There was some talk in the forum thread about the flickering in the game, as seen here:
So I decided to try the game out on my TV with my PAL Mega Drive, and I got this:
Still a touch of flicker when Lucia shoots, and when the tortoise crosses the power up, but much less than before. What's going on?
Here's a still from the tortoise crossing. I think the translucency effect is a result of shooting video of a TV screen on a phone, but it's probably what the flicker between the two sprites is supposed to be achieving and something like what it looked like on a CRT in the 90s.
I took a shot on my SMS-modded Nomad, which runs like an NTSC Genesis:
basically it looks like a lo-fi version of the image from earlier in the LP. Here's that again:
I fired up my emulator and set it to run as a European machine, and I got:
Almost no flicker, except when a power-up and an enemy occupy the same space (which is probably intentional). I think what we're seeing here is PAL optimisation. Remember, this game only came out in Europe and Australia, 50Hz countries. Actually I think it also came out in Brazil, and I'm not sure how their TV works, but I'm guessing it was a PAL game first. Consequently, it's designed to run at 50 FPS rather than the more common 60. That means the system has 1/50th of a second to process each frame rather than 1/60th, and I'm guessing the power ups are the last thing it draws, meaning if it runs out of time to draw the frame the power up is left off.
I've noticed a few SMS games have terrible slowdown played on the Nomad, which I assume is because it finishes drawing the frame and then waits for the next clock tick, which may have already passed if the system is running faster than the game expects. If I'm right about what's happening in those games and about what's happening here, I think flicker is the preferable bug to result from the mismatch.
Of course, I have no insight into how the game was programmed and could be completely wrong. The Nomad seems to flicker less when Lucia has shots on screen, which would seem to undermine my idea, but regardless I guess I'll be setting things to EU for the rest of the LP.
So I decided to try the game out on my TV with my PAL Mega Drive, and I got this:
Still a touch of flicker when Lucia shoots, and when the tortoise crosses the power up, but much less than before. What's going on?
Here's a still from the tortoise crossing. I think the translucency effect is a result of shooting video of a TV screen on a phone, but it's probably what the flicker between the two sprites is supposed to be achieving and something like what it looked like on a CRT in the 90s.
I took a shot on my SMS-modded Nomad, which runs like an NTSC Genesis:
basically it looks like a lo-fi version of the image from earlier in the LP. Here's that again:
I fired up my emulator and set it to run as a European machine, and I got:
Almost no flicker, except when a power-up and an enemy occupy the same space (which is probably intentional). I think what we're seeing here is PAL optimisation. Remember, this game only came out in Europe and Australia, 50Hz countries. Actually I think it also came out in Brazil, and I'm not sure how their TV works, but I'm guessing it was a PAL game first. Consequently, it's designed to run at 50 FPS rather than the more common 60. That means the system has 1/50th of a second to process each frame rather than 1/60th, and I'm guessing the power ups are the last thing it draws, meaning if it runs out of time to draw the frame the power up is left off.
I've noticed a few SMS games have terrible slowdown played on the Nomad, which I assume is because it finishes drawing the frame and then waits for the next clock tick, which may have already passed if the system is running faster than the game expects. If I'm right about what's happening in those games and about what's happening here, I think flicker is the preferable bug to result from the mismatch.
Of course, I have no insight into how the game was programmed and could be completely wrong. The Nomad seems to flicker less when Lucia has shots on screen, which would seem to undermine my idea, but regardless I guess I'll be setting things to EU for the rest of the LP.
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