Could Sonic Mania have been made as SEGA CD 32X game?

>>388203586
Probably more like a Sega Saturn game would be more like it.

Possibly, but they'd have to cut a few levels and a shitload of animation frames.

>>388203586

What was the point of 32x CD games? Did they ship with a disc AND a cart or something?

>>388204723
Only came with a disc
It used the mega CD for the extra storage and Red Book Audio, and the 32X for extra power. The FMV games on the SEGA CD 32X look a LOT better than the standard Sega CD versions

>>388204723

Yup. Only six were ever made.

>>388204723
No. Most came with the SegaCD disc and a extra one for if you had the 32x as well, some required both at once for weird reasons.

They usally just used the 32x to help with better video decoding and it was a huge fucking boost in quality.

>>388203586
The proper name for the system with all it's add on's is the Dragon Megazord Genesis.

>>388204723
They never made one like that, but if they did it would be really interesting.

>>388203586
With the restrictions Sega placed, yeah. There was very little 3D within the game, and the special stages would have probably been choppy like the original Sonic CD or a remix of Chaotix, and the bonus stages would have probably worked just fine due to how Sega had millions on Sonic 1 & Knuckles.

I don't think they would have had to cut much due to the fact that in a perfect world, none of the 32X games would have been rushed out due to the Saturn looming just months away, which would have gave them time to optimize memory techniques and other things. If anything, a proper 32X Sonic Mania would have probably included Chaotix characters as unlockables due to already working in a Sonic setting and the ease of reusing assets.

>>388206007
Imagine the canceled Castlevania with a CD for FMVs, certain sprites and red book audio, and the cartridge for most of the gameplay

>>388205746

I assume all that plus Sonic 3 & Knuckles is the Genesis Ultrazord?

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>>388203586
No

>>388203586

We had this thread already.

The 32x is shit when it comes to large 2D maps. Play any game that isn't Kalibri or Tempo and you'll see that scrolling the background would move at a slideshow pace. Kunckles Chaotix has frame rate drops and that game practically has no objects or enemies in it's levels. Knuckles puts all the background layer work on the hands of the Genesis processor while the 33x handles sprites and objects. And that shit still struggles. Tempo doesn't even use the 32x outside of background. With both of them depending on the Genesis to do the heavy lifting, that means that those elements are also restricted to the Genesis limitations like the limited color palette.

The CD would add nothing to the product other than CD audio.

32x was a piece of shit hardware. It was quickly made as a stop gap for the Saturn and it shows. The arcade ports it was meant to show off still ended up struggling on the thing. It couldn't even handle one of the most empty and boring Sonic games. How on Earth would it handle one of the best?

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>>388208075
I thought Knuckles Chaotix had large 2D maps, though.

>>388208075
32x was truly a piece of shit, an amazingly ill-conceived turd. At least had some real hardware acceleration in there.

I wonder if any homebrew developers made tech demos for the 32x.

>>388208669
The backgrounds were all drawn by the Genesis. The 32x sucks at drawing backgrounds, because it doesn't have anything built in to do it.

>>388208747
*At least Saturn had some real hardware acceleration in there

>>388208075

>The CD would add nothing to the product other than CD audio.

And full FMV with a much larger color pallette.

>>388206320
>had millions on Sonic 1 & Knuckles
There are 128 Blue Sphere 16x16 segments. Each Blue Sphere stage is a combination of four of them. In terms of storage it's actually pretty small.

>>388208947
Have you ever seen FMV on the Sega CD?

But I heard the Sega CD had some pretty beefy hardware built in, like a 68k twice as fast as the Genesis'. Didn't it also have some mode 7-esque stuff going on?

Yes. It's literally the same Shit. Fuck you faggots for tricking me into buying this game

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>>388203586
>Could Sonic Mania have been made as SEGA CD 32X game?
The main game itself could have existed as a 32x + CD title. You can tell that some of the effects they used like sprite rotation and size manipulation are very similar to the ones used in Knuckles Chaotix (Look at the first hardboiled heavy fight in Studiopolis, and how rotating his sprites while he's riding the helicopter creates weird artifacts and doesn't look "right", Chaotix was full of that shit).

At the same time, the music was all CD level audio, and the Sega CD would have provided even more hardware specs to work with.

The problem are the special stages themselves. There's no way that those would be running on Sega CD and 32x hardware. Hell, idk if they'd even run on the Saturn properly at full speed

>>388209107

Yeah, it was blurry, grainy crap.

But at least with 32X CD it was more colorful crap.

>>388209296
Even the Saturn sucked at doing FMVs. At least, without the VCD card.

>>388208669

It had large 2D maps, because again, the Genesis did all the heavy lifting processing those, but the game still had frame rate drops even when nothing was going on.

Mania has a ton of objects, and sprites all over the place on top of maps way larger than Chaotix has to offer. A single level in Mania has more badniks, rings and gimmicks going on than all of Chaotix.

>>388208947

>MUH FMVs THAT HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH THE GAME'S PERFORMANCE

Shut the fuck up Boco

>>388210773

>forgetting the three or so games that were literally interactive FMVs

But its okay, Anon. I forgive you. Your love is like a Night Trap.

>>388211132

I didn't forget you moron. The only games released for the CD 32x we're all FMV games. Mentioning them is pointless. Of course it could fucking do videos, that's the only thing it ever did.

>>388203586
>cd+32x
anyone who mentions these together is retarded
operating both in tandem to do anything remotely complicated (eg, more than streaming audio/video and driving everything on the 32x) is basically worse than the worst of Saturn programming

>>388208947
>>388209107
The Sega CD includes a 68k processor at 12.5 MHz, that one only being more powerful than the main CPU in the Neo Geo, and also adds 8 PCM audio channels.
The GPU is still substantially slower than the one in a Neo Geo though, but a Genesis + CD combination sits nicely somewhere between the SNK console and a SNES. Too bad it didn't gain more traction (or ship with a better GPU for that matter) because I really fell for the Sega CD. The few games that make use of the PCM channels sound incredible.

>>388210063
Mania has a "true" physics engine; some objects are affected by gravity, also some crap like those elastic jelly pools of Chem.Plant are going to be a pain in the ass to optimize.

The only thing that could be cool is, using the original Yamaha-Z80 music processor (not a render, but the chip in real time)

>>388214135
Cool. Did it happen to add any RAM? What are some good tech demos for the Sega CD?

>>388214135
>Sonic CD past stages

>>388210773
https://youtu.be/Crjgu2aE1QE

>>388208075
32X wasn't made for 2D at all, and wasn't ever designed to be more than an SVP on steroids.
The games where the 32X shines are where it's just filling the screen with big, flat-shaded polygons (there's a hardware memset that lets you quickly fill in spans of data, perfect for accelerating polygon drawing).
this is the intended use case, the machine was made to port Virtua Racing (which is also the best 32X game by far)
It was also always intended to leverage large segments of Genesis hardware, being an add-on. Otherwise, it'd have just been its own separate machine.

drawing pixel-by-pixel graphics on the 32x is a lot less effective, and you end up with performance similar to the 3D games on the machine anyway if you try to update the whole screen each frame on the 32X
The idea of the 32X isn't a fundamental mistake, but imagine being given the 32X devkit back in 1994 and seeing just how fucking little you got (assuming you weren't developing a flat-shaded 3D game).

having no sprite blitter was a fucking mistake, being able to write high-color sprites to 32X VRAM quickly would have been a massive help

>>388209257
>Hell, idk if they'd even run on the Saturn properly at full speed
they'd run just fine at 30fps, which is what people would have expected at the time anyway
you'd get a really low framerate on 32X
Sega CD could technically do it as all hardware scaled sprites+"mode 7", but working with that is awful due to the slow transfers to Genesis VRAM required and you'd probably get a really low framerate anyway

>>388214135
the Sega CD "GPU" (the chip that generates scaled graphics and sends them to the Genesis as tiles) is fantastic with one caveat: getting the graphics off of the Sega CD and onto the screen is absolutely awful and there are like two games on the system that do it at a reasonable framerate
doing anything on the Sega CD side is going to be bottlenecked by the Genesis bus, majorly limiting the usefulness of the fast 12.5MHz 68k

>>388206991
It would have been really cool if they made a limited print for a dreamcast version. The dreamcast can read CD's and homebrew games are still being printed for it. I'd pay a shitload for a copy

is there any word on the PC port? I can't imagine that it would have performance problems but since they delayed it i'm a bit more wary to prepurchase for that sweet 2€ discount

>>388215147
Only around 5 days to go till the PC release date.

>>388215147

I can assure you it's not a performance problem. The Retro Engine has always performed and ran better on PC because that's where the bloody thing was developed for

There's gotta be something wrong with their DRM implementation. Taxman's tweet was way too convenient. Ignore the retards that shout "MUH ARTICLE!"

>>388214825

Do console devs ever look at their hardware and see the bottlenecks? Or is it always a cost cutting a reason?

>>388217534
A lot of consoles have bottlenecks that just look like oversights.

>>388217534
It depends on who they are listening to while designing it. What developers NEED is a fast CPU, plenty of RAM, depending on the era either loads of sprites or a fast blitter and a decent sound chip.
Trouble is, what they WANT is a boatload of expensive hardware features that make the last game they made or some crazy shit they just thought of easy. Which is why you get arcade boards that have road generators. Or a separate hardware chip that did nothing but perspective distorted planes. Or basically an SGI openGL card that by the time it was cost reduced it was terribly lacking. Waste of silicon and money for 90% of games and better spent making the generic hardware more capable.

>>388218193
>What developers NEED is a fast CPU, plenty of RAM
That shit is never in consoles. I can't think of a console except maybe the Megadrive that was disproportionately CPU-heavy.

>>388218343
Yeah, I should've added another saying "What developers GOT..."

>>388204491
Hey Bocci ball

>>388218651
Thing is, consoles have to last a whole generation. Especially with older hardware, the graphics chip is extremely inflexible while CPU code can be optimized.
It's no surprise that consoles end up with weak CPUs. You can squeeze more power out of a 68k as you learn its tricks. With a PPU or a VDP, what you see is generally what you get.

>>388209062
Huh, that's quite interesting to learn.

>>388216449
It's control over those without control, since Sega did the same thing with Generations years ago by having it release later than the console ports.

Mania will hit Tuesday and likely be pirated to hell and back again due to the small size and Sega not likely employing something akin to Denuvo for a 250 MB game that they'll sell for half-off when Forces hits later this year.

I'm honestly surprised they haven't said anything about a mobile port by this point in time, seeing as the engine itself is well known for how well it works on mobile devices, as well as more powerful machines.

>>388218945

Sup.

>>388219124

I thought the whole reason it was delayed was to add DRM.

>>388214825
>32X wasn't made for 2D at all, and wasn't ever designed to be more than an SVP on steroids.

Before I say anything else - I loved reading your post. How do you know so much about the old hardware?

Also I looked up SVP in this context - Sega Virtua Processor, the Sega equivalent to the Super FX chip if I understand it correctly. It sounds like while Nintendo was putting the chip in every cart that needed it, Sega decided to make a dedicated add-on with their version. Which actually makes a TON of sense if you were running under the assumption that you'd make a lot of 3D games.

Learned a lot today. Thanks anon!

>>388220406
The SVP was built into Virtua Racing for the Genesis, exactly like the Super FX.
Virtua Racing was the only game to do this, and it was also stupidly expensive.