was their reasoning for the GBA f-zero games having this 2-layered effect but not the SNES cause allegedly the GBA was powerful enough to do it but the SNES wasn't. yet it would appear that single level in TMNT 4 is definitely scrolling, scaling, and rotating 2 mode 7 layers on top of each other just fine. what gives?
Hey there, thanks for the question! Wonder no more, the actual answer to this is pretty simple. The grid under the track and the track itself are not two separate layers, they are indeed just a single layer. The grid doesn't actually go under the track, it stops when it touches the track. There's only one mode 7 layer in the stage (with a horizontal split about 1/3 of the way down the screen to display a mode 1 background and the HUD in the top portion).
If you look closely and go frame by frame you'll see they actually aren't scaling, rotating or even moving independently, they are together. The mode 7 layer is just angled in such a way to make the effect more convincing. It's basically the exact same thing F-Zero does.
You can actually see what's going on more clearly at the end of the stage when it shifts to a side view for the Krang boss fight. Check out the grid in the background, and you can easily see it's moving exactly the same as the track.
@@WhitePointerGamingit looks like there's more going on than just that (all the way to the horizon it is much more double-layered looking than anything f-zero ever did. it even ends in two different horizon lines) - but i will take the time to frame by frame it when i have the time. if you're right it's a WAY better illusion than f-zero.
I've checked it in the tilemap viewer and that's indeed all that's going on in this level.
What about the scaling Rareware logo in DKC?
Yeah, the scaling logo in the intro is using mode 7. But it's not used at all during the actual game.
A classic example of SNES stock-hardware polygon rendering is The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past: the Triforce shown assembling before the title screen appears. That game does also use Mode 7, namely for the world map view.
Also, the Star Wars forest example should be pretty obviously not mode 7 for one simple reason: it looks like shit lol
The Starwars example may look a bit more tolerable if shown on a CRT. On digital displays it does indeed look pretty horrific.
I knew this wasn’t mode 7 since mine was broken, but star fox worked fine for me
Hi, thanks for explaining this,it’s interesting,no mode 7 and no sprite scaling,BUT have you ever wondered why nintendo did not implemented sprite scaling in the snes???
I do because if they implemented sprite scaling,then game developers didn’t had to waste extra memory space to put 10 identical sprites at different sizes to fake such scaling effect,
Also why didn’t they used sprite scaling trough software just to get around such lacking feature on the snes and to save on space,because memory was expensive back then,
I found it strange that the gba does have sprite scaling builtin since memory was much cheaper by that time so game developers didn’t had to try hard to save on memory space,it’s just a weird decission from nintendo not add sprite scaling inside the snes don’t you think so???
I'm not the maker of this video, nor am I an expert on this. But I think the reason sprite scaling isn't usually done in software is two-fold. Computing a scaled sprite is not too difficult for the hardware, but then it has break it into "standard" sized sprites and arrange them from RAM into the tile map, which is more costly and can also make it harder to manage the rest of the tile map. This is the kind of thing the SuperFX chip is handling when you see, for instance, those asteroid sprites that scale up when they get closer.
All I can say about the GBA is that, while it plays games that look really similar to SNES, it actually has a 32-bit RISC processor, so it can crunch those numbers more efficiently.
GBA and Jaguar have two line buffers and much more time to draw sprites into them. C64 already could scale sprites by 2 because it does not use a linebuffer here. PCEngine should have been king of superscalers!
Lynx in 1987? already showed how the GBA should just have used a framebuffer. Nintendo opted for a system with less latency? Check y position of all sprites in every scanline??
The Nintendo DS works in a serial fashion. Control inputs, fast RISC game logic, a special chip only for fast transformation, sort by y. Then draw stuff scanline by scanline as on GBA and DMG. Only then shade vertices and pixels. Could also post pone the x and z ordinate to here with a little more memory. Subpixel precision. Like when we allow some filter for this or the next scanline, the original transformer only needs an epsilon on 1 px.
Price, most likely. There were arcade systems around years before the SNES, or even Mega Drive, came out that had hardware support for sprite scaling, but it was probably considered too expensive for something that most games would not have used.
As for software scaling, it was probably just too slow generally.
@@todesziege 1986 IBM introduced chunky mode memory mapped video memory where any 8 bit CPU could scale bitmaps easy at fast. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-Color_Graphics_Array
@@ArneChristianRosenfeldt And how does this relate to the SNES or Mega Drive at all?
2:22 - but why wouldn't they use Mode 7 for the cube columns that DO scale toward you?
Mode 7 scales a single background layer. It can not scale objects like that. That's all being done by the SuperFX chip.
@@WhitePointerGaming thx for the clarification, these are fantastic videos. Since I watched them, I saw another on YT that on some channel w/"Bits" in the name, and sure enough, it listed Mode 7 and some of the ones that you pointed out were not. Great stuff, loving the channel
DKC2 (and 1 & 3?) doesn't use ANY "helper chips" in the cartridge??? That is unreal...
Yep, all running on stock hardware.
Wait at 2:25 the background is clearly rotated, it's not just the white dots. the horizon, the clouds as well as the ground lines are not horizontal and rotate when the ship turns. I know it doesn't use mode 7 but it's not just a static image there's some shenanigans going on for sure.. I'm guessing it's something with the super FX chip ? Or is it the same as for the planet ?
As for the others, I think people associated mode 7 with the effects seen in mario kart, the map in secret off mana and f-zero which is a mix of mode 7 and hdma so I can see why they think other hdma effects use mode 7.
Oh and the bike scene from star wars is sooo ugly they probably should have went with mode 7 or anything else really XD
The background tilting is explained at around 3:00 in the video (talking about the planet in space, but it's the same effect). It's done using vertical offset-per-tile. It's not a proper rotation, just a tilt.
Not Mode 7... It's Super FX Co-processor 3D graphics. Or Vector Based image processing. Capable of quickly transforming matrices just to scale and rotate sprites and do that sort of crazy shit. Mode 7 is different from this thing because Mode 7 is a very very hardware-based solution without much flexibility... But in essence Mode 7 is also about transforming matrices... But it's usually limited to a single plane... Super FX can do much more... Even polygons... THERE'S NO REASON AT ALL TO USE MODE 7 IF YOU HAVE SUPER FX WHICH IS SUPERIOR IN EVERY WAY!!! If devs used Mode 7 the game would just lag and be less efficient. Not to mention the limitations of Mode 7, you could only do some things with it...
It’s so funny how much misinformation concerning this one graphical mode is out there
So mode7 is just blast processing; real yet imagined at the same time.
Never saw anybody claim that Star Wing uses Mode7.
I provide several examples in the video of sources claiming it. The common belief is that it's using mode 7 in addition to the SuperFX. It's especially common to at least believe the zoom in from the map screen is mode 7 (which is a reasonable assumption).
Mode 7? I don't even know what mode 1-6 do!
What about Mode 007?
Oh, dear, I have some ACHTUALLYS to write on some comment sections.
since tmnt snes didnt use mode 7 i wonder why sega's tmnt didnt use the same trick as it was always pretty cool. i wish it had also had fx like how bloodlines and batman had pretty cool things going on while hyperstone heist was a good game but not really a showpiece. really odd not to make it have dazzling fx since according to konami tmnt series was one of their major sellers and would outsell the castlevania series.
It could be as simple as Nintendo having some influence on Konami and keeping that feature exclusive to Turtles in Time. On a technical side, the SNES used three background layers for the game, with the third layer being for the Foot Soldiers. The Genesis had two BG layers, so if they used the effect, they would have had to reserve one of the BG layers for the Foot Soldiers(unless there was some workaround). That would have limited the possibilities for multi-layer parallax. Though, having looked at the game recently, there's not a lot of that kind of parallax in the game, so I wonder if they were initially planning to include that feature.
WTF? Star Fox was FAMOUS for using the Super FX chip. The chip was built for the game, and the super FX chip was HEAVILY featured in marketing. It’s synonymous with the game.
NO ONE thought Star Fox used mode 7.
Seriously, WTH man?
The super FX chip
The common belief is that it's using mode 7 in addition to the SuperFX chip. I provided a number of sources in the video that claim this to be the case. Even the wikipedia article about mode 7 listed the game as using mode 7 at the time this video was made (it has, however, since been removed).
mode 7 = stage 2 of space megaforce / super aleste
So if the tossing of foot soldiers at the screen was not mode 7, then why did Konami not implement that same technique for the Hyperstone Heist? EGM and other video game magazines docked the Genesis points for not including that gameplay feature. And they also claimed it was mode 7. Shame shame Konami
Good question about Hyperstone Heist, I'm not really sure. It was either a deliberate design decision or some other technical restriction like a lack of available layers, but plenty of Mega Drive games did that kind of faux-scaling so it's a headscratcher. And yeah, when even gaming magazines were getting it wrong it goes to show you how misunderstood the feature was, and still is.
I always assumed it was for space reasons, but to my surprise it turns out they are both 8Mb carts. Hyperstone Heist feels a bit cut-corners graphically in general so it might be a lack of experience then; it was apparently handled by the 'B-team'.
@todesziege The Animation in Hyperstone Heist was definitely better and less choppy than TMNT 4. The colors of course were not as colorful due to some genius at Sega thinking 64 out of 512 was a good idea. The recycled levels with a few cut scenes did make the game feel like a cheap rush job.
@@PrinceRawD I think Heist's colours are mostly fine, if a bit darker, but the backgrounds seem repetitive and bland compared to Turtles In Time or Turtles '89. It doesn't help that they are mostly reused from previous games either. Maybe it is just the choice of backgrounds, then.
The tossing of the Foot Soldiers to the screen was done using the third background layer of the video mode they used for the SNES. It's not possible for that effect to be mode 7 because the game has full backgrounds throughout and that mode only has a single layer. The Genesis could have done the effect just fine, but they would have had to have planned the game for it. Saving one of the two BG layers for that effect would mean they would not have been able to do any parallax other than line scrolling or animated tiles. However, looking at the game again, there is not much multi background parallax in there, so perhaps they wanted to implement that effect and maybe Nintendo convinced them not to. But, to the original point, Konami took advantage of the third BG layer on the SNES. This is most apparent during the first stage when the giant Krang shows up. Krang is then the third BG layer, in addition to the two other BG layers that stage uses. As long as giant Krang in on screen, it is impossible to throw Foot Soldiers at the screen.
There are more frames in many of the animations in Hyperstone Heist, but the flip side is that Turtles in Time has a larger assortment of unique enemies with their own frames, so it's a trade off in either case.
Donatello is the best.
That's a strange way to spell Raphael ;)
No, that's not Mode 7!
If they were wasting storage on animated foot soldier scaling then why didn’t they use that wasted space for increased detail as they get closer?
I haven't looked into it, but it is possible it is CPU stretched once and then saved in RAM rather than stored on the cartridge.
It is a trick used now and then on the MD and PCE, where it can do scaling on the CPU, but it would just be too slow to do in real-time even for a single object.
mode 7 actualy is reffered as a background mode on the official technical doc, it's like the chip that use for the parallax scrolling or other zoom and scaling mode the SNES have 5 dedicated chip for every effect or sprite mode and of course a main CPU.
I explain what all of the background modes are and what they do in this video: ua-cam.com/video/K1DSUHFDmkA/v-deo.html
The SNES did not have a chip for parallax scrolling. You don't need a special chip to do that. It did not have dedicated chips for effects or sprites, either. It didn't need to. It was all handled by the S-PPU.
@@WhitePointerGaming i mean by that , the scrolling are hardware accelerated, note like on some NES game that must use a special chip in the cartridge, the SNES have an hardware implementation for a lot of effect, maybe not every game use it, except for some ground effect on street fighter 2 using a kind of raster effect by using some slincing, a lot of zoom or rotation are using the internal chip of the snes.
I've actually never heard anyone say Starfox used Mode7 just SuperFX.. That's pretty interesting
No star fox in UK pal is Star wing a European thing
It was definitely called Starwing in the UK as well, back of box shot of the UK version: www.mobygames.com/game/6629/star-fox/cover/group-36624/cover-99891/
There are people who think the SNES is unfairly maligned for its limitations, but on the flip side there have been many misconceptions about the SNES being more capable than it actually was, such as the various things people have claimed to be Mode 7 that actually weren't. The Foot Soldier thing has been going around for many years. It always showed ignorance about what Mode 7 could actually do. It's just not possible for that to be done that way while still having full backgrounds. You can actually verify just from gameplay that the Foot Soldiers tossed at the screen are using the third background layer. In the first stage, when giant Krang is on the screen, he is the third background layer. As a result, it is impossible to throw the Foot Soldiers at the screen as long as Krang is there, despite being able to do so before and after than sequence.
I think part of the TMNT foot soldier misconception is that the original arcade version actually did have true scaling of them when you threw them into the screen (due to running on more powerful hardware). But this wasn't translated over to the SNES version. I make a joke about it in the video, but the fact that other sources like that trophy seem to be propagating the misconception probably doesn't help.
@@WhitePointerGaming Thanks for replying. The arcade version is true scaling and you can see how smooth it is. I have said this before when I've pointed out this misconception before, I give credit to Konami for the method they used. I call it fake scaling, but it's convincing enough(despite the choppiness compared to the arcade effect) and was likely trivial to implement. It was a good way to do it. I think the rest of the misconception comes from lack of information out there with the internet not getting popular until several years after the game came out, and not a lot of people talking about it from a technical perspective like you do. It takes time to reverse those old thoughts.
So who's the genius that actually thought that Star Fox was mode 7? By now, everybody knows that that game was enhanced by the Super FX chip!
The common belief is that it's using mode 7 in addition to SuperFX. I provide a number of examples in the video of various sources claiming this to be the case.
Kinda annoying the constant "is not mode 7, you are an idiot" thing, like, congratulations to be a nerd I guess.
I always thought tmnt used mode 7 during neon night riders.
It does. That's not what the video is about.
I honestly feel bad for the people who thought some of these things were done with Mode 7, especially when the Foot soldiers would fly towards the screen. It's so obvious, I thought most people moved on from that belief by the time the 20th century was coming to an end, but apparently not.
Maybe people are confusing Mode 7 with SuperFX chip?
Lol this episode could be renamed, the times Nintendo borrowed a bunch of techniques the genesis was doing. It was amazing what people did to simulate these effects, it manipulates the 0 and 1 sometimes. You don’t see anything as clever being done today.