Spectacular graphical tricks in classic games - Your questions answered! | White_Pointer Gaming

Comments · 259

• TU

  @TurboXray · 8 months ago

  For Rondo: just wanted to give some clarity. FYI- you can&apos;t change the palette number associated with the sprite cells - mid screen because the sprite table is locked down. You can change the palette colors themselves, but not the palette &quot;association&quot;. There is no &quot;blue&quot; alt palette sitting in CRAM that they switch to. They overwrite the normal palette with the blue colors.. on said scanline. The reason why he looks blue in the debugger view - is that you&apos;re viewing it at or after the colors have been changed - so you don&apos;t see it as a partial vertical normal/blue transition like you do on the game screen. <br><br> There&apos;s a neat effect in the Docks level (heading towards the ghost ship); when they change colors on the PCE mid line (the visible pixel area) - pixel &quot;artifacts&quot; are generated on screen. Sort of like the &quot;cram garbage dots&quot; on the Sega Genesis.. but instead of evenly spaced garbage dots/pixels... you get a smear effect. The VCE, responsible to applying color ram to the pixels from the VDC (the actual video chip), can&apos;t do both at the same time: cpu updating color, and accessing color to render the pixels. So while the CPU has the VCE busy with updating in that instant, the VCE outputs the last color is rendered - and since the cpu write is slower than a single pixel.. you get about 4-5 wide pixel smear (per VCE access). You can see this around the pillars going into the water for that stage - it&apos;s shimmering too because of the jitter of the start of the scanline interrupt. It&apos;s looks cool (and intentional). But you need the real system, or very accurate emulator to see this.

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• TH

  @therealseanw.stewart2071 · 8 months ago

  Alien Soldier is incredible. The whole game feels like a playable technical showpiece for the Mega Drive.

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• EX

  @ExtremeWreck · 8 months ago

  Alien Soldier is one of the most beautiful &amp; well playing Genesis games ever. Interesting to hear about some of the techniques used!<br><br>...and Toy Story Racer for GBC is impressive, but not all that great. (better than the developer&apos;s Atari Jaguar game, Supercross 3D however)

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• TH

  @TheGoofy-Mouse · 8 months ago

  gameboy had to sacrifice Woody&apos;s clothes for its effects

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• SC

  @ScubaLuigi · 8 months ago

  I&apos;d like to see how battle transitions work in rpgs. Like every time an encounter starts and the screen melts or shatters or whatever. There are so many different visual effects for it across the genre.

  9

• DW

  @Dwedit · 8 months ago

  One NES game with a spectacular priority effect is Time Lord. &nbsp;The player can smoothly walk behind the background, and even jump up and see the sprite peeking out. &nbsp;It uses low-priority solid sprites (just like SMB3) to pull off the effect.

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• CO

  @colos3284 · 8 months ago (edited)

  Wow. Also I remember that you never covered how worked scaling and distortion effects worked in intro from Sega Mega Drive games - Super Fantasy Zone, Monster World 4. It would be nice if you do so.

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• TH

  @TheT3rr0rMask · 8 months ago

  Rondo is mindblowingly good looking for PCE. Even on the CD system most games couldn&apos;t compete with its fidelity.

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• TH

  @TheWaterMiners · 8 months ago

  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9dH7bfAznc&amp;t=947">15:47</a> These waves also serve the important purpose of masking the artifacts that come from changes the palette, though most emulators don&apos;t show them. I think BlastEm is the only emulator you can see them on.

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• NU

  @NukeOTron · 8 months ago

  Showing off that bit from Tales of Phantasia reminds me of R-Type III: The Third Lightning, where after you choose your pod, there&apos;s an epic zoom-out through three different layers, transitioning to the ship flying through space.

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• EN

  @endymallorn · 8 months ago

  Okay, here’s one, just a whole game. We know what happened with the Drivin’ series on SNES, but how did the game Star Trek: Starfleet Academy: Starship Bridge Simulator manage so much polygonal 3D without SuperFX support and have it run so smoothly?

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• CU

  @culpritdesign · 8 months ago

  The Jurassic Park implementation was impressive!

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