It was funny, because Sega never actually claimed they were the first in any of their ads, haha.
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What was the deal with the Sega CD 32X games? How did those work?
- Thread starter AztecComplex
- Start date
It was funny, because Sega never actually claimed they were the first in any of their ads, haha.
Yep. TTI was basically about as big as the US Sega home console branch...back when they were launching the Master System. Nothing they were going to do was going to have any real impact on the market but they had a job to do.
I will say this -- all those early CD Rom systems fucking ruled. The Sega CD, the Turbo Duo, the Amiga CD32, the FM Towns Marty, all of those are absolute awesome systems. History has, for some reason, buried these consoles as miserable failures, but they really weren't. Even back in the day, when you had one, they were cool. FMV gets really over hyped, but for example, there were only 35 FMV games in the libary out of about 200 games (depending on region). Even back in those days, when you owned a Sega CD, you knew to ignore those. I wasn't out buying Night Trap, I was buying Lunar, and Popful Mail, and Shining Force CD. And those kinds of games really complimented the action-focused titles on the Genesis. The Sega CD was full of more story focused, RPG-elements style games, the kind that the Genesis library generally lacks.
Owning the Sega CD back in those days, I treated it like someone might treat owning a laser disc. I would routinely pick up the Sega CD versions of a game over the Genesis version, because they'd always come with extras. Extra animations, extra levels, extra modes, extra bonus artwork, stuff like that. It was just like getting a laser disc special edition over a regular VHS release.
With the 32X, I actually didn't play my 32X at all much after release. This is because, just a couple of months after I got my 32X, I got SEGA CHANNEL, which was the greatest thing on god's green earth. And, crazily enough, Sega Channel was completely incompatible with the 32X, you had to disconnect the 32X to play Sega Channel. And Sega Channel was in my Genesis constantly until the service died, so outside of a handful of times, like when I picked up Knuckles Chaotix, my 32X sat in it's box in the closet. Pretty much sums up the difference between the 32X and Sega CD for me, in my mind. While the internet likes to lump them together, I fully feel the Sega CD was one of the best things to release in the 90's, and as someone who owned one back in the day, I loved the content that came out on it. By contrast, I was probably one of the most dyed in the wool sega fans in the world back then, and even I couldn't stand to keep my 32X plugged in.
Yeah, when you line up the potential cost like that, it does sound like it'd be a better deal in the long term. Problem is that the upfront cost was too much for a lot of people, especially since it was already apparent to a lot of people that this was basically as stopgap add-on that would be supported for long, especially with the Saturn on the horizon. While the Super FX games were definitely more pricey, it was ultimately the better strategy since it was a flat price for every game, while your first 32X purchase was going to run you $200+, which is pretty steep even if game prices afterwords were significantly cheaper. Hell, even if you were, say, a Genesis-only owner at that point, buying a Super NES would probably look like a better value proposition than, even if the system and games were significantly less advanced than the 32X, if only for the already deep library of games available there.
Well, the 32X was priced much more like a successful add-on to begin with, launching at $150 in 1994 wasn't bad. The problem of the Sega CD is that it was always more expensive than the main system alone. The Sega CD was all about premium, if you got a Sega CD from scratch in 1993 you were paying like $550 at the time, which was insane. The 32X was really a pretty cheap system. It's just a pair of processors and some memory, all things which were poised to come down in price. I think the 32X ultimately launched really too late. Had it launched instead of the Sega CD, I could have seen it really catching on, even though I feel like bigger storage space ultimately wound up adding more to the genesis than more colors. I feel the general public wanted color, color, color, though, so perhaps nix the dual SH2s and go with maybe some cheaper 68000s inside and release earlier, and people would have been more happy. By late 1994, when you only really think the Genesis could have been viable for another year and a half, it just wasn't worth it. And it didn't even last the year and a half it was supposed to extend the Genesis by, it did the opposite. It basically killed the Genesis.
Had the 32X launched in, say, 1992 or early 1993, it would have eventually fallen in price. By like late 1994, maybe you might have seen like $60 32X upgrades with lots of titles behind them. By the time the 32X launched, the Sega CD had a legitimately respectable libary, at about 100 releases. Imagine if those had all been 32X titles instead. Too little, too late, though.
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Yeah, the improvements to FMV from the increase in colors alone would be nice. It's also a shame that there weren't any non-FMV based 32X CD games. It would have been cool to see what devs could have done.
Before DKC came out and gave the 16 bit era a shot in the arm the west basically had a mini crash in 1993/4 with all the failed consoles/multimedia not being the next big thing. Only key difference was that videogames were established enough that this was seen as time to move on to the next generation and not the end of the day like it was seen as ten years previous.
32x in 1992 is an interesting thought experiment.
32x in 1992 is an interesting thought experiment.
93 and 94 were huge in spite of dkc not because of it. I don't recall a mini crash. At all.
95. That was the year shit was getting cagey with a lot of companies taking baths on unsold inventory of minimum cart purchases. You couldn't send that shit back.
TBH, I don't think a '92 attempt at the 32X would have worked out much better. I feel like the bump from the hardware you're asking for just wouldn't be impressive enough to justify it's initial price, and if it survived long enough to hit your suggested MSRP, it'd probably end up significantly fragmenting and confusing the market. The Sega CD's status as a premium product meant that it didn't interfere with the mainstream Genesis market that much, but something like the 32X being priced that aggressively would probably cause issues.
I mean, yes and no. 16-bit scene was clearly on fire at that point, but that era is definitely characterized by a lot of half-baked "next-gen" machines that ended up all failing (hell, we're posting in a thread about one of them, ffs).
From what I understand, the CD 32X combo just doesn't have enough memory to properly leverage the hardware. Maybe they could have done some sort of RAM cart solution like on Saturn, but I think we all know the last thing this setup needed was another add-on.
Nope, the Sega CD could be seen by the 32X as either a 128Kb or 256Kb moving window of ROM. That was very much enough space to do great things.
I think he was just trying to make a weird point by using fanboyism in place of facts.
Doom on a cartridge was pretty wild tho. Even if the port was less than stellar
It's just the exact opposite of what happened, lol. In 1993-1994, the 16-bit market was surging. 1993-1994 were the most solid years ever for the 16 bit market. Donkey Kong Country and the 32X released on the exact same day. If anything, it's that the 16-bit market sort of took a hit after that day, because the 32X pretty much marked the end of the 16-bit market leader at the time's commitment to the era (Sega). After the 32X died, Sega basically abandoned the 16 bit market hard. Because Sega basically pulled out of the 16 bit market, Nintendo eventually overtook them in sales by the end of the generation, but the sales were never as strong as they were in 1993 and 1994 when both Sega and Nintendo were selling incredibly strong.
Nah I was more talking about the 3DO landing with a thud (and then the Jaguar but that never had a real chance) which was the next big thing at the time and it did cause some ripples in the industry.
Atari was also doing great sales wise right before the crash when debts piled up and because of video games being seen as just a fad back then all confidence dropped. You can read some industry trade pieces at the time worrying about the fate of the industry.
that's not what you said. admit you're wrong and stop talking out of the side of your mouth. there was no mini crash in the two best years of the 16 bit era.
Yeah, there's so much revisionism that has been adopted as received wisdom on the internet that has become quite frustrating. The Mega CD was an aspirational system right through to the Saturn launch while the 32X was desirable for just a few months before reality dawned on everyone that the next wave of Doom/VRD/SWA tier games was never going to happen. While the 32X drew resources away from the Saturn and dented Sega's reputation, the Mega CD did neither of these things and anyone smart enough to stay away from FMV games got access to some of the best games of that generation.
The revisionism comes from idiots thinking people like AVGN are historians. It was pretty obvious at the time that the Sega CD was impressive add on that wasn't harming the regular Genesis market. Adding the 32X into the mix and screwing up the Saturn launch, those were problems.
It never helped matters that the FMV games were the games that Sega of America wanted to push, though. During the time I spent between raising over $200 for my Sega CD and the next ~$50 I needed for Sonic CD, I spent a lot of quality time playing Sewer Shark, the pack-in of the time. And I never ended up getting a ton of other games for the system, so those miserable few weeks with Sewer Shark stick out pretty harshly, and it's easy to see why those games color the lasting perception of the system so much.
This is the guy that used the Star Fox soundtrack as an example of the SNES having better sound than the Genesis/Megadrive.
Sega licenced the distribution of Master System and Genesis stuff to a company called DISAM. If you had a Videocentro, Gigante o Liverpool, you could buy Sega stuff from them.
OP
OP
Holy motherfucking shit! Thanks for that!
Still a far cry from Nintendo which had an official magazine, launch events, and tv shows (plural) on Mexican network TV. Plus they had presence in Mexico since the early NES days too.
Still, for one reason or another, Sega consoles in homes in Mexico were an extremely rare sight in my youth.
Is that somehow a bad choice? Star Fox has a good soundtrack.
Krejlooc I have to ask, as rarely, any Sega historians go into full detail, but why did the Sega CD fail?
In the mid-90s, I switched from Nintendo to Sega (mostly for cheaper games, and a new found love of Sonic) and got a CDX (RIP) in 1994 alongside Sonic and Knuckles. I honestly thought the ports for SCD were better (and cheaper!) than their Genesis versions (e.g. Mortal Kombat, NBA Jam, Earthworm Jim, Mickey Mania, both Eccos, etc) , but never understood why more games (or in this cases, ports) weren't made for the system (for example, EGM always spoke of a Street Fighter 2 port)
For 32X, I can understand that the hardware was kinda so-so, plus developers wanted in on Saturn instead, but why did people drop the SCD so suddenly if it was easier and cheaper to make games for it? Were the sales truly not there?
In the mid-90s, I switched from Nintendo to Sega (mostly for cheaper games, and a new found love of Sonic) and got a CDX (RIP) in 1994 alongside Sonic and Knuckles. I honestly thought the ports for SCD were better (and cheaper!) than their Genesis versions (e.g. Mortal Kombat, NBA Jam, Earthworm Jim, Mickey Mania, both Eccos, etc) , but never understood why more games (or in this cases, ports) weren't made for the system (for example, EGM always spoke of a Street Fighter 2 port)
For 32X, I can understand that the hardware was kinda so-so, plus developers wanted in on Saturn instead, but why did people drop the SCD so suddenly if it was easier and cheaper to make games for it? Were the sales truly not there?
There's a really simple business consideration to be had:
All other things being equal, if you're a game publisher, would you rather create something that you could sell to a subset of the Genesis userbase or to the entire Genesis userbase.
Great thread, especially with all of the wisdom that Krejlooc shared with us.
I never owned either a Sega CD or 32X myself, but a few of my friends owned both of them, so I got to play a lot of their games. Seeing some of the YouTube clips in this thread brought back some good memories of some great games.
Despite that, I don't think I've ever played any of the 32X CD games. As others have already mentioned, the few 32X CD games were all FMV games. While FMV was a big novelty 2-3 years earlier, that trend faded drastically by the time those games came out, so none of my friends ever bothered to buy any of them.
While Sega has done a great job of keeping some of the finest Genesis games relevant in their compilation packs over the last two decades, it's a shame that they haven't seen fit to reintroduce Sega CD and 32X games to today's video game market in the same way. I'd love to have the opportunity to play those games on current platforms, and I'd bet many other people would value that opportunity as well.
I never owned either a Sega CD or 32X myself, but a few of my friends owned both of them, so I got to play a lot of their games. Seeing some of the YouTube clips in this thread brought back some good memories of some great games.
Despite that, I don't think I've ever played any of the 32X CD games. As others have already mentioned, the few 32X CD games were all FMV games. While FMV was a big novelty 2-3 years earlier, that trend faded drastically by the time those games came out, so none of my friends ever bothered to buy any of them.
While Sega has done a great job of keeping some of the finest Genesis games relevant in their compilation packs over the last two decades, it's a shame that they haven't seen fit to reintroduce Sega CD and 32X games to today's video game market in the same way. I'd love to have the opportunity to play those games on current platforms, and I'd bet many other people would value that opportunity as well.
I agree wholeheartedly with Krejlooc that the Sega CD versions of Ecco and its sequel are vastly superior (though I hestitate to refer to them as the definitive versions when the PC port of Ecco 1 has redrawn high-resolution graphics that look a fair bit cleaner), and I wish they were even half as ubiquitous as the originals.
But man, not having, like, Shining Force CD available anywhere straight-up sucks.
But man, not having, like, Shining Force CD available anywhere straight-up sucks.
Absolutely. But a big problem was still Genesis cartridges cost $50-60 (versus Nintendo being $50-$80). If you can get that same program in a $3 disc (without major development issues), wasn't it worth the investment?
I just remember reading gaming mags as a kid and seeing SCD games on the best sellers chart (in comparison to 32X) and still find it weird that many of the titles ported to 32X (Mortal Kombat 2, NBA Jam TE, Wrestlemania: TAG, Primal Rage) never made it to SCD, when it should have cost less to make.
Great point.
Here's something that I considered and wondered if it would have been feasible: What if a developer could create a Genesis cartridge game, which could optionally use a companion CD for "extras" such as CD-quality music and full-motion video sequences?
I remember when Defender 2000 was in development for the Jaguar, that they had considered this concept. The game would be released on cartridge, but you could also get a CD containing a higher quality soundtrack. If you happened to own the Jaguar CD peripheral, then you could insert the soundtrack, and play the cartridge game with CD-quality music. If you didn't have a Jaguar CD, then you would just get the ordinary music from the cartridge. That way, all Jaguar owners would be able to play the same game, but the Jaguar CD owners would get the extra benefits. Unfortunately, this feature was not implemented in the final game.
If Sega had considered doing this (assuming there were no technical hurdles), then instead of producing similar but separate "Genesis" and "Sega CD" versions of games, they could have consolidated it into a single product. You could sell one game to all Genesis owners, but those who also had the Sega CD peripheral would be able to play a better version of the game. The companion CD could either be packaged with the Genesis cartridge, or you could purchase it separately (possibly by mail order) for a nominal fee. Another benefit of this concept is that it would enable people who owned only the base Genesis system to buy the game first, and then encourage them to buy a Sega CD peripheral in order to easily "enhance" some of their existing games, without having to repurchase the games altogether.
We can see in this thread that Sega did that for a couple of Sega CD games, where the 32X CD version was also included in the package. I think this would have been a bigger boost and and easier sell for Genesis or 32X cartridge games, to get a companion CD to upgrade those games.
Pier Solar does this:
It's not redbook audio, either, it's high quality streaming PCM:
another comparison:
with CD:
The Jaguar game Protector does this with it's expansion pack, Protector Resurgence:
I'm pretty sure there are some homebrew games out there that do exactly that.
Packaging an "enhancement CD" with standard Genesis games is a pretty novel idea and might have been worth the effort considering how cheap CDs were to produce.
I don't really think it failed. It was an add-on, not a main system, but it sold millions of units, got hundreds of games, and was steadily supported for 4 years with quality third party and first party releases. I dunno what people define as success or failure, but owning it at the time, it always felt like a worthwhile purchase and it, for me at least, was basically everything I hoped it would have been. One other bit about owning a Sega CD is that, unlike many consoles of that era, basically everything great on the system came west, including a bunch of japanese titles that usually skipped the Genesis. As I said earlier, the Sega CD's library very much compliments the Genesis library, making for an incredibly well rounded selection of games. If you kept up with both Genesis and Sega CD releases at the time, you always had something great to play. It was neat being an owner of both at the time, because it's not at all like Sega abandoned the Genesis. It was like this whole other selection of games, in genres that often didn't cross over, suddenly opened up.
The Sega CD was not the hit Sega hoped it would be, but it didn't totally fail; it just died off REALLY quickly after 1994. The Sega CD sold 2.24 million units (only counting Sega systems, not the JVC ones and their handful of sales), and managed to be the best-selling addon that gen -- it did probably slightly outsell the Turbo/PC Engine CD because that system sold almost nothing in the US. So Sega definitely didn't consider it to be a success, but I don't think calling it a failure is fair, it did okay in the US -- the sales numbers out there show it selling more in the US than Europe and Japan combined, by a sizable margin (1 million in North America in '94, 300-something thousand each in the other regions -- versus the Turbo/PCE CD, which sold 1.92 million in Japan but only in the tens of thousands in the US). This is why the PC Engine CD has far more games released on it than the Sega CD -- despite it selling slightly less overall, Japan made more console games at that point and the SCD was much more popular here, not there.
So what happened? Well, the SCD did okay at first, as the whole FMV craze sold consoles to people who wanted that kind of games, but the SCD didn't sell enough outside of that audience to have lasting popularity, and it failed to sell much outside of that audience -- note how the FMV games on Sega CD are cheap and plentiful, while what I would call the better games, the non-live-action-FMV stuff, is rarer and more expensive. The system was too expensive to sell to a mass audience, CD consoles cost a lot at that point. And then by the time they started to get cheaper, in '95, better consoles were available or coming soon, and people moved to those instead of Sega CD. It didn't help that probably because of its failure to sell in Japan Sega of Japan didn't release any first-party games made in Japan after 1994, and apart from Sonic CD didn't gave the system the kind of attention that it might have been nice to see. So as the FMV craze died off and new consoles released and got more popular after '94, the Sega CD died off quickly, thought it had done decently in the US for its first few years.
So, why would more Japanese third parties make Sega CD ports of their games when they'd sell very poorly at home, and the US audience was more interested in Double Switch or Ground Zero Texas and such, rather than a Sega CD port of Street Fighter 2 or something like that? Also, not all cartridge games could easily convert to CD -- remember that thanks to the SCD's perhaps biggest flaw, the relatively small bus between the SCD and the Genesis (unlike the Turbo CD, which pretty much has full system access through the rear expansion port), lots of SCD games had to cut back on animation and such versus their cart-based counterparts. You can't just drop a cart game to CD and add CD audio, it's not that simple. It'd be a fair amount of work for what would probably be not all that many sales, particularly in Japan. So most of the cart-to-CD conversions are Western games, since the system sold better here.
And here in the US, those FMV games that were the best selling games on the console were expensive to make, so as soon as sales started to dip I imagine devs rapidly moved over to newer platforms (PC, 3DO in the interim, Playstation, and such.). You could get much better video quality on other systems too, the Sega CD's video playback is of course quite poor unless you make it a 32X CD game, and then you're got a pretty big ask for your customer, that's a lot of hardware.
In 1992-1994, at that price? no, you really couldn't. The Sega CD has the luxury of being able to devote an entire 12 mhz 68000 to decoding video; it's not quite mpeg or anything, but it's hardware decoding and that puts it an entire class ahead of FMV games on the Turbo CD and Amiga CD32. Now, you COULD get an actual FMV Mpeg2 cart for the CD32, but it cost like 500 GBP after the system, and was sold in extremely limited quantities. The 3DO of course could produce better video quality, but it was over $700. Things like the FM Towns Marty actually produces a FMV quality about on par with the Sega CD. It really wasn't until the Sony Playstation launched that you could get better FMV for cheaper.
Also, Sega CD FMV gets a really bad wrap because people look at in crystal clarity on modern displays, exposing all the dither:
This isn't really what Sega CD FMV looks like on a CRT of the time. The NTSC Color Blur makes for a much softer image, and dithering sort of vanishes into honest to god new colors. It definitely doesn't look great or anything, but it looks dramatically better with even a 1 pixel color blur applied to the image.
The Sega CD was relatively cheap for what it was though. You have to remember even a portable CD player than than off batteries in 92 was around $100.
My Sega CD was actually a "family gift" intended for the entire house hold, because it was a CD player. Together, between my brother and sister and I, we got a Sega CD with stereo speakers and a few music CDs. The Sega CD was mainly mine, the stereo was mainly my brothers, and the CDs were picked out by my sister, but the whole family used the Sega CD. It was our only CD player for a few years. It was definitely the first time the family had seen CD-ROMs before.
That's such a neat thing to remember, my parents using my Sega CD for music. Because of that, we got to hook the Genesis and Sega CD up to the big tv in the front room next to the speakers for many years.
That said, the Sega CD remained expensive well after the price of CD players had come down. By late 1994, CD players were no longer hyper expensive, but the Sega CD was still like $250, years after it had been released. That's because there is honestly a lot of tech in the Sega CD.
Right, which is why it sold alright from '92 to '94 in the US. As I said, in '95 better systems released -- the 3DO, Playstation, and PC that I had just mentioned -- and that's part of why it crashed so fast that year, along with that that was also the year that the FMV craze started to pass, and the market took a bit of a dip (there is truth to that, the sales show it).
True, compared to the handful of games on Turbo CD with live-action FMV, the Sega CD definitely looks better -- the SCD versions of Sherlock Holmes, Consulting Detective are a bit better than the TCD ones, and It Came from the Desert only has tiny little bits of actual video on the screen. On the other hand, because of its failure here and Japan's lack of interested in live-action video at the time, there wasn't much of an effort to get, say, Super CD live-action video, I imagine that would have been better -- see Guilliver Boy's nice quality animated cutscenes ("HuVideo", Hudson called it), or the videoclips in Madden CD on Turbo CD. But yes, thanks to that added hardware power, the Sega CD did have advantages over the Turbo CD; the Turbo CD couldn't do the scaling-and-rotation games the SCD has, for example, of course, which are some of its more impressive titles, such as SoulStar. On the other hand, the Turbo CD ones have more colors on screen, and that matters even on a CRT; yeah, CRTs make Sega CD video look a little less bad, but it's still very low color. It's not too bad really, and some actually look somewhat impressive, I think Wirehead has some nice FMV for example, but everything is low color.The Sega CD has the luxury of being able to devote an entire 12 mhz 68000 to decoding video; it's not quite mpeg or anything, but it's hardware decoding and that puts it an entire class ahead of FMV games on the Turbo CD and Amiga CD32. Now, you COULD get an actual FMV Mpeg2 cart for the CD32, but it cost like 500 GBP after the system, and was sold in extremely limited quantities. The 3DO of course could produce better video quality, but it was over $700. Things like the FM Towns Marty actually produces a FMV quality about on par with the Sega CD. It really wasn't until the Sony Playstation launched that you could get better FMV for cheaper.
Also, Sega CD FMV gets a really bad wrap because people look at in crystal clarity on modern displays, exposing all the dither:
This isn't really what Sega CD FMV looks like on a CRT of the time. The NTSC Color Blur makes for a much softer image, and dithering sort of vanishes into honest to god new colors. It definitely doesn't look great or anything, but it looks dramatically better with even a 1 pixel color blur applied to the image.
As for the 3DO, its video quality is somewhat underwhelming -- it's kind of too bad that no 3DO games support the system's Video CD addon -- but it is at least a lot better than Sega CD. However, it was also, yes, very expensive.
There was one platform with good image quality by itself, lots of colors, and, with its Video CD addon, great quality video, far better than anything else from the time (3DO included): the CD-i. Sure, it may have been poor at gameplay, but the CD-i really shines at video quality. It totally wipes the floor with everything else pre-Playstation in terms of video. I got a CD-i a few months ago, the games are not the best but some are interesting, and the video quality's really good. CD-is were also expensive, though. The Sega CD is expensive too, but not as much as a CD-i I believe... and Sega definitely had better marketing.
The PC Engine/Turbo Grafx has no hardware inside capable of long format FMV. The way the Turbo Grafx CD works is that it transfers data in blocks of memory into the Turbo Grafx RAM and that's where the playback occurs. All the video clips in Turbo CD games are tiny video files that must be able to be completely held in memory, the CD unit of the Turbo Grafx has no ability to decode new video and prepare it necessary for streaming. The Sega CD explicitly does, it streams video from the CD using the dual 128 Kb mode as a double buffer. While one frame is displayed on the television, the Sega CD's 68000 is preparing the next frame on the other buffer. The switch between buffers in memory is instant, and the way the sega CD's Cinepak Codec works is that there is a dictionary of patterns stored in VRAM that don't need to be updated, only the nametable corresponding to the plane displaying the video needs to be updated (kinda like JPEG). This allows for super quick transfer of frames between the buffers. This lets the Sega CD stream video without the need for the entire video to reside in the Sega Genesis 64 Kb of memory. Super CD-Rom 2 and even arcade card wouldn't have been much help for FMV on the PC Engine CD. In order to match what the Sega CD could do, it'd need some sort of dedicated hardware for decoding video, like as an external module or something. But no, developer support in Japan would not have really made a difference in the Turbo CD's FMV capabilities. At best, they would have had to chop long movies up into short clips, and let there be pauses in between parts of the movies for loading.
Also to point out, what you filmed mattered on the Sega CD. Brighter things with more subtle color gradients tended to look washed out, lighter pastels looked pretty bad on the Sega CD. But things with high contrast, really bold primary colors, they tended to look great on the Sega CD. Like many here were unaware that Time Gal is actually FMV for this very reason. That's all obviously limited by the master palette of the Genesis.
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And, just to expand on my last point, here's an example of a game on the Sega CD using FMV in a pretty amazing way:
Silpheed combines real time polygon graphics, with FMV backgrounds of much more complex low polygon scenes, to make it look like the Sega CD is producing graphics on par with something much more powerful. It gets away with this, because the origin video is rendered to match the color limitations of the Genesis palette in the first place.
Silpheed combines real time polygon graphics, with FMV backgrounds of much more complex low polygon scenes, to make it look like the Sega CD is producing graphics on par with something much more powerful. It gets away with this, because the origin video is rendered to match the color limitations of the Genesis palette in the first place.
It's easy to look back with hindsight and look at these platforms as failures, or obvious, stupid, mistakes; but the reality was that technology was exploding in the early 90s and the CD/FMV/3D arms race was in full swing. SEGA desperately didn't want to be left behind and even Nintendo themselves tried (and failed) to get in on the action.
At the time, it was the obvious next step for platform holders to take. Jumping straight to (very expensive) 3D hardware wasn't the obvious decision; lest we forget that both the PS1 and the Saturn were significantly more expensive than both the SNES and the Mega Drive!
SEGA CD was a huge boon for SEGA fans at the time, even if the library didn't end up living up to its potential. Its still one of the most successful addons of all time (which is very impressive, especially considering its hefty price tag!). It's very much to the 16 bit era, what PSVR is right now (even the sales numbers are similar).
Makes sense that CDi would excel at video decoding, given that that was more or less its hardware's entire focus. It couldn't even do basic smooth scrolling!
Pretty sure that Sipheed just uses pre-rendered sprites. There isn't any actual real-time polygon rendering happening.
At the time, it was the obvious next step for platform holders to take. Jumping straight to (very expensive) 3D hardware wasn't the obvious decision; lest we forget that both the PS1 and the Saturn were significantly more expensive than both the SNES and the Mega Drive!
SEGA CD was a huge boon for SEGA fans at the time, even if the library didn't end up living up to its potential. Its still one of the most successful addons of all time (which is very impressive, especially considering its hefty price tag!). It's very much to the 16 bit era, what PSVR is right now (even the sales numbers are similar).
Makes sense that CDi would excel at video decoding, given that that was more or less its hardware's entire focus. It couldn't even do basic smooth scrolling!
Pretty sure that Sipheed just uses pre-rendered sprites. There isn't any actual real-time polygon rendering happening.
All of the non-fireball and non-background objects in silpheed are real time polygons (filled vectors). The game includes a model viewer mode where you can examine any model in 3D:
This is done by chopping up the VRAM in the genesis into small quantized frame buffers and drawing to them directly. That's why all the models that appear on screen are small - so their rasterized representations could fill as little VRAM as possible.
All of the non-fireball and non-background objects in silpheed are real time polygons (filled vectors). The game includes a model viewer mode where you can examine any model in 3D:
This is done by chopping up the VRAM in the genesis into small quantized frame buffers and drawing to them directly. That's why all the models that appear on screen are small - so their rasterized representations could fill as little VRAM as possible.
Oh! I stand corrected then! I always thought they were sprites! Pretty awesome :D
That looks incredible, I can usually spot pre-rendered video a mile away but with that limited colour palette makes it look real time.
I'm actually shopping around at the moment for a working Model 1, I think the cheapest I'll be able to get a working model is around $350 AUD. I've given up on the 32x because its not that much cheaper and I'd have to go to the trouble to converting it from PAL to NTSC.
It was a show stopper at the time and was directly compared to Star Fox. The nature of the FMV backgrounds has made lots of people confused about whether or not it's actually 3D, but it really is an impressive game overall. The use of FMV is impressive, but even beyond that, the 3D models it produces are pretty impressive as well. It's 3D and FMV, a really cool combo for the system.
There was also a dracula game that tried to use FMV for backgrounds but is done pretty abysmally. It's sad that not many games tried the effect, because Killer Instinct in the arcades used it to create pretty stunning backgrounds. Silpheed is probably the very best example of this kind of game on Sega CD.
Star Blade is a similar game but has more primitive graphics overall, and the FMV backgrounds aren't as convincing:
Star Blade also had a 3DO remake/port where, much like Silpheed on the Sega CD, it was a stand out game:
worth noting that Silpheed was originally an old PC game. The Sega CD version is a pseudo sequel/remake. This is the original:
Yeah, in terms of adoption, the CD-i is in the upper tier of addons that aren't called the Xbox 360 Kinect -- 8-something percent if I remember right. PS4 PSVR adoption was recently compared to Sega CD purchase rates, yes, as you say. Sega may have considered the SCD to be something of a failure, but that'd only be because they apparently had much too high expectations for sales of a quite expensive addon. It did okay, and has a pretty good and interesting game library.
Hey, the 32X and 3DO rarely manage 60fps in side-scrolling 2d games either, 3DO platformers usually are 30fps at best. Some systems were just not designed for platformers... and the CD-i was designed for photo CDs, informative interactive demo stations, video playback, and oh yeah a few games like Battleship and Connect Four. About the best scrolling I've seen so far in games that don't use the Digital Video Cartridge are... well, probably Link: The Faces of Evil, which does scroll not too badly, though it is slow. And in the racing genre, while Micro Machines and Virtual Speedway both are horribly slow and choppy, Accelerator has solid, smooth scrolling, and it doesn't use the DVC. Pretty nice. (I own Accelerator, but did not get CD-i Micro Machines, not yet at least. Accelerator is fun, in that Amiga-ish kind of way...)
With the additional hardware in the Digital Video Cartridge, however, games can do better scrolling. Few did, but look up Lucky Luke for CD-i -- it uses the DVC for some pretty nice graphics, reasonable scaling, and good animation. Unfortunately the sprites are inordinately large and the game is frustrating as a result, but it looks good...
But anyway, yeah, while the CD-i may be better at things like National Parks Tour -- the thing sure can display great-quality photographs for the early '90s -- or, with the DVC, Video CD movies than games, in terms of color and photo or video quality the CD-i is really quite good. It's far and away better than its contemporaries, the Sega CD and Turbo CD, in that respect. It has big downsides too of course, but it IS good at something.
(Interesting CD-i fact: to the system, all CD-i controllers are actually a mouse. So all CD-i gamepads have a speed switch on them somewhere, to adjust cursor speed, and the sticks on its remotes are analog.)
This is a somewhat controversial point, but there is reason to believe that they are actual polygon models, and not just sprites. That is, the in-game objects, enemies, your ship, and such, are polygons. The model viewer is one thing, but ingame they look like polygons as well. The background is of course FMV.
Pretty much since I got the system, I've thought that SoulStar and Silpheed are the two games with the best visuals on the Sega CD. They're both quite impressive, SoulStar for being the best use of the Sega CD's scaling and rotation chips, and Silpheed for being the best use of FMV and polygons. (It was mostly Western developers who made games that used hardware scaling and rotation on the SCD, Japanese examples are few... there are the Sonic CD bonus stages, Formula One World Championship, Night Striker... not a lot else. Starblade is interesting too though, yes. I like the SCD version.). For FMV, as I said... maybe Wirehead? Or maybe it's just how crazy-silly that game is... it's grainy of course, but good looking for SCD FMV:
There was supposed to be a 32X CD version of Wirehead, but unfortunately it was cancelled. That's too bad, it'd have been cool to see.
Wow!, I don't know how I missed that growing up, I thought I'd played every DOS game set in space. We didn't have a console in the house until the mid 90's when I got my Playstation, so most of my early gaming memories are things like Solar Winds, Major Stryker and X-Wing.
Haha, I love how they rip off the scene from temple of doom with the lifeboat only for him to use it as a hanglider.
Huh? Never knew that! Guess that really shows how it wasn't really geared towards games first and foremost...
The 32X lacking any sort of hardware acceleration was such a bumblingly stupid decision that it still makes me double take today! Who on earth thought that was a good idea!?
What an absolute waste of those SH2 CPUs! They would've been better off just chucking them into MD carts honestly.
The 32X might have worked if it came out like 2 years earlier; and actually had hardware acceleration; but there was no way that that half-baked mess of hardware was ever going to do anything of value when it actually came out in 1994!
I'll throw out the Japanese exclusive (one of the very few) Night Striker as the best graphics on the Sega CD:
This is a super scalar style racing game, more like Outrun or Outrunners than anything on the Genesis or SNES at the time. Incredibly impressive for the system. By comparison, here is the Sega Saturn version:
This game is really cool, because while the 32X got killer ports of Space Harrier and Afterburner, it never got Outrun. Night Striker definitely isn't nearly as good as Outrun, but it's still a really good substitute.
This is a super scalar style racing game, more like Outrun or Outrunners than anything on the Genesis or SNES at the time. Incredibly impressive for the system. By comparison, here is the Sega Saturn version:
This game is really cool, because while the 32X got killer ports of Space Harrier and Afterburner, it never got Outrun. Night Striker definitely isn't nearly as good as Outrun, but it's still a really good substitute.
The term "hardware acceleration" gets thrown around, but it's sort of a meaningless term to be honest. What people refer to as hardware acceleration is usually broken up into two categories - computation, and rasterization. For that era, game machines did not have graphics processors -- the term "Video Display Processor" and "Picture Processing Units" to describe the Genesis and Snes graphics chips are misnomers, they're actually much more like video controllers than actual processors. "Hardware accelerated" computation, thus, in this case means a dedicated processor with built in trig operations, which the 32X has. The SH2 is a processor built to crunch 3D math. The 32X has two of them, one to run main game code, and one used normally exclusively for math computation. If having the CPU do math computation disqualifies a machine from having hardware acceleration, then the dreamcast has no hardware acceleration either -- the PVR Core is not a processor, and all vertexes are calculated entirely on the SH4 and then sent to VRAM for rasterization.
So that leaves the other half of the equation at rasterization. And the way the 32X draws -- scanline by scanline, it actually does have video functions devoted to speeding up draw. The 32X will automatically output pixel patterns over a scanline to fill an area between two given points on the scanline. This is basically hardware rasterization on a scanline basis.
So I mean, yeah, the 32X doesn't have a conventional graphics chip that does everything automatically and is merely configured by a control port, but in it's place it has an actual processor that can run 3D driver code, which is built to do 3D math, and a video chip built to help rasterize 3D shapes.
On top of this, the 68000 is no slouch as a math processor. I wrote a topic a long while ago about how much I love the 68000 here, but with 8 32-bit general purpose registers plus 7 32-bit address registers at your disposal and a pretty high for the time clock speed, you could crunch some math on the 68000 separately if you needed some extra grunt.
Source? I heard some stuff like that, but it sounded more like DSP-n on board rather than SuperFX.