>the Saturn couldn't do transparencies

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https://youtu.be/f_OchOV_WDg

>>4237667
with nintendo and capcom pumping out 100 dollar street fighter 2 carts of late which are new......christian whitehead should port sonic mania to the saturn,id pay 50 quid or more for a saturn version desu

>>4237748
I up this

>>4237742

Anything like this for the other fifth gen systems?

>>4239078
ching chong
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ev7x8MwLq2A

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they look fine to me

>>4237667
Saturn can do transparencies between background layers. It can also do transparencies between sprites, but not together with transparencies between sprites because they get wiped out.

Also the Saturn has a ridiculously high speed penalty for doing transparencies between sprites.

In conclusion the console can do it, but the way it was set up is pretty un-intuitive.

>>4237667
vdp1 can do 50% blending with things drawn by vdp1... but it screws up because it applies this per-pixel, so shrunken or skewed sprites screw up and apply the effect multiple times (IIRC, you can do it to upscaled sprites without issue, too lazy to make a test ISO and burn it to check on hardware)
it can also do a 50% darkening, ignoring the source colors except for the bits where it doesn't draw anything
also, the backgrounds don't show behind transparent vdp1 objects
and it's supposed to be slow as heck

vdp2 can do all kind of blending effects on backgrounds and the whole sprite layer practically for free
and you can apply vdp2 transparency to sprites... but since vdp1 pixels underneath are overwritten, there's a big hole if there are any sprites behind that (eg, the girl in Guardian Heroes)

this is basically why mesh mode exists, which just exploits chroma blending in low-quality video signals and looks just fine, assuming you actually do get chroma blending
iirc, you also can't combine vdp1 and vdp2 transparency

>>4240078
Meanwhile on the PS1, transparency effects can be done on a per-face/poly/sprite basis. On the N64 side it can only seem to do per-pixel/texel alpha blending.

In conclusion, you might be able to save a few cycles and draw calls doing per-layer transparencies on the Saturn but you're really limited on what you can do, likely resulting in special effects that look like ass.

>>4240465
honestly, it clearly wasn't a high-priority feature and it's basically an enhanced adaptation of how the SNES did things (since the SNES PPU was loads more featureful than the Genesis VDP), like basically everything else VDP2 does
Sega's top-end Model 2 board didn't have it either, they really didn't care about transparencies.

if you really want lots of transparent objects, you end up copying shit drawn by VDP1 to a VDP2 background, like in Burning Rangers (transparent shit done this way doesn't stack, but it's better than the drawn on VDP1 and transparent via VDP2 colors method, which doesn't stack at all and worse, clobbers non-transparent shit)

alternatively, ignore VDP2 completely -- there's loads of limits like the no skewed polygons/no shrunken sprites rule and the fact that it's only a 50% alpha blend vs the current framebuffer pixels, but you can totally just use it for sprites and shit, and it stacks perfectly fine
IIRC, Robotica does this for explosions and barely uses VDP2, so it works fine.
it's slow, but workable

most games just said fuck all this work and used the zero effort 50% mesh pattern that had zero speed penalty and looked fine enough anyway on extremely common composite cables
some games use the 50% pattern in places (like UI elements) that you'd expect them to use a background layer because they're actually gonna use that background for something somewhere else

at least VDP2 blending lead to really, really nice shit like Sonic R's fade-in, which would be loads slower on PS1 and you'd clearly see things behind each transparent face instead of it strictly melting in from the background

really, VDP1's faults are all from it being designed to have just enough 3D power to comfortably coast past the various not-PS1 competition Sega expected and not much more since they didn't actually expect 3D to be the most dominant thing for a while, which is why VDP2 is such a 2D focused chip

>>4237748
I'm pretty sure it would be trivial to put on the Dreamcast, the engine he wrote that they ended up using for Mania has Sonic running on it.

>>4240465
>On the N64 side it can only seem to do per-pixel/texel alpha blending.
What do you mean by 'only'? Per-pixel/texel allows for more advanced transparency control than per-polygon. This is achieved by the N64 allowing textures to have an alpha channel, so each texel can have an independent opacity value. On older platforms like PS1, the whole polygon has to be either set as 50/50 blend, additive, or subtractive. Guess the one thing the PS1 had on the N64 in this regard is that additive blending is risky as fuck to use on N64 since the GPU doesn't clamp the values. So you literally can get an RGB overflow and fuck up those framebuffer pixels.

>>4241086
>since the SNES PPU was loads more featureful than the Genesis VDP
Not as much as people suggest, though. Even though VDP lacks 'true' blending modes of PPU, it has a shadow/highlight feature which is basically a less-advanced equivalent. It takes the color and adds or subtracts it by a fixed value - Sega called it a 'type' of semi-transparency, as primitive as it is, they were right.

>>4237742
Low Score BOY!
Thank you for sharing. Great video. I guess i enjoyed the breakneck pace, as he went trough game after game with examples, unlike a lot of bad video makes who can only do 1-2 examples in the same timeframe.

You know, looking back, 5th gen really is the optimal 2D generation. All those neato 2D games we missed over here because US-based companies wanted to push inferior 3D bullshit for years...

Kinda pisses me off.

>>4241821
2d games largely looked gorgeous and ran at a solid 60fps. It was a great compromise. 3D was experimental and rarely ever 60fps which is a shame, but there was a lot of inventive stuff at least.

>>4240078
>(IIRC, you can do it to upscaled sprites without issue, too lazy to make a test ISO and burn it to check on hardware)

This is correct, 2-point scaled sprites are proper rectangles without any distortion, so no pixel overwrites happen while drawing.

Saturn can do
- per-poly transparency, but it only has 1 mode for this (addition), and the VDP1 is not fast enough to apply this often enough.
- per-background transparency, where each background is faded together by a set ratio. I think you can fade up to 4 of them together max. The polygons in the framebuffer are treated as 1 background.

BUT,
Framebuffer can be RGB or use palettes. In RGB mode, you have no bits indicating transparency, so you can't tell for any individual pixel to be transparent to a background (15 bit colour, and the MSB tells the VDP2 that this is an rgb pixel).
In palette mode, you can tell the VDP2 that this pixel is transparent. But then you cannot make two polygons stack on each other, because the VDP1 doesn't know colours, it just does a logical sum of data, and that would brake paletted pixels (the palette itself is applied in the VDP2).

So, you can only have either per-poly transparency, or poly-to-background transparency. Not both. Hence, mesh mode, which is kinda sorta works both ways.

There are two special cases:
- Burning Rangers draws explosions as opaque, copies them to VDP2, and has them displayed as a background while drawing the rest of the polygon scenery.
- Sonic R uses RGB sprites and sprite transparency (and 4-bit CLUT textures to get around the vram size). But it draws 1 set of faraway polygons as paletted ones, so they can fade to the background.

And yeah, the VDP1 has overwrite artifacts when drawing distorted polygons, but the real problem isn't this, it's just that it doesn't have the fillrate to draw them often enough.

As much as I like the directional pad, the overall controller seems so silly, the buttons material seems to be real bad, are they just like Genesis? I hated those controllers