General Project Screenshot/Video Thread

I want whatever he's having

 

Help, I'm being turned into a Mother 3 background

 

There hasn't been nearly enough exploration of the potential that Mode 1 offers.

 

Yeah, there's all kinds of things you can make use of. Of course, there's CD audio playback, but there's also 8 channel PCM, graphics operations (both scaling/rotation and also bitmap -> tilemap conversion), and reading any kind of disc data (i.e. FMVs, extra content (dare I say, DLC?), etc.). There's also more generic uses like offloading tasks to the Sub CPU, or just using the additional 256 KiB of Word RAM for whatever. You can have all that without needing to make a disc game, provided that you can initialize the Sega CD hardware and get the Sub CPU up and running, since the BIOS isn't booted into to do that for you (*cough*).

I'm hoping that the usage of mode 1 outside of CD audio playback gets more attention, because there really is so much more you can do. Kega Fusion and Genesis Plus GX support it (albeit VDP DMA from m68k memory is wacked out in Kega Fusion in mode 1, because it still treats memory as if it was in mode 2 for them, and without the cartridge actually being accessible either). With Sega CD support being added to BlastEm as of late, I'd imaging that mode 1 will be supported if it isn't already. Of course, this also works on hardware, all you need to do is have a Sega CD plugged in and just run the cartridge ROM.

...but for now, this is what I got.

 

Blastem's nightlies already support Mode 1 (your Mode 1 Demo runs flawlessly in it), and already it seems to be more accurate than Genesis Plus GX at this point. GX actually appears to be terrible with regards to the Sega CD's finer hardware details; testing a Mode 1 tool I wrote revealed a couple of severe inaccuracies in its Sega CD emulation, one of which, as far as I'm concerned, makes it utterly useless for any Sega CD development (both of which I'll be discussing when I release the tool in the next few days).

 

Question about the whole mode1 thing. I recall tech members here talking about the bus between MD and MCD being slow as fuck. I see on your video that the game lags like there's no tomorrow when the cliff breaks, is that because of said bus (or other bottlenecks that can happen while using the Sega CD), or is it just cos it's a demo and there are unpolished stuff?

Other than that, Mode1 really looks like literally an arcade machine hardware. You get scaling, rotation, another powerful CPU (if you can use it without too many drawbacks that is), you keep 6 synth, gain 8 damn PCM channels, you still have the PSG... save for the still limited colour palette, that's some killer hardware for real.

 

It's very unpolished, and Sonic 1's engine wasn't designed for this. Currently, I'm manually copying the rendered tiled to be arranged for sprites, but I'm probably gonna port the DMA queue and do a series of DMAs straight from Word RAM, and also optimize Sonic 1's engine some. I also decreased the size of the sprite canvas after I made that post and got better performance, because less data to copy.

 

Does this mean a partial conversion of Chaotix can exist on the Sega CD

 

While you can get scaling to work, it should be noted that Chaotix uses the 32X to render sprites, and all 4 Genesis palette lines for the stages. The Sega CD's graphics capabilities only involve transforming/converting an image, which the programmer then transfers into VRAM, so you are still limited by what the Genesis VDP can handle. A conversion from the 32X to the Sega CD would still require a lot of work to get *all* of the graphics to fit within the Genesis limitations and look okay.

 

Honestly I dread to imagine actually getting the special stage to run

 

For what it's worth, if you set Word RAM to 1M/1M mode (Word RAM is split in half with the Main CPU having access to one half and the Sub CPU having access to the other), the graphics operation changes into a sort of bitmap to tilemap converter.

The idea is that a Word RAM bank will contain a plain 2D array of pixels, with each byte still containing 2 pixels. The Sub CPU side provides a mirror of its Word RAM bank in which each pixel/nibble is assigned into separate bytes, making the drawing process easier to deal with. The Main CPU side provides its own mirror of its Word RAM bank in which the data is arranged into tiles that can be directly copied over into VRAM.

There are multiple canvases to work with. At the start of a Word RAM bank is a 256px height canvas, followed by a 128px height one, then a 64px height one, and then 2 32px height ones. The output tile data is arranged vertically (i.e. the tile #2 is to be placed below tile #1), allowing for a variadic width (up to 512px), since you can just copy up to only what you need.


(btw, it's meant to say "cell", not "dot" in those 2 sections)

Basically, the idea is that on the Sub CPU side, you write your pixel data into the Word RAM bank mirror, which will then write your pixels into the appropriate nibbles. After drawing, you swap Word RAM banks, and on the Main CPU side, you copy the output tile data from its Word RAM bank mirror into VRAM.

Basically, this was Sega's solution for software rendering on the Genesis before the 32X.

 

Way too many star posts in the game now. It is time to spice things up a bit (and BTW bring back coherency with other classic Sonic games).

 

See you soon.

 

Had a burst of inspiration over the weekend and cooked this up. This mod overhauls the Boost mechanic to be more similar to the dash from Spark the Electric Jester. Take a look:

 

I love user customisation, it seems silly of course, but it does give me an excuse to steal ...ahem... borrow... some ideas from Windows, Apple, Amiga, or linux distros~ In seriousnless, it's mostly just to see what works on the Mega Drive and in such a small screen resolution...

There's now a complex message queue system for all objects, and they communicate with one another properly. I also fixed a few graphical issues shown in the video some months back, also optimised it with reasonably acceptable success, it feels much snappier now! Got space on the bottom of the window for skin options, but only have one skin right now. Maybe I could snap up one of you lovely artists on this forum to make some alternative themes?

 

One question. Does MD-OS play MIDI files? Bin/ASM files in the place of MIDI files I mean.

 

It doesn't, but it can.

I plan on making an instrument editor on it, so people can make instruments on hardware and hear what they sound like. A full music editor is planned, but the OS needs to be functional first d=

 

That's actually the most badass thing anyone can do. Looking very much forward to it.

 

Last year I started working on porting Sonic 1 to the Sonic 3 & Knuckles engine.
I know it's not the first project like this, and things like this have been done before by other people. But I am genuinely quite passionate about working on it.

In any case, my project is going to be different from the others. I have my own vision. It will be a version with my own fixes and improvement ideas.
I'm not going to remove Sonic 3 & Knuckles graphics. On the contrary, I'm trying to keep the style of that game, so in a sense, it will be something like Sonic 3 in Sonic 1 (or S3S1 Edition).

The porting is being done to my Sonic Clean Engine (S.C.E.). Some of you may have already seen it on my GitHub.

At the moment the following levels are ready: GHZ, MZ, SYZ, LZ and Special Stage (The video is currently already outdated and SLZ is also fully finished). However, there is still a lot of work to be done on the project still.

In the future, I plan to release this project and make it open source (free use) like other S.C.E.'s.

I hope that this work will be useful or interesting to someone.


Video:



Here are some screenshots.

Spoiler

Green Hill Zone:


Marble Zone:


Spring Yard Zone:


SYZ boss now uses chunks instead of sprite blocks.


Labyrinth Zone:


Star Light Zone(Current progress):


Special Stage:

Spoiler

I'm also trying to rewrite the code to Sonic 3 & Knuckles style:

https://pastebin.com/mNzTuDgr

Spoiler

P.S. YouTube sent me a copyright strike for the Marble Zone music...

 

Will Eggman use his laughing animation from the bad ending of S3&K in Scrap Brain Zone Act 2 and final Zone (I like his smug/bad ending/laugh animation where he has the Master Emerald in his possession if the player doesn't get all emeralds)?