That's how a lot of clever coding goes, tbf.

@PXLTRON it's been 30 years, you can let it go

@Sonny Henry Yea, I've been using Flixzone for since november myself =)

@Sonny Henry Yea, have been using Flixzone for months myself :)

@NALTO Recently I've only heard people appreciate tricks on the mega drive?

I thought so too. Then I remembered how old systems didn't really have all-points-accessible graphics.

@@NeoTechni That's neither here nor there. It's possible to create approximations of it. Some systems are worse for it than others. The SNES and Amiga both have bitplane based graphics, which are a pain. (on SNES in the worst case you might have to modify 8 bytes of graphics memory to set a single pixel) Of course, on anything under 256 colour graphics you're also dealing with multiple pixels per byte when your CPU almost certainly doesn't efficiently handle less than 8 bits at a time... Many early systems did have actual bitmap modes though. The Atari 8 bit microcomputers have 1.5 (aka 2 shades of the same colour), 4, and 16 colour bitmap modes. Unfortunately when dealing with a 1.79 mhz 8 bit cpu with no multiply/divide circuitry, doing graphics on the CPU is not a good idea. With a 160x192 resolution you've got 30,720 pixels to manipulate, and you can't even clear the screen for free. While a screen clear lets you clear 4 pixels at once due to how they are arranged in memory, you'd have to write to 7680 bytes just to clear the screen. 1.79 mhz cpu. Absolute best case 4 cycles per instruction (in practice probably 8 or more even for something as trivial as clearing a screen) Best case you can write 447,500 pixels worth of data in a second (and that's assuming you have no game logic and no complex graphics. I wrote a line drawing algorithm for this CPU and it came to about 200 cycles per pixel drawn). At 60 frames per second that's 7458 bytes. In short, you can only just barely clear the entire screen each frame, much less do anything much more complex. Sure you can lower the framerate, use cleverer tricks, but it's still not going to impress anyone. Now, a 7.16 mhz 68000 cpu sounds better, but realistically, it's not that much better. My own ballpark estimates based on this led me to the conclusion that to start doing non-trivial graphical tasks with a CPU without major compromises would require a 30-40 mhz CPU, give or take. And sure enough, that's roughly the kind of clock speeds where the PC started having games like Doom, Descent, Magic Carpet and so on... You can find workarounds for weird graphics formats. But it's much harder to do anything when your CPU just isn't that powerful, relatively speaking...

@@KuraIthys it is totally relevant because APA graphics are the easiest way to do it. Anything else requires a bunch of more complex/impressive hoops, such as the ones in the video.

@@KuraIthys: SNES CPU can go up to ~3.58 MHz. (The SA-1 runs at 10.74 MHz and includes bitplane conversion functions. The Super FX GSU runs at the full 21.477 MHz.)

Same, Genesis has some crude polygon games, even some relatively quick, smooth ones like Kawasaki Superbike Challenge. So I figured we were looking at a flat plane of polygons, or some similar vector drawing scheme. Which it kind of is, behind the scenes, it just uses the vectors to figure out which tiles to use. Wizardry.

Jesper used the same melody for Sub-Terrania, Red Zone and Blood Money

ok!

@@johanjohan5881 shut the fuck up

@@poble Probably a 12 year old, those shits ruined KZfaq

@_ Pobert-Eii _ ok!

Theres a ton of mid or per scanline something something video memory raster effect 7.3 Liter 8 cylinder voodoo going on. The fact these people did most of this stuff in assembly blows my mind.

x2

Great game. I’d like to see a video on this too.

Same as Contra Hard Corps..

@@graphicsgod DEFINITELY HARD CORPS

ok!

They probably used the same technique used for Toy Story's 3D effect during gameplay for the shelves.

@@pacsonic9000 Actually it's a little more complex than that.

Ooooooo.

ok!

Probably the same way as the Sonic 3D Blast intro.

they def using the two-tone coloring to their advantage

pretty sure it's the same as the 3d blast logo/game over fmvs

Might be surprising, but the FMV scenes are being made in the same way as the water in-game! You can see all the different 8x8 shapes in Vram. There's a LOT of them.

The were many later Genesis games that were wonderful games. Unfortunately, by then the 16-bit era was coming to a close, and everyone was drooling at 32-bit.

The developers released the proto as public domain, you can grab it here: www.zophar.net/pdroms/genesis/hardwired.html

ok!

@@jillcrungus This is awesome! Thanks for the heads up. 💪🏿🙃🤙🏿

The same teams did Scorcher and AMOK on the Sega Saturn. AMOK even uses music from Red Zone. Those games would be worth a video too, Scorcher double rotating backgrounds (one of the few games to do so), 15bit colour, and transparent polygons, while AMOK runs a full voxel engine and some hidden top-down levels. In fact AMOK started as a 32x title and you can see it on the legendary 32x Zyrinx demotape.

+

yes. this.

ok!

I wished for it to be gone, and enjoyed the video without it, as it's such a sad tune, and quite a short loop. Too short to continuously play during a ten minute video.

Yeah. Was happy to see it.

ok!

Sounds like a plan, then. Off we go to build some sick games with all we've just learned! Are ya with me?

I don't think enough time was taken to explain and illustrate the concepts properly. He tends to go over some stuff too quickly. I understand the small layered sprites, but the tile mapping explanation lost me.

​@@Prizm44Might be a two year old comment... but.. You want a 2 hour in depth tutorial? Because if so... Those exist...

I second this. I can think of several cocktail napkin methods but there’s got to be one out there that is the fastest. ( maybe AND it against every tile and see which one has the largest value aka largest common overlap?? )

They must be proud

Subtract the angle of object from the angle of camera, you get apparent angle on screen - it's an index of your sprite (you store them incrementally angle-wise). You use the same step counter from tile rotation routine to position the sprite accounting for camera rotation.

@@michaelbuckers there are several tile of the same angle with different fill ratio. The water rotating plane is like a grid of 8x8 bitmaps. Also, calculating angles on a 8mhz mc68000 having only integer arithmetic for 40-50 tiles 30 times per second appears to be costly. The game is not only doing rendering, there's a lot of action going on etc... The trick is probably clever as shit, like a weird DDA algo or something like that using a look up table. I'm pretty curious about it.

@@emmanueloverrated It's a lookup table yes. You can always compute pretty accurate values but rarely does it ever makes practical sense.

Might've been possible. However it's far from trivial calculating which pixels need updating. Since polygon rendering in this context is CPU bound in general, you'd need to consider if the calculations to work out what needs updating are simple enough to outweigh just updating the whole thing directly....

It's a good bet many have already tried and failed. The rush for 3D was on for everyone.

Not with ~7 MHz of single core processing power & less than 0.5 IPC - even if you dedicate the entire processor to just rotating the screen it'll be ~140 CPU clock cycles per pixel, it's not nearly enough. At least there wasn't RAM lag like on today's machines which causes CPU to idle 90% of the time unless you use special memory access techniques (flat gapless arrays etc). Same story with GPU, it's so easy to stall it's ridiculous, you feed it commands at full speed and it still idles 70% of the time. You need to avoid switching shaders models textures etc at all costs - you must use megatextures, one-size-fits-all shaders, baked static geometry literally everywhere. Don't get me even started on the drivers, they're so finicky, in order to get good shader speed you must find some random way to trigger driver's fast pathway (the driver was coded to trigger for some AAA game shaders which otherwise run godawfully slow because the devs are lazy and/or idiots).

ok!

Yes!

Isn't vectorman just pre-rendered sprites using 3D modelling software and then treated just as regular sprites in the megadrive hardware?

@@KungKras No, that was Donkey Kong Country. Vectorman used tweened orb sprites to create super smooth animation. It also mixed in a lot of differently rotate sprites, and a metric ton of crazy raster effects (every other level has some unique special effect, starting as soon as the SEGA logo, it's nuts. And there are prototypes around which show that they had to cut a bunch of even more impressive stuff cut from the game).

I second that, I loved binge watching all of the videos when I first found this channel. Jon's voice with that background music is just so satisfying, and it is truly amazing to see what devs managed to pull off back in the day to get around hardware limitations

A lot of the music produced by demoscene coders (including the team that made this game) sounds like that - they may have done work on the Amiga (another 68k based system) and some of that knowledge carried over.

ok!

yeah indeed, and I'm kinda sad I never got to experience coding that, nowadays it's so easy

@@embodyingocean189 you can still code for old systems like Genesis, but it isn't too practical

@DPAD-FTW Yako

@@xyzzy-dv6te I've been trying to figure out how to code java games for the nokia button phones, don't know where to start as there are no tutorials

That's just 2 circles a top of another.

yeah those are just two circles with parallax

Oh, cool, you're here. I really liked your 'Remember When' MOD song. Was it originally made as .MOD or .XM?

Nikku4211 Thanks - yeah originally a MOD written on the Amiga.

i don't think the genesis was physically capable of rendering real polygons, it was probably the same technique in doom

@@maskedmonocle1991 Cyber Cop had a real 3D face in it. It was very low poly, but it moved around in 3D. Also Hard Drivin was ported to the Sega genesis. The framerate was awful, but that was 3D racer.

The B&W in the intro is just animation... there’s no polygons to it. It’s likely done with color cycling and tile animation. This channel did a demo of it before. You can get what looks like fluid motion from preplotting your animation this way

You don't need a second CPU to do that. You can update it every single scanline with the base hardware. In fact, that's kind of the point. That perspective effect everyone associates with mode 7 only works because the mode 7 effect is being adjusted dynamically every single scanline. HDMA exists for this purpose, to automate it. Many, MANY games did splitscreen based effects without any additional hardware. F-Zero is a mode 1 display up to about 20% down the screen then switches to mode 7. Contra does this in reverse at some point with a mode 7 display on the top half and a mode 1 display on the bottom. The reason Mario Kart uses a co-processor is to deal with placing scaled sprites into the environment in believable positions and handling the calculation of 8 moving players and a bunch of objects in the world. (DSP-1 is purpose-built to perform 3d transformations, such as perspective projection, scaling, etc.) You don't need that to split a mode 7 display; You need it to calculate placement of dozens of moving points in 3d space. Of course, mode 7 has been used for 'sprites' repeatedly; It's a trick, but at the end of the day sprites and backgrounds are a relatively arbitrary division. If you use your sprites to represent a background, you can use mode 7 to represent a large scaling and rotating sprite. Mode 7 rotates and scales a single background, but all the parameters for rotation, scaling, and positioning can be altered per scanline in base hardware. Perspective works by adjusting the scaling factor every scanline. As long as you don't alter the actual scaling, you can pre-compute these factors once and use HDMA to adjust it automatically. (HDMA exists for the sole purpose of automating effects that happen on a per scanline basis) You wanna change graphics modes 8 times on a single screen? That's something you can pre-calculate on SNES, and send the pre-calculated list to the PPU. Wanna do really complex rotating textured 3d effects using mode 7? As long as those effects align to horizontal scanlines, you can precompute the whole thing and simply use HDMA to copy the lists each frame to make that effect happen. The expansion chips are doing calculations that the standard CPU would struggle with. However, the splitscreen effect is trivial. You want a 4 way horizontal splitscreen on SNES? Completely trivial. 4 sets of mode 7? Mode 7 + mode 6 + mode 3? No problem. Easy. What isn't easy is creating a 2 player racing game with 8 racers, and dozens of environmental objects that scale based on their position relative to the camera and have to remain in contact with the ground the whole time...

Look at Street Racer on SNES. In 4 Player Mode it zooms and rotates 4 layers at once at 60fps without any helping Co-processor

Who cares the snes is a slow RPG console

@@StaticTV80 Well, obviously more people cared about the SNES than about the Genesis. 50 Million SNES sold vs 30 Million Genesis... And it is not as if the SNES had no action games

@@retropolis1 you know why the snes sold more because it was family friendly and censored the Genesis was too muture

I used Exodus to change the palette to highlight the tiles

After watching videos from Jon, you should believe that all coding is just smoke and mirrors.

It always felt a little sinister to me at the time - it didn't have any of Desert Strike's lighter feel. Very dark, violent and this weird graphical frippery that looked like nothing else on the system. But the intro video was the most amazing thing I ever saw my Mega Drive do ...though I didn't have Sonic 3D ;)

That's because it's not a good game. It's a 'techdemo' made into a game. All eye candy no substance.