Sonic and Sega Retro Message Board: tokumaru - Viewing Profile - Sonic and Sega Retro Message Board

The plane viewer is cool as hell! It's even better than what I had in mind back when I requested this feature! Awesome work!

I too was very disappointed with the cheaper SCART-to-HDMI converter I bought a while back (LKV362A). The video remained interlaced and it actually looked worse than if I just connected the composite cable directly to the TV. The RGB somehow became incredibly blurry and the sound was completely mangled, it was way worse than the composite. Other consoles, like the SNES, performed better, but never better than the TV by itself, which was a huge letdown.

I can't possibly afford the XRGB-Mini, specially considering the recent exchange rates (the dollar is 15% or so more expensive than a few of months ago), and the abusive import taxes of 60% my country charges on any international purchase, plus the shipping, which is never cheap. Guess I'll just have to hold on to that old CRT for as long as I can.

The last game I actually played all the way through was Sonic Adventure 2, back when my Dreamcast was still working. Adventure 1 and 2 showed me that Sonic didn't translate well to 3D. After that I did try some PlayStation 2 games (Heroes, Shadow and Unleashed), but none of those succeeded in keeping me interested for more than a couple hours (Unleashed in particular sucked really hard). Sonic 4 and Generations had me hyped for some Classic 2D action, but they also couldn't keep me interested for long. The physics in Sonic 4 was so incredibly broken and the flow of the levels so boring (homing attack!!!) that after playing a couple of zones I already knew I wasn't gonna try Episode 2. Generations played much better, but 3D levels felt as boring as ever and Classic Sonic wasn't well done enough to compensate that.

After that I pretty much gave up on keeping up with the new stuff, and accepted that the current Sonic is completely different from the games I liked back in 1991-1994. I'm not saying all games are bad (some definitely are!), only that they're not for me. The formula I used to love (physics that could be exploited in levels with multiple paths and hidden areas that I could explore any way I wanted at any pace I wanted - under 10 minutes! =) -, using tricks I discovered myself to overcome obstacles) was nowhere to be found. Some times I still get a kick out of the Advance games, because there's something reminiscent of the classics in them, but other than that, I'll forever be an 8 and 16-bit sonic fan.

There's a farting flower in Hill Top Zone!? Never noticed it...

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.