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The systems operate in fundamentally different ways, you can't compare them like that. The C64 is more than capable of displaying things the SMS can't, and vice versa.

The Master System has only one background layer. You have to fake parallax by horizontally scrolling it, or animating the tiles in sync with the scrolling. You can do this tile animation on more or fewer tiles, depending on how much of the valuable frame time you are willing to spend on it - but the upper limit is fairly low. You can use sprites cleverly to mask tiles to enhance the effect - but the sprite limit means this has severe side effects.

For example: You could imagine building a game around that effect, but it'd be hard work to make it a good game.

Anyway, parallax isn't everything. It's more like a sign you could have spent the resources doing something better like more sprite animation frames or maybe even a higher frame rate - note how many later games dropped from 60 to 30 to 15 or fewer frames per second...

What's this obsession with POWER anyway?

Maxim and others are politely trying to tell you that you are taking less-relevant measurements as signs of greatness, being easily distracted by the baubles that game companies have set before you, rather than care about the meat of the game.

Master system can do parallax in stripes (Like Black Belt, California Games, Shadow of the Beast), and also fake 2 planes (Shadow of the Beast, Micromachines). What it doens't have is 2 real different planes.

ccovell wrote

What's this obsession with POWER anyway?

It's SMS POWER !! LOL :P

Maxim wrote

The systems operate in fundamentally different ways, you can't compare them like that. The C64 is more than capable of displaying things the SMS can't, and vice versa.

The Master System has only one background layer. You have to fake parallax by horizontally scrolling it, or animating the tiles in sync with the scrolling. You can do this tile animation on more or fewer tiles, depending on how much of the valuable frame time you are willing to spend on it - but the upper limit is fairly low. You can use sprites cleverly to mask tiles to enhance the effect - but the sprite limit means this has severe side effects.

For example: You could imagine building a game around that effect, but it'd be hard work to make it a good game.

Anyway, parallax isn't everything. It's more like a sign you could have spent the resources doing something better like more sprite animation frames or maybe even a higher frame rate - note how many later games dropped from 60 to 30 to 15 or fewer frames per second...

Cheers Maxim.
Thought the c64 is probably more versatile in terms of graphics being a computer and the master system isn't but the master system is tons better in terms of colors and gameplay (commodore only uses one button i think). There are good games like Katakis/Denaris that use parallax scrolling , would've been cool if they had released it on the master system.

The worst example about the frame drop is Xenon 2 , so goddamn slow!

The c64 colour palette is very limited and so is the amount of colour per char.The processor is also very slow so to get a full screen scroll I had to time the raster,normally for pal there is enough raster time to update 21 rows with colour scrolling but even less for NTSC.Master system wins hands down compared to c64.I would rate "from best to worse"this way Master System ->Nes->C64.

These are mine for C64

Full colour scroll test
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=302mX2wHV2U&t=21s

Chopper animation and full colour scroll
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGm881JuuNg

Full screen vertical scroll "no colour scrolling"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwfnw7lD0bE

Partial screen scroll "two way scrolling"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcOc1EIQlJw&t=29s

Full colour scroll 21 rows Pal"testing wonderboy in monster land tiles"2x2" type game"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agIOeO_7wwk

All scrolling is double buffered and done over multiple frames as the processor is much slower than the nes and master system processors.

It's not exactly Master System, but GG Shinobi did parallax in the road stage I believe via tile animation.

The SMS game that blew me away technically was Road Rash. The game is halfway to true 3D (uses true 3D math for the hills), and looks nearly as good as its Genesis counterpart! It makes me wonder if the Genesis one might have run a lot smoother if they had used fewer segments in the road on-screen and took out the realtime scaling like in the SMS one.

OmegaPrime, I dig these! :) I've done a little C64 coding and know how tricky this can be.

Hey LouisG, welcome to the site. Somewhat of a pivot but you if you like chiptune you should check out Louis's stuff! Produced under title 'Extent of the Jam'.

Something that impresses me is the lengths later platformer games go to to get fluid animation with sprites and add background animation. Whole engines with broad levels of complexity revolving around dedicated sprite management routines, the use of buffers freeing tiles for more detailed backgrounds.

A DMA solution would have been a game changer for the system.

LouisG wrote

It's not exactly Master System, but GG Shinobi did parallax in the road stage I believe via tile animation.

The buildings in the background and the stripes on the road are made of animated tiles, the clouds are sprites and the parallax scrolling of the black and yellow walls is done by colour cycling.

vingazole wrote

LouisG wrote

It's not exactly Master System, but GG Shinobi did parallax in the road stage I believe via tile animation.

The buildings in the background and the stripes on the road are made of animated tiles, the clouds are sprites and the parallax scrolling of the black and yellow walls is done by colour cycling.

Oh interesting! I didn't know there were that many simultaneous techniques used in that scene. Very impressive.

It's the overlapping which makes it so tricky, and also more convincing. They could have avoided the overlaps relatively easily, but went for the more clever version instead. It's a shame the rest of the game is less innovative.

The games that imho pushed the system to its limits was Street Fighter 2, Shadow Dancer, Mortal Kombat 1 and Space Harrier.

G-LOC has some (fake?) scaling/zooming in and out the cockpit. It looks good for an 8-bit system.

I'd like to know what special effects do the hardware support. I was amazed by the distortion effect in Psycho Fox when you use the voodoo doll. Also, the background in the first level in Sagaia is awesome. Did the programmers do something extraordinary or is it within the hardware's native capabilities?

That's an application of the hardware's ability to scroll horizontally (which was not a given on some earlier systems). Some games use this to have a screen split for a status bar, some use it for parallax, games like Hang On use it to bend the road, but you can also use it for shimmering wave effects quite effectively. The limitation is that it's the whole screen and the split is horizontal.

Maxim wrote

That's an application of the hardware's ability to scroll horizontally (which was not a given on some earlier systems). Some games use this to have a screen split for a status bar, some use it for parallax, games like Hang On use it to bend the road, but you can also use it for shimmering wave effects quite effectively. The limitation is that it's the whole screen and the split is horizontal.

Is it the only hardware "special" feature?
And what about external hardware on games, did any games use it as Sega even did with Virtua Racing SVP game?

The Master System doesn't expose its internals on the cartridge slot like some Ni****do consoles, not does it have the DMA capabilities or video memory to allow a custom cartridge to stream graphics in as with the SVP. Some things could be done - for example, you can take over the bus and upload graphics faster than the CPU can, but you are still limited by the memory. This wouldn't have been economically feasible in the system's lifetime.

The key hardware video features of the system are hardware scrolling (albeit on a small map; home computers and earlier consoles required a screen rewrite to scroll), hardware sprites (home computers often had to draw them into a bitmap), line split scrolling (good for status bars, parallax and road effects), and to some extent reasonably fine grained attributes for things like colours (compared to NES where attribute clash was an issue).

Heliophobe wrote

There are some examples of large sprite games on the SMS that get around the sprite limit by using background tiles to represent the larger sprites, such as Altered Beast and Golden Axe, but the trade offs are very slow frame rate and choppy movements (always in 8-pixel increments) which really affect the playability of the games, so while they look good in screenshots, they look (and play) poorly in motion. SFII uses more traditional sprites and I'm not crazy about the gameplay, I think it's more about a sloppy port than technical limitations.

I beat Altered Beast today (1cc, even) and was wondering about this exact same thing, i.e. whether it uses background tiles instead of sprites, so this post is a welcome confirmation.

I also wonder whether "looks good in screenshots" was a deliberate strategy. Surely the developers had to be aware that Altered Beast looks rather dire in motion -- and as Heliophobe says, it plays poorly too, with lots of inputs getting eaten, especially when things get busy (not to mention the game's charming habit of declining to spawn the power-up wolves if there are too many enemies onscreen!).

So was it seen as OK -- advantageous, even -- to put out a game that no one would really want to play, but looked good in the still shots in the marketing materials? Was that the game's raison d'être, basically?

But there again, it's hard to fathom the strategy, because Altered Beast SMS looks plausible enough in screenshots -- the garish pink-and-green of the opening stage notwithstanding (why was that color scheme so common in Master System games?) -- that it almost risked harming the Genesis's credibility in a "Huh, 16 bits isn't much of an upgrade, is it?" sort of way. Or if you need video footage for a TV ad, the transformation scenes on the SMS look fairly close to the Genesis.

Anyway, miserable experience, that Altered Beast port. But it is Altered Beast, and it is beatable. :)

I think both Altered Beast and Golden Axe exceed the limits of the SMS so I recomend to emulate these games by Genesis Plus GX on Retroarch, and overclock the game at least to 125% or 150% to do this go to options after running the game to the "Options" tab, it will noticiable improve the graphics animation, and here is another improvement, activate Run-ahead at the "Latency" tab and set 2 frames to Run-ahead for.

The latter feature reduce the input lag and it works great is one of the features of Retroarch, and let's talk about the sprite limit in this case Altered Beast lacks a nice sprite flickering so I suggest to turn off this option too, and set the region to PAL especially for Golden Axe since the player walks annoyingly fast on NTSC region.

It would be great if somehow the Genesis/MD had these features as improvements for Master System games by software or something.

goldenband wrote

I also wonder whether "looks good in screenshots" was a deliberate strategy. Surely the developers had to be aware that Altered Beast looks rather dire in motion -- and as Heliophobe says, it plays poorly too, with lots of inputs getting eaten, especially when things get busy (not to mention the game's charming habit of declining to spawn the power-up wolves if there are too many enemies onscreen!).

So was it seen as OK -- advantageous, even -- to put out a game that no one would really want to play, but looked good in the still shots in the marketing materials? Was that the game's raison d'être, basically?

Probably it was a strategy to look better in the screenshots, but I've to say that back in the time, being Altered Beast my third SMS game, I didn't notice it being specially bad or choppy (well, I was coming from the Amstrad CPC, haha)

goldenband wrote

Anyway, miserable experience, that Altered Beast port.

It doesn't help that the arcade original isn't exactly a great game to begin with.

Kagesan wrote

goldenband wrote

Anyway, miserable experience, that Altered Beast port.

It doesn't help that the arcade original isn't exactly a great game to begin with.

I've only played the arcade game a little bit, but I enjoyed the Genesis version -- in a way, at least. It's the kind of game that's torture until you 100% memorize it, and then suddenly it becomes quite fun and you can kick ass left and right.

But the inconsistent controls on the SMS version totally ruin the potential for that, as you'll press a button and nothing will happen...or the wrong thing will happen...or the collision detection will decline your request...or...

Author	Message
Maxim Site Admin Joined: 19 Oct 1999 Posts: 14744 Location: London	Posted: Thu Apr 06, 2017 6:39 pm
	The systems operate in fundamentally different ways, you can't compare them like that. The C64 is more than capable of displaying things the SMS can't, and vice versa. The Master System has only one background layer. You have to fake parallax by horizontally scrolling it, or animating the tiles in sync with the scrolling. You can do this tile animation on more or fewer tiles, depending on how much of the valuable frame time you are willing to spend on it - but the upper limit is fairly low. You can use sprites cleverly to mask tiles to enhance the effect - but the sprite limit means this has severe side effects. For example: You could imagine building a game around that effect, but it'd be hard work to make it a good game. Anyway, parallax isn't everything. It's more like a sign you could have spent the resources doing something better like more sprite animation frames or maybe even a higher frame rate - note how many later games dropped from 60 to 30 to 15 or fewer frames per second...

ccovell Joined: 26 Dec 2004 Posts: 374 Location: Japan	Posted: Fri Apr 07, 2017 12:47 am
ccovell Joined: 26 Dec 2004 Posts: 374 Location: Japan	What's this obsession with POWER anyway? Maxim and others are politely trying to tell you that you are taking less-relevant measurements as signs of greatness, being easily distracted by the baubles that game companies have set before you, rather than care about the meat of the game.

kusfo Joined: 29 Mar 2012 Posts: 886 Location: Spain	Posted: Fri Apr 07, 2017 6:44 am
kusfo Joined: 29 Mar 2012 Posts: 886 Location: Spain	Master system can do parallax in stripes (Like Black Belt, California Games, Shadow of the Beast), and also fake 2 planes (Shadow of the Beast, Micromachines). What it doens't have is 2 real different planes.

Filipe Santos Joined: 27 Feb 2017 Posts: 145 Location: Northern Ireland	Posted: Fri Apr 07, 2017 10:24 pm
	ccovell wrote What's this obsession with POWER anyway? It's SMS POWER !! LOL :P

Filipe Santos Joined: 27 Feb 2017 Posts: 145 Location: Northern Ireland	Posted: Fri Apr 07, 2017 10:28 pm
	Maxim wrote The systems operate in fundamentally different ways, you can't compare them like that. The C64 is more than capable of displaying things the SMS can't, and vice versa. The Master System has only one background layer. You have to fake parallax by horizontally scrolling it, or animating the tiles in sync with the scrolling. You can do this tile animation on more or fewer tiles, depending on how much of the valuable frame time you are willing to spend on it - but the upper limit is fairly low. You can use sprites cleverly to mask tiles to enhance the effect - but the sprite limit means this has severe side effects. For example: You could imagine building a game around that effect, but it'd be hard work to make it a good game. Anyway, parallax isn't everything. It's more like a sign you could have spent the resources doing something better like more sprite animation frames or maybe even a higher frame rate - note how many later games dropped from 60 to 30 to 15 or fewer frames per second... Cheers Maxim. Thought the c64 is probably more versatile in terms of graphics being a computer and the master system isn't but the master system is tons better in terms of colors and gameplay (commodore only uses one button i think). There are good games like Katakis/Denaris that use parallax scrolling , would've been cool if they had released it on the master system. The worst example about the frame drop is Xenon 2 , so goddamn slow!

OmegaPrime Joined: 18 Dec 2014 Posts: 95 Location: Canada	Posted: Sat Apr 08, 2017 3:01 am
	The c64 colour palette is very limited and so is the amount of colour per char.The processor is also very slow so to get a full screen scroll I had to time the raster,normally for pal there is enough raster time to update 21 rows with colour scrolling but even less for NTSC.Master system wins hands down compared to c64.I would rate "from best to worse"this way Master System ->Nes->C64. These are mine for C64 Full colour scroll test https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=302mX2wHV2U&t=21s Chopper animation and full colour scroll https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dGm881JuuNg Full screen vertical scroll "no colour scrolling" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rwfnw7lD0bE Partial screen scroll "two way scrolling" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HcOc1EIQlJw&t=29s Full colour scroll 21 rows Pal"testing wonderboy in monster land tiles"2x2" type game" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agIOeO_7wwk All scrolling is double buffered and done over multiple frames as the processor is much slower than the nes and master system processors.

LouisG Joined: 08 Jun 2017 Posts: 5 Location: San Francisco	Posted: Fri Jun 09, 2017 5:23 pm
	It's not exactly Master System, but GG Shinobi did parallax in the road stage I believe via tile animation. The SMS game that blew me away technically was Road Rash. The game is halfway to true 3D (uses true 3D math for the hills), and looks nearly as good as its Genesis counterpart! It makes me wonder if the Genesis one might have run a lot smoother if they had used fewer segments in the road on-screen and took out the realtime scaling like in the SMS one. OmegaPrime, I dig these! :) I've done a little C64 coding and know how tricky this can be.

psidum Joined: 01 Jan 2014 Posts: 331	Posted: Sat Jun 10, 2017 2:35 am Last edited by psidum on Mon Jun 12, 2017 2:33 pm; edited 1 time in total
psidum Joined: 01 Jan 2014 Posts: 331	Hey LouisG, welcome to the site. Somewhat of a pivot but you if you like chiptune you should check out Louis's stuff! Produced under title 'Extent of the Jam'. Something that impresses me is the lengths later platformer games go to to get fluid animation with sprites and add background animation. Whole engines with broad levels of complexity revolving around dedicated sprite management routines, the use of buffers freeing tiles for more detailed backgrounds. A DMA solution would have been a game changer for the system.

vingazole Joined: 20 Feb 2008 Posts: 118 Location: Saintes, France	Posted: Sat Jun 10, 2017 1:42 pm
	LouisG wrote It's not exactly Master System, but GG Shinobi did parallax in the road stage I believe via tile animation. The buildings in the background and the stripes on the road are made of animated tiles, the clouds are sprites and the parallax scrolling of the black and yellow walls is done by colour cycling.

LouisG Joined: 08 Jun 2017 Posts: 5 Location: San Francisco	Posted: Mon Jun 12, 2017 5:19 pm
	vingazole wrote LouisG wrote It's not exactly Master System, but GG Shinobi did parallax in the road stage I believe via tile animation. The buildings in the background and the stripes on the road are made of animated tiles, the clouds are sprites and the parallax scrolling of the black and yellow walls is done by colour cycling. Oh interesting! I didn't know there were that many simultaneous techniques used in that scene. Very impressive.

Maxim Site Admin Joined: 19 Oct 1999 Posts: 14744 Location: London	Posted: Mon Jun 12, 2017 8:38 pm
	It's the overlapping which makes it so tricky, and also more convincing. They could have avoided the overlaps relatively easily, but went for the more clever version instead. It's a shame the rest of the game is less innovative.

386DX Joined: 13 Jun 2017 Posts: 96	Posted: Tue Jun 13, 2017 11:57 am
386DX Joined: 13 Jun 2017 Posts: 96	The games that imho pushed the system to its limits was Street Fighter 2, Shadow Dancer, Mortal Kombat 1 and Space Harrier.

TinchoDJ Joined: 12 Jan 2005 Posts: 187 Location: Reconquista, Santa Fe, Argentina	Posted: Tue Jun 13, 2017 7:07 pm Last edited by TinchoDJ on Thu Oct 26, 2017 11:20 am; edited 2 times in total
	G-LOC has some (fake?) scaling/zooming in and out the cockpit. It looks good for an 8-bit system. I'd like to know what special effects do the hardware support. I was amazed by the distortion effect in Psycho Fox when you use the voodoo doll. Also, the background in the first level in Sagaia is awesome. Did the programmers do something extraordinary or is it within the hardware's native capabilities?

Maxim Site Admin Joined: 19 Oct 1999 Posts: 14744 Location: London	Posted: Tue Jun 13, 2017 9:13 pm
	That's an application of the hardware's ability to scroll horizontally (which was not a given on some earlier systems). Some games use this to have a screen split for a status bar, some use it for parallax, games like Hang On use it to bend the road, but you can also use it for shimmering wave effects quite effectively. The limitation is that it's the whole screen and the split is horizontal.

386DX Joined: 13 Jun 2017 Posts: 96	Posted: Thu Oct 26, 2017 9:21 am
386DX Joined: 13 Jun 2017 Posts: 96	Maxim wrote That's an application of the hardware's ability to scroll horizontally (which was not a given on some earlier systems). Some games use this to have a screen split for a status bar, some use it for parallax, games like Hang On use it to bend the road, but you can also use it for shimmering wave effects quite effectively. The limitation is that it's the whole screen and the split is horizontal. Is it the only hardware "special" feature? And what about external hardware on games, did any games use it as Sega even did with Virtua Racing SVP game?

Maxim Site Admin Joined: 19 Oct 1999 Posts: 14744 Location: London	Posted: Thu Oct 26, 2017 1:04 pm
	The Master System doesn't expose its internals on the cartridge slot like some Ni****do consoles, not does it have the DMA capabilities or video memory to allow a custom cartridge to stream graphics in as with the SVP. Some things could be done - for example, you can take over the bus and upload graphics faster than the CPU can, but you are still limited by the memory. This wouldn't have been economically feasible in the system's lifetime. The key hardware video features of the system are hardware scrolling (albeit on a small map; home computers and earlier consoles required a screen rewrite to scroll), hardware sprites (home computers often had to draw them into a bitmap), line split scrolling (good for status bars, parallax and road effects), and to some extent reasonably fine grained attributes for things like colours (compared to NES where attribute clash was an issue).

goldenband Joined: 24 May 2010 Posts: 127 Location: New York	Posted: Mon Aug 03, 2020 11:53 pm
	Heliophobe wrote There are some examples of large sprite games on the SMS that get around the sprite limit by using background tiles to represent the larger sprites, such as Altered Beast and Golden Axe, but the trade offs are very slow frame rate and choppy movements (always in 8-pixel increments) which really affect the playability of the games, so while they look good in screenshots, they look (and play) poorly in motion. SFII uses more traditional sprites and I'm not crazy about the gameplay, I think it's more about a sloppy port than technical limitations. I beat Altered Beast today (1cc, even) and was wondering about this exact same thing, i.e. whether it uses background tiles instead of sprites, so this post is a welcome confirmation. I also wonder whether "looks good in screenshots" was a deliberate strategy. Surely the developers had to be aware that Altered Beast looks rather dire in motion -- and as Heliophobe says, it plays poorly too, with lots of inputs getting eaten, especially when things get busy (not to mention the game's charming habit of declining to spawn the power-up wolves if there are too many enemies onscreen!). So was it seen as OK -- advantageous, even -- to put out a game that no one would really want to play, but looked good in the still shots in the marketing materials? Was that the game's raison d'être, basically? But there again, it's hard to fathom the strategy, because Altered Beast SMS looks plausible enough in screenshots -- the garish pink-and-green of the opening stage notwithstanding (why was that color scheme so common in Master System games?) -- that it almost risked harming the Genesis's credibility in a "Huh, 16 bits isn't much of an upgrade, is it?" sort of way. Or if you need video footage for a TV ad, the transformation scenes on the SMS look fairly close to the Genesis. Anyway, miserable experience, that Altered Beast port. But it is Altered Beast, and it is beatable. :)

FeRcHuLeS Joined: 22 Mar 2015 Posts: 228	Posted: Tue Aug 04, 2020 3:33 am
FeRcHuLeS Joined: 22 Mar 2015 Posts: 228	I think both Altered Beast and Golden Axe exceed the limits of the SMS so I recomend to emulate these games by Genesis Plus GX on Retroarch, and overclock the game at least to 125% or 150% to do this go to options after running the game to the "Options" tab, it will noticiable improve the graphics animation, and here is another improvement, activate Run-ahead at the "Latency" tab and set 2 frames to Run-ahead for. The latter feature reduce the input lag and it works great is one of the features of Retroarch, and let's talk about the sprite limit in this case Altered Beast lacks a nice sprite flickering so I suggest to turn off this option too, and set the region to PAL especially for Golden Axe since the player walks annoyingly fast on NTSC region. It would be great if somehow the Genesis/MD had these features as improvements for Master System games by software or something.

kusfo Joined: 29 Mar 2012 Posts: 886 Location: Spain	Posted: Tue Aug 04, 2020 7:42 am
kusfo Joined: 29 Mar 2012 Posts: 886 Location: Spain	goldenband wrote I also wonder whether "looks good in screenshots" was a deliberate strategy. Surely the developers had to be aware that Altered Beast looks rather dire in motion -- and as Heliophobe says, it plays poorly too, with lots of inputs getting eaten, especially when things get busy (not to mention the game's charming habit of declining to spawn the power-up wolves if there are too many enemies onscreen!). So was it seen as OK -- advantageous, even -- to put out a game that no one would really want to play, but looked good in the still shots in the marketing materials? Was that the game's raison d'être, basically? Probably it was a strategy to look better in the screenshots, but I've to say that back in the time, being Altered Beast my third SMS game, I didn't notice it being specially bad or choppy (well, I was coming from the Amstrad CPC, haha)

Kagesan Joined: 01 Feb 2014 Posts: 877	Posted: Tue Aug 04, 2020 3:25 pm
Kagesan Joined: 01 Feb 2014 Posts: 877	goldenband wrote Anyway, miserable experience, that Altered Beast port. It doesn't help that the arcade original isn't exactly a great game to begin with.

goldenband Joined: 24 May 2010 Posts: 127 Location: New York	Posted: Wed Aug 05, 2020 6:52 pm
	Kagesan wrote goldenband wrote Anyway, miserable experience, that Altered Beast port. It doesn't help that the arcade original isn't exactly a great game to begin with. I've only played the arcade game a little bit, but I enjoyed the Genesis version -- in a way, at least. It's the kind of game that's torture until you 100% memorize it, and then suddenly it becomes quite fun and you can kick ass left and right. But the inconsistent controls on the SMS version totally ruin the potential for that, as you'll press a button and nothing will happen...or the wrong thing will happen...or the collision detection will decline your request...or...

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