An unbiased comparison of Megadrive vs A1200 graphics?

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by TCD

The one thing about Samurai Shodown that I always wondered if it could be done on an Amiga is the 'zooming' of the background and characters when the characters near the edge of the screen.

Team17 wanted to add this kind of effect on Alien Breed 2 when it was intented to be just an A1200 version. It was ditched when they finally decided that the AGA version will be just an enhanced OCS one. Anyway, I'm not sure it was even possible. Seems a bit heavy for a basic Amiga OCS or AGA but who knows, they did managed to get this effect on Art of Fighting on the PC Engine CD.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

Team17 wanted to add this kind of effect on Alien Breed 2 when it was intented to be just an A1200 version.

Makes sense to add it to a game like Alien Breed. Shame it didn't make it into the final game.

[sokolovic]

Not as smooth of course but Pinball Illusion and Slam Tilt use a nice feature of the AGA chipset by switching to Hi Res on the fly to enlarge screen view.
Of course this is something a Megadrive cannot do (640*512 screen with 256col and still remain perfectly smooth).

Trivia : unlike the SNES, the Neo Geo hardware cannot zoom in but just zoom out.

[Megalomaniac]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Not quite. What hobbled OCS was lack of bandwidth. AGA fixed that. AGA also introduced 16 color dual playfields and 64 bit wide sprites with more color choices. With intelligent use of those improvements the A1200 can do much better than the A500, even with no change to the Blitter itself.

Street Fighter II was ported to the Amiga in 1992 by British game developer Creative Materials for US Gold, along with ports to the ZX Spectrum, Amstrad CPC, C64 and Atari ST. That's two things that tell you it's highly unlikely that the game was optimized for the Amiga.

To see what it could have looked like, watch this:-
[ Show youtube player ]

Slightly off-topic but still relevant IMO is the Amiga's better sound. The fanciest graphics in the world won't make up lack of good sounding special effects and music. For example Swiv on the Amiga has awesome explosion sounds that are immensely satisfying. The wimpy sound effects on the Mega Drive version don't compare, spoiling one of the best aspects of the game. Having more action does not compensate for this, it just makes it worse.

Good sound effects don't just give the game more depth, they also provide another dimension which helps the player to keep track of what's going on. For example you don't have to look to see that an enemy has been dispatched or a pickup collected. When the sound is poor you concentrate more on the graphics because you have to. The corollary is that good sound makes the graphics quality less important.

I watched a few videos showing Amiga games (mostly OCS) next to the same games on the Mega Drive. The general takeaway I got was that games tended to look better on the original platform, probably because they were 'made for it'. The more limited color palette of the Mega Drive was quite noticeable. It could move more objects around faster, but I found this wasn't always a good thing. Some games had so much going on that it just became an unholy mess. Another thing I noticed was more repetition and less detail in the graphics of some games on the Mega Drive, probably due to its more limited memory.

But the most interesting thing was the preponderance of Mega Drive games that were touted as excellent examples when to my eyes they weren't. After watching all these games being played I remembered why I never wanted a Mega Drive.

Elfmania is the best proof of two of your points - one being the importance of good sound effects to the 'feel' of a game, which Elfmania fails in, and the other being how much better Street Fighter II could have looked (did it even use the blitter? The coder was an ST guy, and at first glance the Amiga and ST versions don't look vastly different).

Overall though, there's enough here to say that the A1200's potential was much higher than the Megadrive's for most types of games, and was never fully exploited because Commodore just didn't live long enough.

[touko]

First the Md can display 61 colors max, only the color 0 of palette 0 can be visible,this is normal with a paletised system.
second you can use the four palettes for all layers, each tiles can have one of the 16 colors sub palettes, so you can use the four sub palette for layer 1/2 or sprites layer .

The Md use a chunky display, so 3D is more easy than the amiga.

[sokolovic]

Is there really a difference between planar and chunky display for 3D using a 68000/7mhz CPU ?
I mean, there isn't any 3D games on the Megadrive that seems impossible to make on the Amiga. Actually most of the Megadrive 3D games are Amiga ports and doesn't seems to be much smoother.
(Also the blitter can be used on the Amiga to accelerate 3D by filling polygons)

[khph_re]

There are a couple of nice wolf3D style games on the magadrive, but OCS has a few as well. In general, Flat poly 3D seems lacking on the MD compared to the Amiga, could be to do with the tile system, or the Amiga blitter, or just the fact they weren't that popular on 16 bit consoles.

[Retro1234]

Overall the 1200 is probably better but given Commodore were trying to compete with consoles it was a bit short-sighted not to significantly increase the number of sprites that could be displayed.

Of course the Amiga is a computer and better for working with graphics than any console of the time.

[DanScott]

Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000

I thought MD layer 0 is limited to 16 colour palette, layer 1 15 colour palette and sprites another 15 colour palette.

Every tile (8x8 char) and sprite on the MD has a 2bit palette index in the control word(s) (sprite uses 4 words of control data) , so can chose from any of the 4 palettes to use

[Samurai_Crow]

As has been said before, the lack of caches on AGA hobbled the bandwidth by not taking full advantage of fast-page memory fetching when dealing with sequential memory accesses that are common in video and audio data.

[slaapliedje]

Here is a prett sweet demo for the Genesis. [ Show youtube player ]
Someone should port it to the Amiga.

[DanScott]

Originally Posted by slaapliedje

Here is a prett sweet demo for the Genesis. [ Show youtube player ]
Someone should port it to the Amiga.

The sequel blows the original away!!!

[ Show youtube player ]

[saimon69]

Originally Posted by TCD

The one thing about Samurai Shodown that I always wondered if it could be done on an Amiga is the 'zooming' of the background and characters when the characters near the edge of the screen.

In Neo Geo case UNzooming, since that is what sprite scaling on Neo Geo look like - it can reduce sprites very fast but not increase it, so i guess the zoom mode in Art of Fighting then Samurai Showdown comes from this, they did design the playfield full scale then reduction was free and added it

[Samurai_Crow]

@DanScott
TiTAN has some Amigans among its members. Maybe they will allow it to be ported. Perhaps the system requirements on the Amiga will indicate how much the Sega Genesis/Megadrive can do.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by saimon69

In Neo Geo case UNzooming, since that is what sprite scaling on Neo Geo look like - it can reduce sprites very fast but not increase it, so i guess the zoom mode in Art of Fighting then Samurai Showdown comes from this, they did design the playfield full scale then reduction was free and added it

Interesting. I was always wondering why the effect looks so smooth. Thank you for the explanation

Edit: I should have written 'zooming out' now that I read my post...

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by TCD

Interesting. I was always wondering why the effect looks so smooth. Thank you for the explanation

Edit: I should have written 'zooming out' now that I read my post...

Now I have the proof that you didn't read my trivia comment above.

This effect is heavily used on the Neo Geo. In Sengoku you can see sprites coming from the background running at you and appears on the Playfield at full scale. Except that they cannot "grow" more when they are at full scale so it use the dezooming effect at reverse.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

Now I have the proof that you didn't read my trivia comment above.

Correction: I read your post before you added the trivia

I know that the effect was often used, but Samurai_Crow mentioned porting Samurai Shodown to the Amiga so I wondered if that aspect of it would be possible.

Trivia: Did you notice that two people added an extra W to the name of the game?

[sokolovic]

Originally Posted by TCD

Trivia: Did you notice that two people added an extra W to the name of the game?

Ahaha. Must be because my english is a bit broken, like many french. It didn't knew that there was an actual "showdown" word with a meaning in english. In any case I'll prononce it the same way "shodon" with a sounding final N.

[TCD]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

Ahaha. Must be because my english is a bit broken, like many french. It didn't knew that there was an actual "showdown" word with a meaning in english. In any case I'll prononce it the same way "shodon" with a sounding final N.

As far as I'm aware you weren't one of the two I still wonder if the spelling of the name is a typo or if the missing W is intentional.

[saimon69]

Originally Posted by sokolovic

Now I have the proof that you didn't read my trivia comment above.

This effect is heavily used on the Neo Geo. In Sengoku you can see sprites coming from the background running at you and appears on the Playfield at full scale. Except that they cannot "grow" more when they are at full scale so it use the dezooming effect at reverse.

Sengoku and Magician Lord did contribute to the "neo geo signature feeling" of a game with their scaling and distorting of sprites, that mostly disappeared later on, as iconic as the overuse of brown in the Commodore 64, color clash on the speccy and the copper bars in Amiga demos - as OT i LOVE the first sengoku, its atmosphere and its soundtrack, and feel that the universe is too downplayed; some parts of it reminds me the Ronin Warriors animated series that might be among its inspirations

[ Show youtube player ]