Graphical tricks on the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis | White_Pointer Gaming 

At around 6:20, when talking about the solid background colour, I say "At the very back, you had a solid background colour. This could have been set to any available colour but was usually blue or black. This was set in stone and couldn't be changed." I understand the way I worded this might be a bit confusing, and may be interpreted as meaning that the actual colour couldn't be changed once set (which isn't true). So to clarify, what I meant was that it was always the bottom-most layer and it was set in that position. This is what couldn't be changed. Thanks for watching and all of your feedback!

man i miss the days where every console was different and brought something new and unique to them that would dazzle and amaze. i honestly cant remember any recent consoles that have done what the mega drives parallax, snes mode 7, transparencies, and sample based music, and pcengine cd (and mega cd which was a upgrade over the normal mega drive). now everything is the same ol same on every console. well the new 3ds xl for me was awe inspiring as i adore stereoscopic 3d and wished theyd converted more classic games for it like M2 did with the sega games.

Other line effect megadrive could pull was reusing sprite registers, enabling it to use more than the theoretical limit of 80 sprites.

Of the big four 16-bit consoles, the Mega Drive was also, while limited, best at rendering simple polygons on the screen, without helper chips. Scaling and rotation of sprites was possible through clever programming. Road Rash II shows scaling for the entire screen, more noticeable when the camera zooms out after finishing a race, and with all the rolling hills, simple physiscs, random traffic, many opponents (with different behaviors) and obstacles going on, it's a miracle the game is still very playable, even with the low frame rate. Also, the Streets of Rage games on the harder difficulties and some shooters show many animated sprites of different sizes on the screen, one of the console's strong points. Lastly, the console's sound chips are more flexible than a lot of people give 'em credit for. Check out the Overdrive demo by Titan made for original hardware to hear for yourself. The visuals are well done as well.

Great video. The FPS is done with raycasting; the Devs created their own bitmap mode withe one of the 2 planes. They also probably used the 256pixel wide mode you talked in the video. The columns drawn with raycasting are 2 pixels wide (if you want to cast 128 rays) or 4 pixels wide (64 rays)

I always liked the MD/Gen palette. Yes, it's smaller than the other 4th-gen machines, but it had this interesting moody quality. And that, in turn, permeates most games published for it, to some extent or another. So MD/Gen games tend to have a very distinct vibe to them that's almost always recognizable. I kind of miss when console quirks allowed them to have a genuinely distinct look. See also: later-era VCS/2600 games and their eye-popping use of raster effects and TV-signal hackery, like no other console could do.

I love these videos. Its so interesting how devs got so much out of the limited hardware. I couldn't imagine programming a whole game in assembly

Thank you for this video. I realy like that technical stuf. Lighter and darker colors of the palette were used to create transparency-like effects in later games (light streaks in Vectorman underwater level for instance). Recently I've learned that those colors could be apply to sprites to make them look transparent without dithering.

I always appreciated the Genesis having "High Definition Graphics" emblazed right on the console itself. Even as a kid I knew that resolution mattered. Games were more colorful, usually had more realistic sound, and sweet mode-7 on SNES. But, the sharper visuals (especially with the rca cables), speedier gameplay, and *blood* won me over.

Now we should do a vid on the 3D superscalars in the Sega CD. There are only about 12-13 games out of over 200 titles that made use of the powerful ASIC-DSP.

I appreciate videos like this because even though I'm familiar with the types of graphics the Genesis can do and grew up with the system both as a child in the early 90's through adulthood I still learned a lot by watching this video. For a very long time up until the last 10 to 15 years the only system that got thoroughly discussed was the NES and systems especially with regard to the Genesis had no digestible information on it with the exception of some emulation author diaries or reads. Those were helpful but without graphical examples to accompany it or in best case scenario watching video examples like this it was difficult to wrap your mind around each of the concepts. I understand high level programming and occasionally I dip my toe in the low level pool of information but I'm far from an expert in understanding disassemblers, memory viewers and many debugging tools but would play around and examine any that were available in certain emulators to hopefully catch something new. My favorite thing to do lately was I discovered in Exodus it has a sprite outline feature that puts visible wire frames around each sprite tile on the fly frame by frame so you can quickly identify which is or isn't a sprite and is super helpful. I believe that's maybe what you were using when talking about the background planes because it also shows boxes around mid-frame adjustments and scrolling. When I found out the Genesis only had 16 more sprites than the NES and Master System I was baffled as to how so but programmers could cleverly work around that limitation since each sprite was adjustable from as small as 8x8 to as large as 32x32. It was fascinating watching how Capcom composed the meta sprites with the Genesis and Super Nintendo in different ways with their Street Fighter ports. I'm understanding now too that just because the Super Nintendo can do 128 sprites, and can have sprites as large as 64x64, it's greatly held back from it's full potential since the SNES can only do 2 sprite sizes at a time as opposed to fully featured like the Genesis can.

10:30 The base limitation is actually 61 since 3 of those (1 for 3/4 subpalettes) are fully transparent Nice vid!

Wow🎉! Thanks for reviewing Sega Mega Drive technical capabilities! I hope that you will cover more features of Sega MD hardware in next videos...

A low-res 256x224 mode on the Genesis also gives a different pixel aspect ratio. 320 width mode has narrow pixels that are 91.4% of the width of a square pixel. While 256 width mode has fat pixels that are 114.3% the width of a square pixel. This also has the side effect that fewer tiles are needed to cover the screen, so more screen area can be covered up by sprites without dropping them.

Dynamite Headdy and Ranger X are great games for “how did they do that?” type visual effects.

Always interesting, I apprechiate this kind of content and I'm glad I discovered your channel. The Megadrive was my first console and it's one of my all time favourite systems, together with the SNES and NeoGeo. 16bit era still rules!

I really like your videos! Good work!

I always loved that since the Genesis did not have the same graphical and sound chops that the SNES did it instead had to thrive on its grit and simply running the games better. After all, the Genesis's CPU didn't just run at a higher clock speed, but the whole system was built around a 16-bit data bus as opposed to the SNES's 8-bit data bus. Consequentually DMA transfers, while crude in implementation, were FAST, literally "blasting" data at the memory at speeds up to 4x faster than the SNES. This is of course where the term "blast processing" comes from.

something ive always wondered about: why megadrive games usually on average used more frames of animation than snes games? ive noticed that looking at spritesheets of some games that came out on both, or exclusives for sega always usually had more frames. im thinking of 2 konami games, contra hard corps vs contra 3, or castlevania bloodlines vs castlevania 4 or dracula x (snes). i wonder if it had something to do with the size of the game ram, or maybe the faster cpu in the sega? of course looking at dracula x pcengine cd vs castlevania dracula x snes spritesheets is crazy! they really went all out for the pcengine cd game. i know theyre not the same game and of course cd has way more space than a 8 or 16 meg game but its really cool. of course theres exceptions to the rules and all, and for the record i adore ninty and my snes, tho by 1993 i had all 3 consoles and cd adaptors and man the world was glorious! i loved em all!

Zero Tolerance was a Sega Classic!!!

Thank you. I've learned much today.

Very cool 😮

Discovered your channel through Reddit! Fun and educative as well. Would be cool to see one video in the same spirit dedicated to the PS1 as well

I would love to hear about software scaling on the Genesis. I know developers utilized said programs for games like Red Zone, which featured everything that was said to be impossible on the Genesis all at once. I'm also very interested in hearing about Road Rash and Zero Tolerance.

Greetings from Trinidad! Great channel, surprised it hasn't blown up yet !

I appreciate your explanation of the dithering technique, but your example at 8:50 doesn't really do it justice. I actually have a Mega Drive and a CRT and the effect looks indistinguishable from actual transparency.

PS: The great FPS Zero Tolerance was done with a method called raycasting, right?

So I have an ask. I am the combat designer for a new (as of this writing we are nearing completion) Neo-Geo game, Vengeance Hunters. I am a software dev by day, but i'm .net/c# so I am not experienced much with C that our game is being programmed in. I also have read the the NGDevKit documentation for the system. So I get what it can do. What I do not get is why a lot of what the Mega Drive/Gen can do, the Neo-Geo seems to be weak at. Mostly in regards to the different scrolling areas. Also, NG has scaling and deformation, but only from a larger art asset shrunk to a smaller asset and back up. However, I was told that this was not very performant. I'd love to see a comparison of what the MD can do vs. what the NG can do. The pros and cons of either, where they excel and where they are limited. I always thought that the Neo-Geo can do almost anything. And I found out that it seems like it is very very good at very particular things, and pretty awful at others.

when your talking about the raster effects to display more color (or colour for you, lol) is that the same as HAM (hold and modify)?

Do a video where you cover the 32x

Great video! Subscribed!

2:11 The lower resolution on Mega Drive/Genesis is imo not a great option to use over the 320x224 resolution in most cases due to the fact that, obviously, it runs in the lower resolution that means the Genesis no longer has any display advantage there, and also the fact it reduces the max on-screen sprites on Genesis from 80 to 64 (so now down to only half of the SNES' 128 max), the max sprites per scanline from 20 to 16, and the max sprite pixels per scanline from 320 to 256, which is now even less than the SNES' 32 sprites and 272 sprite pixels per scanline (Genesis normally has an advantage with the sprite pixels per scanline in 320x224 mode). So, really, in 256x224 mode, the SNES beats the Genesis almost across the board other than raw speed, as it already has the way more colours, proper transparency effects, up to two times as many background layers, built-in Mode 7, HDMA, and now also both more sprites on-screen max (which is always the case anyway) and more sprites per scanline and sprite pixels per scanline too (which is one of the few meaningful advantages the Genesis actually has over the SNES normally), along with the exact same resolution there as well. It's also worth noting that every effect you see the Genesis doing here, by using the likes of row/line/column scrolling, background tile priority, dithering, using raster effects and palette swaps to increase on-screen colours even more, using some layer element to create a static HUD and so on, can also be done on the SNES as standard as well, and in some cases actually better, such as being able to vertically column scroll to a finer granularity and a smoother effect (every 8 pixels on SNES vs every 16 pixels on Genesis). Plus, even though the Genesis can use shadow/highlight mode to increase the on-screen colours in some ways, it is a very limited-use feature that isn't as clear or easy a colour increase as it sounds. This is similar to how the SNES has a standard background feature in some background modes called Direct Colour that allows it to display a whopping 2048 colours on background 1 alone, which is alongside another 128 totally separate colours for background 2 and the additional standard 128 totally separate colours for sprites on top of that too (and that's even before any colour math or HDMA backdrop gradients are used to increase the colours even further), but that also has similar caveats in terms of how it specifically works. The Genesis definitely does have some advantages over the SNES though, like the faster CPU and the normally higher horizontal resolution and higher sprite pixels per scanline that come with that, and a couple of other things too. But, dropping down to 256x224 resolution is not something I would recommend, especially if the idea is to try and match or even surpass what the SNES is capable of. Genesis should stick with the 320x224 resolution in most cases, as that's where pretty much all of its strengths lie and where it is then able to properly compete with the SNES in some [but not all] ways and even surpass it in a few important areas.

6:30. That's actually wrong. You can change the background colour. They do this on the first stage before the boss appears in Thunder Force IV.

Can someone explain how systems like the Intellivision displayed graphics and what tricks it used. Thanks

Nice Video ! Sub & Big Like ! And Love Retro Sega Game !

So basically the genesis does have 3 background layers,even if that window layer does not support transparancy,but still,,,

Great video. I do have one minor complaint though. The impression many seem to have in comment sections of videos of this nature is that the Genesis could do effects that the SNES couldn't. Every one of these graphicsl tricks can be found in a number of SNES games.

What is the game at 4:00? It looks pretty cool!

Don't apologise, yanks don't apologise for calling it the genesis and it is refreshing to hear it called the Mega Drive for once. Even more refreshing is hearing the snes called just that and not the es-en-ne-es. I'm beginning to think all British youtubers that cover retro gaming was not around in the 80s and 90s (coupled with ninty not having much of a presence in Europe until later) and that's why they only repeat what yanks have said.

Sure, the Super NES was half as fast clock for clock, but due to all the specialized hardware, it was essentially accelerated to around the Genesis/MD's raw performance, because the Super NES was doing MORE per clock than the Genesis/MD was. :p Honestly the MD was more like somebody took an '80s EGA card, gave it more RAM (thus a better colour palette) and bolted on a CPU for good measure, whereas the Super NES was actually a game machine, in the truest sense of the word. It was a CPU (as well as related components) specifically designed for running games.