/vr/ - Retro Games

The hardware was the middle-ground between the NES and SNES, which were both systems with more good games than it did.

>>5665270
That has nothing to do with what I said but ok
Also people tend to really overestimate the NES library imo

Because you've played like 5 games on it.

>>5665267
Uhhh technosoft games were amazing

Other than Sonic 2, most of Sega's notable releases on the thing are super early games with 80s tier graphics. Decent looking sure, but not great.

Meanwhile, nearly anything with the Konami brand looks and sounds amazing.

>>5665293
Ristar is probably the best looking game on the system after McDonald's

>>5665293
This, Konami games looked and sounded excellent.

>>5665270
With a faster processor than the SNES.

>>5665326
Sega had around half the RAM, much weaker sound system, and a more primitive overall system bus.

>>5665353
And a faster processor, allowing for more sprites on screen and better framerates. So no, it wasn't the middle ground between the NES and the SNES.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfFjOqquYtI
watch the framerate take a dive once SNES tries to run thunderforce 3

>>5665403
You should see Arcus Odyssey vs Arcus Spirits

>>5665414
Wolf Team knew how to program for the genesis even if their games played kind of janky like Earnest Evans it still looked great and ran really smooth even if the character himself didnt

>>5665353
>Sega had around half the RAM
The RAM was much faster though and developers said that was more important. Having a lot of slow RAM lying around is bordering on the useless.

>much weaker sound system
Completely different technologies and yet the Sega has two more sound channels than the SNES.

>more primitive overall system bus.
What on earth does this even mean? The SNES has an 8-bit memory bus while the Sega has a 16-bit memory bus. Not only that, but Sega's sound co-processor (Zilog Z80) has a dedicated bus to the ROM while the SNES sound co-processor (Sony SPC700) can't access the ROM without the main CPU giving it a helping hand along its own bus.

>>5665424
some of their games*
sorry, i meant to specify cause yeah arcus is actually a great game and not janky at all

What's the best looking Mega Drive game? For me it's Ranger X

>>5665428
yeah probably that one, cant really argue with that. It has a perfect balance of graphics and effects where as something like red zone might be more impressive with the effects they were able to pull off but the art style is nowhere near as pretty as ranger x

>>5665428
"best looking" is hard to grasp. Alien Soldier moves and looks like a low-tier Neo-Geo game. The things Treasure managed to pull off with the mega drive are simply breathtaking. Monster World IV has some of the best pixel art ever shown in a video game.

>>5665428
Batman and Robin

>>5665267
VAPOR TRAIL
/THREAD

>>5665267
Plenty of non first party and non-Treasure games sound good on the Mega Drive. The rule is this: Japanese MD games generally sound good, Burger Genesis games all sound like farts. I seem to remember hearing that the real culprit is the development kit software that the Yanks had to use. Maybe they had some good tunes in their heads but all they had to work with were the fart noises so it came out shite, while Japan had superior software that made even basic boring compositions sound decent.

>>5668123
This, it's a well documented fact that Amerikkkan composers stick to the default GEMS sound engine instad of programming their own and to prove I'm not racist because racism is an american crime and americans are disgusting niggers I'll say John Baker, Jasper Kyd, Matt Furniss and Tommy Tallarico were the only Amerijew niggers who knew how to use the genishit yamaha sound chip.

>>5668135
Are you retarded?

>>5665267
Game Freak did, Westone did, Camelot did, Konami did, Ancient did, Nextech did etc

>>5665267
You need good technical understanding of the FM synthesizer to get the most out of the genesis' sound - and that's on top of the universal requirement of actually having musical talent.

The Japanese musicians were generally the best at this - to be fair, it was a Japanese chip that did well with musical styles popular in Japan at the time. Some European musicians also excelled getting various techno sounds out of it - understandable, because that style of music was also popular in Japan at the time. The chip seems to have been made for it.

American musicians... often did not fair well. Struggling to pump rock, heavy metal, classical, and other real-instrument sounds out of an electronic chip that just wasn't capable of it.

Because working the FM synthesizer like a pro was basically black magic to a lot of people, sega put out GEMS, a music dev board that would slide into the cartidge slot and let devs play and write music directly on the genesis. It came a with a bunch pre-programmed instrument sounds for the FM chip that were used by many, many developers.

When you find yourself thinking that lot of Genesis music sounds the same, what you're actually noticing is the GEMS instruments, in the hands of people who lacked the ability, or were too lazy to finetune their own sounds and just made songs out of the same 12 farts you'd heard in a dozen other games.

>>5665267
It completely depended if the composer wanted to spend the time and learn the Chip. Or try and make tunes with stock sounds.

You can make great music come out of the MD's chip, but you have to make it. The Stock sounds are absolute Trash.

>>5671770
The most maddening thing about GEMS is that it has a perfectly serviceable instrument editor that no one seemed to use. You don't need to know jack shit to fiddle with presets until they sound decent.
The system simplified the process of composing for the Genesis so god damn much.
Use your ordinary MIDI equipment to write a song, log it using the GEMS system, stick it in your game.
You've got fucking ears, and the GEMS system is designed for the composer to not just be going in deaf, you can hear what it's going to sound like directly from the machine.

On a technical level, there's absolutely fuck-all wrong with GEMS as an engine or a composing system. In fact, it gets almost everything right.

>>5665428
>best looking Mega Drive game
Sonic 3&K.
>Ranger X
Disqualified for being 30fps.
>>5671835
>the GEMS system is designed for the composer to not just be going in deaf
Howard Drossin got it right. Comix Zone and The Ooze both have good soundtracks that don't sound like generic MIDI.

>>5665428
>best looking Mega Drive game

Flink

>>5671770
>techno

also Europeans were just as good in getting really great sound out of it as the Japanese.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRDLjB4bY1g

both GEMS:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1QAKVfRFas
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WPaP4psE-U

Doom (also GEMS)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g2oyweqZ7WM

>>5671835
Can you use the special mode on channel 3 with it? The one that lets you control the frequency on each operator independently.

>>5671875
Howard Drossin did in fact make some great tunes. However he did help compose one of the most ear grating songs to ever be crapped out of a Genesis and we can't forgive that.
https://youtu.be/vh2WTCQZkdg

>>5671956
>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iRDLjB4bY1g

that sounds really good damn

>>5665353
>much weaker sound system

This is actually subjective because while the SNES excels with samples the sound capabilities of the Mega drive are an actual synth chip and a channel for samples. Too bad most composers for the Megadrive didn't have the skill to exploit the hardware properly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZJxmBVbqBbo

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgdceaN99gU

>>5665428
Red Zone.

>>5671975
IIRC, yes.

>>5671835
>The most maddening thing about GEMS is that it has a perfectly serviceable instrument editor that no one seemed to use.

It really is maddening. The only defense I'll offer to the composers is that while you don't technically need to know anything to fiddle until something sounds decent, it's really hard to know what parameter you need to change to morph one sound into another without many hours of experimentation. You can fiddle, sure, but you do need a level of familiarity with the chip before you can reach the point where you can start making your own instruments in a timely fashion - something the musician's pay might not necessarily be worth.

>>5671956
Time Trax sounds great.

Comix Zone and Cool Spot suffer for trying to imitate real instruments, but they're some of the best sounding attempts on that front for sure.

...And then Doom. Probably the laziest midi conversion ever to taint the sega. BRRRP-BRRRP-BRRRP-BRRRP FART, FART, FART, fart-fart! FART FART FART, FAAAAAART!

Doesn't even use a drum sample. 3-4 different farts.Absolutely atrocious.

>>5672464

These are fucking great. A fucking synth wizard wrote these. Holy shit.

>>5665280
/thread

FM gets more easily abused, mostly by shitty American devs.

>>5672556
>These are fucking great. A fucking synth wizard wrote these. Holy shit.

This here is the original. I think the Megadrive version Savage Regime did blows it out of the fucking water.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qp1CfsdHdBc

>>5672556
>>5672576

Also the music from that second link is from this game.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1l_b1xskcE

>>5665267
the others didn't bother.

>>5672576
>I think the Megadrive version Savage Regime did blows it out of the fucking water.

It does.
It fucking does.
Ha ha, oh wow!

Cuz very few companies put in the effort to make stuff sound good and the ones that did never made Sega system exclusives.

>>5665267
Vic Tokai
Namco
Compile
GAU
Telenet

All made good looking games for it, nice try, but you just exposed yourself for how little you know about the MegaDrive library, get fucked zoomer.

God damn it, is there even a good reproduction 6 button controller for the Genesis? All I have is this shitt 3 button that came with it that has a busted C button

>>5672761
Originals are not hard to find my dude.

>>5672773
I'm gonna be devils advocate here and say you can't trust the sellers of so called genuine hardware considering how rampant counterfeiting is.

>>5665267

Most Mega Drive devs were coming over from the Speccy, Amistad and c64 and were British brapophiles that LOVED the sound of robot farts - and their sonic intuitions set the standard for the system.

>>5665267
>Why did no one except Sega and Treasure know how to make good looking and sounding games on this thing

if you think genesis games look like shit, then turbografx must look like vomit

>>5672813
But Brits and Japs made the best sounding MD games?

>>5672813
Not really, it's more due to the fact that around that period western Europe was having a revolution with electronic music, a lot of the staple genres of dance music was established around then.

>>5665267
not enough time
https://youtu.be/Xln0a0HIX5Y

>>5672761
How are the new licensed Retrobit controllers?

>>5673218
i heard they're really good

>>5673184
Jesus. It almost sounds like it could be a Sega CD game.

Wondered what the file size - 3.8 mb. Absolutely crazy to think a 4 meg cartridge could done this.

>>5665267
Konami says hi

>>5665293
>>5665305
Was going to mention Hard Corps., but these fine gentlemen already did it.

>>5665267
FM synthesis is truly an art form, most developers just reused stock sounds.

>>5671942
>gradients

>>5674985
They're really nice. Much better dither pattern than I've seen elsewhere.

>>5665267
Jesper Kyd says hello
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dq7fGZ_-RM0

>>5673184
If you put this on a flash cart, could a Genesis actually run this?

>>5665267
It barely had more RAM than a commodore 64, so any developer that wanted to do something fancy would have to spend more money adding extra ram to their carts.

>>5675704
RAM isn’t as important when you have solid state ROMs attached. And no Mega Drive game put extra RAM in the cartridge except maybe Virtua Racing.

>>5675501
apparently
https://youtu.be/AkcY0DQXOT0

>>5665270
It was literally twice as fast as the SNES. Even the PC Engine was faster.

>>5665267
30fps on stock genesis
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=LcT1XIrklhQ
25fps on snes with added fx chip
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dOqxLBZiBRA
Genesis does what nintendont.
To be fair Snes can do 3d without fx chip
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MT6gnpSuhm4

>>5675501
Yes. You didn't see this used in commercial games because of the fuck-huge amount of ROM space it takes to stream any real amount of music from the cartridge.
Sonic VR is another audio heavy romhack that uses three Anamanaguchi songs for the BGM, the ROM is 6MB as a result (IIRC, it's using the bank switching mapper that Super Street Fighter 2 does for >4MB).
You can't really do any kind of fancy decompression in real time while running the game, so it's just straight uncompressed 8 bit per sample PCM audio. You could reasonably cut that down to 4 bits per sample and decode that in real-time, but now your audio sounds kinda like ass, and it's only a 2x space improvement.

Almost 2/3rds of Sonic 1: The Next Level is PCM audio, and it's a 4MB ROM. A lot of the audio could have been cut down a bit if needed (eg, playing short clips of sampled audio in sequence), but we're still looking at dramatically more space used for audio than a typical Genesis game could afford for it.

>>5676567
>>5678793
Huh, pretty cool. There's something really appealing to me about playing homebrew stuff like this on an actual console, these and beta stuff like the Sonic 2 prototypes and Sonic Crackers are the biggest reason I wanna pick up a flash cart

>>5677559
it was clocked twice as fast because it did half the work per cpu cycle

The Genesis twang the sound chip had made it hard to produce good music unlike the SNES sound chip, but when someone made a good song, it was damn good. Not many games use the Genesis sound chip well, the Sonic games, Streets of Rage, Earthworm Jim, Mortal Kombat, and Golden Axe come to mind when I think of good music on the Genesis.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SBTAGVnfXAw

>>5673218
I've heard some people say that the dpad sucks on the thing, that it breaks easily I even saw a pic but I didnt save it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mSkI0VkQm1I

>>5679848
I agree with the games you said, especially Sonic and Streets of Rage, but The Adventures of Batman & Robin has an absolutely incredible soundtrack that's often overlooked. 30 seconds in this song becomes one of my favorites on the Genesis
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dq7fGZ_-RM0

>>5679884
Thanks anon, this is good.

>>5665267
>Why did no one except Sega and Treasure know how to make good looking and sounding games on this thing
treasure? they didn't exist until 92, they've always had great programmers. but sega? are you retarded? this is something you needed to ask? why did a hardware developer know how to make good looking and sounding games WITH THEIR OWN FUCKING HARDWARE? are you high? no.. you must be retarded.

>>5679848
>Not many games use the Genesis sound chip well,
a lot of musicians for genesis were hacks and lamers. they just loaded up midi songs into a converter and added terrible instrumentation to it. not that many software developers had their own routines to push the audio to its limits. nobody shared routines and those routines that did get shared cost a fortune to license. quite a lot genesis musicians didn't even bother to produce original sounds, they kept using the same presets that were developed by sega of america's in-house tool developers, which led to genesis having a reputation for audio that always sounded the same.

>>5680330
I'm pretty sure the question was more along the lines of "why didn't any other developers know how" rather than "why did sega know how". Don't call people retarded without making sure you're not retarded first

>>5679835
>it was clocked twice as fast because it did half the work per cpu cycle
No, that's not how it worked at all.

>>5665293
>get a MD bundle with Rocket Knight Adventure and Castlevania

Those 2 games spoiled me too much with quality, especially the fucking soundtracks.

>>5680607
>> Why did no one except Sega and Treasure know how to make good looking and sounding games on this thing
> oh OP didn't mean that!
it's pretty fucking obvious and clear what was written, you retarded illiterate. just fuck off.

>>5680152
np, same composer as Sin & Punishment for N64 if that means anything to you

>>5665280
this

>>5665267
Western games can be good on genny if they hire jap devs and musicians
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TnkXMZk_4_4

>>5681660
Same way western cartoons were amazing in the 90s because animation was still done in japan for the good episodes.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MJh2VU3Rbts