Crappy C64 screen resolution

[saimo]

Originally Posted by AestheticDebris

Sonic on the Master System

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Sonic on the GX4000 (Homebrew preview)

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YMMV, but I don't think "chunky pixels" make the GX version look worse to be honest with you.

Eventually the C64 got its Sonic port, and it uses both lores and hires pixels:

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Download and information: https://csdb.dk/release/?id=212523

[Megalomaniac]

Master System Sonic is a simplified game designed around the 8-bit system, there's a lot more going on at any one time in the Mega Drive / Genesis original being recreated on C64 and GX4000 / Amstrad Plus. You'd expect the GX4000 / Amstrad Plus to outperform the C64, and it does, but I'm sure the standard CPC couldn't get anywhere near that speed of scrolling with all this detail. The C64 version is hugely impressive, it looks very playable, and while the C64 palette is far from perfect for this type of game, the visual result is good enough.

[lmimmfn]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

Master System Sonic is a simplified game designed around the 8-bit system, there's a lot more going on at any one time in the Mega Drive / Genesis original being recreated on C64 and GX4000 / Amstrad Plus. You'd expect the GX4000 / Amstrad Plus to outperform the C64, and it does, but I'm sure the standard CPC couldn't get anywhere near that speed of scrolling with all this detail. The C64 version is hugely impressive, it looks very playable, and while the C64 palette is far from perfect for this type of game, the visual result is good enough.

I don't think the scrolling would be the biggest problem on the base CPC, the challenge tbh would be the rotating rings and lack of sprites which would consume too much CPU time to update.

The C64 version does look very impressive.

[Mad-Matt]

Bare in mins that Sonic needs a little extra magic from the reu dma to work as well as it does on the C64.

[lmimmfn]

Originally Posted by Mad-Matt

Bare in mins that Sonic needs a little extra magic from the reu dma to work as well as it does on the C64.

Ahh ok, so kinda cheating I guess.

Don't get me wrong, I love hardware that expands original machines but should be stated e.g. there's a huge difference between Grind and similar running on a 68060.

The GX4000 version is on base hardware but just a large cart size as was the norm on consoles to increase capacity.