Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3 arcade vs Genesis and SNES | Mega Drive | UMK3 

Thanks, I wish it had been possible to show the same stuff at all times but it just wasn't with this one.

It's missing 4.

Yup, lotta strange stuff exclusive to particular versions with this one.

The CRT "smoothing" didn't help much unless you had a really bad CRT TV. Back in the 80s and early 90s I had my systems hooked up to either C64 or Amiga composite monitors and the dithering was obvious. From the mid 90s on (32-bit system era) I had most of my systems hooked up via s-video on a bigger TV and dithering was still obvious on that one, too. In my experience CRTs really only hid dithering on these old systems if you had an especially blurry TV or hooked your systems up via RF. Where I do still appreciate CRTs is response time for input which was never something we even had to think about.

Yeah, weird how the same devs worked on both versions but made them unique and didn't share the character assets. Oh well, sorry Columbo was delayed 😁

Yup, I know him and his work. I did a few music tracks for his Splatterhouse demo!

Há também demos de KOF98 e Metal Slug pro Mega Drive que parte o coração, só de imaginar que mesmo KOF94 ou 95 pudessem ser lançados para o Mega ou até o SNES, que eram games que eu e meus irmãos jogávamos tanto nos fliperamas, nós sonhávamos com a possibilidade de ter eles em casa, Street Fighter Alpha, etc, pelo menos, o SNES recebeu uma versão do SFA2 que apesar de comprometida, eu lembro de ter jogado muito e achava inacreditável ter em casa.

@@roberto1519 it is unbelievable.

I watched your video but it only improved on of the worst stages (the dragon head on the floor). Literally everything else was identical as far as I could see. If you are curious as to the colour count on the desert stage, it is 45. That leaves 1/4 or a whole palette completely unused. Here is the video counting colours. The SNES character select screen breaks the 128 snes colour limit by using mode 3 or 4 for direct colour mode and 1 simple background (not performant enough for use in a game). ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-8K5lRUeUR5k.htmlsi=PlMr9meF3XIU_yE9

oh dear. It does break the 128 colour limit in the next 10 seconds of video. Mode 4 is useable in-game as it uses indexed colour and not direct colour but only 1 background is available.

For the arcade version I captured it at 1:1 resolution and scaled it proportionally. Might be one of those cases where the larger horizontal resolution of the arcade game makes it look squished when it isn't stretching on a 4:3 CRT. As for the whole CRT dithering thing, I went over that in detail in another reply but to summarize: they didn't hide dithering too much unless you had a particularly blurry CRT or used RF cables. Composite or better and you'd notice dithering strongly on a decent CRT.

​@@InglebardGaming In fact, many Midway games use the same board and resolution, we can see how taller and skinnier the characters since MK1 look compared to the console counterparts, it could be they considered this, keeping a higher resolution and that the CRTs from the arcades would stretch it just enough so they would look more natural, but when capturing 1:1 using emulation, they just won't look right. As for CRTs, sure, dithering, color banding and pixelation were always noticeable, even at the time, but it just look way more highlighted in modern displays, thus, making them uglier/worse in hindsight, but in 14", 19" or 21" screens, using analog signals, they just looked OK enough. In fact, using modern technology to pinpoint visuals from anything during the analog era is a stretch, really.

​@@roberto1519sir, the programmers did a poor job with the backgrounds. There is no debate. It has nothing to do with intentional design for tech of the time. There are more than enough examples of programmers doing that successfully, this was not done here.

@@TheCubicleReview2 That I agree, if you ask me if there's room for improvement, it surely does, no doubt about it. I only mentioned that in today's crystal clear displays, all the technicalities are highlighted more than ever.

I also ended up skipping UMK3 on Saturn because of MK Trilogy. still have my original Trilogy disc I got from Funcoland back then. 😂

I DID get Saturn UMK3 when it was new and skipped Trilogy!

Do you have a link that has that info? I've been trying to find solid information on their T related systems for a while.

@@InglebardGaming It was on a random message board I saw some time ago when I was searching for specs on another arcade board and one person mentioned it can handle 256 sprites. Given how animated the game is compared to the 16-bit versions it probably is that high or higher since several arcade boards around that time could handle 256 sprites and higher at once.

@HellTantrumbull I would guess that it did way more, personally. Most hardware of that generation handled more than 256, some had no hard limit on the number of sprites at all. But, I've never been able to confirm a number so who knows, maybe they're right.

First, you know I'm a huge Genesis fan, so I'm not knocking it, but we ARE talking about hardware that came out (in Japan) in 1988. The small overall palette and only 61 usable colors across four 16 color palettes was a problem for a lot of later games, which is especially a shame since it was originally designed with a larger palette. As arcade hardware advanced and we had games with hundreds of on-screen colors, it became tougher for it to mimic the look of them. The big advantage the SNES has is the size of its palette and on-screen colors, so it's only logical to expect a game that relies on a larger palette for its appearance would look better on it. I don't think you could say that considering the graphics would have to include the missing levels. That's content, not graphics. The levels that are here objectively look significantly better on SNES. It's less cut and dry with the characters. The SNES ones are so much lower res that they're hard to look at up close, but on smaller screens they're less of an issue.

​@@InglebardGaming The limited colours were a problem for alot of later games? Such as what? The SNES colours didn't help it at all. Your saying it did. It's logo is literally a palette. But the colours don't help it. It still sucks. What are these 'more modern games' Street Fighter Alpha? No. That won't run on SNES. SNES is an 8bit console. The colour is 15bit master palette. But tile engine is 4bit. Same as Genesis. You get 8 palettes maximum and get the impression they might be tied to layers but this needs more research. The one useful mode of snes is mode 1 which is just 2 bg's + a 2bit bg. Mode 2 gives you column scrolling at the cost of the 3rd bg layer. The other modes are pointless. You need to look at bit values in colour depth as a matter of subtlety. That's all more depth gives you. Less banding. Do you think Super Puzzle Fighter would work on 61 colours? Yes. Real Bout? Just about. Let's look at Samsho on the 16bits (I'm currently playing it.) The SNES game is a game running on an 8bit console. It slows down too much for Earthquake to run properly. So he is pointless. Not very good graphics if they are slowing the whole game down. The little snes characters are like that because the snes cannot move any more pixels than that without creating an input lag which is already bad. The Genesis version has large characters and no slow down. No input lag. Many extra small animations and such to telegraph hit's or blocks and it's an adrenalin fuelled experience simply due to the visual prowess. Even with the backgrounds reduced to almost being illegible in some cases. But the backgrounds are not bad because the vram is maxed out. It's like that because the rom space is not sufficient to include more unique tile to put into the scene. There are no games coming out in 1995 that are needing high colour I can think of that aren't 3D. Those PSX and Satrun 3D games are using 9bit dithered colour by the way for textures. It was actually possible to use a higher colour depth using knowledge of the system not available at the time. So you're wrong.

@@InglebardGaming Look. The System 16 arcade board was not Sega's first arcade board. The boards are designed for speed. Because that's the most exciting thing that people want in a game that isn't a casual game. They reduced the palette memory because it's the fasted memory in the system and by far the most expensive and fastest type. They took out pcm sound and the sprite chip is just a fraction. But the cpu is barely less clock speed. If you can figure out how to get 61 colours to work, your in business. The Mega Drive runs 2D games faster than an Xbox 360 and with less input lag.

​@@iwanttocomplainYou are arrogantly stupid. I don't think you'll take this to heart, but somebody just needed to tell you.

@@InglebardGaming The System 16 is from 1986. The SMD is therefore less good than a pretty good 1986 arcade machine. The SNES only has 15bit colour because it's using planar graphic format for efficiency at the cost of speed of drawing pixels as 15 sections of memory are accessed in parallel which is complicated to program and design hardware for. The 256B (256B is left unused) palette address spaces are 2 bytes although only use 1byte/8bit values. This palette memory is a fast as it needs to be. Because the bottlenecks in this system are multiple, before faster palette memory is going to improve rendering speed.

Dithering looked terrible over composite also unless the TV was really blurry. It was very noticeable on the old monitors and TVs I used to use when this stuff was new.

The Genesis version never looked great tbh

@@Isoquant Yup, but there are worse home ports of the time for MK1 and 2 that should be avoided.

@@HellTantrumbull that's a good point. SNES and Genesis ports were both a cut above some of the lesser ports at the time

Never heard it called that before. It fixed some of the mistakes with MK3 so I'd say it was probably the most disappointing one when it launched.

No, OG MK3 was only considered bad because Scorpion wasn't in it. UMK3 is the only game of the classic 3 that anybody takes seriously competitive because it's the only one out of the classic games that's actually a good fighting game and not just about the gore.

Yeah, they should have taken one look at some of those backgrounds and just went "nope."

If you want to be more accurate, you have to use the word 'nominal' as code for 99.9% of the time or with acceptable performance.

SNES pcm samples and 15bit bitmaps use more rom space so they ran out of space on SNES for cost reasons.

For reference, the Genesis has 128B of palette memory.

All I know is that I wish there was MK on Turbografix

To the snes's 256B.