"It's Alive" - Fanmade Sega Mega Drive / Genesis Port Of Windjammers Gets First Dev Update In Over A Year

Yeah I completely agree with @-wc- there's absolutely no reason to believe the Megadrive isn't suited to Windjammers, nor that its somehow incapable of playing a 90% accurate version of it.

Windjammers is an incredible, fun, timeless game, but hardly a showcase for what the NeoGeo's hardware can do. Its probably using only a tiny fraction of the system's capabilities... and the Megadrive uses the same CPU, albeit at a lower clockspeed. And in reality, the reason most famous NeoGeo games weren't possible on Megadrive was less to do with power, and everything to do with storage space of carts & ram to hold the data read from it. Look at the roms we all have on our hard drives... somthing like Garou Mark of the Wolves is 80mb. Thats around 700 meg cartridge. So to port the game to Megadrive, you'd have to lose 75% of the animation frames. But Windjammers is less than 4mb. Every single bit of the animation, sound and data from the NeoGeo cart could fit onto a 32 meg MD cart. And considering the relatively simple gameplay, not too much going no screen, theres no reason at all to assume the MD can't replicate the gameplay in its sleep.

The minor "sprite scaling" in the original has been cleverly converted here to nicely drawn sprites/tiles for each frame, again, easy to fit on the cart when there isn't many of them needed. The reduced colour palette and number of colours onscreen again is not a factor for this game as long as you pick them well, the original was not using the full palette by any standards - it shows this very clearly in the comparsion part of the video, the arcade version didn't use a fraction of the maximum colours of the hardware, so they are close to the limits of the MD and barely any real notcable cuts need to be made as long as you handle the palette swapping cleverly, which they have. Again, kudos to the devs.

None of this is to take away from the quality of this port. It looks amazing! I'm super impressed and the new content and redesigns/improvements he's making show a true labour of love. Its impressive for the fact they're working so hard and polishing it up so well. I commend them immeasurably, this is brilliant.

But to imply that its some miracle to convert one of the NeoGeo's smallest and simplest games to the Megadrive is to vastly underestimate the MD or not understand why the ports of other NeoGeo titles were so cut down in the first place. Perhaps this was just hyperbolic writing rather than a fundemental misunderstanding. But it read like an insult to the MD hardware capabilities.

I bought windjammers 2 because everyone complained it was just pong, and I love pong, but it's nothing like pong, and I hate it, and I wish I had my money back. End of extremely interesting anecdote.

@samuelvictor I was always curious about scaling on the Mega Drive — I was under the impression that the SNES could handle sprite scaling, but it wasn't until relatively recently that I realised that it was only the background layer (hence why the boss screens on Super Mario World had a black background).

Would developers essentially have to manually draw a new, unique frame for each layer of zoom? Despite its slightly choppy frame rate, I remember Road Rash having some incredibly smooth scaling (on top of the undulating road), which I found very impressive for the time.

@Andee Yes neither the SNES or Megadrive has any native sprite scaling abilities, though they can both replicate it to varyign degrees of success with different measures.

SNES games used mode 7 and other register tricks to manipulate, scale, rotate and linescroll a single background layer. As you said, this often means you can make it look like Sprite scaling but only in very specific cirumstances when the screen is very empty.

The SNES games where there was true rotation or scaling and/or rotation on the sprites themselves, like Yoshi's Island, usually used extra chips in the cartridge. Other games where it appears there is sprite scaling, (EG: Turtles in Time where you can throw the footsoldiers towards the screen) just use several frames of animation on a sprite. Its technically possible for the SNES to calulate sprite scaling, but the CPU isn't anywhere near fast enough to pull it off without tankign teh framerate.

Similarly, Megadrive/Genesis has no sprite scaling capabilities, and it of coruse doesn't support Mode 7 style dedicated scalign or rotation on a background layer. Almost all "Sprite scaling" effects on the console are done with just redrawing the sprite as multiple frames at different sizes. However, the CPU of the Megadrive is far more capable than the SNES for doing calulations for linescrolling (which can emulate certain Mode 7 style effects in very specific circumstances - for example Red Zone is essentially Mode 7 using CPU techniques) and even native sprite scaling and even polygon rendering with no extra help... whenever it does this though it usually tanks the framerate and causes sprite flickering so its very rarely done, and instead they just draw multiple frames and switch between them.

The main technical restriction for this is how much memory there is on the cart, and how much is stored in the ram at any one time... but when used in a comparitively simple game like Windjammers, theres absolutely no problem whatsoever. The reason early Megadrive conversions of sprite scalers like Thunderblade or Space Harrier look bad is tehy were on very small cartridges and didn't have enough frames of animation for the "scaling" so it looked like stuff was bobbing up and down, or jumping around teh screen. Later games with "smoother scaling" were infact just larger capacity carts with more individually drawn frames.

The other minor restriction is that sprites can only be a maximum size, so large spites like those for the character art here, and also for the most "zoomed in" versions in a sprite scaling racer / shooter need to be broken up into multiple parts, and there are restrictions as to how many spritres you can have on screen before stuff starts to flicker. Most games get around this by actually drawing the "sprites" with 16x16 background tiles instead, which is much faster and has almost no restrictions in comparisson.

Another thing the Megadrive could do better than the SNES to improve framerates when trying to emulate sprite scaling is by using cleverly designed sprites or tiles that can show multiple frames of animation in one image by palette swapping. If you keep the amount of colours low, and design the image a certain way, you can swap the pallete and the same sprite/tile will show multiple images per frame, similar to how red/blue 3d glasses work. Again, the Megadrive's hardware is more suited to this than the SNES.

@Andee Of course, by the time you add a Mega CD, you now have an additional 12mhz CPU that can handle true scaling and rotation in its sleep, tragically not very many games took advantage of this, instead concentrating on FMV. But the games that actually do use the sprite scaling abilities to their fullest are very impressive.The 32X can very easily replicate full Outrun/Space Harrier/AfterBurner style scaling and rotation with its SH2s.

To be clear, I'm not saying the base Megadrive is more capable than the SNES. The Mode 7 stuff allows for some incredible effects and its also far better suited to transparencies and has waaaaay more colours (albeit at a very slightly smaller resolution). But its hugely handicapped by its CPU - and this is what Megadrive programmers learned to harness. Many of the tricks learned by the demo scene groups on the Amiga were duly used bythe best developers to pull off incredible almost 32bit style effects - for example Red Zone, The Lost World, Batman & Robin, or Jon Burton of Travellers Tails using the combination of using Tilemaps for sprites and shifting through pallettes to make the Megadrive play FMV and store it on a tiny cart size, or fully rotate entire levels ala Super Castlvania on games like Puggsy. Dude's a genius. But these are all using clever tricks from programmers who know the specific strengths and weaknesses of each system - looking at how Konami pushed each system differently with Contra 3 vs Hardcore, and Castlvania IV vs Bloodlines, I don't think it would be possible to say which game is the most impressive, they are equally impressive in different ways, showing the strengths and limits of each hardware platform.

I truly believe if the SNES had a better CPU (rather than essentially making it a suped up NES for the sake of making it "easy" for Famicom developers to switch across) it would have been a night and day difference and all its games would have wiped the floor with the Megadrive on performance. But the Megadrive using a 68000 (which devs were familiar with from most 16bit arcade boards and Amiga/ST) was just as easy, if not easier to use, and infinitely more powerful, meaning it could compensate for the lack of colours, and very specific fancy effects. Sega knew that its single area where it was better than SNES was speed - hense why Sonic was designed to be a fast mascot, and all the marketing talk of "blast processing" and adverts describing the SNES as slow/boring. Similarly to how choosing cartridge as a platform hamstrung the N64, chosing a 6502 based cpu hamstrung the SNES, and neitehr ever really got to fulfil their true potential.

@samuelvictor Fascinating and thorough — nice one!

I'm not sure where I read this, but when the Mega Drive was first conceived, weren't Sega originally going to essentially use the same tech as the arcade boards that were being used at the time for games like Afterburner, Golden Axe and Out Run, thus creating an arcade perfect, super-scaler console? But apparently the manufacturing costs would have had each console coming out at something like £300 a pop, so they chose to strip them down in order to save money? We got a near-perfect arcade experience, but ever so slightly out of reach...

I'm not saying I would have been able to convince my parents to shell out three big ones on a console at the time, but it would have been quite impressive!

@Andee Thanks, and no worries!

Yes, the Megadrive was originally intended to be as close to Sega's arcade hardware as possible. Its essentially half of a "Super Scaler" board, which had 2x68000 processors, but the Megadrive only had 1.

However the Megadrive is extremely similar hardware to Sega's more common System 16 / 18 arcade board, which had 1x68000 and 1xZ80, exactly the same as the Megadrive, though the arcade board has more memory and can push more sprites simultaneously. This board was extremely popular and powered about 40 arcade titles, including Golden Axe, Altered Beast, Shinobi, Fantasy Zone, Alien Syndrome etc, so this is why the ports to Megadrive are so close, with minor cutbacks here and there.

Earlier arcade titles from the 80s (Flicky, Choplifter, Wonderboy, Monster Land etc) were on System 1 & System 2 boards - the Megadrive was significantly more powerful tan them, and had their Z80 cpu as its backup/support processor, so could easily do arcade perfect versions - in fact the Master System was initially designed to be a home version of the System 2, and the Megadrive included its Z80 to allow Master System backwards compatibility.

Later arcade boards including the System 14 (used for Columns), System C, and of course Mega Tech and Megaplay were essentially repurposed Megadrive boards in arcade cabinets and were functionally identical - thus slightly weaker than the System 16 but cheaper to manufacture and literal perfect ports were possible.

There were small upgrades along the way for specific games (like the X/Y boards and System 24) but it was only really the System 32 arcade boards (Rad Mobile, Death Adder, Jurassic Park, SegaSonic etc) that abandoned the 68000 based architecture altogether and blew the Megadrive out the water, completely impossible for it to begin to compete with... before Sega switched to Polygon based hardware like Model 1 (Virtua Fighter, Virtua Racing, Star Wars Arcade, etc)

Essentially, for most 2d Sega arcade titles of the 80s and 90s, the Megadrive could reproduce them at anywhere from 75%-100% accuracy... if you ignore the super scaler titles. Adding the Mega CD made the hardware about equivalent to the Hang On board, the 32x was actually more powerful on paper than the early super scaler boards (and got near arcade perfect Space Harrier and After Burner ports... I still mourn that they canceled Outrun!), though it was not on par with System 32. Saturn was leagues ahead of System 32 but not directly compatible with the source code as its chips were very different, so ports had to be more or less retooled from the ground up, with varying degrees of success.

Of course, several Sega consoles and arcade systems moving forward were purposefully designed to be extremely similar so that arcade perfect ports could exist, and arcade titles could be developed cheaper - The Titan / ST-V was a Saturn, the Naomi was a Dreamcast, the Triforce was a Gamecube, the Chihiro was an Xbox. The latest Sega Arcade titles are just PCs running a version Windows, with NVidia hardware, Direct X and Unreal Engine.

The Neo Geo is just a Megasis on roids.

I'm surprised it didn't have more Neo Geo ports than it did.