Dude if you wrote a book about all this stuff I'd buy it in a heartbeat

Further proving hardware is nothing without skilled devs. Regardless of which console had better hardware, it's safe to say TT is one of the most impressive devs and can make magic happen. This is some seriously amazing optimization.

This takes me back. I worked on the PC conversion of MM back in the day for Psygnosis based on the Sega CD version. This was the first section I worked on.. I remember looking at it for the first time wondering how they'd got it to run at 60fps.. really cool effect.

Your vids are the coolest, Jon. Cheers

All of these old hardware tricks are incredibly interesting!

It's absolutely blowing my mind how licensed games on the Genesis could have such absurd programming tricks behind them. You're definitely giving me a new appreciation for these games.

The first time I saw this stage, I was totally blown away!

Geeze, the programers on the Genesis don't get much credit as they should.

That must have given you a headache when creating that floor =P

This is actually very similar to how Sega pulled off the Blue Spheres special stages from Sonic 3, but waaaay cooler

It’s so cool to have a KZfaq channel from a game developer behind some of my favorite games

IIRC this was the same trick used in Sonic 3's special stages, except the horizontal gaps between the different palette maps were much larger.

Meanwhile in 2017 this effect will cost you 1GB of VRAM and 3GHZ worth of cycles

Brilliant! The Genesis/Mega Drive was a very capable machine in the right hands.

I think Tt was making the impossible, possible in the 90s.

I love this channel. So insightful.

The moment I saw that cylinder color pattern I figured it was palette trickery of some sort. That stuff is *everywhere* in games of that era.

This is hands down one of the best channels I've ever seen on KZfaq.

As someone who absolutely loved Mickey Mania as a kid - thank you. This is an amazing look back and it's awesome that the actual developers are able to showcase their talents by breaking down the incredible visuals from their games!

These descriptions are so quick, concise and mindblowing all at once. Great stuff!

You should write a book about all this stuff. It's interesting.

This is one of my favorite videos of the ones you made. I love seeing older games being analyzed and picked apart like this. Keep it up :)

This is really some demoscene-like setup for cool effects ported into an actual game. Every video that you post is so amazing man, keep them up. I'm learning so much from all these videos!

So glad I stumbled on your channel. I love these old behind the scenes of games that pushed the limits. I remember most of these games growing up but didn't realise they were all from Traveller's Tales. You guys were 68k gods

I needed to watch 2 times to understand the basics of how it was done, great job man

This stuff is mindblowing 😲 I played your games to bits on my Mega Drive back in the 90s. Still some of my alltime favourites 😊

God, just what a cool channel! It’s great hearing these stories of programming tricks for an older console from someone with all this enthusiasm!

This was a much beloved game from my childhood, so it's really interesting to see some behind the scenes stuff about the effects. Thanks so much for making these videos.

This channel is a treasure trove of gaming insights, thanks for putting them out there!

I can't believe how quickly you're putting these videos together. Fantastic stuff!

This was incredibly informative and inspiring. The endless creativity an resourcefulness of that era was just outstanding and unbelievable. Thank you so much for making these videos from your own time, you are a legend. Instant favorite channel.

I love these videos. Please keep em coming. It’s awesome to have such an insight to these games.

I love the background music and your explanations! Great to see what innovation there was, I just took it all for granted!

This channel is getting one of my favourite. Thx for the videos man and keep up with the great videos

Learning about how people code with such restrictions is so interesting because you learn something so left field every time, these videos are awesome!

Very interesting video. I was looking through your videos yesterday hoping to find some Micky Mania videos, but found just one, so thanks for uploading this. I need to pick up a copy of Mickey Mania; it looks fun.

This is INSANE! Your videos are amazing!

I love learning about things like this, it's very fascinating. Great video Jon!

These videos about programming are AWESOME! Keep them coming!

I love your videos man. They are just absolutely interesting to watch.

The stuff you guys came up with on the Megadrive is insane :) i love this channel

Your channel is going to explode, man. I'm happy that KZfaq finally recommended something really interesting to me. Subscribed.

A fascinating insight in Sega mega drive development as always. I remember playing this game to death as a kid and loving every minute. Its really interesting to see how some of my fave games were made. I've actually set up alerts on my phone so I get to watch a video as soon as you upload it! 😄

Your ingenuity never ceases to amaze!

Absolutely brilliant. TT really understood the Genesis hardware and how to code for it. It shows in the games.

Love this! Wow one of my fav childhood games. Amazing. Love the channel

Great step by step, I loved it. I really appreciate how these constraints can lead to such incredible solutions.

It's really something to see what people were able to do with such low spec hardware.

i must commend u for taking the time to explain these games in details this is marvelous work and as a kid of this era i am happy to learn about this stuff

Amazing as ever. Love these bite sized chunks of knowledge!

Awesome video, I love all the visuals.

This is an amazing channel about amazing work on amazing games. Thank you for your service.

I love this videos. So interesting to learn how these wonderful effects were achieved.

Wow, that is so resourceful! Keep the videos coming please. This is the total opposite of the approach that most things seem to have these days, they all yell: "Oh, let's just upgrade the hardware to push through more frames/fps/effects". But back in the day you were stuck with meager hardware for longer and so true talent would come to surface. I wish modern console and PC game-makers would have a similar mindset. The more hardware resources we have, the more we waste, same as with everything else really.

Awesome. I falling in love with the channel. Congratulations!!!

These videos are amazing. I loved the genesis and I think we had this game because I seem to remember it. The fact that you were able to use programming tricks to push the genesis that far is very impressive.

I love this channel! So many interesting little coding tricks!

This is neat, keep the cool videos up!

Thanks for such a great video. Because of these kind of videos is why I started following your channel :)

Fantastic video as always

Hello, John Burton. When I first saw your games, I thought these games were impressive and they inspired me to add pre-rendered sprites in my games, and when I started watching your videos on KZfaq, the coding secrets did not spoil the surprise and excitement for these games, instead, I was impressed even more, knowing how much effort has been put into this. And I was also shocked by the fact that _you_ were the one, who founded TT Games (Traveller's Tales). Impressive, very impressive, keep up the good work.

I don't know how you're in my recommended but KZfaq is definitely doing something right. Instant subscribe.

Oh, this is so damn cool! I'm totally geeking out about it! I'm a computer programmer, and I want to be a game developer one day. So, this kind of video is always so much fun to watch. To see the curtain pulled back and see all the visual trickery going on is really fun and interesting for me.

Wow. Played this when I was maybe 6 years old and it was the best game I had ever seen, and I couldn't believe how it could be so cool. Still one of the best games, if not The best game I have ever played or seen. This little insight into what exactly it was that blew my little boy brain was a pure gem, thank you

YOU DID THE TEXTURE WITH ONLY PALETTE SWAPS??!?!?? Damn, that's really impressive. I'm still curious how you distorted it to make it look like a cylinder, though. Also, do you think you'll ever make a video about how you did the scrolling tower in Mickey Mania? That's one of my favorite special effects you've ever done.

The rotating floor effect is... _color cycling_ ??! Mission accomplished, mind blown. You, sir, have my respect!

As a former graphics and computer vision programmer, I really appreciate your videos. I always find coding tricks, especially ones for visuals, to be extremely fascinating!

You totally blew my mind. I had no idea those old warped text demo fx did this.

Fantastic video as always. Please keep the coding secrets coming even if they aren't from games you've worked on.

I love this channel more every day

SO GOOD! I subbed to your channel dude, absolutely love what you're doing when you have time please re-do your non voiced videos with voiced narration, that'd be fantastic

Oh man, Leander? I thought I'd seen that warp effect before. I'm loving your channel. TT was a huge part of my childhood growing up, even though I was in a weird limbo due to being born in the late 80s.

These insight videos are fascinating, and I especially like having more information on Mickey Mania, as it's my all-time favourite Travellers Tales game, and indeed one of my all-time favourite games overall. I was both thrilled and heartbroken to learn of te sequel that never came to be! I still play the Mega Drive version of the first game a few times a year at least and am still finding new secrets in it (such as the alcove with eight stars in the second Lonesome Ghosts section). To me it's the game that keeps on giving. I have played through both the Mega Drive and Mega CD versions of the game to completion (my idea of a definitive version of the game is the Mega CD port with Mega Drive music), and am still working on beating Mickey's Wild Adventure on PS1, which understandably has its fair share of differences being a 32-bit upgrade. However, I recently gave the SNES version of the game a try and it feels like a completely different 16-bit game. As well as some obvious changes (different layout for Moose Chase and Gurney Ride), there's a lot of small changes and nuances in gameplay (such as the amount of hits needed for the upper/lower cogs on the Steamboat Willie boss, and the seemingly more random bone patterns for the exploded skeletons). I'd be fascinated to have further insight into these changes and why they were a thing, if you still had access to information for both versions. In the meantime, thank you so much for all of the videos you upload. It's genuinely thrilling to have so much information on the games of my childhood.

I can't imagine the amount of work that would have gone into making the floor look good using that method. extremely impressive

This is so amazing... I love so much this game... Thank you very much for sharing it with us.

Ive actually seen this effect before! I figured it out not too long after I saw it, then later saw this confirming my theory, thanks Jon! Also with this you could do all sorts of shapes and images, making it pretty useful! You just gotta know what your doing.

I love this kind of stuff, brilliant!

This is brilliant! Thank you for sharing how you did it!

Amazing how with these tricks you guys made such awesome games, as a teenager i was amazed the first time i played this stage on my snes.

Thanks sir ! It blew my mind as a genesis kid and once again as an adult with this explaination.

Great info here. Got me interested in playing around in programming again.

I found the most impressive aspect of the game was the animation. It really looked like you were traveling through an animated cartoon.

With all of these secret trickery, I'm sure you'd be able to make Doom on the genesis after all (the 2016 version)!! I challenge you! 😋 Joking! Awesome work as usual! Incredible content. Love it!

This is absolutely amazing. This channel shows magical optimisation that no modern gamedev can handle, because hardware progressed so much that developers don't really need to know their hardware. Simply incredible.

Do a video on how Mickey Mania's "intended for use on NTSC systems" message on startup somehow KNOWS if an emulator changes regions during that screen

Wow! Your skills in this are awesome.

such a clear explanation! love it :)

Thanks for the explanation, that was incredibly impressive! A similar technique was used in Sonic 3's Blue Spheres special stages to create the illusion of running across a 3D sphere. The checkered floor appears to move, but the entire animation is achieved purely via palette rotation.

So glad I found this channel

I just got this game because of this channel. Great content 👍

This blew my mind as a child and still looks just as good as remembered!

I just want to say, thanks for being one of the only people on the internet talking about the nitty gritty of the genesis. It's a console that was so much more capable than a lot of people thought, because a lot of devs just didn't use it to its fullest potential.

Wow that's amazing tricks, so much talented programming! And your explanation video is very interesting and easy to understand :D

Knowing how the movement of the floor works is especially interesting for me; I once played the game on an old emulator, but when it got to the Moose chase, the graphics of the floor and sky glitched out, so that you could actually somehow see each "column" of color rapidly move from side to side, even changing color depending on what terrain you were on. Essentially, this made everything except Mickey look as if it was part of a psychedelic hyperspace warp.

Amazing! Thanks so much for the great way of explaining and visualising this >.>

...I'm actually gonna use this for my retro games now. Subscribed. Hoping to see more useful info

Even as a kid I knew that something special was going on with this now after all these years it's more complicated than I could have imagined

Great video. Mickey Mania and Toy Story were two of my chilhood videogames and two of my favorite Sega Génesis games ever. This videos are really interesting. I always liked that chase level. Maybe you can do a video about the Day-Toy-Na level un Toy Story? Keep the good work.

Love your vids. Wish you developed every game so we could in depth looks like this

Absolutely mind-blowing.