What's so special about the 68000?

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22 Jul 2016, 2:20 pm

I saw this in another thread (Scary things in non-horror games), and I thought it was pretty impressive.

This has fast, fluid motion, a gigantic multi-part boss monster, a pseudo-mode 7/parallax effect with the background layers that make them appear to span out into the distance, what appears to be a transparency effect (thought it could just be a checkerboard effect with a filter applied to the video), and awesome music with clear drum samples. The Genesis is doing stuff here that you'd normally expect from the SNES, as well as things the SNES would likely struggle with. I'm honestly amazed people don't cite this game when they talk about the Genesis' capabilities.

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marcb0t
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26 Jul 2016, 1:24 pm

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

I saw this in another thread (Scary things in non-horror games), and I thought it was pretty impressive.

This has fast, fluid motion, a gigantic multi-part boss monster, a pseudo-mode 7/parallax effect with the background layers that make them appear to span out into the distance, what appears to be a transparency effect (thought it could just be a checkerboard effect with a filter applied to the video), and awesome music with clear drum samples. The Genesis is doing stuff here that you'd normally expect from the SNES, as well as things the SNES would likely struggle with. I'm honestly amazed people don't cite this game when they talk about the Genesis' capabilities.

Ecco was always good at showing what beauty could be achieved with 64 colors.

I really consider it a work of art overall. Even my dad was impressed with it in the mid 90's. He got a degree in marine biology if I'm not mistaken.

Tim Follins made the soundtrack for the Sega Dreamcast Ecco game. He used a sampling program of some kind.

That paneling effect was also in Sonic games. Most prevalent in Sonic 2 and 3. Although, Mode 7 on SNES was more about full scaling. That is in Mario Kart where the character is able to turn around 360. It's a full 3D plane of movement for the 2D sprite.

With the Sega CD, this could be achieved easily. Look up the special stages for Sonic CD.

The paneling effect however has been done even on Sega Master System back in 1986:

Hehe, that was my first SMS game. Pretty fun and well made.

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Aaendi
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26 Jul 2016, 5:35 pm

marcb0t wrote:

The 68000 is a power house compared to SNES CPU. But SNES has a good GPU and APU to make up for what the CPU lacks.

The 68000 takes 4 cycles to access memory. 4 CYCLES! What don't people understand about that?

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26 Jul 2016, 7:14 pm

Aaendi wrote:

marcb0t wrote:

The 68000 is a power house compared to SNES CPU. But SNES has a good GPU and APU to make up for what the CPU lacks.

The 68000 takes 4 cycles to access memory. 4 CYCLES! What don't people understand about that?

Then does the SNES take only 1 cycle to access memory?

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26 Jul 2016, 10:32 pm

marcb0t wrote:

Aaendi wrote:

marcb0t wrote:

The 68000 is a power house compared to SNES CPU. But SNES has a good GPU and APU to make up for what the CPU lacks.

The 68000 takes 4 cycles to access memory. 4 CYCLES! What don't people understand about that?

Then does the SNES take only 1 cycle to access memory?

Exactly.

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26 Jul 2016, 11:00 pm

But how many memory accesses can the 68000 do in the time it takes for the 65816 to do a memory access? The 68000 may take more cycles to do a memory access, but that wouldn't really matter if it can burn through those cycles faster than the 65816. I don't know if it does or not, but it would be interesting to see.

In fact, I'd like to see someone code a benchmark for both systems, as well as other consoles from around the same era, to see which has the most raw CPU horsepower. This would mean programming the benchmark in portable code, and somehow finding compilers for each console's CPU architecture that are equal in ability.

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27 Jul 2016, 9:56 am

According to this TvTropes page http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HowVideoGameSpecsWork
The Genesis CPU is about 7% faster that the SNES CPU; not much of a difference. I did read in some places that SNES memory was rather slow though.

marcb0t wrote:

Tollorin wrote:

marcb0t wrote:

mr_bigmouth_502 wrote:

Time Trax has some really impressive music.

It really shows off what the Genesis sound chip is capable of.

Here is a proof concept of Star Fox running on a Sega Genesis. There is no need of an extra chip in the cartridge:

Obviously, there is gradienting with the polygon shading (64color limit), but still this is not bad at all.

There is a better theme song for Genesis that I made the orchestra hits for:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2C16041iMhgbGpWY1RnNnpJZUU/view?usp=drivesdk

This track uses only Genesis FM and PSG. NO sampling.

While it's impressive, the frame rate is lower that the already low frame rate of Star Fox and there is less objects on screen. It may end up too gimmicky to make a good game. It certainly can't be a easy task to make a good 3D game on the Genesis without a extra chip, as if it would have been easy Sega would have put more 3D in their games to impress players.

Granted it would not have been easy or quite as polished as SNES. Though with the Sega CD architecture combined, it would have been even more feasible.

Case in point, Sega Genesis is fully capable of 3D polygons and action. And there were games that would exploit this from time to time. Though not often.

The 68000 is a power house compared to SNES CPU. But SNES has a good GPU and APU to make up for what the CPU lacks.

There is some polygons used without expansion chip in Zelda:alttp (The Triforce and the rotating crystals when you free the maidens). Maybe also in Chrono trigger for some spells; though maybe it's made from other way that "true" 3D polygons. In both those cases there is little action on screens beside those polygons however.

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27 Jul 2016, 2:18 pm

During the mission briefings in Front Mission, there are crude polygon models of the targets that you can spin and rotate, but the controls lag when you manipulate them. There's also a "sales pitch" for some of the ingame weapons during the attract sequence where you can do the same thing with polygonal graphs of the weapons' stats. This game used no special chips to my knowledge, other than battery saving. That said, some of the on-cart SRAM could've been used as extra RAM, though I'm not 100% sure if this is actually possible or not.

Steel Talons is another example of an unenhanced SNES game that uses polygons; in fact the whole game consists of polygons, but it's pretty clear from playing it that this is just too much for the SNES to handle. Then again, the last time I played it was ages ago on ZSNES, and this emulator is actually a fairly poor representation of the SNES' capabilities. Reportedly, it'll blitz through sections of Megaman X that have slowdown on the real system.

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Last edited by mr_bigmouth_502 on 27 Jul 2016, 6:52 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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27 Jul 2016, 5:48 pm

Tollorin wrote:

Oh, a little 3D polygon triforce, and a few polygons for some spells...

How about an entire bonus level with no expansion chip?

Thought it was time to pull out the big guns.

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Aaendi
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27 Jul 2016, 6:40 pm

I remember bounding box collision being something the 65816 is good at.

Quote:

collision:
lda x_position // 4
sec // 2 6
sbc.w x_position,x // 6 12
cmp.w width,x // 6 16
bcc + // 2 18
clc // 2 20
adc width. // 4 24
bcc no_collision // 2 26
+;
lda y_position // 4 30
sec // 2 32
sbc.w y_position,x // 6 38
cmp.w height,x // 6 44
bcc + // 2 46
clc // 2 48
adc height // 4 52
bcc no_collision // 2 54
+;
lda #$0001 // 3 57
rts // 6 63

no_collision:
lda #$0000
rts

It only takes 63 cycles, which means it can do almost 1000 collision pairs per frame. The ironic thing is that everyone assumes the 65816 is bad at collision, so they program all kinds of crazy complicated sprite sorting tricks that ends up making the 65816 run slower.

Aaendi
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27 Jul 2016, 7:36 pm

Now let's see how the 68000 handles collision.

Quote:

Collision:
sub.w d0,(x_position,a0) // 14
cmp.w d0,(width,a0) // 14 28
bcc + // 10 38
add.w d0,d1 // 4 42
bcc no_collision // 10 52
+;
sub.w d2,(y_position,a0) // 14 66
cmp.w d2,(height,a0) // 14 80
bcc + // 10 90
add.w d2,d3 // 4 94
bcc no_collision // 10 104
+;
move.w d4,#$0001 // 8 112
rts // 16 128

no_collision:
move.w d4,#$0000
rts

Twice as many cycles.

Boy were those old programmers ever wrong!

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28 Jul 2016, 1:17 pm

Wow! I just found this unreleased Genesis game:

Looks like they figured out how to get that 360 scaling with alternate road routes.

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28 Jul 2016, 4:29 pm

Old thread, i know, but OP should google "CISC vs RISC".

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29 Jul 2016, 3:40 am

Ichinin wrote:

Old thread, i know, but OP should google "CISC vs RISC".

It's funny you bring that up, because it has been argued that the 6502 is an early example of a RISC CPU. The 65816 is basically just a 16-bit 6502 with a few additional instructions.

I honestly think the SNES would've had a good edge over the Genesis if Nintendo had clocked the SNES' CPU higher and found a way to access the cart memory at full speed from the get-go. Running at the same clock speed, the 65816 should be able to outperform the 68000 for sure. It already trades blows with the Genesis 68000 at the speed it runs at.

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10 Aug 2016, 7:28 pm

Something that gives the Genesis a benefit with 3D polygons is the graphics format. Genesis uses packed pixel format while the SNES uses planar. If the SNES had packed pixels, I could easily program a 3d polygon demo, since every pixel would be stored individually.

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13 Aug 2016, 3:46 am

Aaendi wrote:

Go to 9:55

It's been done, although I wonder if it could be done better.

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