New SuperGrafx demo

For those who've missed it; there was a small SuperGrafx demo released recently by the group punkfloyd. ROM and youtube link can be found here.

I was never interested in SuperGrafx prgramming, but list of features sounds nice. Maybe, when I'll get enough of NES.
Oh, question. How effect of the robot is done? (2:00 on Youtube). I mean: It have only 2 layers of background. One is the text, I think. Can TurboGrafx to manipulate the screen to leave robot (the middle of screen) and do some efects on the sides?(Resizing the columns). Or is it done by using GFX changes?(don't look like it, though).
Overall: I liked this. Seems to be something between NES and SNES, my next retro platform to do programming for.

SuperGrafx has two sprite layers, each one can cover up full screen width with sprite graphics.

If you want between NES and Super NES, then I'd guess a lot more Genesis consoles were sold than SuperGrafx consoles. This means more people will have nostalgia for the platform, and you'll have a larger market if you plan to sell your work on a cartridge.

The SuperGrafx is extremely niche. Very few consoles were produced and sold. Something like 6 games exist for the platform. If you want something that's more capable than NES, the regular PC-Engine/TurboGrafx16, Genesis, and SNES come to mind. The Genesis and SNES are far more available everywhere than the PC-Engine. The SNES has pretty good cloned units available. The Genesis clone units are not as good.

So it were sprites, neat.

But I'm not after selling my work. None will buy it anyway. I just want something that allow me for a little more freedom with backgrounds and sprites limit(8 sprites per line is SO annoying).

That's...really rare. If that's the case, I'll better drop the idea.

If I ever will leave NES grounds, I'll go with Genesis or SNES. PC engine sounds interesting, but it have only one BG layer.
Anyway, thanks for tips, guys! I really appreciate it.

The popularity of a platform is something I take into consideration before developing any serious interest in its architecture. I mean, I do have a general interest for retro hardware, and I often read documents describing the capabilities of even the most obscure gaming consoles, but I would never consider developing for one that didn't still have plenty of working units or a moderately sized fanbase.

To me it's mandatory that I own the hardware I'm developing for, I could never trust emulators alone. And when I finally release a game I'll surely want more than 8 people worldwide playing it!

Tokumaru, you hit the nail on the head. Except for last part. I own a famiclone, but have no way to test my programs\hacks. But, of course, ask people who can to check it for me.
Well, I'm not really in position to say that, though. I released only one, poor NES game...

I didn't even know this system existed.
I can see how the single background layer of the TG16 would have been a killer.

Obscure, yes. Don't know if I'd call it rare.
You can pick up SuperGrafx systems in fairly good condition for about $150. Of course, you'd have to settle for an NTSC unit. But still, it's not a Vectrex we're talking about. Hell, even the Sega 32X - another failed piece of hardware, but one I'd still assume more people in the western world to be familiar with - will fetch prices in that neighborhood these days.

Still, I have no plans to get one myself. I already have a TurboGrafx, and I'd rather upgrade to a Turbo Duo (CD-ROM support) than a SuperGrafx. But it's nice to see people developing stuff for these largely forgotten systems.

Actually due to the very large sprites I guess on TG16, many games look as though they have two background layers at times. Lords of Thunder on the Super CD-ROM for PC-Engine does this. I've heard before the reason there was only 1 background layer may have been so you could access VRAM at any time, not just during VBlank. I'm not sure if this is true but I'd think having to obey your standard VBlank/VRAM write rules and having a second background layer would have been more helpful, although maybe that would have risen the price due to the additional VRAM you may have wanted/needed.

An NES has 64 pixels of sprites per scanline, a Genesis 256 or 320 depending on the chosen dot clock, and a Super NES 272. Are you saying a regular TG16 has 256 pixels of sprites in 256px mode or more in higher res modes?

256 sprite pixels per scanline for each of two layers, 512 sprite pixels per scanline total.

So you can pretty much fake a second BG layer and still have 256 pixels of sprites for actual moving objects? Are there any games that do this? All games I've seen appeared to have a single BG layer.

Like it was said above, there was about 6 games released for the system. Didn't check them to see if they fake a second layer specifically, but if they don't, I think it is just because developers were just starting to utilize potential of the system and didn't have chance to do it to full extent.

So you were not talking about the regular TG16? You answered tepples' question about the regular TG16. If it's just the SuperGrafx that has this many sprites there's not much point in using them for an extra background layer, since there are already 2 of them.

This thread is about SuperGrafx, I'm talking about SuperGrafx. I didn't notice that tepples said 'regular', because I didn't expect him to say that in answer to my post about SuperGrafx.

The main difference between TG16 and SuperGrafx is that SG has two VDP instead of one, so two BGs and two sprite layers.

The SuperGrafx is a cool console, but the Genesis is still the more powerful system (barring sheer sprite numbers.)

The main problem is that developers really had no confidence in the system and nobody except for first-party companies (Hudson, NEC Avenue) made dedicated games for it. The bicompatible game did the following to pay lip service to using the SGX's extra power:

Just watched a video of Darius Plus on YouTube and the foreground layer built with sprites looks pretty bad. When it has to fill the entire screen, the flickering looks weird (since a full screen worth of pixels isn't enough to fill the whole screen because of scrolling). YT videos don't run at 60fps though, so it might look better on the actual console.

Darius Plus runs on both the PCE (with all sprites running on only one VDC) and on the SGX (with the aforementioned shield and shots running on the SGX's extra VDC). Those YouTube videos might be showing the worst-case PCE situation.

I did find other videos where the flickering was absent, as far as I could tell. Still I wouldn't use this as an example of good graphics... So many available palettes on that system, yet everything looks so monochromatic. Another thing that caught my attention is how objects have very few animation frames. This console could do so much better!

That's because the arcade version was just like this.

At least they cared to stuff in additional huge bosses into Super Darius (the original CD version that did not feature flicker reduction enhancement with the SG) so that you have a different boss in each area, which was awesome. Darius Plus, which was released later, was unfortunately a Hucard, so those additional bosses had to be cut.

Not exactly SuperGrafx related, but a video showing off sprites + dynamic tiles + Hsync interrupt for parallax and multilayered effects:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQX8KfYT-zc

And some SGX related videos (no demos do this yet, but it's fairly easy stuff):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75IdGO1I1o4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9N4xgkwm154
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0dVFfrfvmeY

Wow, this is much more impressive graphically than Darius Plus, and that's without the SuperGrafx hardware!

In the first transperency video, you explained that the 2 VDPs have windowing registers, (like the SNES does) so that makes sense for 1 shade of transparent color, but what about the 3rd video with the light shining through the window?

Lords of Thunder is a great game for showing off the PC-Engine and Super CD format. Though it makes me wonder just how much more they might have accomplished if the SuperGrafx had been included in the DUO hardware. Ofcourse it would have been too costly but if it hadn't been, that would have been a neat system. It would have been able to display more sprites than any of its competitors except I suppose NeoGeo. Plus the SuperGrafx had extra RAM which combined with the Super CD card's RAM could have helped a bit more before the Arcade CD card came along.

Well, both the SNES and SuperGrafx can show a total of 128 sprites...

The SGX has priority settings for the four layers of the two video outputs: BG0, SPR0, BG1, SPR1. The chip that mixes the two outputs of the video controllers can set priority to the sprite layers in relation to the BG layers (but cannot change the BG layer priorities; they're fixed). I have a sprite on VDC1 (the top video layer) that is "low priority". That means it will be drawn behind all BG pixels of VDC1, but show out in the transparent pixels of the BG layer (like any other system of that era). VDC0 has the same sprite in the exact same position underneath the sprite in VDC1, but with a different palette associated to it. The VDP (priority controller) is setup in a configuration (1 of 4 settings) so that the sprites are like so: 'spr0,bg0,'spr1,bg1,*spr0,*sp1. ' = low priority, *= high priority. VDC1 sprites always have a higher priority than VDC0 sprites. But when VDC1 low priority sprite passes in front of VDC1 BG, it disappears (on a pixel basis) allowing VDC0 sprite to show underneath. Given that the SGX has the inherent number of supalettes of the PCE (32 subpalettes), it's pretty easy to create alternate colored palettes for transparency effects like that without running short of subpalettes.

Oh, I was under the assumption that the PC-Engine could display close to the amount of sprites as the SNES. I guess I should have looked up the details. I knew the SNES was something like 32 sprites and 34 cells per scanline. I guess I was just expecting more of out the SuperGrafx since I thought close to SNES, doubled.

Actually that just got me thinking that I was thinking more about sprites per scanline rather than total sprites. Which wins out in total sprite pixels per scanline? Or is it a draw?

You must be thinking sprite pixel scanline limit; 272 sprite pixels or 34 8-pixel-wide cells or 32 sprites (total) for the SNES per scanline and 512 pixels or 32 16-pixel-wide cells or 32 sprites (total) per scanline for the SGX. Of course, on the PCE and SGX that's per *VDC scanline* and not NTSC scanline. You can setup the VDC to draw two or more scanlines per NTSC scanline, but you'll get a gap between them (the width of hblank since no pixels will be sent to the encoder except color #256; sprite transparency color). The PC-Engine is 256 pixels or 16 16-pixel-wide cells per scanline. Which ever comes first. It doesn't increase with the resolution change either, since the internal fetch/hold buffer isn't larger than that. Which is why most PCE games stick with the 5.37mhz dot clock over the 7.16mhz and 10.74mhz dot clock resolutions. So that's another advantage the SGX has over the PCE. The higher resolutions become more useful in relation to sprites and scanline limits.

If, uh... you want to see the above in action, download my Fractal Engine (2.0) program. It detects SGX hardware (or SGX settings in an emulator) and then uses all 4 layers (2 BG, 2 SPR) to make a 256x240x6bpp fractal. At 512x240 or 512x480 it uses SGX + PCE BGs in unison for higher resolutions/colour count.

Wait what? How many scanlines can it display per scanline?

Picture a VGA signal (31khz horiz. freq) but missing an Hsync pulse every odd scanline. That's the picture you'll get if you set up the VDC in certain ways.

The PC-Engine can do quite a bit with just one BG layer. Just look at Got: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZEMpyATFRQc (30 min play through). Or Lords of Thunder, or Dracula X.
Or some homebrew doing it:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WnglTbLR8VY (first area)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oabDZSMT93A

There are other examples, but I don't have videos of them.

@tokumaru: There are a lot more than 8 people who own an SGX. A lot of PC-Engine fans own one. The first person who puts out a SGX SuperCD homebrew is gonna hit it big in the PCE retro community. SGX+arcade card CD would be ideal; you'd be surprised how many people own that setup (a lot more than 8 ). Arcade card gives you the normal CD features as well as and extra 2megabytes of ram to play with (on top of the 256k CD RAM). They also added 4 long pointers into the AC memory, so no mapping or fiddling. The four register pointers can self increment and decrement (either on WORD or BYTE read/writes) and the value of the incrementing is a signed 16bit number (each register has its own 'indexer'). There's also a 32bit shifter and barrel shifter, but that's not as a cool as the other stuff on the card. All the new AC regs are mapped into a normally fixed area too (normally open bus), so no bank swapping to access the new regs (kind of like the SNES).

This:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbljxwgyKOw (stage 1/2)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lr1oSq2SLbA (stage 3/4)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdQClRBEgrw (stage 5/6)
Would be even more incredible on SGX...




I know homebrew isn't ALL about making money (and not at all for some), but if you picked the CD platform then the cost to manufacture a CD with a manual and case is about $1.20. That's for a pressed CD bundle of 500 with case and manual. Compare that to the cost of a cart+box+manual. Frozen Utopia (PCE homebrew) just released an old school RPG for the system on CD that sold 200 copies as of a couple of weeks ago. At $40 a pop x 200, that's $8000USD. Sure, they include free shipping in that, but you get the idea. I think overall a lot more shmup fans own a PCE/Duo CD unit than RPG fans.


@psycopathicteen: I've done up to 7 in hi res mode, but they were practically useless. Two is easily doable. Here's a game that has a debug mode to show it off:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ENXcn5idTOk
Though they didn't shrink hblank for it. You can shrink it more than what's shown.