PC Engine Pixelization

[NecroPhile]

Isn't there a transparency effect in the background ?

I think it's just shaded to look like they're transparencies, as the ovoids wave together as one piece, never changing the amount of overlap.

[Joe Redifer]

I think the shadow effect on that level of Magical Chase is very poor. I mean technically the effect is good... it's just wrong. A shadow would not travel WITH the foreground. It would be stationary against the background. That is assuming it's the player that's moving and not the foreground itself. But even then, the shadow would be smaller than the foreground and should not scroll as fast. The developers did not understand how perspective works.

[TurboXray]

If the foreground is casting the shadow, then it makes sense that it's attached to it. The shadow isn't going to change as long as the angle of the light casting it doesn't as well. 

 There are a lot of things that are unrealistic in 8 and 16bit games. Nit picking this one seems a little strange.

[ParanoiaDragon]

IIRC, Spriggan does a similar thing with shadows in one of the levels....can't remember which one though.

[CrackTiger]

That Magical Chase stage is on the more plausible side as far as 16-bit games go, particularly because of the theme and style.

If you want to see non-sensical shadow/lighting effects, try playing Steel Empire. 8:00 in this video shows how realistic/effective that Magical Chase effect is for the time:

[TurboXray]

That Magical Chase stage is on the more plausible side as far as 16-bit games go, particularly because of the theme and style.
If you want to see nonsensical shadow/lighting effects, try playing Steel Empire. 8:00 in this video shows how realistic/effective that Magical Chase effect is for the time:

I like the design of the effect in Magical Chase. Even though the set of dynamic tiles are pretty repetitive, they break it up with some horizontal color striping against it. Even if it's surreal or unrealistic, it looks really well done. This isn't the only game to use this effect (Star Parodia, Psychic Storm), but it looks best in this game from what I've seen.

[TurboXray]

Nexzr - ship arriving from hyperspace..

[touko]

you have forgotten the sprite zooming in chuck no-rice intro:

[CrackTiger]

That effect in Nexzr is basically the vertical equivalent of the Zentradi ships arriving in Macross Scrambled Valkyrie.

[TurboXray]

Scaling PCE demo. Doesn't fit inside the 10sec limit of gifs.com

[shubibiman]

Nexzr - ship arriving from hyperspace..

Definitely the coolest trick I've seen in a PCE game.

[NightWolve]

Nexzr - ship arriving from hyperspace..

Nice, good to see that effect captured in a GIF. I bought that game in the 90's, enjoyed it quite a bit. It's not as great as Blazing Lasers or Super Star Soldier, but the CD soundtrack stands out - it's an overall respectable shooter to have in your library, maybe just a bit too short.

[deubeul]

Nexzr - ship arriving from hyperspace..

The first time I saw that destroyer appear back in the days, was such a shock. It still thrills me today each time I play the game. Thanks for that gif!

[NightWolve]

Yeah, it does induce panic/freak you out a bit along with the accompanying sound effects!

[deubeul]

Totally, I was testing the game with a friend and we both jump, after that we were "WTF" and laughing for the next 5 minutes. Good memories.

[NecroPhile]

[ParanoiaDragon]

And....that's probably the best part of the entire game sadly!

[NightWolve]

Totally, I was testing the game with a friend and we both jump, after that we were "WTF" and laughing for the next 5 minutes. Good memories.

Wow, and it's popular nostalgia for us retro types. I shared it on Twitter and my rarely used account got the most Likes/Retweets its ever had since creation! Heh. Even got a Like from HappyConsoleGamer on it in there too.

Loading: twitter.com/NightWolve75/status/734848727689482240

[touko]

It's not PCe but SGX,hope you like it too  .


https://j.gifs.com/pZnDJm.gif

[esteban]

It's not PCe but SGX,hope you like it too  .

It counts!

[CrackTiger]

Tom has a similar SuperGrafx transparency demo using LttP assets.

[touko]

Tom has a similar SuperGrafx transparency demo using LttP assets.

Yes is the same effect (playing with windows), but the book effect after is original, and not done already on PCE/SGX world, even on Md (in comic zone) is not at the same level .
it's not obvious here, but i can do a dual playfield scrolling and at the same time the book effect .

[Digi.k]

your demo reminded me of this.

Although not as clever as yours

[touko]

It's a sprites priority trick,clever too ...

[spenoza]

Shearing (just slanting the image by changing the scroll registers each scanline) is a little bit easier than the vertical stretching/scaling that we can sometimes see in PCE games.  Proper scaling (in both dimensions) is more CPU/RAM-intensive which is why it's usually limited to the SNES & Genesis.

Well, the SNES is effectively cheating because it has dedicated hardware to do the job, and it usually sticks to using that method. And the Genesis CPU is a multiplication monster, so yeah.

[touko]

Don't forget the chunky mode of the Md, it's well suited for pixels manipulation, it's not the case with the PCE and his planar mode .

[TurboXray]

To put things into perspective: I can scale (shrink) a 64x64 pixel image @ 28k cycles per frame. That's 24% cpu resource per frame at 60fps. That's totally doable. You could break that down further to a slower but still decent 20fps scaling at 8% cpu resource per frame. By comparison, to convert that chunky pixel image I just scaled into planar PCE format, it would take 150k cpu cycle just for that conversion. Scaling is easy on the processor, but that image conversion really slows things down.

[CrackTiger]

Is there anything that can be displayed without converting from chunky to planar, like wire frame stuff or anything?

Any theoretical workarounds, like so many Genesis homebrewers have found to do impossible things on Genesis hardware?

[Joe Redifer]

Don't forget the chunky mode of the Md, it's well suited for pixels manipulation, it's not the case with the PCE and his planar mode .

What is this "chunky" mode you speak of? How are the giant, blocky sprites in El Viento done (explosions, sea creatures, etc)? From my understanding reading some of the things the guy who designed the system has said, the MD/Genesis CAN scale sprites so that they appear bigger/blockier with relative ease, it just can't do the actual enlarging of them (Spite can be seen as 1x, 2x, 4x etc but not be seen transitioning between 1x and 4x or whatnot). Of course clarifications on this would be appreciated.

[ccovell]

Joe: they're unrelated.

1) Some magazines reported early on that the Genesis/MD had sprite scaling hardware, but that simply isn't true.  Only Sega's arcade hardware at the time (even some non-"super-scaler" models) could scale sprites.

2) El Viento is just using clusters of 4x4, 8x8, 16x16 (whatever) single-colour square sprites and animating them to make it look like scaling.

3) "Chunky" means all the bits for a single pixel in one graphic tile are in the same byte, or in consecutive bytes.  Planar means that each bitplane for a single pixel is split up in separate bytes.  For example, bitplanes 0,1 are separated from planes 2,3 by 32 bytes on the PC-Engine.  Logic dictates that bits for the same pixel right next to each other can be manipulated much faster by the CPU than when they're separated from each other (a lot more relative memory reads & bit shifts are the unwanted result.)

[TurboXray]

Chunky mode refers to how the pixels are stored in memory. Chunky=linear=packed pixel format. That is to say, you can access a pixel as a single bit, nybble, byte, word, etc. Depends what the format is. It's fast for doing pixel based effects and manipulation. It's fast for rendering, as well as scaling and rotation (which is why the SNES mode 7 used this form of pixels, while the other modes do not).

El Viento just uses the BG layer to make the explosion pixels (they are the size of one 8x8 tilemap entry). Sort of how Sapphire does it for scaled explosions after a boss:


Turtles in Time for SNES also uses the BG layer for the scaled enemy when it's thrown at the screen.

Is there anything that can be displayed without converting from chunky to planar, like wire frame stuff or anything?

Any theoretical workarounds, like so many Genesis homebrewers have found to do impossible things on Genesis hardware?

Yeah, monochrome wireframe effects can easily be doable on the PCE planar format.

Planar system lends itself to transparency effects. It also allows more complex dynamic tile support (only update dynamic animation on specific planes); Ninja Spirit does this on the second level to allow the dynamic tiles to appear behind the leaves.

As far as the scaling thing, I do have a much faster routine that deals directly in planar mode (for sprites). I haven't got around to using it for anything yet. I got the idea from nesdev forum - from tepples I think. It uses sprites to advance the scaling part. In other words, each 16px wide sprite gets shrink down to 1px (all ranges in between), and instead of ORing a bunch of pixel runs together, the sprites are just horizontally adjusted to remove the gaps. It's possible to do something like a 128x144 huge sprite object with scaling at 20fps @ 57% cpu resource per frame (perfect for a boss or such).

[roflmao]

Holy moly this thread is awesome. It should be awarded a sticky.

[Digi.k]

[Digi.k]

Emerald Dragon

[Gredler]

I second this for a sticky, behold the power of the little engine that could! Brings a tear to my eye

[CrackTiger]

That last Emerald Dragon pic is cool, because it means that the background is sprites.

[Gredler]

That last Emerald Dragon pic is cool, because it means that the background is sprites.

A clever use of the background color to "light" the smallish pillar/stonehenge sprite and cloud. So nice.

[exodus]

Have we discussed yet why this thread is called pc engine pixelization? this does not jive with what I'm seeing.

[CrackTiger]

It was supposed to be about the popular pixelation style, but people just started posting any kind of special effect and here we are.

[ccovell]

Have we discussed yet why this thread is called pc engine pixelization? this does not jive with what I'm seeing.

It was supposed to be about the popular pixelation style, but people just started posting any kind of special effect and here we are.

I tried to rein it in a bit when I mentioned that some pics didn't have any scaling going on, only warping or shearing, but... eh.   

[exodus]

but pixelization doesn't mean scaling...? like these are all pixels, so I'm not sure what pixelization was supposed to mean in the first place here!

That said, I like seeing all these fun effects!

[Gredler]

"Feats of Graphical Programming: Pixelation and other programmed VFX"

[NecroPhile]

Ya know you can change the original posts subject line to something more appropriate, right?

[esteban]

Pixelization Party @pce @tg-16

[CrackTiger]

but pixelization doesn't mean scaling...? like these are all pixels, so I'm not sure what pixelization was supposed to mean in the first place here!

That said, I like seeing all these fun effects!

It is what people called the 16-bit equivalent of "jaggies" bitd. When pixels are grown, but not because scaling is actually taking place, or assets that never shrink or grow are depicted as though the pixels are much larger than what are technically individual pixels, it's called pixelization.

It's also the literal definition.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pixelization


It was an unfortunate fad which was popularized by the SNES' Mode 7. It got out of control and it became common for games on all platforms to pixelate things just for the sake of it, even if it was prendered nonsense which takes up as much space as polished redrawn frames of a different size. Even SNES games are loaded with fake scaled/pixelated assets, since the hardware's built-in scaling is so limited. Just like how most SNES "transparency"/translucent effects are done with flickering.

Ya know you can change the original posts subject line to something more appropriate, right?

It's still appropriate, since most people around here think of stretching and distorting as pixelization.

[Joe Redifer]

Holy shit I thought this thread had been deleted or sunk really low or something. I hardly ever look at the stickied stuff. Pretty soon the stickied posts will take up the entire first page of the forum.

[NecroPhile]

[exodus]

tengai makyo II and neo metal fantasy both have stuff in their intros as well

[Digi.k]

[Digi.k]