Dithered Shadows or Flickering Shadows?

[Black Tiger]

EvilEvoIX: the SNES can only do a transparent tile layer. All sprite based transparency effects, the most common kind in 8 & 16-bit gen games, use flickering and ocassionally dithering. The Genesis however, can do proper transparent shadow effects, but it eats up sprite bandwidth.

SamIam: that NitM skull on Saturn looked perfect on my crt through composite when the game came out and I had to stare at it to figure out if it was dithered. Even though most <32-bit dithered effects were noticeable to me bitd.

I don't know, man, it must depend on the TV.

For you see, I too have played the Saturn version of SOTN via a composite connection, and it was after having played it in s-video and RGB. I remember arriving at that spot thinking "I wonder if it will look OK because it's composite video this time?" and shortly after thinking "Nope". There was a little bit of melting - I mean, the skull looked more like a skull and less like a blob of white pixels - but the checkerboard pattern was plain to see, and I couldn't make out what was behind the skull.

I think the CRT itself was manufactured in 2000 or so. Perhaps a 1990 set shows something quite different?

The TV definitely makes a difference. Mine was a 25" that I bought new in 1995.

[Gentlegamer]

I think Joe, like me, was being facetious about perfect SNES shadows.

I can't remember seeing a shadow/transparency in a game and it bothering me how it was accomplished. That's not the sort of autism I'm subject to.

[EvilEvoIX]

EvilEvoIX: the SNES can only do a transparent tile layer. All sprite based transparency effects, the most common kind in 8 & 16-bit gen games, use flickering and ocassionally dithering. The Genesis however, can do proper transparent shadow effects, but it eats up sprite bandwidth.

SamIam: that NitM skull on Saturn looked perfect on my crt through composite when the game came out and I had to stare at it to figure out if it was dithered. Even though most <32-bit dithered effects were noticeable to me bitd.

I don't know, man, it must depend on the TV.

For you see, I too have played the Saturn version of SOTN via a composite connection, and it was after having played it in s-video and RGB. I remember arriving at that spot thinking "I wonder if it will look OK because it's composite video this time?" and shortly after thinking "Nope". There was a little bit of melting - I mean, the skull looked more like a skull and less like a blob of white pixels - but the checkerboard pattern was plain to see, and I couldn't make out what was behind the skull.

I think the CRT itself was manufactured in 2000 or so. Perhaps a 1990 set shows something quite different?

Thanks, that clears things up.  Can anyone post pics or links of the Sega Genesis Transparency? 

[Joe Redifer]

There's an example of it in the Batman section of Game Sack's Regional Differences episode. They took out the true transparent shadows in the US version for unknown reasons. Link --->

I could always tell what was dithered on the Genesis. When I played Twinkle Tale I just about died. Nothing but dithery stuff in there and I played it via composite. Solid black shadows flickering on and off to me looks annoying. Flickering works best when the colors are close to each other to make a new color. I can still see it shimmering in cases like that, though. Neo Geo MVS shows are impossible to record correctly for Game Sack because they run slower than the far superior AES hardware which runs at the speed it needs to. Not sure why the MVS needs to run slower. Anyway when I record these games from MVS there will be frames where they are solid two frames in a row or gone two frames in a row, so it doesn't quite work. Very spazzy. Can't even run at the proper speed! So weak. AES is way more powerful with much more power. That's why it costs so much more and it's worth twice as much more than that because of that extra power that makes it not weak.

[Gentlegamer]

I just encountered the first shadows I can remember really noticing and disliking. Genesis WWF the Arcade Game uses a mesh of black pixels under the wrestlers to represent shadows, and it looks terrible. I'm even playing through composite and the mesh won't blur enough to look like it's an actual shadow. It looks so bad I'd rather there be no shadow at all.