Everything you listed is a flicker effect because there is no other way to do it on the PCE.
And you know this because? Everything I listed specifically is
not a flicker based effect. You need to go back check for yourself if you gonna make such declarations. And you even make them admittedly without any knowledge of the system too.
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.
Sapphire is not an exception from that list. It doesn't flicker. I'm not sure how flicker can be more than what it is, more kick-ass or super. You can't just increase the rate of alternating pixels beyond what the display allows, now can you? And as a side note: LCDs still uses flicker. Much higher rate. Plasma uses flicker too. Just much higher than 60hz.
I could explain these effects if you really wanted know, but knowing how they were done doesn't change the original point - that you think 'ALL' transparency on the PCE is flicker based. There's the SGX demos, but that's the SGX so you exclude them. That's valid, since 2 of the three demos required SGX specific hardware to create the effect. And no, they don't use any sort of flicker.
But there's also Jackie Chan. One of those SGX demos uses the same effect of Jackie Chan. And it's also not a flicker effect. Add that to the list of transparency effects on the PCE that's not flicker based and in a game.
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.
Well, using the LCD and capture type devices as example; they can look even
better than a real/original SD display. Not every LCD simply throws away 1 frame. Many do
frame blending because it treats the frame as a field. It really depends on the hardware. Most of the stuff you see on youtube is emulation screen capture vids. You have to go the extra mile if you wanted to frame blend that sort of footage, since YT doesn't support 60p in all resolutions (supposedly it does for 240p view mode, but not all videos for some reason). Back to point; it's not JUST flicker that doesn't show in the examples you're talking about. Anything that exists in 60fps time zone is lost when dropping a frame. That means a lot of Shmups only show half the bullets for those kind of videos too. And that has nothing to do flicker. Anyway, I'm still not sure what this has to do with flicker base effects. These systems weren't made to be view on display equipment that's going to be dropping/not display half the frames. So they have no relevance as to whether flicker is a valid method or not. Nor does emulation (which often breaks the illusion since it will drop frames from time to time).
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).
It's not. All warped quads can be rendered in transparency. There's an undesirable effect in the rendering when there's an overlapping bend edge of the same quad that folds back onto itself. The transparency logic isn't correctly applied. If you technically capable of following along, there's an in depth explanation over at
spritesmind dev forum.
I believe, some of them are done with tiles (or stuff), which are like a stealth plane over the background which then can be changed in colors to creat kind of the illusion of a transparent transformation. In fact it's only an animation over the actual BG.
stealth plane over the background O_o
If you really want to know, I can explain them. Sometimes it's better not to know the magic behind the trick
It losses its luster afterwards....
No one mentioned the TFIV transparency demo for PCE? But I guess that doesn't count since we're not counting demos.
