pros & cons... 16 bit cd games.

[awack]

There is a discussion over at the sega 16 forums about CD vs cartridge, i brought up that there are some pce cd games that will load information during gameplay so i decided to see how far it went, the one game i knew that did this was Tenchi wo Karau...just look at the variety in the backgrounds.

lets test it.

these shots are all from the first level.






i didn't feel like going back and taking shots of the first level, but it applies to every level...you can see that tiles start to drop until none are left.



last level

[esteban]

Aside: so first tell me what you think about the game. I've never played it.

[override]

Im not sure I follow, but are these pics of the same game on two diff systems? or are these straight pics of just that specific PCE game?

[awack]

I'm not sure I follow, but are these pics of the same game on two diff systems? or are these straight pics of just that specific PCE game?

Didn't have much time when i did this, its from the same game.

The pce super CD has 256k of memory(also 64k for adpcm sound), for a lot of games thats all you get for each level or its split into two parts, level plus boss fight....once the CD music is playing you cant load any more information from the CD. I wanted to know how many games get around this, one of the ways i know of is to use psg sound instead of streaming the music from the CD, Tenchi wo karau uses psg sound and therefore can load a wider variety of bg tiles than most 16bit games per level.

Another way is to stop the CD music every three screens or so, Beyond Shadow gate does this, which gives it highly detailed backgrounds.

Aside: so first tell me what you think about the game.  I've never played it.

I like it, you have four characters to choose from, there isn't a lot of variety to the gameplay but because there are so many enemies on screen it doesn't become dull.

I'm postsing some shots of the first level to show what happens if you stop the pce from accessing or reading from the CD, as you can see you start to lose background tiles/graphics as you progress.

[TurboXray]

 awack: Cool find

 I had looked as this game before because of it's horrific unnecessary mangling/use of sprite overlaying causing lots of flicker. I'm not sure why they didn't choose the lower res of this game. I mean, they scaled/redrew the sprites anyway - so it's not a big deal to do it for lower res mode. You gain more sprite bandwidth (i.e. less flicker). The other thing that I noticed was that the game uses large sections of 16 color areas, instead of optimizing for PCE's girth of onscreen colors. What I didn't notice is what you found.

 Taking a second look, it's pretty interesting. The game logic and sprite movement is all done on a 30hz system (instead of a 60hz like most games). The background itself scrolls as 60fps res (vblank interrupt routine does it), but everything else is tied to 30fps res. This means the game can request/read a single 2048k of tiles into vram with a system card call for the in between frames. Even frames = sprites/game logic, off frames = read from CD buffer. Since the screen is auto scrolling, timing isn't an issue. Seek time isn't an issue either since all the level/tile updates inside the level are stored on the CD sequentially.

 Besides some of the short comings like not using more colors (or better palette choices) and sprite optimization, it's a pretty clever game system. On a side note, this game could have been easily hacked to run on an Arcade Card setup and change the audio routine to play CD tracks.

 Edit:
 Funny thing. Looking over the first level 256k ram chunk, there's definitely enough room in there in the chunks of free space - for all the updates of the first level. I think I counted 16 updates of 2k each for the first level. I beginning to doubt that this game actually needed this CD read mid level system.

[WoodyXP]

Now that would have been awesome.  I love the Arcade's soundtrack, the PCE version is a little 'meh'.

On a side note, this game could have been easily hacked to run on an Arcade Card setup and change the audio routine to play CD tracks.

[awack]

I had looked as this game before because of it's horrific unnecessary mangling/use of sprite overlaying causing lots of flicker.

Here are a couple of shots that show overlapping sprites, the riders leg will cut out every other frame.

Seek time isn't an issue either since all the level/tile updates inside the level are stored on the CD sequentially.

That definitely makes sense.

Funny thing. Looking over the first level 256k ram chunk, there's definitely enough room in there in the chunks of free space - for all the updates of the first level. I think I counted 16 updates of 2k each for the first level. I beginning to doubt that this game actually needed this CD read mid level system.

Interesting, the reason i knew it was doing something different was because of the variety in the backgrounds in each level, if you look at the screen below you will see that the sprites are very small(though a crap load of them) and only have two frames of animation for their run/walk so i wouldn't think a lot of memory is dedicated to that.




For comparison I'm putting up some shots of its closest competition.

Variety in background, 1st level, beginning to end.








This is just to show the game with less washed out colors, magicengine.

[CrackTiger]

Does Altered Beast do the same thing?

It's a pretty goofy idea to stream stuff but still give riders and horses separate overlapping sprites. Maybe they just ported over the sprites directly from the arcade and didn't bother to merge them?

[awack]

They did a great job on the backgrounds, the sprites on the other hand.

pce                                                        arcade

Does Altered Beast do the same thing?

It definitely loads info during gameplay, but its different than tenchi o karau, it will either start dropping sprites and crash or stop at the transformation screen., this is just an indication of what happens, emulation isn't exact.

[TurboXray]

 awack: You're right. The home port does retain a lot of the detail of the arcade version. Pixel for pixel the majority of it.

 Below: Arcade image in PCE's palette - compared to the PCE.

/dynastywars_alt.png <- 104 colors
/CD_009A7520-079.png <- 93 colors

 The guys on the horses, yeah - mean ol' sprite overlaying. They should have merged them. The weapon of the main char is also overlaid :/

 The other guys, missing sprite frames should have been there - there's room in vram for them:
/vram1.png
^- red colors show free vram for sprites (taken from vram snapshot of mednafen debugger)

[awack]

Below: Arcade image in PCE's palette - compared to the PCE.

Damn, they are close.

The guys on the horses, yeah - mean ol' sprite overlaying. They should have merged them. The weapon of the main char is also overlaid :/
 The other guys, missing sprite frames should have been there - there's room in vram for them:

NEC Avenue...unlike backgrounds which they where really good at, they didn't seem to be the best at sprite handling,animation/effects....sounds like this game could have been even better.

[CrackTiger]

NEC Avenue...unlike backgrounds which they where really good at, they didn't seem to be the best at sprite handling,animation/effects....sounds like this game could have been even better.

Super Darius/Darius Plus is another game with needless overlapping sprites (for the bosses). If they really wanted to save some space on the bosses for the HuCard so be it. But the CD version should've merged more, especially since the game reloads before each boss.

[Tatsujin]

damn the foregrounds are 99.9% arcade adapted just shame on the lil' sprites that had could been an almost 100% accurate port.

may you post some morer straight pce<>arcade comparisons

[TurboXray]

damn the foregrounds are 99.9% arcade adapted just shame on the lil' sprites that had could been an almost 100% accurate port.

If they had merged the sprites and kept the same restraints (or a lack thereof) for sprites, they could have been made bigger.

[awack]

may you post some morer straight pce<>arcade comparisons

Check out page 5 of pce vs gen vs snes thread to see the genesis port.

chiki chiki boys

pce                                                                  arcade

[TurboXray]

/sprite_tenchi_wo_kurau.png
^My quick conversion of the sprite to no overlays. Only takes up 4 cells. The original pce one takes up 6 cells standing. The original also took 11 cells for full attack frame, while mine would take only 5 cells. 11 cells!! You can only have 16 sprite cells before flicker/blank out. Mine also takes up less vram because overlaying takes up more.

/Tenchi_wo_kurau.gif

 Note: It took little effort to optimize/resize the sprite. The red translucent areas in that sprite arrangement are unique sprite tiles. The rest can be reused for other horse guys, cutting down on cpu bandwidth to upload frames.

[Tatsujin]

damn. as for all the backgrounds, PCE was so CPS-1 faithful.

[awack]

^My quick conversion of the sprite to no overlays. Only takes up 4 cells. The original pce one takes up 6 cells standing. The original also took 11 cells for full attack frame, while mine would take only 5 cells. 11 cells!! You can only have 16 sprite cells before flicker/blank out. Mine also takes up less vram because overlaying takes up more.

Awesome, optimized and scaled up in size, i would imagine if some one were to make the foot soldiers larger (10 0f them on screen at once) they would have to decrease the number that appear on screen in order to minimize flicker.

[omotai]

Nununununu!

That's the best battle cry ever.

[awack]

A little fun, the big men from streetfighter 2 HU card and worldheroes 2 ACD.

[Tatsujin]

wow..and suddenly zangief looks like a dwarf from Snow White.

[awack]

Difference in foot soldiers, two arcade dudes in front, their pattern is one in front of the other a lot of times, if some one was to try and use similar sized sprites in the pcengine game then they would definitely have to use the standard res....in my oppinion.

[TurboXray]

Heh, looks like his younger brothers have come out to help them.

 On a side note, this game kicks my ass. I can't get past level 8 

[awack]

How do you achieve a sense of depth with a system that only has one bg screen with out causing excessive flicker by using to many sprites.

Every thing in the screenshots are sprites.




Again every thing are sprites, the sprites marked by the white arrows will magically turn into tiles when you reach the end, so as not to cause flicker when the boss fight begins.





Rondo uses three types of transparency tricks that i know of.


type that is used in magical chase, shadow effect.
Colors will become darker as they pass thru the areas
marked by the white arrows.


           
Simple sprite flicker, the sprite will reappear every other frame, this is the flashiest of the three, giving the flames a transparent look.


                      1                                                  2

                      3




Changing the colors of the bg tiles.

[esteban]

How do you achieve a sense of depth with a system that only has one bg screen with out causing excessive flicker by using to many sprites?

Every thing in the screenshots are sprites...

Very neat stuff

[TurboXray]

type that is used in magical chase, shadow effect.
Colors will become darker as they pass thru the areas
marked by the white arrows.

Dynamic tiles FTW! PCE has a lot of sub palettes, so it can't waste a few for shadow effects on dynamic tiles like that without a second thought.

Changing the colors of the bg tiles.

They could have done that in realtime, but that one was actually just frames of animation.

PCE has another option for transparency. A demo I wrote here. The PCE has planar graphics, like the Amiga and ST - so you can do similar "transparency effects" via the hardware like popular Amiga/ST demos. Think of it as transparency hardware assist on the PCE ;)  The composite grouping of bit planes works perfectly for the 16bit video controller (because you only write a 16bit value at a time, no lower - no 8bit direct writes), works nicely for this trick.

[CrackTiger]

They could have done that in realtime, but that one was actually just frames of animation.

 PCE has another option for transparency. A demo I wrote here. The PCE has planar graphics, like the Amiga and ST - so you can do similar "transparency effects" via the hardware like popular Amiga/ST demos. Think of it as transparency hardware assist on the PCE ;)  The composite grouping of bit planes works perfectly for the 16bit video controller (because you don't only write a 16bit value at a time, no lower - no 8bit direct writes), works nicely for this trick.

That's pretty freaking amazing. Would it be practical for a normal game environment?

/pcetrans1.png
/pcetrans2.png

For anyone who is seeing the screen shots before testing out the roms, it really has to be seen in motion to appreciate the full effect.

[TurboXray]

Would it be practical for a normal game environment?

Like all special FX, it has some limitations. IIRC, is takes about 30% cpu (1/60 frame) to do a screen update of that size, but it is practical to use in game. To get the performance I got in that demo, the setup is extremely complicated. The way the tiles is laid out in vram, how the TP layer frames are stored in rom, etc. I had to write special external apps to setup the transparent layer. The TP layer is stored in a total of 8 frames. Think dynamic tiles meets transparency. I only update the upper 2bits if the 4bit plane, so I'm not changing/over writing the mountain tile data at all. I also store the graphic data as opcodes, so it's pretty fast - but can bulk up if you use different TP graphic layers (not really a problem for SCD though). It's hard to see, but there are 3 transparent colors in the cloud layer. Each of the transparent cloud color makes 4 transparent colors of the base mountain. Anyway, it's really complicated to setup. An extension of this is, that you can also do single transparent-color addition/subtraction. Like shadow/highlight but with color. It leaves more room for colors in a tile than the method I used in that demo. But the kicker is, is that this is all done on the video controller side. The CPU isn't "mixing" any color, just transferring some data to certain bit planes and letting the video processor do the rest.


 I also forget to mention that PCE also has "silhouette" mode. This was used in Jackie Chan. Another type of transparency method. (An SGX demo using that silhouette" mode here. Change the .pce extension to .sgx so that mednafen will run it. Or just try it on a real SGX.)

[awack]

I posted this before over at sega16.com, looks like dynamic tiles but not sure.

PCE has another option for transparency. A demo I wrote here. The PCE has planar graphics, like the Amiga and ST - so you can do similar "transparency effects" via the hardware like popular Amiga/ST demos. Think of it as transparency hardware assist on the PCE ;)  The composite grouping of bit planes works perfectly for the 16bit video controller (because you don't only write a 16bit value at a time, no lower - no 8bit direct writes), works nicely for this trick.

Amazing!!

[awack]

To give an idea of whats going on at once.

Drac attack, scaling, line scroll and background animation(simple lightning)
the linescrolling BG does something slightly different, the lines(horizontal ban of pixels) that are close to the top and bottom of the screen will stop and move back a few pixels, this gives the illusion that the background is warping in a circle(blurry TV for best result) i wonder if this puts more strain on the CPU?

When Dracula is hit, the scrolling BG will reverse and move backwards for a moment, i always thought the scrolling would stop and the reason was because the CPU was taking a hit(hit detection) but not sure about that now.

[CrackTiger]

I posted this before over at sega16.com, looks like dynamic tiles but not sure.

I believe that the warping is real time and nothing too special. If it's not just doing some sort of warping calculation on the fly (like other game chugging effects), I'm guessing that the tiles are just being line scrolled horizontally pixel by pixel SFII floor style while the bg pushes strips vertically.

The shading is the most impressive part for me. Tom said that it was similar to the shaded horizon in Chris Covell's Axelay demo. I believe that it's using the PCE's third layer which is something like a single solid color that can pierce through the bg layer, only for something like this it's being constantly updated...  or something.

[awack]

The shading is the most impressive part for me. Tom said that it was similar to the shaded horizon in Chris Covell's Axelay demo. I believe that it's using the PCE's third layer which is something like a single solid color that can pierce through the bg layer, only for something like this it's being constantly updated...  or something.

Yep, the stationary bans of color is what I'm talking about, i just checked out the Axelay demo and it appears to be the same effect.

[TurboXray]

I posted this before over at sega16.com, looks like dynamic tiles but not sure.

I believe that the warping is real time and nothing too special. If it's not just doing some sort of warping calculation on the fly (like other game chugging effects), I'm guessing that the tiles are just being line scrolled horizontally pixel by pixel SFII floor style while the bg pushes strips vertically.

The shading is the most impressive part for me. Tom said that it was similar to the shaded horizon in Chris Covell's Axelay demo. I believe that it's using the PCE's third layer which is something like a single solid color that can pierce through the bg layer, only for something like this it's being constantly updated...  or something.

Yup. It's doing a full screen linescroll system for the warping. And you are correct about the PCE's BG color 0 layer. It's changing color 0 value on the same scanline interrupt routine. So as to keep a "fixed" image while the rest of the barrel rolls. Amiga does this quite a bit. The port of Bonk to Amiga by Factor 5 added a scroll layer by doing this. Many other Amiga games also do this.

So no dynamic tiles there. A good example of realtime dynamic overlaid tiles is Ninja Spirit second level. The game code manually overlays the tree branches onto the dynamic tiles and uploads. It's one reason why slowdown occurs more in that level. While I'm sure the code isn't really optimized, IREM isn't exactly known of fast code, it is cool that they went out of their way to do some of these effects on early hucards  - when other companies were happy with minimal effort.

Edit:

When Dracula is hit, the scrolling BG will reverse and move backwards for a moment, i always thought the scrolling would stop and the reason was because the CPU was taking a hit(hit detection) but not sure about that now.

I just took a look at that stage. The whole thing is done with H-int's (line scrolls). It takes the same amount of cpu resource to do the reverse movement than it does for the forward movement. And even when it's paused for a frame or so before the reverse movement, it still takes cpu resource to keep the frame as is (something like 100 fixed point ADDs isn't a resource hog. The bottom flipped half of the screen is just H-INT drawing the same BG but in reverse or upside down. I.e. you don't need another 100+ ADDs for the bottom half.). So I'd say it's done for effect. If anything, if it was a cpu resource issue - then it would result in slowdown and not a halt.

[awack]

I'm an idiot, i was wondering why you two were talking about line scrolling so i read where i said dynamic tiles dynamic tile got stuck in my head after reading Toms earlier comment about Rondo's shadow effect, anyway, what i wasn't sure of earlier was if the metamor jupitor color effect was the same as the rondo/magical chase shadow effect.

So I'd say it's done for effect. If anything, if it was a cpu resource issue - then it would result in slowdown and not a halt.

Thanks Tom, have always wondered about that because that fight is very impressive to me and thought the CPU had to be taking a hit before i  looked closely at it today running on an emulator.


It appears that you can plop the the BG layer over top of a big sprite(the moon) and not worry about hitting any limits that cause flicker.

[TurboXray]

I'm an idiot, i was wondering why you two were talking about line scrolling so i read where i said dynamic tiles dynamic tile got stuck in my head after reading Toms earlier comment about Rondo's shadow effect, anyway, what i wasn't sure of earlier was if the metamor jupitor color effect was the same as the rondo/magical chase shadow effect.

So I'd say it's done for effect. If anything, if it was a cpu resource issue - then it would result in slowdown and not a halt.

Thanks Tom, have always wondered about that because that fight is very impressive to me and thought the CPU had to be taking a hit before i  looked closely at it today running on an emulator.


It appears that you can plop the the BG layer over top of a big sprite(the moon) and not worry about hitting any limits that cause flicker.

Hey! Haha, the moon is still behind the BG layer.  Nice find The sprite that flickers all depends on the sprite priority itself in relation to the other sprites. The lowest priority sprites are dropped first. It's possible the moon is low priority in the SAT (sprite table) and since it's behind the BG layer, you don't notice it flickering/blanking out - while the rest of the sprites show fine. Again, nice find

Since we're on the topic of design stuff, Gate of Thunder has a part where a sprite is static/not moving and appears as part of the BG layer. But it fact it's not. I don't think it's supposed to be there. It's on the second level right before the boss fight. The other sprites using the same graphic as moving in that part like some sort of brackets or whatever. The only reason I noticed the fixed sprite was because it flickered. Thought that was really weird. Like something they missed since it blends in so well.

[Tatsujin]

indeed that's a nice find. but still i wonder, why they didn't outblank it completely?

[TurboXray]

Lords of Thunder desert level.

/12.png
/13.png
/14.png
/15.png


The desert sand appears to be line scrolls, but they are not. Not in true fashion. They are dynamic tiles. There are only like 6-8 of them vertically and they repeat the tile horizontally via the tilemap. You update any single tile of pattern and the rest of the tiles horizontally are updated automatically - because the tilemap is pointing to that single tile for a lot of entries. The way LOT is using it, you get a scroll "layer" every 8 pixel. Now, the upper buildings and mountains are using the linescroll method, or more precise H-int's (Horizontal interrupts), just not on every line. Their data would be too much to implement on a dynamic system. They have not complex overlapping parts, so it's simpler to use a H-int method.

Now, the large sand creature is also made up of mostly BG tiles. You can see in the third pic the "sprite" parts of the creature.

If you look at the last pic, I edited the palettes of the dynamic tiles (and upper planes too) so you can see just the tiles of the creature. If the creature was made up of all sprites, there would be some considerable flicker. And since you can't use H-int's and have the creature as BG tiles on the same lines, they used dynamic tiles. The tiles around the creature are updated to give the scroll effect. But... the tile edges of the creature, the outside parts that contain 'sand' graphics, are not updated. So if you look really closely while the game is in action, you can see this. The fact that the colors are kinda gradient and only scroll every 8 pixels tall (the scroll height), makes it really easy to get away with this.

If the dynamic patten was more pronounced, they could have made dynamic tiles for the outside edges of the creature as well. But in this case there's no need to.

Lords of Thunder uses lots of dynamic tiles through out the game. The first part/area of the water level uses them too.

/28.png

The water parallax is done with dynamic tiles, same as the sand. This more easily allows overlapping parts like in the circled area in the pic, without using sprites.

[CrackTiger]

Lords of Thunder uses lots of dynamic tiles through out the game. The first part/area of the water level uses them too.

/28.png

 The water parallax is done with dynamic tiles, same as the sand. This more easily allows overlapping parts like in the circled area in the pic, without using sprites.

That also allows the water to scroll right up to the vertically separation when you enter the cave. It's amazing how much many Super CD games crammed into a single section, when dynamic tiles were used.

[Tatsujin]

so amazing. not just your discovers (they're as well) but also the work and effort those programmers put into this, to get such beatiful things out of the pce. just imagine if they said "bahh no need, too lazy for that, no budget etc." a flat GoT or WoT really wouldn't be the same. and the most ashamed thing would be, that it would loose against the MCD version with a landslide.

[awack]

If the creature was made up of all sprites, there would be some considerable flicker.

I had always assumed that the dragon was a sprite.



I forgot about the transparent effects in the screens below.





A lot of people don't about this but Rondo gives you another  information display behind the vertical post.





After you enter the room with the spinning painting, shapes that flicker will appear.

That also allows the water to scroll right up to the vertically separation when you enter the cave. It's amazing how much many Super CD games crammed into a single section, when dynamic tiles were used.

and the most ashamed thing would be, that it would loose against the MCD version with a landslide.

I might need to do a detailed comparison of the sega cd and pce Winds of Thunder.

[CrackTiger]

a flat GoT or WoT really wouldn't be the same. and the most ashamed thing would be, that it would loose against the MCD version with a landslide.

If WoT/LoT had been completely flat, the Sega version wouldn't have all the layering it does. A few sections might've been split so that a single layer overlays at times. Parts in the actual release with simple 'Air Zonk' style parallax would remain flat static in a Sega port, because if they wouldn't have bothered/been capable to do it for the PCE version then they wouldn't have done it for Sega/Mega-CD since it requires no built-in features.

I've heard Sega fans trashing the LoT port as being sloppy sometimes say that it would've run better if it wasn't doing the layering the same way. But if it didn't do it the same way, the sections with added scrolling wouldn't have all layering that it does. I also suspect that in many places, like the desert "dragon", the Sega version likely does use a bg layer instead of dynamic tiles. Either way I think that they did an amazing job with the Sega version. The only unfortunate part is the new music, but just like with the color/detail, it's a matter of 'less good'.

[esteban]

TANGENT: Hey fabulous people... are any of you curious about an analysis of Jagu, the last boss in Legendary Axe?

I'm sure he is mostly comprised of background tiles, but he jumps around and stuff, so I'm curious. IIRC, his fingers and eyes are animated, so they're probably sprites.

Anyhow, I love all the stuff you are documenting in this thread. Good stuff.

[Nazi NecroPhile]

TANGENT: Hey fabulous people... are any of you curious about an analysis of Jagu, the last boss in Legendary Axe?

I'm less 'fabulous' and more 'asshat', but count me in anyway.  I'm not really a L.A. fan either, but Jagu's pretty cool looking and I'd like to see how he works.

Anyhow, I love all the stuff you are documenting in this thread. Good stuff.

Indeed.  Thanks for the interesting read gentlemen; keep up the great work.

[TurboXray]

A lot of people don't about this but Rondo gives you another  information display behind the vertical post.

That sprite post reuses part of the score display, that's why you see it like that. But it serves a different purpose:

/dracula_x/32.png /dracula_x/33.png
/dracula_x/34.png

The post sprite is higher priority than the player sprite. So, the player sprite will appear underneath it. But... that column sprite is set to be behind the BG layer while the player sprite is set to be above the BG layer. When the player sprite crosses behind the column sprite, it's not shown because the column sprite is in the way - but the column sprite can't be seen so the BG tiles in its place are shown instead. This complex clipping using sprites. So the column sprite you can't see serves a specific purpose.

/dracula_x/35_a.PNG

Also, the outlined areas are dynamic tiles to simulate a second BG layer.




The top part with Richter uses two tricks. The first is an H-int call on a specific line (that water line) and it changes every color in the sprite to solid blue. Since it's drawing out the screen, only the part of Richter from there, down, shows as solid blue. The other part is on that water line, it cycles turning all sprites on and off at 60hz. This makes the sprites translucent over the BG layer, but looks like the water is translucent.

The creature/boss is just hard coded animation. The PCE having a ton of sub-palettes can afford it (i.e. not having to worry about sharing out subpalettes).

[awack]

The post sprite is higher priority than the player sprite. So, the player sprite will appear underneath it. But... that column sprite is set to be behind the BG layer while the player sprite is set to be above the BG layer. When the player sprite crosses behind the column sprite, it's not shown because the column sprite is in the way - but the column sprite can't be seen so the BG tiles in its place are shown instead. This complex clipping using sprites. So the column sprite you can't see serves a specific purpose.

That sounds like it would be difficult to program, i haven't seen any thing like it in any other pce game...yet.

I'm sure he is mostly comprised of background tiles, but he jumps around and stuff, so I'm curious. IIRC, his fingers and eyes are animated, so they're probably sprites.

If i had to guess i would say he is made up of sprites, if no one else knows, i will check it out.

I will mention that the first boss in Legendary Axe II is all sprites and almost as big as the last boss in Axe I.

[CrackTiger]

That sounds like it would be difficult to program, i haven't seen any thing like it in any other pce game...yet.

I've actually seen it quite a few times, even though I don't play emulators very much. The only one I can name for sure from memory is Popful Mail.

[ccovell]

Don't forget all the trees, doors, etc in Neutopia 1 & 2.  It's a pretty common trick.

[awack]

I thought the trees in Nuetopia were just part of the BG that sprites could walk behind, the Rondo example seems to be different from a programing stand point, at least to me, I'm probably reading into it More than i should though.

[shubibiman]

NEC Avenue...unlike backgrounds which they where really good at, they didn't seem to be the best at sprite handling,animation/effects....sounds like this game could have been even better.

Ok, now I understand why I always felt like NEC Avenue games always had flickers.

[awack]

Ok, now I understand why I always felt like NEC Avenue games always had flickers.

I should mention that two of the reasons for that, one, was using high resolution and as Tom mention about Tenchi O Karau, sprite overlaying.

Strider on the other hand used standard resolution and no sprite overlay that I'm aware of, of course there is a lot going on in-game but Ive seen more in other games with less flicker.

Their best over all effort in my oppinion was Forgotten Worlds, it used high res with a ton of stuff on-screen and good animation, infact all of their Capcom games were impressive with the exception of Strider.