"Whoa... color!" - the official Game Gear thread!

[turboxray]

On 10/26/2021 at 2:17 AM, Lostdragon said:

 

 

I know this video is for FPS comparison, but the other thing no one seems to talk about.. is that the GG (and GB) are higher resolution than the Lynx. To put it into perspective; the pixels on the Lynx are 38.5% larger (tall and wide) than the GG! And you can clearly see it in this video comparison. Yes, John clipped the left and right side of the Lynx video, so it would be wider, but that's just viewable area - and not pixel size dependent (these are all square pixels with no PAR adjustment). The GG side looks much higher res.. because it is!

[Lostdragon]

13 hours ago, turboxray said:

I know this video is for FPS comparison, but the other thing no one seems to talk about.. is that the GG (and GB) are higher resolution than the Lynx. To put it into perspective; the pixels on the Lynx are 38.5% larger (tall and wide) than the GG! And you can clearly see it in this video comparison. Yes, John clipped the left and right side of the Lynx video, so it would be wider, but that's just viewable area - and not pixel size dependent (these are all square pixels with no PAR adjustment). The GG side looks much higher res.. because it is!

? It's been a personal gripe of mine for years when I would read comments from Atari Fans, that the Lynx hardware was never beaten until the arrival of the GBA. 

 

The Lynx was an amazing system yes, but as you say, both the GB and GG beat it in resolution, the GG beat it on number of colours on screen as standard (Lynx had to use clever software routines to get more than 16 colours on screen), Lynx not ideally suited for platform games. 

 

 

The GG was far from perfect, titles often had to be substantially reworked for it, but it's just daft to claim the Lynx conquered all before it, in all areas. 

[Hwlngmad]

6 hours ago, Lostdragon said:

The GG was far from perfect, titles often had to be substantially reworked for it, but it's just daft to claim the Lynx conquered all before it, in all areas. 

Very true.  As a Lynx owner from back in the day, it definitely wasn't perfect and not all conquering.  However, while there were some things that other handhelds could do better, like you mentioned in your post, the Lynx was technologically superior to the GG, Gameboy, and Gameboy color.  It wouldn't be until the GBA that something really matched and/or surpassed it hardware wise.  Still, having started a dive into various GG titles, I can tell you that it does have some impressive games that's for sure.

[turboxray]

On 10/28/2021 at 6:49 AM, Hwlngmad said:

Very true.  As a Lynx owner from back in the day, it definitely wasn't perfect and not all conquering.  However, while there were some things that other handhelds could do better, like you mentioned in your post, the Lynx was technologically superior to the GG, Gameboy, and Gameboy color.  It wouldn't be until the GBA that something really matched and/or surpassed it hardware wise.  Still, having started a dive into various GG titles, I can tell you that it does have some impressive games that's for sure.

I'm confused as to how you justify it's technically superior when it's literally inferior is almost every way to compared the GG? I mean sure, it has scaling and rotation.. but at the expense of much lower resolution and super low framerate (and color). I'm not sure how that adds up to overall superior. Also, do the Sega Nomad and PCE GT/LT not count?

[+jgkspsx]

The scaling performance in Blue Lightning blows away almost every Genesis Super Scaler port, much less the Turbografx’s badly compromised Afterburner II etc or especially the Game Gear’s sad attempts like G LOC and Space Harrier (which, I will grant, is a ton of fun despite being graphically not much to look at). The full polygonal 3D of Steel Talons and Hard Drivin’ or the open worlds of Warbirds or Battlewheels or Cybervirus would be impossible to do on a handheld (Nomad excepted) until the GBA. Either that or the folks who programmed Faceball weren’t the best. (Actually, given that GB Faceball runs better than GG, maybe that is the case…)

 

Now, Game Gear pixel art is generally much more impressive than Lynx, and Lynx can get a little claustrophobic. Neither system was really pushed to its limits, sadly. It would be nice to see homebrewers take on that challenge.

[Hwlngmad]

31 minutes ago, turboxray said:

I'm confused as to how you justify it's technically superior when it's literally inferior is almost every way to compared the GG? I mean sure, it has scaling and rotation.. but at the expense of much lower resolution and super low framerate (and color). I'm not sure how that adds up to overall superior. Also, do the Sega Nomad and PCE GT/LT not count?

 

7 minutes ago, jgkspsx said:

The scaling performance in Blue Lightning blows away almost every Genesis Super Scaler port, much less the Turbografx’s badly compromised Afterburner II etc or especially the Game Gear’s sad attempts like G LOC and Space Harrier (which, I will grant, is a ton of fun despite being graphically not much to look at). The full polygonal 3D of Steel Talons and Hard Drivin’ or the open worlds of Battlewheels or Cybervirus would be impossible to do on a handheld (Nomad excepted) until the GBA. Either that or the folks who programmed Faceball weren’t the best. (Actually, given that GB Faceball runs better than GG, maybe that is the case…)

There is no way in hades that the GG can do what the Lynx can with Blue Lightning, or even one of my personal favorites Warbirds.  Granted, both Blue Lightning and/or Warbirds are not the most fully fleshed out games on there.  But, in 1991, Warbirds on the Lynx was doing 3D effects that were on par (to a large but not complete extent) only really available on computers.  Granted, the GG was an impressive machine in its own right.  But, the GG was really just a slightly hopped up Master System whereas the chipset in the Lynx was really something special to be seen on a handheld in the late 80s and/or early 90s.  Now, was the Lynx completely superior to the GG.  Nope, as you pointed out its better resolution and framerate.  However, going along with what jgkspsx said, the polygonal 3d with scaling and rotation was damn impressive, borderline mind blowing and left any other handheld in the dust.  Just my opinion though.  You are more than entitled to your own opinion, but the things being done on the Lynx really weren't seen again on a handheld until the GBA.

[Lostdragon]

2 hours ago, jgkspsx said:

The scaling performance in Blue Lightning blows away almost every Genesis Super Scaler port, much less the Turbografx’s badly compromised Afterburner II etc or especially the Game Gear’s sad attempts like G LOC and Space Harrier (which, I will grant, is a ton of fun despite being graphically not much to look at). The full polygonal 3D of Steel Talons and Hard Drivin’ or the open worlds of Warbirds or Battlewheels or Cybervirus would be impossible to do on a handheld (Nomad excepted) until the GBA. Either that or the folks who programmed Faceball weren’t the best. (Actually, given that GB Faceball runs better than GG, maybe that is the case…)

 

Now, Game Gear pixel art is generally much more impressive than Lynx, and Lynx can get a little claustrophobic. Neither system was really pushed to its limits, sadly. It would be nice to see homebrewers take on that challenge.

Game Gear is tile-based hardware, is it not? and with an 8-bit CPU, your not going to be doing the maths for polygon 3D, even the Genesis made use of the Z80 and 68000 chips for F-22 Interceptor and Block Out. 

 

Battlewheels and Cyber virus were superb examples of the Lynx hardware being used to great effect, I will also throw in Stun Runner, as that used sprite rings to mimic the polygons of the coin-op and retain the essential speed and essence, where as the ST and Amiga conversions went the Polygon 3D route and suffered badly as a result. 

 

 

Steel Talons? Hmmn... an ambitious conversion, has it's fans, but really needed to be on more powerful hardware to get a decent frame rate out of it and you lost a lot on the control side. 

 

Hard Drivin, again, can't fault it, ambition wise, but implemention left an awful lot to be desired , controls especially. 

 

How they got through playtesting is beyond me. 

 

Just personal opinion, but I would of rather Atari had devoted resources to titles like:

 

Cabal

Vindicators 

Rolling Thunder 

 

On Lynx, than try and do Steel Talons and Hard Drivin. 

 

Better still, aquire the licence to Elite, the tech demo Handmade Software showed Atari, built using the Battlezone 2000 routines, was very impressive and they said the Lynx hardware was ideally suited to it.. 

 

That would of been something way beyond the Game Gear, not available on Genesis etc. 

 

Jeff Minter offered to convert Defender II to the Lynx, Atari never got back to him, yet the Game Gear had Dropzone.. 

 

 

 

 

Atari seemed to want to push the Lynx on the grounds of it's arcade conversions, then in order to keep costs down, limited developers on cartridge sizes, so games like APB, Ninja Gaiden, Double Dragon etc were compromised as a result. 

 

 

Crying shame. 

Edited October 29, 2021 by Lostdragon

[turboxray]

On 10/29/2021 at 12:30 PM, jgkspsx said:

The scaling performance in Blue Lightning blows away almost every Genesis Super Scaler port, much less the Turbografx’s badly compromised Afterburner II etc or especially the Game Gear’s sad attempts like G LOC and Space Harrier (which, I will grant, is a ton of fun despite being graphically not much to look at). The full polygonal 3D of Steel Talons and Hard Drivin’ or the open worlds of Warbirds or Battlewheels or Cybervirus would be impossible to do on a handheld (Nomad excepted) until the GBA. Either that or the folks who programmed Faceball weren’t the best. (Actually, given that GB Faceball runs better than GG, maybe that is the case…)

 

Now, Game Gear pixel art is generally much more impressive than Lynx, and Lynx can get a little claustrophobic. Neither system was really pushed to its limits, sadly. It would be nice to see homebrewers take on that challenge.

Okay...

 

Quote

The scaling performance in Blue Lightning

Single digit framerate? Super low res solution? No animation outside of your ship (which is already choppy)? There's no rotation. The enemies are so low framerate and pixeled, that there isn't much scaling going on. Most of the time, it just looks like the object pixels are just wiggling around. The floor, for almost all levels, is a low frame rate 4-5 color scanline image. There's actually object/layers there (like trees), except it's so low res and small they don't even appear as not being a flat part of the BG. You're trying to tell me that looks more impressive than SH/AB/etc on 4th gen consoles???

 

You give me a local mapped linear-pixel vram buffer at that res and I could do it just in software alone on the PCE, let alone the MD, at that frame rate. So yeah, give me a chunky-to-planar chip on cart, and I'll get you exactly that! The same can't be said for the Lynx. No amount of cart hardware is going fix the inherit problems of the Lynx. Sorry.

 

 

 

Quote

much less the Turbografx’s badly compromised Afterburner II etc

Seriously??? Okay.. how is the PCE's version of AB2 "badly compromised" exactly? I really need to see this hahah. I mean, I probably already know what you're going to say, but since the statement is so ridiculous, maybe you'll surprise me

 

Quote

The full polygonal 3D of Steel Talons and Hard Drivin’

 

5 frames a second. You're boosting about 5 frames a second??? ?  And Steel Talons has like 5-6 polygons.. maybe.

 

 

Quote

Warbirds

Seven tiny pyramids and some clouds, against a solid green plane? At least the fps looks like it might approach 12 at points in the game hah.

 

Quote

Battlewheels

 About the only one we agree on. At least you can see cars up close. The HUD being the letter box reduces the vertical res down to like 68% of the screen. I guess it's needed to get that framerate up.

 

Quote

full polygonal 3D..[].. would be impossible to do on a handheld (Nomad excepted) until the GBA

 And you know this because....? So if I added any sort of support chip on the GG or GT or GB/GBC, then it's still not possible? What's possible and impossible, and what happened are two very different things.

 

 

Look. Resolution aside, and color aside, if you gonna make a blitter system like the Lynx VS any raster based system - at least make it fast enough to handle actual usable blitting speeds!! Part of the power of a blitter system is that you can trade speed for more pixel bandwidth (objects/transforms/etc). I get that. It's why systems moved away from raster base video. The scaling is almost inherently for free for blitters because it's nearest neighbor; the blitter simply skips or repeats a pixel - that's it. This, from a 16bit 16mhz ASIC? I'm sorry, but that's not impressive. Something else that's also underwhelming of the Lynx compared to EVERY other console and handheld... it literally has to load rom to ram. It doesn't have direct access to rom. That is literally the strength of a cart base system. The Lynx has the left over 'load' mechanism from the tape drive design, except rom replaced it. That's horrible. What you can't do on the Lynx but what you can do on the GG, is actually have additional functionality for stuff like blitting. If you wanted low 16 color, low frame rate, blitting/scaling.. you could get that on the GG hahah. 

[Tanooki]

Ummm you want to really check yourself with the can't do it on stuff before GBA with 3D?  I know it's probably a laugh, but you had to mention Hard Drivin, and well Race Drivin was on Gameboy, and as disgusting as it may be, it has a better control and framerate setup than both the Genesis and SNES games do on stock hardware.  Why I have no damned clue, but it is using polygons and the same courses all the same which is strange.  Gameboy shouldn't be doing that all, but you get those rare nuggets of geniuses that pull off insane stuff on old hardware like that.

 

@turboxray He's blowing smoke for attention as I'd feel bad if he actually believed every little bit of that post you tore apart.  AB2 is NOT badly compromised, I own it/did own it (have it still not sold but system I have.)  It outdoes the sad Genesis release so not sure where the point got lost on that one.  Generally games between PCE and GEN/MD hardware where they had the same title, the PCE one fared better.  Devil Crash or Dragon's Fury?  SF2CE PCE vs SF2CE on Gen...?  Hah.  Looked, sounded, played better...I feel like I'm reading an issue of EGM here where all the writers were paid shills on crack fanboying up one system over another for brownie points.  And like I said, you can do it even without a chip on the Gameboy with Race Drivin with 3D polygonal graphics that aren't an utter slide show.  It can also on GB done smoothly at least enough to be playable with wireframe with X and Days of Thunder too as other choices, GBC had a few more including even the unreleased until recently FPS game Tyrannosaurus Tex and Faceball 2000 did have full polygonal walls in the mazes and scaled sprite smilies to shoot at.  Maybe dementia is setting in forgetting things?

[+jeremiahjt]

I hate to break up the blathering on about how inferior the Lynx is to, well everything according to some people, but one has to do what one has to. I picked up a couple more Game Gear games today and both are pretty impressive: Shinobi and Vampire: Master of Darkness.

 

Now I have heard good things about the Game Gear Shinobi so I was not surprised in the least how well it played. Every time I hear someone talk about Vampire: Master of Darkness, it is always the Master System version. The Game Gear version seems pretty impressive so far. Almost as impressive as what the Lynx can do.

 

Anybody know why they added "Vampire" to the title of the Game Gear port?

[+jgkspsx]

Wow, somebody needs to take some happy pills. Hard Drivin’ is not on the Game Boy, and if somebody the caliber of Dylan Cuthbert with the budget that the games mentioned above had been working on the Lynx it would have been interesting to see what they could have achieved.
 

You can talk about specs and hardware design all you want, but the system libraries are what the system libraries are, and Game Boy and Game Gear don’t have anything like Battlewheels, Battlezone 2000, CyberVirus, or Warbirds, with the sole exception of X, which is a work of genius from the best of the best. If I’m wrong, I’d love to play whatever I don’t know about.

 

I have a copy of Afterburner II for the PC Engine available if anybody wants it. I agree it’s an impressive port and probably the best home port until, what, the X68000? But the canyon levels with their single-width canyon walls are just hard for me to take when I have the 32X and arcade versions close at hand. (Also they cut the Outrun and Super Hang On cameos, booo.) I wasn’t dumb enough to ever buy the Genesis game or the Sega CD “Afterburner 3” atrocity  

 

Here is a comparison of some of the biggest name afterburner-alikes for each of the systems:

 

 

 

 

 

I think to any fair minded person the Lynx game comes off really well. I played G-LOC for hours and hours and hours - it was the system seller for me after I played the arcade game at a birthday party - but if I had seen Blue Lightning I would have been beside myself.

 

@jeremiahjt I think they just added “Vampire” so it was more clear what the game was about. Probably parents and politicians were up in arms given the timeframe  

 

Then again, the Japanese title was “In the Wake of Vampire”, with Vampire highlighted, so you could argue that was the original title. The Japanese art was much classier IMO.

 

[+jgkspsx]

So I prepared myself a Halloween Spooktacular of games that are appropriate for Halloween:

 

Garfield: Caught in the Act (Count Slobula’s Castle)

 

In the Wake of Vampire: Master of Darkness

 

Dracula’s Castle

 

 

Bram Stoker’s Dracula

 

 

Wolfchild

 

 

Megami Tensei Gaiden Last Bible Special

 

(There’s also Last Bible not so special, but I ain’t got all night.)

 

Devilish

 

Wizard Pinball

 

 

Pinball Dreams (Graveyard table)

 

 

Chakan: The Forever Man

 

 

And of course that irresistible trio of ghost hunting games…

 

Pac-Man

 

 

Ms Pac-Man
 

 

And best of all… PAC-ATTACK!!!

 

EDIT: and how could I forget the Addams Family?? (Because I didn’t really want to play it…)

 

 

[+neogeo1982]

What a fun spooktacular!?

[+neogeo1982]

Gamegear Mini! Did you buy 1 or all of the GG mini packages? I kinda wish they would have done a Phantasy Star one with translated Gaiden, Adventure, and Text Adventure?.

And they're too mini for my old hands for any length of time...

[+jgkspsx]

I have the three Minis with a majority of games playable without Japanese language skills. They are surprisingly playable.

[Tanooki]

I had considered getting one of them once, but backed off it when I saw how greedy people were being about the charges for it vs the domestic value.  I figure eventually the trolls will lose interest and they'll fairly well bottom out like other little gimmicky pocket pick up play devices.

[+jgkspsx]

They were relatively pricey to begin with… I think $35 or $40. But the screen and sound quality is in a whole different league than the Tiny Arcade / Micro Arcade things. I felt dumb about spending that much on them and still do.

 

The Aleste one that came with the Aleste collection I do not feel dumb about, though. That was worth every penny. I almost got to the last level in GG Aleste II and I wasn’t even playing well, so it controls pretty well.

[akator]

I got a RetroSix modded Game Gear off eBay.  The screen looks and plays great, even better than I hoped.  I can't recommend this enough.  Even SMS games look amazing.

[Tanooki]

The Aleste one I found interesting, but worrisome that being the size they are trying to keep track of pixel sized bullets would be a bit much.

[+jgkspsx]

I have found Mark III Aleste to be the worst in that regard. The GG Aleste games were made with a very ghosty original screen in mind and thus with high visibility and fair shot patterns as a result (one reason I like them so much). 

[+jgkspsx]

So far the Analogue Pocket is living up to expectations. It’s really weird to be playing Game Gear on a vertically oriented handheld!!

 

Had to be the first game I played on it:

 

 

 

Mappy’s superb colors really shine with this device.

 

Next I am going to test all the Codemasters games. Some of those won’t run on emulators or flash carts…

[+jgkspsx]

Compatibility isn’t perfect. Only two of the ten Codemasters games work. 

Everything else I’ve tested including the most advanced games I know of has basically worked. 

Sonic 2 in 1 is stuck on Sonic Spinball even if I power down and power back up, and crashes on waking from sleep. Of the three bootleg multicarts I tested two crashed on waking from sleep. But Sonic 2 in 1 is more of a collector’s item than anything you would want to play, and save states work fine on the multicarts as long as you keep playing the same game.

[+neogeo1982]

Hey can you show one of the shining forces on that? It'd be nice to see how the text and saturation look. Oh, will a master gear fit in that? With something like Phantasy Star? I used to hate how the GG squished the text down using the master gear...

[roots.genoa]

10 hours ago, jgkspsx said:

Compatibility isn’t perfect. Only two of the ten Codemasters games work. 

Everything else I’ve tested including the most advanced games I know of has basically worked. 

Sonic 2 in 1 is stuck on Sonic Spinball even if I power down and power back up, and crashes on waking from sleep. Of the three bootleg multicarts I tested two crashed on waking from sleep. But Sonic 2 in 1 is more of a collector’s item than anything you would want to play, and save states work fine on the multicarts as long as you keep playing the same game.

Do you know if there were the same problems with the GG adapter of the Mega Sg? I think I remember GG's core was based on the latest revision of the hardware, the one by Majesco, even though I have no idea if this one has compatibility problems to begin with.

[+jgkspsx]

I know that at least Cosmic Spacehead worked on the Mega SG adapter. I intend to test them all today.