SpritesMind.Net

I disagree. The vast majority of games don't push the PCE hardware at all. And I have yet to see any crazy optimized code (everything that I've seen, debugging games - it just your basic average code). There is a LOT of untapped potential in the PCE that devs left on the floor. A large number of de...

Blast Processing, the way Sega pushed in ads, was just marketing hype. The joke among programmers was to point to a chip on the PCB and tell folks "that's the Blast Processor." :lol: The "blast processing" done by programmers of the time was to make use of raster timed interrupts to initiate DMA op...

As Enforcer said, there is 2 interlacing modes on Sega Genesis, and one of them allow to preserve correct aspect. It's just that Sonic 2 used the other mode. See VDP register 0C description here: https://segaretro.org/Sega_Mega_Drive/VDP_registers LS1-LS0: Interlace mode: 00 = no interlace; 01 = in...

You can't compare clock rates directly. While the Genesis has a faster clock rate, it take multiple cycles to do instructions. The quickest instructions take four cycles, and you can quickly run over a dozen cycles by working on longs and using certain addressing modes. In contrast, the 6502/65816 ...

Sonic uses double resolution for two-player so that each half-screen is the standard Sonic resolution. This means all art assets are used as-is. There's no room for other assets to make two-player look not squished. This means two-player looks squished, but the Sonic Team felt that was preferable t...

As Enforcer said, there is 2 interlacing modes on Sega Genesis, and one of them allow to preserve correct aspect. It's just that Sonic 2 used the other mode. See VDP register 0C description here: https://segaretro.org/Sega_Mega_Drive/VDP_registers LS1-LS0: Interlace mode: 00 = no interlace; 01 = in...

Someone just posted the images from the demo, so I figured I'd add them here:
Nice to finally see Blast Processing in all its glory.

Does anyone know what the big bars of solid colour are at the bottom of the images?

I may be wrong, but I believe there are 2 different interlace modes. Sonic 2 uses mode 2. I don’t know of any game that uses mode 1 or what the difference between the modes are. I presume this is similar to the two different types of interlacing SNES can do, as seen in modes 0-4 and 7 vs modes 5 an...

I saw this posted in another thread and figure it would be interesting to talk about here too: Just a little video showing Sonic 2 multiplayer scaled so it's proportionally accurate. I would've done this with my TV but it has the most useless sizing/scaling option ever (Scaling outwards doesn't move...

"The fact is that Blast Processing is such a hardcore, low-level application of the Mega Drive hardware that, astonishingly, it was never used in any shipping games and only in recent years has the technique been successfully mastered. And even then, its actual application in games is severely limit...

Those "benchmark" videos just demonstrate that while the person knows how to program, he knows very little about hardware. Understanding the processors and related chips at a hardware level is necessary to get the most out of a system. Many games don't need the most, so you don't need to understand...

"A better indicator of the VDP performance would be the number of displayable layer pixels + sprite pixels per frame for instance." Wouldn't that just be how many pixels you can see on the screen, which would be the same if all three consoles are running in 256x224 mode as per the test above, so 57,...

Unfortunately the comparison video is completely off, i already saw it and was surprised about the title as benchmarking and compare VDP performance of the different system sound like a rather difficult task. And here what he did is basically just trying to compare the VRAM write speed from CPU for...

Also, side note from the other thread too: I recently discovered this about the VDPs of the PC Engine, Genesis and SNES, which I found very interesting too: https://youtu.be/r7Jh_izIc8Q It's a nice partner video to the normal comparison of CPU speeds that we usually see: https://youtu.be/2k_jP73Ly7A...

ob1 wrote: ↑

Tue Dec 06, 2022 1:07 pm

Thank you.
It is an actually much better way of posting this - still very interesting - piece of information.

Cheers,
Olivier

No problem.