Those games (there were only 5 or 6 of them) required both of the addons. the CD bits were mostly used to add FMV, while the 32X bit improved the in-game graphics (slightly).
As a former proud owner of this monstrosity I concur.
What was the deal with the Sega CD 32X games? How did those work?
- Thread starter AztecComplex
- Start date
As a former proud owner of this monstrosity I concur.
The Sega CD was full of good ideas and I maintain that it was a good system with a that showed its full potential with Snatcher, Soul Star, and Sonic CD. Unfortunately, there simply wasn't enough games to justify it. It's a beast though, and a nice response to the Super CD ROM.
Every sega fan should own a CD system and a copy of final fight. Bare minimum.
The 32x was nothing more that a cynical cash crab for one Christmas season and a waste of engineering and development.
Every sega fan should own a CD system and a copy of final fight. Bare minimum.
The 32x was nothing more that a cynical cash crab for one Christmas season and a waste of engineering and development.
32X was definitely a mistake in retrospect but it still has it's moments. Even if just for the quality arcade ports (Virtua Racing DLX, Virtua Fighter, Space Harrier, AfterBurner, Star Wars AC).
Holy crap that's crazy! I would love to see what it looks like in pictures and/or in real life. Just going by the drawings, it looks like a top-heavy monstrosity. Lol.Actually, the 32X does work with the CDX. Sega was set to release an adapter that allowed one to set the 32X on top of the smaller unit, but never actually did. You don't technically need the spacer, but the 32X does interfere with accessing the CD drive without it.
Did you know that the joypad ports on the megadrive could operate like null serial modems? You can pretty easily whip up an arduino interface and get your megadrive online if you know what you are doing.
Isn't there a 1st person shooter on the system that uses the player-2 controller port to link to another console running the same game for LAN play?
It is indeed a top heavy monstrosity, the 32X only looks right attached to a MD1 + MCD1 tower of power.
Zero Tolerance
early megadrives/Genesis actually had 3 controller ports -- there was one that was gender swapped on the back labeled EXT that was nothing more than a 3rd joystick port. Zero Tolerance used Player 2's port because it was more common, but the actual Mega Modem in japan used the 3rd controller port (i.e. EXT).
It is indeed a top heavy monstrosity, the 32X only looks right attached to a MD1 + MCD1 tower of power.
That looks so weird but so cool at the same time. Thank you for taking the time to do this.
I remember standing by the sidelines as sega descended into madness. I was only fifteen, so you think I would have wanted all this shit. But it was clear that the Sega CD was all fucked up, the 32x is all fucked up, and the 32x CD 'platform' was a double fuckburger.
I was pretty much as Team Sega as you could get in the 90s but the 32X was a hard sell at the time even to me.
I mean it basically launched at the same time as the Saturn.
I got my Sega Master System for christmas in 86, my Sega Scope 3D glasses in 88, my genesis in 91, my Game gear in 92, my Sega CD in 93, my 32X in 94, my Saturn in 95, and my Dreamcast on 9/9/99. I remember buying the 32X CD version of Supreme Warrior at EB Games and the guy behind the counter going "you know you need a Sega Genesis and a Sega CD to run this, right?" and going "ya" and him going "AND a 32X as well" and going "ya" and the guy going "wow" when he rung me up, lol.
Stellar post.the sega genesis talks to both peripherals in two different ways. The sega genesis firstly can address 4Mbits of ROM through the cart ports. In actuality, the genesis has TWO cartridge ports, one on the top, and one on the side, which is gender swapped:
The Sega CD is thus seen by the Genesis as a large cartridge attached to the system, except while the Genesis sees the Sega CD as a large chunk of ROM - read only memory -- the addressed data port space on the Sega CD is actually RAM - memory the Sega CD can write to. The Sega CD has two modes of addressing available, one that lets the Genesis see the Sega CD as one giant 256 Kb chunk of memory at once, which only the Genesis or Sega CD can access one at a time, or as two 128 Kb chunks of memory, which can be swapped around. In this dual 128Kb mode, the genesis can access one 128 Kb chunk of memory at the same time the Sega CD can access the other 128 Kb chunk of memory, allowing them to be used like a frame buffer.
The Sega CD itself lacks any sort of hardware to draw to the screen, all drawing is done via the Sega Genesis. Despite this, the Sega CD is almost entirely it's own console otherwise. It has it's own, independently running 68000 CPU -- clocked faster than the Sega Genesis CPU -- it's own RAM, and loads of custom sample based audio hardware more in line with the SNES than the Genesis. It also includes an ASIC chip for fast 3D math, which lets the Sega CD perform hardware scaling and rotation on sets of sprites and tiles. Despite this, because the Sega CD has to use the Genesis to actually draw it's skewed and stretched art, a bottleneck emerges when the Sega CD has to quickly put tiles into the Genesis VRAM; the process is that the Sega CD must internally update some tiles in it's own RAM first using the ASIC, then move them to one of the 128Kb buffers, then swap buffers so the Genesis can see them, then wait for Vblank to DMA a large chunk of tiles from ROM to VRAM. This is why, for example, the special stages in Sonic CD are at a much lower framerate than, say, Super Mario Kart.
The 32X, by contrast, is basically a frame buffer and a Gen Lock running on top of the Genesis. the 32X has it's own completely independent graphics system from the Genesis. Rather than using 8x8 tiles and sprites to draw images on the 32X, the 32X presents the programmer with 2 Direct Color frame buffers which can be configured in memory. There are a few color modes available to the the 32X, including an indexed 256 color palette mode, and a 16 bit per pixel color mode. The benefit of a direct color Frame buffer is that individuals pixels can be plotted on the screen arbitrarily, allowing for things like 3D polygons to be rendered. The 32X also has a hardware fill function, which lets it fill arbitrary areas of memory with solid color (or patterns) which is useful for rasterizing polygons beyond the wireframe.
The 32X interacts with the genesis in a pretty hands off way. the Genesis underneath the 32X runs basically independently of the 32X. where they communicate is in the cartridge, which is addressed by both the 32X and the Sega Genesis. The space in the cart addressed by the Genesis runs 68000 code, and the space in the cart addressed by the 32X runs SH2 code. The limits of the interaction between the 32X and Genesis is basicaly the 32X using the Genesis' controller ports to poll, and the genesis feeding its own video stream externally back into the 32X using a cable. Comparing this again to a Gen Lock, the 32X thusly essentially has two ports -- a video out port that goes to the television, and a video IN port that takes video from the Genesis. This video-in port will take a full frame from the genesis, which gets treated like an independent background layer on the 32X. thus, 32X elements can either appear entirely behind or entirely in front of Genesis graphics, but can't intermingle. You can't, for example, have 32X elements appearing in between layers of a Genesis background. One problem with the 32X -- plotting pixels directly through the CPUs is a bit too much for the 32X to handle every single frame. Games that try to use the 32X to draw every frame entirely in the CPU wind up running at 30 FPS because doing so at 60 FPS is too slow. The Genesis, by comparison, has dedicated tile-based hardware designed to draw backgrounds at 60 FPS, and thus a common use for 32X games is to have high quality "sprite" elements with lots of colors, while letting the Genesis draw the backgrounds at 60 FPS to make the games run fast.
Now, with regards to the 32X and Sega CD, the 32X sees the Sega CD through the shared memory addressed in the cart space. In practice, all* 32X Sega CD games merely used the 32X to output more colors on screen for better full motion video, something the Sega CD could have technically done using Blast Processing on the Sega Genesis. Despite that, it's possible to write a 32X program that can still access and take advantage of the Sega CD and it's AISC like any other genesis game; it's just that doing so is redundant. It's faster to do 3D math entirely on the 32X rather than relying on the AISC due to the memory bottlenecks.
this brings us to a feature of the Sega CD that was never used in any retail game: Mode 1. Mode 1 is a boot mode from the Sega CD where the Genesis boots from a cartridge, but still can address the Sega CD's 128Kb shared memory and thus can access the hardware. This is basically a way for a cart game to access the AISC and sample based sound hardware, without accessing the actual CD ROM drive. Again, no games ever used this mode, because why would you make a game that ran on cart but required the CD hardware to run? CDs were cheaper to produce than carts and contained more space.
*Pier Solar is also technically a 32X CD game, although it uses the hardware in very different ways. Pier Solar doesn't use redbook audio, but rather streaming PCM to send super high quality audio to be played in real time. It can also detect that a 32X is present and will plant small easter eggs in the game if a 32X is present, but otherwise does not use the 32X hardware at all.
There was a company that planned a release in the US, but cancelled it when the revision dropped the EXT port.
Still, the bit of cancelled hardware I miss the most was the SCSI adapter for the TG16/Duo CD. It used the console hardware to interface with a SCSI port on a PC/Mac, so you could use your console as an external CD-ROM drive.
I got virtual racing deluxe and clayfighters the christmas I got my 32X. My 32X was defective, though, I had to wait till the next day to return it and get a new one. So on christmas, I played clayfighters lol. Also, those metal prongs scratched the top of my Sega Genesis really deeply which upset me.
Virtua Racing Deluxe was badass, though.
Thing is of course, most of those games had been made years prior with VHS tapes in mind so digitizing them with a few more colors then they had over regular Sega CD/Mega CD was not a costly endeavor
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I wish I could uderstand half of what you wrote but I know a god post when I see it. The most incredible thing I learned was that the Genesis could harness the Sega CD's extra power for its regular Genesis cartridge games but never used that.the sega genesis talks to both peripherals in two different ways. The sega genesis firstly can address 4Mbits of ROM through the cart ports. In actuality, the genesis has TWO cartridge ports, one on the top, and one on the side, which is gender swapped:
The Sega CD is thus seen by the Genesis as a large cartridge attached to the system, except while the Genesis sees the Sega CD as a large chunk of ROM - read only memory -- the addressed data port space on the Sega CD is actually RAM - memory the Sega CD can write to. The Sega CD has two modes of addressing available, one that lets the Genesis see the Sega CD as one giant 256 Kb chunk of memory at once, which only the Genesis or Sega CD can access one at a time, or as two 128 Kb chunks of memory, which can be swapped around. In this dual 128Kb mode, the genesis can access one 128 Kb chunk of memory at the same time the Sega CD can access the other 128 Kb chunk of memory, allowing them to be used like a frame buffer.
The Sega CD itself lacks any sort of hardware to draw to the screen, all drawing is done via the Sega Genesis. Despite this, the Sega CD is almost entirely it's own console otherwise. It has it's own, independently running 68000 CPU -- clocked faster than the Sega Genesis CPU -- it's own RAM, and loads of custom sample based audio hardware more in line with the SNES than the Genesis. It also includes an ASIC chip for fast 3D math, which lets the Sega CD perform hardware scaling and rotation on sets of sprites and tiles. Despite this, because the Sega CD has to use the Genesis to actually draw it's skewed and stretched art, a bottleneck emerges when the Sega CD has to quickly put tiles into the Genesis VRAM; the process is that the Sega CD must internally update some tiles in it's own RAM first using the ASIC, then move them to one of the 128Kb buffers, then swap buffers so the Genesis can see them, then wait for Vblank to DMA a large chunk of tiles from ROM to VRAM. This is why, for example, the special stages in Sonic CD are at a much lower framerate than, say, Super Mario Kart.
The 32X, by contrast, is basically a frame buffer and a Gen Lock running on top of the Genesis. the 32X has it's own completely independent graphics system from the Genesis. Rather than using 8x8 tiles and sprites to draw images on the 32X, the 32X presents the programmer with 2 Direct Color frame buffers which can be configured in memory. There are a few color modes available to the the 32X, including an indexed 256 color palette mode, and a 16 bit per pixel color mode. The benefit of a direct color Frame buffer is that individuals pixels can be plotted on the screen arbitrarily, allowing for things like 3D polygons to be rendered. The 32X also has a hardware fill function, which lets it fill arbitrary areas of memory with solid color (or patterns) which is useful for rasterizing polygons beyond the wireframe.
The 32X interacts with the genesis in a pretty hands off way. the Genesis underneath the 32X runs basically independently of the 32X. where they communicate is in the cartridge, which is addressed by both the 32X and the Sega Genesis. The space in the cart addressed by the Genesis runs 68000 code, and the space in the cart addressed by the 32X runs SH2 code. The limits of the interaction between the 32X and Genesis is basicaly the 32X using the Genesis' controller ports to poll, and the genesis feeding its own video stream externally back into the 32X using a cable. Comparing this again to a Gen Lock, the 32X thusly essentially has two ports -- a video out port that goes to the television, and a video IN port that takes video from the Genesis. This video-in port will take a full frame from the genesis, which gets treated like an independent background layer on the 32X. thus, 32X elements can either appear entirely behind or entirely in front of Genesis graphics, but can't intermingle. You can't, for example, have 32X elements appearing in between layers of a Genesis background. One problem with the 32X -- plotting pixels directly through the CPUs is a bit too much for the 32X to handle every single frame. Games that try to use the 32X to draw every frame entirely in the CPU wind up running at 30 FPS because doing so at 60 FPS is too slow. The Genesis, by comparison, has dedicated tile-based hardware designed to draw backgrounds at 60 FPS, and thus a common use for 32X games is to have high quality "sprite" elements with lots of colors, while letting the Genesis draw the backgrounds at 60 FPS to make the games run fast.
Now, with regards to the 32X and Sega CD, the 32X sees the Sega CD through the shared memory addressed in the cart space. In practice, all* 32X Sega CD games merely used the 32X to output more colors on screen for better full motion video, something the Sega CD could have technically done using Blast Processing on the Sega Genesis. Despite that, it's possible to write a 32X program that can still access and take advantage of the Sega CD and it's AISC like any other genesis game; it's just that doing so is redundant. It's faster to do 3D math entirely on the 32X rather than relying on the AISC due to the memory bottlenecks.
this brings us to a feature of the Sega CD that was never used in any retail game: Mode 1. Mode 1 is a boot mode from the Sega CD where the Genesis boots from a cartridge, but still can address the Sega CD's 128Kb shared memory and thus can access the hardware. This is basically a way for a cart game to access the AISC and sample based sound hardware, without accessing the actual CD ROM drive. Again, no games ever used this mode, because why would you make a game that ran on cart but required the CD hardware to run? CDs were cheaper to produce than carts and contained more space.
*Pier Solar is also technically a 32X CD game, although it uses the hardware in very different ways. Pier Solar doesn't use redbook audio, but rather streaming PCM to send super high quality audio to be played in real time. It can also detect that a 32X is present and will plant small easter eggs in the game if a 32X is present, but otherwise does not use the 32X hardware at all.
And boy were the stories right, you ARE a Sega CD 32X guru!
Hold on a second, you're joking there right? There is no Blast Processing, man. That was clever marketing spiel from SoA right?
Blast processing is a real technique. No retail games ever used it.
I used it witouth that just to see if it worked. Never had an isseu with it. Sonic CD worked just fine.
a few more colors and played in a bigger window. Both sucked versus the never released VHS versions.
Was the 32x supposed to be a true followup for the 32bit era but was just too underpowered? What was the point in Sega investing in something like the 32x if they were also working on the Saturn?
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You were that kid in the playground werent you? The one who'd lead the Sega forces into war during recess against the Nintendo brethren didnt ya?
Here in Mexico Sega had no official prescence here so it truly was Nintendo Land over here so I grew up without ever even knowing of someone who even owned a Master System, Sega CD or Saturn. I did knew of one classmate who I wasnt friends with and one distant cousin who had a Genesis (did get to play it maybe once, it was the Genesis JP game where you could play as a Raptor) and my neighbor had a Game Gear but that was it.
My first time playing any Sonic game was 8 bit Sonic on my neighbor's Game Gear. I actually liked the thing, my favorite GG game he had was a Jurassic Park game that was awesome (I had the Game Boy JP game which suuuuuucked), the problem is his GG would never have juice. It was always without batteries and one time he lent it to me and I bought 6 new AAs just for me to enjoy his GG and the piece of shit on me that very same afternoon. Coming from a GB that could last me for day and only took 4 AAs I couldnt believe the GG sucked on 6 AAs in less than 4 hours.
My first and only time I played Genesis Sonic was at this classmate's house I had to go to for a group assignment. We took a break because some wanted to go and play outside. I saw his Genesis in the living room and asked him if he had Sonic. He said yes and I insisted to turn it on for me while the rest went otside to play. I distinctly remember not being able to go past Marble Zone and trying to Pause the game to only hit hard plastic. I was a Nintendo kid, I wasnt used for the Start button to be on top of the face buttons!
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There was going to be a Night Trap on VHS? How would that work?
And how could you know the VHS version was going to be better is it never came out?
Remove the xband, replace it with a master system convertor in the sonic and knuckles cart and it does with most master system games in there
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But that video was an April's fools video wasnt it? I know the one thing the Genesis did better than the SNES was its clock speed but a Blast Processing? It's long been said it was nothing but a marketing ploy.
Also that video, which I did watch, was incomprehensible for my mortal brain but I wrote it off as an Aprils Fools joke. That and their Bubsy video.
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Huh? Why? Im so confused. For years theyve said it was nothing but a bunch of lies or exagerations at best.
The most important takeaway of what the 32X was is that it was a couple pretty powerful RISC chips (efficient CPUs with very basic interfaces) and absolutely no 3D hardware besides a dual framebuffer and the ability to do color fills directly to it which enabled relatively efficient flat-shaded polygon drawing, similar to what you might have seen from Out of This World. The framebuffers are 1:1 with the actual output to the screen, which is why trying to use them to draw 2D scrolling was so awful, because you had to basically re-draw everything in them every frame. If it wasn't 1:1 with the screen output then they could have been used to do scaling more along the lines of what the NES was capable of.
That's basically the reason that these 32X CD games only did one thing, which was to provide better-detailed graphics for FMV games. No other types of commercially released games during the period the hardware was still alive existed, only FMV games. The 32X would decode the graphics and then write them to the framebuffer (well, more or less). As you might guess this required both completely disparate game logic to use the hardware setup and a different set of video data to decode. Little wonder that most of these games were either sold separately or had their 32X-compatible mode on a second disc.
Well, there was Flux, the (IIRC, Europe-only) Sega CD cartridge that was basically just a series of visualizers for soundtrack CDs. That is, you'd put in the disc and it would show animations based on the music you were listening to.
It was...it was more impressive in the days before Windows Media Player.
I mean it certainly could have been used like some of the RAM cartridges were used in the Saturn -- or perhaps, more accurately, like the ROM cartridges for a couple of the SNK games on the Saturn.
I mean the basic idea behind the Sega CD made a lot of sense, considering that by the time it was coming out you didn't see very many new PC engine games that weren't on CD. For me I think the biggest issue is that while it did have its own set of VRAM it was used entirely to blit (scaled) graphics to the Genesis VDP's tile ram, and as Krejlooc implied there was a huge bottleneck there. If the console had been designed to either use the "blast processing" setup for the hardware (so that the Sega CD can draw entire screens through CRAM writes to the Genesis) or had some way to write its own graphics without having to poll the Genesis VDP entirely (so that it might be able to take advantage of increased color space or scale its VRAM map in a way similar to how the SNES VDP's mode 7 worked) it would have probably been ridiculously expensive but at least fairly future-proof. Might have had huge consequences for the design of the Saturn too, and I'd say that console's biggest flaws seem like they were the result of trying to design an aggressive backward compatibility setup for Genesis, Sega CD, and possibly even 32X games that never actually amounted to anything.
There appears to be enough circuity in the Genesis VDP that would allow it to be the source of genlock instead of the 32X, though looking over the documents I can't tell if it would be possible to access it or not. The signal would be /YS (as labeled in the VDP documentation and other system bus diagrams) but it doesn't seem like either the cartridge slot or the expansion port (which was, as noted, a clone of the cartridge slot's pin layout) would be able to access it, and there are like 8 pins on the VDP that don't appear to even do anything. I think one of the worst flaws of the 32X was that it required external power and an input patch cable to get data from the system rather than being a plug-and-play setup, but it feels like that was something that was wholly unnecessary had they been more interested in future-proofing the console. I mean, even if someone's got a Genesis with a bad composite encoder, the video out still has RGB lines (which is how the 32X gets in the video data coming from the Genesis in the first place).
That's basically the reason that these 32X CD games only did one thing, which was to provide better-detailed graphics for FMV games. No other types of commercially released games during the period the hardware was still alive existed, only FMV games. The 32X would decode the graphics and then write them to the framebuffer (well, more or less). As you might guess this required both completely disparate game logic to use the hardware setup and a different set of video data to decode. Little wonder that most of these games were either sold separately or had their 32X-compatible mode on a second disc.
Well, there was Flux, the (IIRC, Europe-only) Sega CD cartridge that was basically just a series of visualizers for soundtrack CDs. That is, you'd put in the disc and it would show animations based on the music you were listening to.
It was...it was more impressive in the days before Windows Media Player.
I mean it certainly could have been used like some of the RAM cartridges were used in the Saturn -- or perhaps, more accurately, like the ROM cartridges for a couple of the SNK games on the Saturn.
I mean the basic idea behind the Sega CD made a lot of sense, considering that by the time it was coming out you didn't see very many new PC engine games that weren't on CD. For me I think the biggest issue is that while it did have its own set of VRAM it was used entirely to blit (scaled) graphics to the Genesis VDP's tile ram, and as Krejlooc implied there was a huge bottleneck there. If the console had been designed to either use the "blast processing" setup for the hardware (so that the Sega CD can draw entire screens through CRAM writes to the Genesis) or had some way to write its own graphics without having to poll the Genesis VDP entirely (so that it might be able to take advantage of increased color space or scale its VRAM map in a way similar to how the SNES VDP's mode 7 worked) it would have probably been ridiculously expensive but at least fairly future-proof. Might have had huge consequences for the design of the Saturn too, and I'd say that console's biggest flaws seem like they were the result of trying to design an aggressive backward compatibility setup for Genesis, Sega CD, and possibly even 32X games that never actually amounted to anything.
There appears to be enough circuity in the Genesis VDP that would allow it to be the source of genlock instead of the 32X, though looking over the documents I can't tell if it would be possible to access it or not. The signal would be /YS (as labeled in the VDP documentation and other system bus diagrams) but it doesn't seem like either the cartridge slot or the expansion port (which was, as noted, a clone of the cartridge slot's pin layout) would be able to access it, and there are like 8 pins on the VDP that don't appear to even do anything. I think one of the worst flaws of the 32X was that it required external power and an input patch cable to get data from the system rather than being a plug-and-play setup, but it feels like that was something that was wholly unnecessary had they been more interested in future-proofing the console. I mean, even if someone's got a Genesis with a bad composite encoder, the video out still has RGB lines (which is how the 32X gets in the video data coming from the Genesis in the first place).
I played it.
A bunch of FMV games were made for Video players that were in the end never released and seriously when you put PAL+ VHS tapes against early CD systems with all the rest(lack of input, lack of interactivity(haha yes)) what comes out on top. VHS video of course.
From what I remember(I am old) the video tapes had a few deminished tracks of video on the same tape. Differences were minimal so as much of the same magnetic data could be used as possible. For a game ending track they had to sacrifice the least data or even none. Fast forward to a short part two seconds on where you die or immediatly where you live for two more seconds and then have you continue after 2 seconds of LOADING TIME(meaning the VHS machine just skips you dying). So yeah those games were designed for old games on VHS machines which never saw the light of day.
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I just looked up a comparison and holy shit I didnt expect the difference between Night Trap on Sega CD vs CD 32X to be this dramatic! I thought it was going to be a PS4 vs XB1 type of comparison where only side by side pixel counting or frame rate analysts could see but nope. Its night and day difference!
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Sega of Japan wanted to kill the Mega Drive and move onto a true next-gen console in 1994.
Sega of America wanted to keep the Genesis as the primary focus until Nintendo was also ready to move to next-gen and suggested an add-on system as a stopgap solution.
So they just did both and released the 32X and Saturn at the tail end of '94. It didn't work well in practice, to say the least.
Technically it was 64 to 32k+ but for video yeah that was more like 16 against 64 (because no on, really pushed thiose numbers like ever, not even now)
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Did the Genesis ever only output in Mono or was it possible to output stereo via one of its peripherals or with the Genesis Model 2?
Yeah the 32X has technically the ability to support a 15-bit color space (albeit at a very slightly reduced vertical resolution to the normal Genesis output).
Whereas the way most Sega CD FMV games worked, they supported only 16 colors at a time (out of a space of 512 total).
Genesis 1 was mono in its video out but had the headphone jack which did stereo and could be fed into the Sega CD, which could then output that audio mixed with its PCM playback and CD audio streaming. Genesis 2 was stereo out and used a different pinout for its output jack, but no headphones (could still pass audio through the expansion port, though). Genesis 3 was only mono (and lacked the expansion port anyway).
Urm it always output in stereo, actually the first model was the best for sound
playing the Sonic 2 maps thru Sonic & Knuckles...thru a Sega 32x was just ridiculous. I recall doing this
No, it was a real technique to push the available color palette far beyond the normal limits that just never saw the light of day in a retail release. Nothing about that video is a joke, as they mentioned marketing latched onto the term and ran with it. In addition to the previously linked video you can also watch this one by Jon Burton of Traveller's Tales showcasing his demo from the era: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8qgArSqMsc
There's so many factors to why the 32X exists that don't make sense unless you calculate them all together, and they're very specific for that time period. First up, let's remember back what 1993-1994 was for Sega. That year was Sega's greatest year ever, the apex of the company. Creatively, in the Arcades, AM2 was lighting everything on fire, pushing more advanced tech than anyone else had, and were creating groundbreaking titles. At the same time, globally, Sega overtook nintendo in late 1993 to become the largest video game company on the planet, taking 51% of the market by christmas of 1993. The vast, vast majority of this global domination came from the west, the US and EU, where Sega massively outsold Nintendo in those days. In the east, Sega's homeland of japan, things were not like that at all, as the Super Famicom and PC Engine crushed the Sega Megadrive there. AM2 represented the creative developer side of Sega, and Japan was not thrilled that they were being crushed in their homeland. Meanwhile, especially in America, the Genesis represented Sega's lifeblood. This created a division between the company -- Sega's success in the west was Megadrive/Genesis, while it was a failure in Japan. Sega of Japan wanted to kill the Megadrive and move on to it's successor as fast as possible, and thus began creating the Sega Saturn. The west, however, wanted to hold onto the Genesis for as long as possible. The 32X was their idea to keep the Genesis relevant into 1995. You need to remember two things -- the Genesis launched in 1988, 2 years before the SNES, and in terms of the global sales, the SNES overtook the Megadrive globaly in late 1995. The US idea of supporting the Genesis and Megadrive as long as possible was probably the right idea, but they took the wrong approach. Nintendo really overtook Sega during 1995 when Sega had basically killed the Genesis as a system abruptly following the death of the 32X.
So that explains why there was a want for an upgrade path for the Genesis rather than developing an entirely new 32-bit console, even though the Saturn was in the works. An aside, but the Saturn would be Sega's worst selling system in the west, while being their best selling system in the East. So, in the end, Sega of Japan's plan worked out, but it wound up basically destroying their global marketshare at the expense of their Japanese marketshare.
Technologically, the 32X is NOT underpowered. For the time period it existed in, it's actually a really awesome piece of hardware. To understand what exactly the 32X is, and why it's so cool as a piece of tech, you need to familiarize yourself with the way 2D graphics worked prior. You might have heard people mention that the Playstation didn't do "real 2D" while the Saturn did, and that's sort of the heart of what the 32X is and why it's great. Let's step back and talk about what "2D hardware" is. 2D hardware is, in short, a form of memory compression schemes and specialized circuitry which aimed to do one thing -- fill a screen with pixels as fast as possible, using as little memory as possible. the origin of "2D hardware" is the birth of video games, and for many many years, memory was simply too expensive. See, graphics take up memory, there is a physical representation of pixels somewhere deep inside the hardware, at microscopic levels. This physical representation of pixel data (which is actually electrical currents captured in memory cells) takes space to store. Over time, transistors have gotten smaller, and the price to build smaller transistors have come down, allowing more modern systems to put more memory at cheaper prices into consoles.
So getting back to how 2D hardware worked, prior to about the mid 1990's, you literally did not have enough memory on video game consoles to represent every pixel on screen. To give an example, to represent a 320x240 screen of pixels, saying each pixel is 8 bits big, that would require 76.8 Kilobytes of memory to hold a single full screen image. The entire Sega Genesis, for example, has 64 Kb of memory, and that memory must also hold the programming code, assets like images and music, level layouts, etc. So to get around the lack of memory, specialized graphics circuits would be developed that could quantize a screen into smaller elements. In the case of most old 2D games, this mean dividing the screen up into tiles, where each tile represents 64 pixels at a time, 8x8 big, like so:
The actual original birth of this concept was for text modes in old terminal computers. Because each tile represents 8x8 pixels on screen, you need much less memory to store a single screen's worth of information. Using our old example, our 320x240 pixel screen is mathematically the same as a 40x30 screen full of 64pixel tiles. Assuming we only needed 8 bits to represent a tile, we could store a full screens worth of image data in this manner in only 1.2 Kb, less than 75 times smaller than a full screen's image!
There are huge limitations to divying up memory in this way, though. For one, you need to store tiles somewhere in memory as well, and there is logically a limit on the number of unique tiles you can store. Additionally, it becomes impossible to change a single pixel on screen at once, you can only change tiles at once. This is limiting because, if you want to do 3D graphics, for example, you need to be able to plot single dots on the screen one at a time in order to form lines that make up the edges of triangles. You'd either need to precalculate every possible tile needed to represent lines at every angle possible -- which might not be viable because you might not have enough memory to represent that number of tiles -- or spend time redrawing tiles in memory, which is a slow process. Even more limiting is that art elements are aligned to an 8x8 grid. You can't really move single elements of the screen at single pixels. Eventually, hardware scrolling circuitry came into be that would allow the entire grid of tiles to scroll at individual pixels, but tiles always have to align to an 8x8 grid. This is why sprites are a thing when talking about 2D hardware -- sprites are small areas of memory that can be drawn anywhere on screen, not bound to this 8x8 grid. 2D consoles have a set aside area of memory for sprites, that are actual physical things. Again, the limiting factor is amount of memory dedicated to sprites. Things like the SNES and Genesis don't have nearly enough hardware sprites set aside to let them fill the entire screen with arbitrary pixels. So, for 2D games, you tend to have trade offs, usually dynamic characters in the foreground made of sprites, and backgrounds made of tiles that can scroll but remain largely static otherwise.
In contrast to quantized 2D hardware is what is called a direct color frame buffer. A direct color frame buffer is what I mentioned earlier when I talked about having enough memory available to represent every pixel on screen individually. For a very long time, this sort of direct color frame buffer was the holy grail of 2D graphics. The Amiga was an early system which gave programmers access to direct color frame buffers so they could arbitrarily plot pixels, but it had a bottleneck in the form of planar memory (in short, memory that is not in sequence, which makes individual writes very slow). The true holy grail of home video game graphics circa 1993 would have been a chunky (i.e. sequential memory) direct color frame buffer. And wouldn't you know it, right around 1993 is when that sort of stuff all became cheap enough.
The Atari Jaguar is much maligned, but it was really the first console that had a chunky direct color framebuffer, which was a huge deal at the time. The 3DO did as well. Over on the PC side of things, VRAM had finally come down enough in price that 2D video cards from companies like Trident could index every pixel on screen. Suddenly, it seemed like everyone had access to these direct color frame buffers, all at once. And here Sega was looking for a way to inject some new life into the market leading Sega Genesis to maintain their lead.
The 32X, for when it was conceptualized, was a pretty significant upgrade. It gets lost because of "robo fart OST lol" but the port of Doom to the 32X was really, really amazing for the time. And that's a very rushed port. But seeing that running on basically a $200 machine, when the PC version needed a thousand dollar rig to run, was outright amazing. The problem with most 32X stuff is that nobody really took advantage of the power the system had. It was a risk-values assessment thing. It was very capable hardware, it's just that it had no where near the market presence needed for devs to actually devote a significant amount of time into. And thus, most games on it are mere slight upgrades of Genesis games.
To develop for the 32X and Sega CD properly, you have to be a hardware fetishist. Even in today's multicore world, wrangling parallel processing is difficult, and back in 1993-1994, it was outright a rare skill. When you approach these systems (and the Jaguar too), you're given a TON of custom hardware to work with, and told to run with it. And if you love really getting into the nitty gritty with this stuff, these are awesome machines, lots and lots of stuff underneath to play with. Between the Sega Genesis and Sega CD and 32X, you have something like 6 different sound chips working all at the same time, all with their own strenghts and weaknesses, all independent of each other. Some are mono, some are stereo, some play samples, some do FM synth. In order to really properly use all of the hardware together, you have to be able to understand how to work with lots of different kinds of chips. Each one of these chips can really be though of as their own small computer inside of a big box, connected by buses. Knowing how to properly keep these chips fed, while not overloading the buses, is legitimately an art.
When I look at the 32X, and what it tried to do, it's honestly a pretty remarkable piece of hardware. People bemoan the multiple cables, but in reality that was very much in line with how early 3D accelerators worked, where they fed a second card video information through cables on the back of your PC. When I see the 32X, I see basically a console version of the "3D accelerator" cards that would emerge like 2 years later, which is really fucking cool.
Here's a clip of what the 32X can really do:
We released that video on march 31st, not april fools. It's not an april fools joke, it's real, you can download the demo and run it on a real Sega Genesis.
To clarify, there are two sound generators on the Genesis. There is the YM2612, which is an FM synth with 6 voice channels, and that outputs stereo. There is also the SN76496 PSG, which is a layover from the Master System (and actually, the colecovision, which is where Sega's hardware descends from), which is a programmable sound generator, that can do 3 different square waves plus a noise channel. The PSG is mono, not stereo. It will output the same sounds to both left and right channel.
I hardly understand any of these words NOW. When I was fifteen, my appreciation of technical capability came from what I saw on the screen. Unfortunately at the time, we were seeing games like sewer shark, night trap... And these were supposed to be showcased games. And I think for a lot of people back then, at first blush those games actually looked really cool. Definitely different and you wanted to play them. The god you can get your hands on one for 5 minutes...
So is Sega CD it was really the game situation that was bad. Sylpheed was pretty dope. Sonic CD was, too. But for the most part, things were dire. And the 32x was even worse on that front! And of course, that's to say nothing of the subject in this thread 32x CD.
But this technical reading is super interesting. I'm delighted to have you guys pouring out this encyclopedic knowledge!
