I give up. The Genesis is true 16Bit and the PCE is a 16Bit imposter.

[Arkhan]

Ninja Gaiden has some great parallax.

 I like it.  Its like the Ys 3 stuff

kinda chunky but still nice.

[Emerald Rocker]

I was kidding.  Ninja Gaiden would be better if they hadn't even tried to add parallax.

[Arkhan]

I know that, but I like it.  The chunkyscroll doesn't bug me.  I play alot of MSX games that do that.

[Bonknuts]

THEY ALL FLICKER. That's how they function. What are you, blind?

 Am I blind??? Are you a prick? Put a leash on the condescending tone for just a sec.

 These are the games that come to mind when I think of non flickering transparency.

 Lords of Thunder: The water draining part in the water level. The part right where you exit the cave back out into the open/ruins area. Translucent blue water drains because the enemy smashes a hole in the floor.

 Sapphire: Forget the level, but there's a light glow around your ship that follows you and lights up the BG underneath.

 Rondo: The boss holding his head. He's translucent blue as his transparency fades to solid.

 ShapeShifter: In the amazon level, when you fail into the pools of blue water - your character is seen with a translucent blue overlay.

 Asuka 120%: when your character is talking to the opponent before the fight. A transparent shadow in the display box over the scrolling background.  

 I'm sure if you look harder, you'll find some more games that don't use flicker.

 Also LCD TVs and digital capture devices don't have shit to do with these old consoles. They were designed for CRTs, SD at that. These old systems display 60fps, it's irrelevant if newer technology can't show these 'FX' correctly. They looked fine on SD sets back in the day. They also recorded fine on my VCR back then too. If you're gonna argue that they are invalid because it's not hardware color math in the video processor, fine. I understand your point of view. And it's a perfectly valid point to have. But don't make up bullshit excuses LCDs and such.

 As far this whole demo thing/mentality. Isn't the large part of these kind of technical system vs system arguments, of what the system is capable of? If you're gonna use existing software to give example of the system's capability, then demos are perfectly valid as well as showing this off what is capable as well. If you want to talk about the limitations of those FX, than that's perfectly valid. But to discount them completely is just ignorance. If you don't care what the system is really capable and only care to play the games, then why are you even participating or arguing in such a discussion?

I was kidding.  Ninja Gaiden would be better if they hadn't even tried to add parallax.

 I completely agree. It doesn't even look as good as Ys III (good being relative here).

[nodtveidt]

They could have done a better job. It's the result of trying to move too much data at the wrong time during the retrace. But at least it doesn't look quite as bad as Ys III... there's no saving that one.

[Black Tiger]

Every transparency on every retail PCE game is fake. They flicker completely opaque objects, usually inconsistently. Its just a fact. f*ck tech demos, they are neat but I can't play them. You not being able to tell the difference between a code based version of this effect and the SNES's hardware accelerate one is either wishful thinking or shitty eyesight.

 And the transparency effects on the PCE that don't flicker? What's your opinion of those? Just curious.

THEY ALL FLICKER. That's how they function. What are you, blind?

I guess you haven't played many PCE games (or are blind). Since you haven't picked up on what some of us have been talking about along the way, I'll just go ahead and spell it out for you once again that there are several different types of effects done in different ways in PCE games, that would usually be done with hardware transparency in a SNES game. I won't brand them all "transparency" effects, because as I explained earlier, hardware transparencies are used in SNES games to simulate an effect. The transparency itself isn't, or at least shouldn't be the effect (many SNES games use transparencies for no good reason).

A good example of one type of an effect in a PCE game that is usually done with a transparency tint in SNES games is the red lighting in a base after an alarm goes off in Blood Gear. Gamefan criticized Street Fighter Alpha for Saturn because they said that the blue shadows weren't right. They even speculated that the Saturn must lack transparencies and therefore couldn't make "real" blue shadows. But they got it completely backwords. The Saturn's default shadows were blue tinted versions of the player sprites, in other words how they'd look using a simple transparency effect. The arcade shadows were entirely rendered with shades of blue.

On the left is a blue tinted pic, as though a transparencey was used. On the right is a blue scale image, as though the screen was lit with blue light.




Blood Gear's red light effect makes the regular colored screen transition into shades of red. This alone would be a superior effect for depicting a red lit room than using a SNES transparency. But in the shadowed areas of the normal background, new details are uncovered by the strong red light. The combination of both effects is very powerful, but this type of scene is often depicted in SNES games using a transparency method to just simply tint everything.

[Arkhan]

Also LCD TVs and digital capture devices don't have shit to do with these old consoles. They were designed for CRTs, SD at that. These old systems display 60fps, it's irrelevant if newer technology can't show these 'FX' correctly. They looked fine on SD sets back in the day. They also recorded fine on my VCR back then too. If you're gonna argue that they are invalid because it's not hardware color math in the video processor, fine. I understand your point of view. And it's a perfectly valid point to have. But don't make up bullshit excuses LCDs and such.

They weren't designed explicitly for CRT displays.  Its just, thats what existed.  Its "designed for them" by default.  The arrival of new TVs shows how flickering effects and such are a bit limited.  Hardware transparency trumps flickering crap.

As far this whole demo thing/mentality. Isn't the large part of these kind of technical system vs system arguments, of what the system is capable of? If you're gonna use existing software to give example of the system's capability, then demos are perfectly valid as well as showing this off what is capable as well. If you want to talk about the limitations of those FX, than that's perfectly valid. But to discount them completely is just ignorance. If you don't care what the system is really capable and only care to play the games, then why are you even participating or arguing in such a discussion?

There are many parts to this debate.  Some of it is comparing the libraries and their use of hardware, hence some people not giving a damn about tech demos released 10+ years after the system died commercially.. or tech demos that are neat, but can't actually function well in a full game.  If you want to prove a tech demo is great for a GAME console, put it in a game.  If it can do it, but can't do it in a game, it is sort of useless on a game machine.  Thats my standpoint.  I program the PCE for the sole purpose of making games.  If some obnoxious hardware nonsense cant be done in a game, I don't care about it.

and then, some of it is comparing the hardware itself without considering the game library at all.... that line of discussion is where tech demos and balls to the wall nonsense takes place.


everythings valid.  Its just a lot of tangents to one main topic: System1 vs. System2

[Tatsujin]

I'm looking at you, IREM.

Ever played X-Multiply?

I agree that irem had up and downs on their sound works, but they had done also pretty good works here and there. as proven in the game mentioned above.

[Tatsujin]

hmm..wears the saturns trancparency?

[Arkhan]

I'm looking at you, IREM.

Ever played X-Multiply?

I agree that irem had up and downs on their sound works, but they had done also pretty good works here and there. as proven in the game mentioned above.

yeah....but why didnt they do that for ALL their games.


They did ok with the PCE chip.  Tonma and Vigilante sound nice.

[Black Tiger]

hmm..wears the saturns trancparency?

Try Shining Force III if you wanna see real-time "transparent" images of 3D models against other 3D graphics. I know that no other console through the last generation could pull that off and chances are no one has attempted it with the current gen. Every games just uses fugly transparent polygons.

[Tatsujin]

why did so many companies fail to use transparency on the SS? 2D & 3D.
just look at akumajo dracula x - gekka no yasokyoku. it ruined a lot.

[Black Tiger]

why did so many companies fail to use transparency on the SS? 2D & 3D.
just look at akumajo dracula x - gekka no yasokyoku. it ruined a lot.

There are still so many that did use transparencies. Unfortunately, just like PCE with parallax, the ones that don't stand out more.

In the case of Dracula X, it was a quick port and depending on who you believe, rendered using polygons.

[SignOfZeta]

THEY ALL FLICKER. That's how they function. What are you, blind?

 Am I blind??? Are you a prick? Put a leash on the condescending tone for just a sec.

 These are the games that come to mind when I think of non flickering transparency.

Everything you listed is a flicker effect because there is no other way to do it on the PCE. The possible exception is that one one level of Sapphire with the light on the floor. I don't quite understand how that was done. I'm suspecting its just very effective use of traditional animation, but honestly I have no idea. Maybe its just really kick-ass flicker.

Also LCD TVs and digital capture devices don't have shit to do with these old consoles.

The reason I mentioned LCDs wasn't to say, "these effects suck because they don't work on LCDs". That would be silly. I was merely pointing out that the reason they don't work on such displays is because they are flickering, therefore, if you want to know which transparencies are flicker based, just watch a Youtube video of the game that was grabbed via analog video capture. Fighting games, for example, will usually have one guy with a fully opaque shadow and the other guy with none at all. These effects are also used a lot in SNES games, btw, since the SNES can only use real transparencies in limited situations. Street Fighter has the same flicker shadows on any system from this time.

As for the oft repeated idea that SNES transparencies are somehow a "cheap trick" because they are hardware accelerated...then you must think redbook audio is a pretty cheap trick as well, eh? Not only does it rely on hardware trickery, but it allows the used of straight up recordings of real instruments bypassing the system's soundchip completely. What a lie that is! And they do it for no good reason!*

Regarding transparencies on the SS. I'm pretty sure they are, like the SNES, limited to BG layers or something like that. They are used well in...Thunderforce V, I think it is, in the BGs. Shining Force III has one town with a giant blue gem or something (it was a long time ago) that is transparent and not made using dithering, that obviously isn't a BG by nature, but it, but maybe its possible to use a matte of sorts aligned with a polygon (not correct terms here, sorry).

* Since some people can't tell, this was sarcasm used to prove a point. At the same time though...its kind of true. Its hard to imagine how a game like...I don't know, Dekoboko Densetsu, would have had any worse music if it had been chip based. Some of that fruity-ass Yamaha/Roland based junk just drives me nuts now. Also, why the hell do you have to have a "reason"? Its a f*cking cloud layer, not a spending bill. Shit.

[Tatsujin]

why did so many companies fail to use transparency on the SS? 2D & 3D.
just look at akumajo dracula x - gekka no yasokyoku. it ruined a lot.

There are still so many that did use transparencies. Unfortunately, just like PCE with parallax, the ones that don't stand out more.

In the case of Dracula X, it was a quick port and depending on who you believe, rendered using polygons.

an other case is radiant silvergun. no trans there, altought it would have looked 200% better if it had

it seems that I'm only aware of those titles which didn't use transparency..lol.