Graphics: Turbo vs. Genesis - ye old debate

[geise]

In Silpheed all the background stuff going on was prerendered.  Your ship and the other stuff you were shooting was real time.

[Joe Redifer]

Actually in Silpheed the enemies are prerendered sprites.

[ccovell]

Actually in Silpheed the enemies are prerendered sprites.

Have you even played Silpheed CD?  There's a polygon test right there in the options menu.  The sprites, at least, are generated real-time.

[Arkhan]

Actually in Silpheed the enemies are prerendered sprites.

Have you even played Silpheed CD?  There's a polygon test right there in the options menu.  The sprites, at least, are generated real-time.

Aww you beated me to it.


In terms of this debate.   I honestly aint reading 20932409234 pages of it.... but heres my two cents.

They both kick ass.

hard.

They are also so amazingly similar to each other that its scary at times.  Lunar totally would have been equally sweet on a PCE SCD.

And then there were some times were PCE outclasses it, like Shadow of the Beast.  The genesis cartridge sucks compared to the super CD.

same with exile....

but for the most part, they both get my thumbs up and 

[Tom]

Actually in Silpheed the enemies are prerendered sprites.

Have you even played Silpheed CD?  There's a polygon test right there in the options menu.  The sprites, at least, are generated real-time.

 In the test option, but in game they are rendered to a set of frames to be uses as simple 2D animation. It isn't rendered realtime, it's cache frames (usually interleaved). 2D sprites is moved along a fixed axis and cycles through the frame cache every 4-5 frames - yet still 'sliding'. You get multiple enemies because the ones behind the main one(or two) are accessing cached the same cached frames as well. Sometime they are even mirrored.

Sapphire's polygons were pre-rendered, as far as I know.

 They are. You can see them with a sprite editor in the ISO. To be honest, there's no reason to waste resource rendering a polygon ship/enemy when you can have them as pre-rendered frames and practically access them for free.
 
 

[Keranu]

Actually in Silpheed the enemies are prerendered sprites.

Have you even played Silpheed CD?  There's a polygon test right there in the options menu.  The sprites, at least, are generated real-time.

So did After Burner II for PCE .

[Joe Redifer]

Notice how much slower the polygon test in the Silpheed option screen is compared to the movement in the actual gameplay where there are many, many enemies onscreen at once.  Common sense right there demands that something is amiss. Anyway, the enemies are sprites during gameplay, not polygons.  Look into the data for yourself and you'll see. 

[ccovell]

I stand multiply corrected.  All in the name of knowledge.

[geise]

Regardless it's amazing what the devs were able to achieve back in the day with such limited hardware.  It really was a special time for games.

[Tom]

Regardless it's amazing what the devs were able to achieve back in the day with such limited hardware.  It really was a special time for games.

 Quoted for truth

[Joe Redifer]

Yes, I was convinced that the backgrounds were polygons back then.  There was no graininess to them.  I was like "OMG SESEGA CD SOOO POWERFUL!!!!"

[Tatsujin]

not 100%ly. correct for the PCE CD-Rom, but the MEGA-CD would have been capable for much more i believe, but they never really pushed that add-on, packed with a lot more hardware inside than the loose MD just had. i bought a lot of MEGA-CD games recently and i have to say now, that they not really did a great job on the most of the games, regarded what the hardware would have been capable of. not so for the PCE CD-Rom, as we all know just too well. even there was "no" addition hardware packed in.

[Tom]

Some US (well really Euro guys) really pushed the system. Well, they really pushed the ASIC. In Batman, the driving parts supposedly hits the chips threshold for bandwidth.

[Black Tiger]

not 100%ly. correct for the PCE CD-Rom, but the MEGA-CD would have been capable for much more i believe, but they never really pushed that add-on, packed with a lot more hardware inside than the loose MD just had. i bought a lot of MEGA-CD games recently and i have to say now, that they not really did a great job on the most of the games, regarded what the hardware would have been capable of. not so for the PCE CD-Rom, as we all know just too well. even there was "no" addition hardware packed in.

I think that both the Genesis and Sega-CD were pushed really far, especially compared to the PC Engine (CD or Hu), even though the Sega/Mega-CD doesn't have nearly as many games. From what I understand, like some other consoles the Sega-CD hardware wasn't designed very well to utilize everything under the hood. Kinda like if you opened up your PC Engine and crazy glued in a Pentium 4 chip and closed it up. There may be some powerful components inside, but that doesn't mean that it's the sum of its parts.

But even judging many Sega-CD games by the hardware's tech specs, I think that some of the most technically impressive 16-bit console games are all Sega-CD titles. utilize their hardware better than most PCE CD games do. Plus the cinemas in Popful Mail and Lunar EB and all the FMV crap make good use of the CD-ROM format.

We should've seen way more PCE CD games with fully animated cinemas that take up a good portion of the screen, especially for the Arcade Card. And only one japanese developer ever tried fmv. Imagine what could be done after several attempts with the Arcade Card. Not enough PC Engine games pushed or worked around the limits like lining up sprites to maximize the number on screen without hitting horizontal limits. As impressive as the handful of games are that made good use of animated tiles for background layers, they're way in the minority, there's no reason for it given the limitless storage space and so much more could've been done.

There are also few games that pushed the level of detail/shading/color and none do more than dent the hardware's potential. Non-sprite heavy games like RPG's could've made good use of higher resolutions, again especially with the CD space and larger system cards. And the amount of space for ADPCM samples is the same for CD2 games as it is for ACD games, so why hasn't every PCE CD game ever released not been loaded with sampled sfx?

[sunteam_paul]

I always felt that Japanese developers never fully pushed the machines as often as they should have. I was always surprised after seeing some new graphical effect or hearing some great sound that others would not try to replicate them. Why were there not sampled drums in every game, for example? Why was there not parallax scrolling everywhere? Of course I didn't realise then that some programmers could actually be lazy/rubbish.