Man, Blast Processing is not what I thought it was. . . .
Posted: Mon Dec 12, 2022 6:35 pm
"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 limited, with some interesting, but not exactly game-changing results ... But secondly, and perhaps more pressingly, Blast Processing essentially uses the entirety of the 68000's CPU time. You can run Blast Processing on a Mega Drive game, but you'd be unable to run anything with it ... So it's useless for standard cartridge games [other than for static high-colour images] ... Throughout the machine's lifetime, clever coding produced an almost generational leap in the effects seen in Mega Drive titles - but Blast Processing, unfortunately, wasn't one of them." - Eurogamer
Here's a video of what real Blast Processing is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvvL6S5Buiw
I guess this would make it more of a VDP thing than a CPU thing then, no? Kinda the opposite of what I would have thought based on Sega's marketing of Blast Processing back in the day. Either way, I definitely used to think it was something specifically related to making Genesis games run really fast, and certainly faster than the competition, rather than being able to make it display nicer looking static images.
I feel like I learn something new about these old consoles every day.
But, hey, the high-colour images do look half-decent for what they are, at least based on the clips in the video footage above. Although, it would be nice if I could find some examples of clean full-screen images of Blast Processing in action somewhere online to check out.
Note: I did try downloading the demo that’s linked in the Digital Foundry video, but it wasn’t working for me, and all I saw was a bunch of horizontal lines on the screen.
Here's a video of what real Blast Processing is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvvL6S5Buiw
I guess this would make it more of a VDP thing than a CPU thing then, no? Kinda the opposite of what I would have thought based on Sega's marketing of Blast Processing back in the day. Either way, I definitely used to think it was something specifically related to making Genesis games run really fast, and certainly faster than the competition, rather than being able to make it display nicer looking static images.
I feel like I learn something new about these old consoles every day.
But, hey, the high-colour images do look half-decent for what they are, at least based on the clips in the video footage above. Although, it would be nice if I could find some examples of clean full-screen images of Blast Processing in action somewhere online to check out.
Note: I did try downloading the demo that’s linked in the Digital Foundry video, but it wasn’t working for me, and all I saw was a bunch of horizontal lines on the screen.