Author | Lightnews

Shannon Birt @shannonbirt.bsky.social · 3d

Its looking superb !!
What would a couple of other racers do to the frame rate ?
Be great to see .

1 2

Shannon Birt @shannonbirt.bsky.social · 4d

If it was just a bit more accurate it could replace blastem possibly as my daily driver , the LUA scripting is lovely .

1 1

Shannon Birt @shannonbirt.bsky.social · 16d

Haha , yes , when Pryon told me its a direct translation from the arcade text I could hardly believe it ;-)
Yes, there literally is a blast in this stage too and some processing , so its not all made up after all haha.

3

Shannon Birt @shannonbirt.bsky.social · 16d

We are having some fun with the White Bell power up text , Pryon has come up with some slogans we all say in our sleep and its translated really well here !!

3

Shannon Birt @shannonbirt.bsky.social · 16d

The blue bell bomb , is using sprites and taking advantage of mirroring and flipping / the fact the core is solid white and a few other tricks to get the tile usage right down.
Its 40 frames of animation and uses at most 147 tiles in vram.
It uses a heavily modified SGDK sprite engine.

5

Shannon Birt @shannonbirt.bsky.social · 16d

One issue was the water, at the waterline we essentially need 3 background layers for the Catboss and we only have 2 on the MD , thankfully the sprites are very flexible , so we have sprites for the water , sprites for catpaws , periscope and cannons . The rest is forground animation.

6

Shannon Birt @shannonbirt.bsky.social · 16d

Can't write novels here but I'll give you the TL;DR version.

Catboss was very hard , much harder than he looks to implement this far. Several animating parts and cant use sprites for all of him as it would lead to sprite overload readily. So hes a combination of Forground + sprites.

5

Shannon Birt @shannonbirt.bsky.social · 16d

* Mega Parodius Update *

New WIP:
Blue Bell Explosion
White Bell Explosion
Catboss + Animating Trees
Music updated (mark 4 - orchestral hits in)

Due to 30 FPS video here on BS, please refer to YT link below ( otherwise the bomb effect is affected ) .

youtu.be/ID2WfqSnyk0

Sega Megadrive - Mega Parodius update

YouTube video by Shannon Birt

youtu.be

5 12 41

Shannon Birt @shannonbirt.bsky.social · 24d

Amazing work , very smooth !!
With a bit of color in sprites / backgrounds that would hide the fact the foreground is in 4 colors a bit .
What do you think is the next thing you will try ?

1 4

Shannon Birt @shannonbirt.bsky.social · 24d

Mega Wipeout incoming ;-)

This is looking silky smooth !!
Its interesting the potential the Megadrive has for 3D rendering and I'm excited where this goes next.
This reminds me a bit of Gasekas work in the Starfox Demos which I hope more updates come also.

Anaël seghezzi @anaelseghezzi.bsky.social · 25d

So mayyybe it's possible to render in 4 colors, it takes 20% more cpu but two palettes of 16 colors are then free for sprites and background #SGDK #SegaMegadrive

1 15

Shannon Birt @shannonbirt.bsky.social · 25d

This was fabulous, back then I was semi decent at playing shooters and could clock this - great time it was !!
The c64 version is also really good.

Shannon Birt @shannonbirt.bsky.social · 25d

Love raycasters , this is looking really good with the enemy interaction going on and detail in the wall sections. Keep it coming haha.

Greg Gallardo @greggallardo.bsky.social · 25d

Rewrote my #SGDK / #segagenesis raycaster again. This time to get rid of the Toy Story mirroring. The FPS dropped of course. But I think I'd rather run 10 to 13 FPS without mirroring the screen than run 15 to 20 with mirroring.

There's still some optimizing I can do, so maybe 15~ish is possible.

1 1 10

Shannon Birt @shannonbirt.bsky.social · 25d

Thanks :-) Pryon has used a high contrast / vibrant palettes and I think it looks close to the Saturn Port actually . Certainly similarities to Saturn port with the wider screen view also.
Using some tricks to get a few more colors here and there too , but mostly its just carefull color selection.

1

Shannon Birt @shannonbirt.bsky.social · 26d

Thanks for the shout out , opened my inbox to 30+ notifications , BS never been so busy for me haha.
I have some good stuff coming , particularly if you like Konami / Penguins and Shooters on Megadrive ;-)

1 6

Shannon Birt @shannonbirt.bsky.social · 26d

Its setting the plane Priorities to High for BGB (so it appears infront of BGA ) so its not doing anything complex like a Z sort but it is a plane update to set the priority bit so theres a small cpu hit there.

Shannon Birt @shannonbirt.bsky.social · 26d

Thanks :-)

2

Shannon Birt @shannonbirt.bsky.social · Sep 26

Smaller area effects can be done well or effects that rely on vertical expansion mainly as that can be done in hardware on MD using VSCROLL updates. DMA limit is also a problem , you can only update ~ 20 percent of the screen tiles in a frame so even with a faster cpu things are bottlenecked.

Shannon Birt @shannonbirt.bsky.social · Sep 26

Often on the MD due to lack of CPU / DMA capability to do it with raw processing they used tile drawing for superscalers or sprites with few animations (to save vram) which is chunky / repetitive like you say . Unfortunately its not easily fixed without hardware for the job. ...

1

Shannon Birt @shannonbirt.bsky.social · Sep 26

Theres been some efforts to do superscaler type roads using multiplexed sprites, that could work . It has that sort of superscaler look to it .
With the MegaCD you could get quite good general use results albiet not full screen without repetition / flips etc. Soulstar is very good .
1/2 ..

1

Shannon Birt @shannonbirt.bsky.social · Sep 25

In Parodius soon I will have to do the puffer fish and thats going to be a challenge so I'll have to see what is the best method for him .

1

Shannon Birt @shannonbirt.bsky.social · Sep 25

More detail could be done but it gets a lot more complex, eg splitting sprites into two colors then having to have combinations of those colors in vram . Then you could theorectically get to 40x40 or greater sizing .

There are other methods using sprites to scale but they use less accurate scaling.

2

Shannon Birt @shannonbirt.bsky.social · Sep 25

One thought I've had is you could scale a small sprite eg 20x20 pixels up to full screen size using multiplexing .
Every pixel in the base object would be a sprite then. You would need 400 sprites though so hence mulitplexing would be needed.
1/2 ....

1 1

Shannon Birt @shannonbirt.bsky.social · Sep 18

Haha it will be free eg fan based conversion, we will get a level 1 demo out soon.

2

Shannon Birt @shannonbirt.bsky.social · Sep 17

Thanks Dan , we are aiming for a high-end close to arcade accuracy conversion with a couple of extra bells / whistles added . I'm lucky as I have some great talent supporting me with Pryon doing the palette / gfx working and Vector doing the FM/PSG Audio.

2

Shannon Birt @shannonbirt.bsky.social · Sep 17

2/2

Viper Shot, Lazer, SpeedUp, Lazer anounce samples added .

Very happy with how the voices turned out, Pyron has supplied modified samples to get better volume levels.

FG collisions for the standard shot added. More of the vic viper power ups and hud bar/ animating water to add yet.

1 3