Playing to SNES' Strengths

[Kirk_Johnston]

 

Here's a little test showing the difference you can get when you play to the SNES' strengths rather than the Genesis' strengths. That's 256 colours on SNES vs 64 on Genesis, 128 sprites on SNES vs 80 on Genesis, while the resolution on SNES is 256x224 vs 320x224 on Genesis as per usual.

 

And, yes, I know when you do it the other way around there's things the Genesis can do better too, but the whole point of this example is to show SNES doing some of the stuff it objectively does better, which I think a lot of people have tried to diminish or outright dismiss in recent times, so I just wanted a simple example to demonstrate that many of the SNES' particular advantages actually are indeed quite relevant and meaningful and can make a noticeable difference when applied properly.

 

Of course, this is only using a couple of the features available to both systems, and I could have added another background layer here on both versions with maybe some parallax scrolling for example, or used some additional colour math and window/shape masking on the SNES version to maybe do a little lense flare or something like that, and so on. But I did what I did. Lol

 

One other relevant thing to also point out here is that the SNES can run a scene like this at a solid 60fps too--as demonstrated in the example below that is properly coded for and runs directly on the SNES, which is basically the same as what I'm showing above but just not in quite so easily understandable a way at a casual glance, hence my slightly more easily understandable example--so any thoughts people have around the Genesis' CPU being faster are irrelevant in this case as it can't run games any better than a solid 60fps, which would also be true of any game programmed to run at a solid 60fps on SNES and/or Genesis.

 

Edited June 23, 2023 by Kirk_Johnston

[Kirk_Johnston]

And, just to add, I converted both images using the same palette quantisation tool created by Rilden and the settings that specifically fit each console's colour specs, so I didn't deliberately downgrade or make that background on Genesis looks worse or something unfair like that. This is exactly what each conversion turned out like without any additional manipulation or tweaking from me.

 

I just wanted to make that clear so no one thinks I'm cheating to show off the Genesis in a worse light or whatever. It just has quarter the amount of colours on-screen total chosen from a master palette that's a whopping 64x smaller, so this is what you get without putting in additional effort to try and compensate for the fact it simply doesn't have anywhere near the same colour capabilities as SNES.

 

And, hey, I'm sure someone could go in and clean up the Genesis background and make it look slightly better if they wanted, just as they could go in and do the same for the SNES background too. But I guess that's similar to how so many developers putting the same games on both SNES and Genesis back in the day didn't put in the additional effort to truly take full advantage of everything the SNES could do that the Genesis couldn't and play fully to its strengths on its versions of those games either, yet they often did indeed put additional effort into playing to the Genesis' strengths and/or hiding its weaknesses. I guess that's partly what has inspired me in modern times to make so many examples simply showing off what the SNES is actually capable of when not artificially throttled and gimped.

Edited June 23, 2023 by Kirk_Johnston