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Post by Black_Tiger on May 11, 2018 15:39:06 GMT
The 512 colour palette is quite a lot,look what the c64 guys are doing with a 15 colour palette The key with PC Engine is that you have a master palette suited for 16-bit pixelart and 16 palettes for sprites with 16 palettes for tiles. Look at how many nicely colored, detailed and shaded Genesis games there are, made with a master palette featuring less smooth color values and only 4 sub-palettes for everything.
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Post by Arkhan on May 11, 2018 15:59:28 GMT
and a fuckload of dithering.
lol
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Post by spenoza on May 11, 2018 16:10:32 GMT
Dithering is a valid graphical technique. And a lot of folks did it on the Turbo, too. I was very disappointed with Loom, for example. Even with the low color counts and dithering Loom is a beautiful game, but it was also a missed opportunity.
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Post by Arkhan on May 11, 2018 16:27:08 GMT
Dithering is a valid graphical technique. And a lot of folks did it on the Turbo, too. I was very disappointed with Loom, for example. Even with the low color counts and dithering Loom is a beautiful game, but it was also a missed opportunity. Dithering is indeed a valid, sometimes valuable technique. In the Megadrive's case though, it was more of a required technique as opposed to something you could do if you wanted to. A lot of MD games actually look kind of strange if you play them on a crisp upscaled screen because of all of the dithering. or emulators. PCE and SNES games generally don't look odd, but Megadrive is like "wow, you could play checkers on all these sprites"
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Post by Black_Tiger on May 11, 2018 17:25:52 GMT
I love good use of dithering. It can be used to texturize or stylize something which would otherwise feel kind of bland. It's common in games made for hardware without constrictive color limits. I've been hoping that the Genesis port of FX Unit Yuki doesn't just dither the crap out of everything though. Many Genesis games like Monster World IV strike a great balance of using it both to stylize and make some hefty jumps in shades. What I don't like is excessive and automated dither patterns that only serve to force visuals to happen with the lowest effort possible. My least favorite PCE game is still F1 Pilot, which I bought new during a trip to Vancouver in high school. Those auto dithered patterns in the skies somehow ruined an otherwise terrible game for me. When I have time at a desktop computer, I might post some screen shots from Genesis games with nice color. The fact that the first screen shot posted in this thread is a fairly straight port of a Genesis original which doesn't use a fuckload of dithering, is a good example of how 9-bit color is more than enough for great looking 16-bit visuals.
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Post by spenoza on May 11, 2018 18:05:57 GMT
The Genesis arguably has a larger system palette than the PCE if you consider shadow and highlight modes, but I don't know how easy or difficult it is to use those modes and what colors may overlap with the base palette.
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Post by Black_Tiger on May 11, 2018 19:05:08 GMT
The Genesis arguably has a larger system palette than the PCE if you consider shadow and highlight modes, but I don't know how easy or difficult it is to use those modes and what colors may overlap with the base palette. It fairly convoluted and eats up bandwidth. It's best used for translucency effects. The only way you can effectively increase on-screen color with it is on static images like the cinematics in Toy Story.
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Post by Arkhan on May 12, 2018 8:51:28 GMT
Ecco made great use of dithering, color usage, shading, and ambiance. I wish that team had done some USA Turbo releases. Even a port of Ecco. Ecco 1 is easily possible on PC Engine since it has no layering/scrolling to worry about. It could've been interesting. but, by the time it came out, Turbo was basically about to faceplant in USA.
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nando
Gun-headed
Posts: 97
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Post by nando on May 14, 2018 11:58:50 GMT
More colors.
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Post by soop on May 14, 2018 12:44:34 GMT
Surprised it took this long for anyone to mention Ninja Spirit. Sublime artwork. I think one thing that makes the PC Engine look worse than it could be, is laziness when it comes to backgrounds. Perhaps it was the time, but even though Ninja Spirit was showing off those visuals early, tonnes of people thought they could get away with plain colour backgrounds, or at a push, a blue gradient for the sky. As soon as NES games started making that sort of effort it really closed the gap between PCE and NES (as in there's an overlap between the worst looking PCE games and the best looking NES games). And like I say, I don't know why that cyan colour was used so extensively. Hate that.
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Post by digipiggy on May 14, 2018 15:16:08 GMT
Surprised it took this long for anyone to mention Ninja Spirit. Sublime artwork. I think one thing that makes the PC Engine look worse than it could be, is laziness when it comes to backgrounds. Perhaps it was the time, but even though Ninja Spirit was showing off those visuals early, Imo I wouldn't class Ninja Spirit as colourful though. It does have great style, hi res and lots of things happening on screen. Maybe hero Tomna, Mr Heli or Vigilante may be considered colourful.
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Post by Arkhan on May 14, 2018 18:01:24 GMT
Surprised it took this long for anyone to mention Ninja Spirit. Sublime artwork. I think one thing that makes the PC Engine look worse than it could be, is laziness when it comes to backgrounds. Perhaps it was the time, but even though Ninja Spirit was showing off those visuals early, tonnes of people thought they could get away with plain colour backgrounds, or at a push, a blue gradient for the sky. As soon as NES games started making that sort of effort it really closed the gap between PCE and NES (as in there's an overlap between the worst looking PCE games and the best looking NES games). And like I say, I don't know why that cyan colour was used so extensively. Hate that. remember though, Energy is a port of a PC88 game, lol. AKA: OMFG PRIMARY COLORS at least they spiffed it up some compared to the original...
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Post by digipiggy on May 14, 2018 19:18:29 GMT
Games like Ys III and Ninja gaiden for pce were done on that pc88-pc98?
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Post by Arkhan on May 14, 2018 19:24:44 GMT
Keep in mind, PC 88 is not PC 98, and PC-98 had so many hardware versions and updates and such that with it, you at least got to the visuals of Rusty. PC-88 on the other hand, not so much. www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGVkHMWC-1oIt is a bit like the PC-XTish era of USA's stuff and then moving into the 2/3/486 DOS era.
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nando
Gun-headed
Posts: 97
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Post by nando on May 14, 2018 23:59:20 GMT
Imo I wouldn't class Ninja Spirit as colourful though. It does have great style, hi res and lots of things happening on screen. Maybe hero Tomna, Mr Heli or Vigilante may be considered colourful. It’s not so much about being colorful. It’s more along the lines of great understanding of color theory and how to apply it to these tiny color blocks.
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