26
votes
Accepted
When did hardware antialiasing start being available?
There's something of a conflation here of antialiasing and filtering, I think. Antialiasing is literally preventing things from adopting aliases — e.g. if a diagonal line looks like a staircase rather ...
- 35.9k
19
votes
Accepted
8-bit console horizontal resolution
The NES did not use an extra bit for sprite positions. A sprite's X-position was the position of its left edge, which means that sprites cannot be placed partially off the left side of the screen:
...
- 5,404
13
votes
Accepted
What PC graphics tech outperformed Sega Dreamcast in 1999?
On paper, based on the fill rate only, all the high-end graphics adapters available on PC in 1999 were at least as powerful as the Dreamcast’s PowerVR2:
the CLX2 in the Dreamcast ran at 100MHz, with ...
- 118k
11
votes
Accepted
Do 3d consoles run OpenGL?
The first generation of consoles use proprietary APIs; I can speak directly as to the PS1.
In the PS1's case there's a vector coprocessor for performing 3d transformations and one is subsequently ...
- 35.9k
11
votes
Accepted
What differentiated the Master System's Sega Card format from cartridges?
The price difference was indeed entirely in the packaging. The important thing to remember about mask ROMs is that, though the setup costs and lead times were high, they had the lowest marginal cost ...
- 24.6k
10
votes
When did hardware antialiasing start being available?
[not a complete answer, but some remarks too big for a comment]
[also it focuses on games, as they are the most complex, real time application. Antialiasing for desktop UI and editors are a fairly ...
- 213k
10
votes
Accepted
What are the major differences between the ColecoVision and the SG-1000?
They have different memory and IO maps.
The ColecoVision has a boot ROM at address 0000h and an inserted cartridge appears at 8000h. The Sega has no boot ROM so just maps the inserted cartridge at ...
- 35.9k
10
votes
Accepted
Did the Saturn fail because of game distribution issues?
Accident analysis includes the concept of the chain of events. The fundamental premise being that there's not usually just one mistake that leads to an accident. It usually takes several, and ...
- 429
9
votes
Does "Heart of the Alien" use the same game engine as "Another World"?
Here is an unofficial port to the Amiga, known as "Heart of the alien Redux". To my knowledge it uses the original engine with the data of the SegaCD version. No idea how much work there was ...
- 861
8
votes
Did the Sega Saturn support homogeneous transformations for graphics or only affine transformations?
All right, I'll try to sum it up.
Disclaimer: I never coded anything on Saturn, only theory. But I did try to code a PPU for the 32X (dubbed SuperVDP), and also a sprite deformation engine à la Neo ...
- 659
7
votes
Do 3d consoles run OpenGL?
Those companies did implement their own graphics APIs that were very light weight and didn't have too much complex functionality. This was done because their libraries could be tailored to the ...
- 1,510
7
votes
Accepted
Does the Sega Megadrive 2 have built-in protection against reverse polarity
TL;DR:
If I connect it other way would any components blow?
No.
Let's have a look at the circuitry
All following schematics are taken from the 1993 manual.
To start with, the wall wart is ...
- 213k
6
votes
When did hardware antialiasing start being available?
This was in no way part of a hardware assisted 3D pipeline, but there were attempts made in PC-class hardware to achieve anti-aliasing even as early as 1990. Edsun Labs made a drop in replacement ...
- 4,766
6
votes
Accepted
Did the Sega Saturn support homogeneous transformations for graphics or only affine transformations?
An addition to the answer by Olivier. Going by the code of the yabause emulator (see this file) the distorted sprite algorithm is essentially a bi-linear interpolation on the four corner vertices. (It ...
- 1,026
5
votes
Does "Heart of the Alien" use the same game engine as "Another World"?
If the author's quote found on the Wiki page is accurate it seems the answer is "no", depending on various readings of the terms:
neither the animations nor the game, entirely developed by ...
- 19.5k
5
votes
How did graphics processing for old 8/16bit consoles work & what are the differences between an FPU/maths co processor & a graphics card?
The video circuitry was a lot simpler in those days and there was no true GPU as we have today. The video memory was part of the CPU memory space and any video circuitry merely converted it into a ...
- 4,643
4
votes
8-bit console horizontal resolution
256 is the maximum number of pixels per row, but most games used fewer. Using fewer pixels allowed for partially off-screen sprites with only 8 bits of position information.
Most hardware of that era ...
- 15.1k
4
votes
Accepted
How does RETN return from NMI on the Z80 in the event of nested NMI?
But I've noticed that pressing the pause button again results in execution jumping back to the start of NMI (&0066)
Sure, as the PAUSE button does another MNI. After all, NMI can be stacked like ...
- 213k
4
votes
Did Tomb Raider on Saturn have fewer save crystals than the PlayStation port?
According to this website, https://segaretro.org/Tomb_Raider
"The European Saturn version also have minor differences to level layouts (specifically some secret areas) because it was rushed to ...
- 3,247
3
votes
What PC graphics tech outperformed Sega Dreamcast in 1999?
I heard "on the grapevine" that Sega, with their benchmarks, felt CLX2 outperformed the PC parts of that era.
Although CLX2 'only' had peak texture & shading fill rate of 100Mp/s, it performed ...
- 365
3
votes
8-bit console horizontal resolution
the stuff you are describing has nothing to do with x resolution selection. In the 8 bit era CPUs didn't have mul , div instructions so computing *,/ was really expensive. That is why the x ...
- 7,218
3
votes
Accepted
Landstalker 2 or a "Look Like"?
According the the German Wiki there was no game successor but a rather rare fan-manga called "Landstalker 2 - Heart of Diamond". Maybe thats where your memory is based on?
There where several games ...
- 213k
3
votes
Do 3d consoles run OpenGL?
But the first systems didn't run an OS like that?
Well, they did, some kind of proprietary OS.
So how graphics were programmed to these machines?
Using functions of said OS, or bare bone.
Did ...
- 213k
3
votes
How to create a switchless multi-system 2 button Atari joystick?
Furthermore, (correct me if I'm wrong) the Commodore Amiga can also read a joystick button wired this way being pushed, as although it treats pin 9 as an analog input, the Amiga's analog pins are ...
- 19.5k
2
votes
Why is Sega Saturn mysteriously missing from No-Intros.org's hash database?
I believe it's because there's an alternative preservation hashing project named Redump that focuses on optical media. Since No-Intro focuses on cartridge games, it would be duplicated (though not ...
- 11.8k
2
votes
Does the Sega Megadrive 2 have built-in protection against reverse polarity
Based upon a quick look at the PAL Megadrive II schematics, it appears as if the the power input is first routed through a common mode choke(for which polarity does not matter) before it goes onto the ...
- 927
2
votes
How did graphics processing for old 8/16bit consoles work & what are the differences between an FPU/maths co processor & a graphics card?
Not really an answer, but...
...The phrase "co-processor," can mean two different things.
When you're talking about a "floating point co-processor" or "FPU," you're ...
- 2,089
2
votes
How did graphics processing for old 8/16bit consoles work & what are the differences between an FPU/maths co processor & a graphics card?
Broadly speaking, all these systems worked in the same way. The base system is always the same — generate the lines and synchronisation pulses needed to build display frames.
The video circuit (could ...
- 640
2
votes
How did graphics processing for old 8/16bit consoles work & what are the differences between an FPU/maths co processor & a graphics card?
A standalone processor, such as the ones you have listed, would usually only be able to perform some basic operations on integer data. This would typically be add and subtract because those operations ...
- 51
2
votes
Did the Sega Saturn support homogeneous transformations for graphics or only affine transformations?
I want to include some diagrams to show the difference between an affine warp and a perspective projection.
I also don't know gl
So here is some additional information that will help you understand ...
- 26k
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible