Espozo wrote:It always ends up sounding like a bunch of white noise to me.
I wouldn't necessarily call it white noise, but more often than not, PCM/CD music sounds uninteresting, boring or just plain weird compared to "proper" video game music. Compare the soundtrack of Sonic 3D Blast
on the Genesis and
on the Saturn. I think the Saturn version is pure crap, boring as fuck, while the Genesis one is much more memorable (but not perfect).
Not to disagree with you, but the approach one particular developer took when porting a game doesn't necessarily reflect what the platform is capable of. Sometimes ports look bad because of ROM size restrictions imposed by the publisher, so the console itself isn't to blame. Horizontal shooters will invariably suffer on platforms like the NES or the SMS, that can only show a very limited number of sprites per scanline.
Sounds like the same situation with some other system...
I never thought of that, but you may be right.
R-Type?
Not sure if I ever gave R-Type a proper try, but no. Since you want to know, from the top of my head, the only shooters I remember having enjoyed playing (as in "played more than once" and "played more than one level") are Tyrian 2000 for DOS and Ikaruga on the Dreamcast.
tomaitheous wrote:System design wise, the SMS is very "clean" for the most part.
I agree. I never programmed for it, but looking at the docs, everything is very concise and straightforward, it just makes sense. The NES appears to have way more quirks.
The choice for a small tilemap size is also weird. Under normal game conditions, it's fine - but depending on some effects, the small tilemap makes it difficult or impossible.
It bothers me a bit that to have something as simple as glitchless horizontal scrolling you have to mask the leftmost 8 pixels of the screen and end up with a weird 248-pixel wide viewport (I know this often happens in the NES as well - and you still get attribute glitches!). Other than that, I don't see any problems.
Dragon's Trap
Never played it, but looking at videos now, that's a very nice looking game at times! Some backgrounds look great, like
this one, but then they go and mix that with crap like
this... go figure. Characters look consistently good though!
Cool Spot turns off the display, and then re-enables it with a BG relocation mid screen (change BG map pointer), and finished it off with sprites in the new status bar area.
I don't see any relocation, it just appears to blank some scanlines to smooth out the transition between the gameplay window and the status bar. The sprites are nicely spread though, and cover a decent enough amount of the the status bar area to not look weird. Earthworm Jim uses sprite magnification to cover a bigger area, but it looks a little weird IMO (and AFAIK magnification doesn't work on all VDP variants).
Well, the trade off was tile flipping in the BG.
When you say it's a trade off do you mean that there's a hardware justification for why both couldn't be implemented or that it's a trade off when compared to the NES? The Good thing about the NES is that while it doesn't support background tile flipping natively, this feature can be implemented by a mapper in the cartridge.
I guess the flip side to that is you can allocate that however you want between sprites and tiles.
I like the fact that the VRAM layout is configurable.
Just one thing to note; you have to be careful with SMS videos on youtube. People love to turn off the sprite limit in emulation for those videos.
That's true. People frequently do that with NES games too.
Espozo wrote:I never understood why they decided to use 4bpp graphics with only 2 16 color palettes.
There have been worse decisions... PCs had 4bpp graphics with a single constant 16-color palette in EGA... now *that* sucked. I can think of a lot of cool things to do using the Master System setup.
a 3bpp background layer but with 3bpp sprites being able to cover close to, if not, the whole screen would have been a much better deal to me.
Sounds cool, but we got what we got. I see no point in dreaming about hardware that doesn't exist unless we can actually get it made.
Doubling the palettes would also be nice too; I don't know why Sega has trouble with that...
They did, for the Genesis.
Sure, by the time they did it, 4 palettes was pretty lame.