Regarding Interlaced Mode

[Kirk_Johnston]

When using the interfaced 320x448 mode on Genesis, is there either a built-in setting or some other way to avoid the visuals looking vertically squished like on Sonic 2's and Combat Cars' two-player modes?

 

https://youtu.be/Omu-zI0HKu4?t=194

[Kirk_Johnston]

Note: That was supposed to read "interlaced".

 

Also, here's Combat Cars for reference too:

 

[Kanon]

Since it's 448 pixels high,, the only way to not look squished would be to output a different aspect ration (not 4:3), or, realistically but expensive, draw specific assets for interlaced mode (have a "tall" version of the sprites and other assets, so when they are squished they look normal)

[maxxoccupancy]

It seems strange then, later in the life of the Genesis, that they didn't just all develop 320x448i games, since the images are much clearer.  Yes, the assets consume more data, but 16-40 megabit games were common during the post-Sonic 1994-98 era.  In fact, using bank switching, you can reach 120 megabits in theory, or 30MB, almost as much as Golden Axe arcade.  Sega CD games, especially, had hundreds of megabytes of data to work with, so still images and sidescrolling games could definitely use the improved resolution.

 

It's just like Shadow-Highlight Mode and color blending.  If you don't mind duplicating tiles or adding a whole additional set of SH sprites, you can draw from a palette of 3,375 colors.  And if you don't mind switching the color palette during HBlank (as a few games did), you can display over 200 colors out of that palette of 3,375.

If you've got bits to burn, why not burn 'em?

[maxxoccupancy]

120 megabits is 15MB.  Sorry.

That is enough for games like Final Fantasy 7 if cut scenes and extras are taken out.  Reason being that each pixel is only 4 bits, and compression methods available at that time allowed a more than doubling of animation data in the cart, starting with Aladdin 1994.  The largest game, IIRC, was Street Fighter II at 40 megabits, or 5MB.  Three such games could've been put on a single cart.

 

Building retro games for the Genesis, it makes sense to me to just fill up the cartridge: 120 megabit.  While this must be spread over four banks, we've gotten so accustomed to 60fps, high res, high color graphics that even Sonic, Batman & Robin, and Panorama Cotton look a bit bleak to our eyes--let alone youngsters. 

[Kirk_Johnston]

On 4/12/2023 at 7:00 AM, maxxoccupancy said:

It seems strange then, later in the life of the Genesis, that they didn't just all develop 320x448i games, since the images are much clearer.  Yes, the assets consume more data, but 16-40 megabit games were common during the post-Sonic 1994-98 era.  In fact, using bank switching, you can reach 120 megabits in theory, or 30MB, almost as much as Golden Axe arcade.  Sega CD games, especially, had hundreds of megabytes of data to work with, so still images and sidescrolling games could definitely use the improved resolution.

 

It's just like Shadow-Highlight Mode and color blending.  If you don't mind duplicating tiles or adding a whole additional set of SH sprites, you can draw from a palette of 3,375 colors.  And if you don't mind switching the color palette during HBlank (as a few games did), you can display over 200 colors out of that palette of 3,375.

If you've got bits to burn, why not burn 'em?

Hmmm, how can it be a palette of 3,375 colours if the normal palette is 512 colours and shadow/highlight is just displaying either a darker or lighter shade of whatever colour. Wouldn't it be around 1500 colours?

[maxxoccupancy]

 

Shadow Highlight Mode gives you 15 levels of red, 15 green, and 16 blue, which gives you a still frame of 148 out of 3,375.

Alternately, some Sega CD FMV games like Sherlock Holmes would blend two dithered images together to get much better looking backgrounds. Again, you can draw from a palette of thousand of colors.

The power of the Genesis wasn't really understood until 1994 and later games started really pushing the limits.

[Kirk_Johnston]

On 4/14/2023 at 3:09 AM, maxxoccupancy said:

 

Shadow Highlight Mode gives you 15 levels of red, 15 green, and 16 blue, which gives you a still frame of 148 out of 3,375.

Alternately, some Sega CD FMV games like Sherlock Holmes would blend two dithered images together to get much better looking backgrounds. Again, you can draw from a palette of thousand of colors.

The power of the Genesis wasn't really understood until 1994 and later games started really pushing the limits.

So, when using shadow/highlight mode it's actually less unique colours on-screen than I thought (I thought it was around 192 max), but more to choose from than I thought (I thought it was around 1536 max)--at least going by the way it's done in the video. Interesting.

 

It's kinda crazy though that, by comparison, the SNES in Mode 3's standard 8bpp 256-colour mode can still produce images that look like this [on a single layer, and without using any colour math or the like]:

 

Makes me real curious to see just how much better SNES visuals could get than what we've seen from it thus far in terms of the max colours if pushed to its limits. And there's even a direct colour mode on SNES that allows 2048 colours per tile on background 1 alone (chosen from, I think, an 11-bit, 2048 palette), plus around another 256 for background 2 and the sprites combined (chosen from the normal 15-bit, 32,768 master palette), still without using any colour math and the like.

 

Edited April 17, 2023 by Kirk_Johnston

[Kirk_Johnston]

A final image just for fun to go along with the Sonic one:

Hehe!