Anyone care to comment in-depth on the PC-FX hardware design?

[SignOfZeta]

Yeah, I can see that. Full hand drawn animation of backgrounds is kind of laborious, and the only thing you'd be actually animating is the parallax.

[Arkhan]

yeah, drawing in any form is laborious for me.

I don't know if there is anyone who would really want to do something like that.   It's too much goddamn work.

"Hey draw, a 3 hour show for me, cmon"

[SamIAm]

I met a girl at an art gallery who spent the better part of a year drawing 1000 full-frame pictures for a very short 5fps cartoon. The result was cool as it was, but it wouldn't be so nice in a video game, I think.

Ever see Blazing Star on the Neo Geo? The background of the 2nd stage is a prerendered and animated loop. Here:

That might be more practical.

Also, if you access to a studio-like environment with controlled lighting and a fixed camera, you could use stop animation. In fact, you could even try drawing background layers, cutting them out, and hand-animating your own parallax.

It's a lot of work any way you look at it, though. The camera out the car window option, at least, is the kind of thing you could pull off in a single day.

[Mathius]

Sounds like I am not the only one who looks out their driver's side window and thinks, "My gosh that's a lot of parallax!"

[trap15]

Wow, thanks for the insightful post, trap15. I have a few of questions, if you don't mind.

Are the 7up chips the only ones that draw sprites?  
Do the 7up chips have the same color palette limitations as the PCE?
Is it possible to freely layer the 7up planes/sprites and the KING planes in any way you like, or are there priority restrictions?
How can the MPEG layer be integrated into a real game?

Also, I think the commonly assumed number of planes that the Saturn's VDP2 can generate is five. I wouldn't be surprised if that's a mistake; after all, there are people who think that the PCE has dual CPUs and that the Sega CD can do HAM like the Amiga. However, I think that five was the number that Sega themselves put out. Have you verified it personally to be four (or trusted someone else who has)?

Yes, only the 7up chips can draw sprites.
Each 7up can output 15 color sprites (0 is transparent, obviously), and 16 color backgrounds, but you get to have very very wide spectrum of colors. You can "chain" the 7ups to make them output 240 color sprites and a 256 color background, but you lose having 128 sprites, and you go back to 64.
Each 7up creates a single plane for mixing (which is the sprites behind/in front of the background), which can be layered in any order around KING, though you cannot put the sprites behind a KING bg without it also being behind that 7up's bg.
MJPEG layer can be used for FMVs, or in a ridiculous fashion like the guys above were talking about.
Now that I think about it, I believe you are correct about the Saturn generating 5 layers. I'm not sure, so don't trust that quote (but the rest should be fairly accurate).

[SamIAm]

That's all very interesting. Thank you so much for taking the time to share!

[Arkhan]

Ridiculous Parallax! LETS GO

[SamIAm]

This is actually a pretty unique idea. It might sound like another crappy FMV project like what came out of the 90's, but with a little seasoned-action-gamer common sense, you could make an auto-scrolling or Super Mario Bros. 1-style scrolling platformer with good gameplay and a totally unique graphical look.

Imagine if you could get five people around the world each with decent cameras and well-suspended cars. You could have everyone drive by two or three unique areas each, maybe within certain speeds for consistency, getting a total of 30 minutes or so of good side-scrolling footage. That would be plenty for a sweet little platformer, and it really wouldn't be that difficult. Then you would just have to draw some foreground and sprites. It would look kind of like Umihara Kawase or something. Which, by the way, I think has underrated graphical design.

I don't have a car, but I could maybe get some sweet train-window footage here in Japan.

[saturndual32]

Regarding the PCFX not being able to handle Doom. I have read that the 32X port of Doom was made using only one or the SH2 32bit 23MHz chips on the system. The PCFX 32 bit 21mhz should give similar performance to that, right?, and the FX has way more ram than 32X. I thought that Doom 32X was deccent technically for the time, albeit rushed. Also 32X and PCFX share the RLE rendering method, can someone mention what it is all about?
From what i remember, 25mhz PCs played a decent game of Doom, back in the day, without any sprite hardware, and with about 2 MB or RAM, so i think the FX should be able to do an ok port of it.
Then again, i would trust more the opinion of guy like trap15, than i would trust mine, hehe.

[saturndual32]

Wow, hadnt realized how weak the sprite capabilities of the FX were, only 128 sprites, same as SNES can do on paper, and without scaling or rotation effects. Although i guess that like 32X, it can do many scaling and rotating sprite in software, like 32x does for games like Space Harrier, Knuckles Chaotix, etc.

On the other hand, it has great background capabilities. So it has the 2 background planes from the Supergrafx, the MJPEG layer, and 4 from the King procesor. One of the Kings planes is a mode 7 type plane, i think another one is called "xelophane" layer, can someone comment what it is all about? And what about the 2 remaining King planes, are they more common ones? Also, i guess the King planes have way better color capabilities than the 7UP planes and sprites, right?

Anyway, i think this system could have been the last great 2d system. Just as Saturn and Playstation jumped into the 3d scene, the FX could have had the 2d scene all for itself, just by getting 32bit sequels to all the amazing PCEngine games like Bonk FX, YS FX, Star Soldier FX, etc, and also ports of stuff like Castlevania Symphony of the Night, Rockman X4, Street Fighter Zero 2... it would have been amazing...darn it NEC!!!

[SignOfZeta]

This is actually a pretty unique idea. It might sound like another crappy FMV project like what came out of the 90's, but with a little seasoned-action-gamer common sense, you could make an auto-scrolling or Super Mario Bros. 1-style scrolling platformer with good gameplay and a totally unique graphical look.

Imagine if you could get five people around the world each with decent cameras and well-suspended cars. You could have everyone drive by two or three unique areas each, maybe within certain speeds for consistency, getting a total of 30 minutes or so of good side-scrolling footage. That would be plenty for a sweet little platformer, and it really wouldn't be that difficult. Then you would just have to draw some foreground and sprites. It would look kind of like Umihara Kawase or something. Which, by the way, I think has underrated graphical design.

I don't have a car, but I could maybe get some sweet train-window footage here in Japan.

This could work, maybe, with some good planning. Cars move around a lot more than you might realize, but if you had a really smooth road, good suspension, a camera that was fixed to the car very solidly, a camera with stability control, and you shot rather far into the distance, it could work. Anything other than that and its just going to shake all over the place.

I honestly like the idea of a hand drawn loop better. Kind of like Iridion with taste. You'd only need to draw about 20 full frames for platformer walking action. Mix things up with foreground sprites. When you get to a new area you can fully animate transitions to a new loop, repeat. Why has this never been done. Has it been done?

I might actually try this when I'm bored at work. If someone could combine this with the "Joust as an action RPG" idea...we could have the best f*cking game ever.

[thesteve]

as for playing doom on PC BITD a 486-100 fought with it.
wolfinstein however ran great on a 286-11

[HercTNT]

Are you sure your thinking of doom and not quake? I had an Amd X5-133 with 16 megs of ram back then, and I could run quake at around 10fps.  At the time i was not aware of the crap fpu unit the Amd chips had. If it had been an intel chip, its gaming performance would have been twice as fast.  Doom should skip along pretty well on a fast 386.  As for the saturn, technical specs amount to nothing. The saturn may have had two cpu's and a fancy 3d chip for the time, but as other pointed out it was horrible to program for. Most saturn games never used the second cpu. The video was provided by Nvidia's NV1 and instead of outputting 3d in polygons it outputted 3d in quadratics. Since everyone else on the planet was using polygons, retooling everything to program in quadratics sucked hard.  Besides its not the hardware that matters in alot of cases, its the quality of the programmers.

[SamIAm]

Regarding the PCFX not being able to handle Doom. I have read that the 32X port of Doom was made using only one or the SH2 32bit 23MHz chips on the system.

I kind of doubt that, but there's an easy way to check. Run Doom with Gens, but go into the config file before you launch the program and underclock the slave SH2. You can almost never get away with turning it "off", but I do remember from when I tinkered with it that a lot of games run with no slowdown even with the slave below 50% speed. I'd bet a friend a cheap beer that Doom gets sluggish below 80%, though.

When you get to a new area you can fully animate transitions to a new loop, repeat. Why has this never been done. Has it been done?

It's a shame how many things haven't really been tried and/or refined in the world of 2D game graphics. If development companies these days gave people real money to make 2D games and encouraged them to go for non-traditional graphical styles, we could wind up seeing all kinds of crazy crap. Just think: if the next generation of consoles have 4+ gigs of ram whenever they come around, the possibilities for animation will be absolutely huge. The key thing is, we need people to evolve the medium, and next to nobody is doing that.

It's kind of like when Odin Sphere came out on the PS2, and everyone said "Why the hell haven't there been more games that look like this?"

Such a shame.

[Arkhan]

All these modern consoles are dreamlands for glorious 2D artwork.

So much space and power to do crazed 2D stuff that wouldn't even dent the CPU.

Only games that seem to do anything with it are the JRPGs from NIS/Atlus. 

I personally cannot stand 2D games that use 3D rendered nonsense.  hand-drawn or GTFO.