As stated previously, the bands are there because dithering allows more colours to be simulated via Composite or RF connection, which was THE norm back in the early 90s. For example: direct output: composite output: Not Megadrive but you get the idea. Those are all extra plugins not included with the standalone emulator. Sure, you could use blarggs NTSC filter which looks the coolest, but you'd have to find it first.
...in my post I already accounted for dithering and color bleed. This is not dithering. It occurs in super fantasy zone during the ending where dithering does not make sense.
The vertical lines are not caused by hardware quirks, they're a deliberate artistic decision taken to make the most out of the small 16-color palette which is used to render the screen. They have to draw all kinds of walls using only 16 colors, so they have to be cheap and use a lot of black to darken the base colors instead of using actual darker shades. Wolfenstein 3D is a raycaster, meaning it renders walls by casting rays from the player until they hit walls, and the length of these rays is used to determine how close to the player each wall stripe is. This is generally faster than actual 3D, and to make it even faster you may cut down on the amount of rays that are cast. If you pay attention (get very close to a wall and turn away from it so its edges are as steep as possible), you'll see that each wall slice in this homebrew is 2 pixels wide, instead on one. This means the programmers are probably increasing the performance by shooting half as many rays as they normally would while still generating a nice image. Now add the color limitation and the reduced resolution together and it just makes sense to define each "software pixel" as two hardware pixels side by side. This is a classic "killing two birds with one stone" situation. The vertical lines you're seeing is just a consequence of making software pixels 2x1 hardware pixels big. They could possibly have gone with 2x2 software pixels and used checkerboard dithering instead, but the loss of vertical resolution would hardly justify it, since the vertical lines blend really well in NTSC, sometimes even better than checkerboard patterns. As for Super Fantasy Zone, that's a completely different issue. That looks like plain poor software scaling to me. The Genesis/MD doesn't support hardware scaling, so any scaling issues you see are a direct result of the method the programmers used to simulate the effect. Maybe they're not manipulating individual pixels at all in Fantasy Zone, and are just expanding/compressing clusters of smaller sprites to make the complete objects look bigger/smaller. This would account for weird gaps in the outlines, although I would expect the same thing to happen vertically. Well, can't tell for sure without debugging the actual scene in an emulator.
Hot damn, this looks pretty faithful to the original. Haven't played W3D in years; I'll have to check this out sometime soon.
You just have to know that only the first episode is fully playable by now, but yes, this is a pretty nice way to revisit this game. This port/conversion really feels like something I would have wanted to play on the Mega Drive in the 486 days.
Wow, this is hot stuff! Makes me want an EverDrive to play on my real one. I'm really impressed by the MD, it's quickly tying up all the loose ends and becoming my favourite console of all time. The amount of stuff it can do that was never even tapped in to... makes you wonder why when there were people who were completely in tune with the hardware all those years ago. I suppose it all comes down to the right people on the wrong games sometimes. Someone who'd be excellent at making one type of game may have been contracted to another project with another team or company, so games of this quality never came to fruition. Kinda makes you wonder why they bothered with the 32X though, the Mega Drive was nearly there, and it'd have saved them a shedload of cash. I mean, despite the fact that Virtua Racing was near unplayable after the first circuit, it was also technically impressive.
Definitely agreed that the Genesis was more powerful than people thought, but I just want to point out that Virtua Racing in particular had the assistance of an on-cart chip (the SVP) for some of its 3D calculations and rendering. So it wasn't using 100% standard Genesis hardware (which is what makes this Wolf3D port all the more impressive), and it's also the reason why Virtua Racing couldn't be emulated for the longest time until more research into the SVP chip was done.
Thanks for the reply! I did know that actually, but still thought it impressive that the Mega Drive could achieve this from a game just a chip in the cart. StarFox did something similar, so I didn't bother mentioning the chip, but you're right on with it. :v:
