Game Sack

[Kamahl]

Great episode. How did these games allow for parallax with only one BG layer?

3 ways:

Line Scrolling (Air Zonk):
Notice how all the layers seem to be "cut"?
It's just changing the speed of the background right before the next line is drawn via interrupts, and this is done a number of times during a frame.

Shoving sprites in smart positions (Darius):
Notice how the foreground has a lot of "empty" space? They abused the fact that you can't have anything going over those mountains and just use sprites there, since that way the sprite limit per line won't be reached.
It was also used in reverse on adventure island, where they are used as the background (also leaving a lot of empty space).
Requires careful planning.

Dynamic Tiles (Star Parodia):
The background is drawn as a series of tiles (8x8 blocks).
Those tiles can be animated.
As the map is moving (say... 2 pixels to the left per frame), these games animate some tiles in the background, drawing them as if it moved 1 pixel to the right.
The result is that a section of the background appears to be moving SLOWER than the rest of the background and, as such, seems like a separate and further away layer.
This takes a lot more memory and is quite limited (tiles have to be placed always next to the same tiles), but looks really good and doesn't waste sprites nor is it limited to "cuts".

Some games also use the cut trick to move parts of the map vertically, making it seem like they're overlapping other parts of the map.

Gate and Lords of Thunder use ALL of these tricks, really amazing stuff.

There's also my super awesome palette animation trick, but all that nets you is an Amiga style single color background like in Shadow of the Beast 2.

[Joe Redifer]

I really liked the dynamic tiles in the beginning of the second stage of Star Parodia. You can scroll pretty much any which way instead of the parallax just being in the vertical dimension. That part of the stage is in the video in the montage segment.

[Kamahl]

Yeah it looks really good there, but the repetition is pretty obvious. The best usage of Dynamic Tiles is in the first stage of Shubibinman 3:

[zetastrike]

Games like Spriggan, Gate of Thunder, Rayzanber, Gradius etc should have been on the Sega CD, but no. We needed Make my Video, Double Switch, Night Trap, and Wirehead.

[TrekkiesUnite118]

Games like Spriggan, Gate of Thunder, Rayzanber, Gradius etc should have been on the Sega CD, but no. We needed Make my Video, Double Switch, Night Trap, and Wirehead.

Honestly, the Genesis itself could probably handle a port of Gradius that would probably be close to Arcade Perfect. Same with Salamander and other Konami shooters on the same Arcade Hardware. It really is odd as those Arcade boards all used the same CPU as the Genesis and graphically weren't as advanced as the Genesis either. You'd think porting those games would be an easy no brainer. Did Konami really hate Sega that much?

[j_factor]

Gradius and Salamander were really old games by that time. It would seem awfully weird to have Gradius 1 on Genesis coming out after Gradius III on SNES.

[TrekkiesUnite118]

Gradius and Salamander were really old games by that time. It would seem awfully weird to have Gradius 1 on Genesis coming out after Gradius III on SNES.

Yet it wasn't weird at all to have them released on the PC-Engine.

[M4R14NO94]

Games like Spriggan, Gate of Thunder, Rayzanber, Gradius etc should have been on the Sega CD, but no. We needed Make my Video, Double Switch, Night Trap, and Wirehead.

While Wirehead was actually enjoyable, I have to agree with you there. Seriously, we should've gotten some real games!

And the TGCD could have been filled with FMV games too. AFAIK the only games on there that had FMV were It Came From the Desert and John Madden Duo Football.

[Zoltor]

Gradius and Salamander were really old games by that time. It would seem awfully weird to have Gradius 1 on Genesis coming out after Gradius III on SNES.

Not really, they could've released a two game cart with Gradius 1, and the unreleased outside of Japan Gradius 2, people would've been all over that. Also from hind sight, it would've been the best version as well, because when part 1, and 2 came out, no console could really handle them, so I imagine it would've run alot smoother on the genny/SNES.

[j_factor]

Yet it wasn't weird at all to have them released on the PC-Engine.

The Japanese market is way different from the US market when it comes to this kind of stuff.

Not really, they could've released a two game cart with Gradius 1, and the unreleased outside of Japan Gradius 2, people would've been all over that. Also from hind sight, it would've been the best version as well, because when part 1, and 2 came out, no console could really handle them, so I imagine it would've run alot smoother on the genny/SNES.

That would've had to have been a very large cart.

[Zoltor]

The Japanese market is way different from the US market when it comes to this kind of stuff.



That would've had to have been a very large cart.

Two NES shooters on a SNES cart is nothing, afterall the Japanese fit 2 NES RPGs on a SNES/SFC cart. The SNES was no stranger to having 2 full blown high quality games on a cart, there is atleast a couple I know of).

[j_factor]

Yes, if you're porting directly from the NES versions, sure.

[gamevet]

And the TGCD could have been filled with FMV games too. AFAIK the only games on there that had FMV were It Came From the Desert and John Madden Duo Football.

Sherlock Holmes: Consulting Detective

[tomaitheous]

3 ways:

Line Scrolling (Air Zonk):
Notice how all the layers seem to be "cut"?
It's just changing the speed of the background right before the next line is drawn via interrupts, and this is done a number of times during a frame.

Shoving sprites in smart positions (Darius):
Notice how the foreground has a lot of "empty" space? They abused the fact that you can't have anything going over those mountains and just use sprites there, since that way the sprite limit per line won't be reached.
It was also used in reverse on adventure island, where they are used as the background (also leaving a lot of empty space).
Requires careful planning.

Dynamic Tiles (Star Parodia):
The background is drawn as a series of tiles (8x8 blocks).
Those tiles can be animated.
As the map is moving (say... 2 pixels to the left per frame), these games animate some tiles in the background, drawing them as if it moved 1 pixel to the right.
The result is that a section of the background appears to be moving SLOWER than the rest of the background and, as such, seems like a separate and further away layer.
This takes a lot more memory and is quite limited (tiles have to be placed always next to the same tiles), but looks really good and doesn't waste sprites nor is it limited to "cuts".

Some games also use the cut trick to move parts of the map vertically, making it seem like they're overlapping other parts of the map.

Gate and Lords of Thunder use ALL of these tricks, really amazing stuff.

There's also my super awesome palette animation trick, but all that nets you is an Amiga style single color background like in Shadow of the Beast 2.

There's also the BG color #0 plane trick used in Magical Chase stage 1 (farthest layer):

[Christuserloeser]

Honestly, the Genesis itself could probably handle a port of Gradius that would probably be close to Arcade Perfect. Same with Salamander and other Konami shooters on the same Arcade Hardware. It really is odd as those Arcade boards all used the same CPU as the Genesis and graphically weren't as advanced as the Genesis either. You'd think porting those games would be an easy no brainer. Did Konami really hate Sega that much?

Well, took them until late 1992 to realize that they probably should show some more Sega love.

The biggest issue back in those days was ROM size. It cost a lot of money to produce games with a 4Mbit ROM chip, not to mention 8Mbit, which is probably why the first Konami games for MD were only 4Mbit (TMNT, Sunset Riders, Tiny Toons). It wasn't until Rocket Knight Adventures that Konami started taking a risk with their MD games.

But even if Konami ported those games you can be sure that they'd have looked a lot like TMNT and Sunset Riders looked in comparison to their arcade originals: solid, and with awesome music, but noticeably scaled back visually.