996. Dan - Fair Spirit Battle - Super Smash Bros. Ultimate WhiteKhakis 2018-12-15 | Playlists: youtube.com/user/WhiteKhakis/playlists?shelf_id=13&view=50&sort=ddHe's the joke character in Street Fighter so it appears they've made his Spirit Power a joke, too. Dang. I'm not sure I've seen any this low (400)!The goal is to showcase how the developers interpreted the character/item - the spirit - with a fair fight!What do I mean by "Fair"? Certainly not fair for ME! Essentially, I'm selecting a Primary Spirit without any Type-Advantage and a similar Spirit Power to the opposing spirits! I've also turned off all Adventure Skills if the battle takes place in the Adventure Mode and I'm avoiding the use of Support Spirits and their Skills unless it ends up being necessary in a fight (All the floor is lava!). Primary Spirits with a Skill or some other buff may be used.Difficulty level in Adventure Mode remains at "Normal". I believe this best represents the full spectrum of enemy AI rather than playing on "Hard" which would push what are supposed to be easier fights towards the difficult side of the spectrum (misrepresenting developer intent!) Besides, the Spirit Board has no difficulty selection! I can only assume that those fought there are of an equivalent AI setting to "Normal" in Adventure Mode.Focusing on uploading all the fights comes first! Insights, stats, or descriptions may come later!*************Thoughts about the fight and how it represents the spirit are encouraged in your comments and greatly appreciated!*************
01. [4K*] Splatoon 3: Side Order (DLC) - Opening and Tutorial/Story Run WhiteKhakis 2024-02-23 | No Commentary / Exploratory Playstyle / Initial Tower Completion*Upscaled from native 1080p for higher YouTube bitratePlaylist: None Yet!I'm showing all the stuffs you see pertinent to the DLC from game boot! It's not that much extra, don't worry. The tutorial tower run is was designed pretty well and is a good introduction to rogue-lites for people new to the genre.After playing a bit more I feel like a bunch of the power ups, chips, are a bit underwhelming but there are some neat combos you might luck into getting! Personally, I think aiming for the chips is the most important factor when selecting a floor! BUT, all this is for later. Enjoy the early story this video!
First Look! - Pennys Big Breakaway - 1-1 WhiteKhakis 2024-02-22 | Just a casual playthrough of the first level (after tutorials) of the game. Game just came out and seems promising!
Alan is very understanding! (Alan Wakes American Nightmare) WhiteKhakis 2023-12-19 | What a stand-up guy!
[FPGA DMG 4K] The Castlevania Adventure - Longplay WhiteKhakis 2023-12-12 | No Commentary / 4k60 (DMG Upscale) / Experienced PlayPlaylist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7IEN-HGlR45aZ1TACwvzzUzOVKKTcbEy***This game is FULL of bad scrolling and graphical artifacts. Maybe the amazing music will distract you from the rushed programming!***This is being played on an "AnaloguePocket" FPGA game console allowing for clear output in sound and audio!Details below in Technical Notes!----I've replayed this title in "Original DMG" display mode because it better replicates the look and feel of the Game Boy, the only available way to play it on release.As mentioned above, this game has issues but it was my first title on the system so I didn't mind! Except the ignored whip/jump inputs could be a bother. ...and the slow pacing. And the weird physics.I still loved it.Technical Notes:------The Analogue Pocket has a native display resolution with a height of 1440 pixels. The dock supports heights of 480, 720, and 1080. To avoid interpolation of the gridlines and other screen effects I set the dock to 720p which cleanly divides into 1440.In OBS Studio, my capture software, I've upscaled the image using point/nearest neighbor with an integer scale of 3 making the new height 2160 pixels, the height of a 4K video. No interpolation was needed to get this clean copy.The "Frame Blending" option, which helps prevent the flickering of transparency effects by mimicking the screen blur of the handhelds, has been disabled. This is because the "Original DMG" display mode actually helps a bit with the transparency effects already so the added blur isn't worth considering.About the Analogue Pocket: It's a FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) based game system which to explain in layman's terms (BY a layman): It's a "chip" dense with circuits and stuff that can be programmed to use only so many in whatever ways necessary to replicate another "chip". Basically, if you can reverse engineer a Game Boy exactly, you can pretty much program this "chip" to behave like a Game Boy exactly. Which is what this is.
Splatoon 3 - Splatfest: Handshake Vs Fistbump Vs Hug - .52 Gal and Friends! WhiteKhakis 2023-11-21 | No Commentary / Edited Down to Matches.52 Gal is my go-to weapon! I'm playing with some fellow friendlies:B-Squared - youtube.com/@strategist9MaidensYuuGiJoou - youtube.com/@YuuGiJoou
BONUS 01. [4k60] Dicey Dungeons (PC) - Halloween Special: Warrior - Full Episode WhiteKhakis 2023-10-31 | No Commentary / Blind Fun-Run / 4k60Playlist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7IEN-HGlR46zyLu2wo7ETnW8KM0N9JrcDicey Dungeon has a couple official mods now, one of them being a spooky Halloween-fest!Warrior is pretty simple but you get some neat floor rules allowing for crazy damage opportunities!-----An adventure capitalizing on luck and iterative deck-building! The soft-storybook style lends a lovely charm only to disarm and distract you from the deceptively deep mechanics the game provides! There's a new twist to be found around every corner with the rules changing every character and episode!I love this game! It's a game of chance but gives you the tools to bend luck to your will! You (generally) start with a small stack of equipment that you cultivate as you go until you're an unstoppable force to be reckoned with! This removes a lot of the pain of choice paralysis when it comes to deck building since you don't have to build a huge deck all at once. And you can only have a few pieces of equipment (generally) at your disposal anyway!The game rewards you greatly for experimentation and often I've found that even when seemingly stuck in a dead end that if you focus on a certain aspect (healing, defense, offense) or capitalizing on certain synergy with a new card you'll find your eureka moment and bust through!
(05/23) Friendly Multiplayer! - Mario Party Superstars - Woody Woods WhiteKhakis 2023-05-11 | No Commentary / Shenanigans AplentyBeen awhile since I've uploaded some multiplayer, so here ya go!
10M. (S-Rank) Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp - Classic Campaign 10 (Max) - History Lesson! WhiteKhakis 2023-05-09 | No Commentary / Curated Turn Time / S-RankPlaylist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7IEN-HGlR46OzPri4_kH1w1VEXkOZOVwI'm showing all animations and dialogue BUT edit turn-time so that there's little to no wait between moves!----I don't have too much to say yet, but I am REALLY excited to see Advance Wars back and shinier than ever! I hope you guys enjoy the gameplay!
09M. (S-Rank) Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp - Classic Campaign 09 (Max) - Blizzard Battle! WhiteKhakis 2023-05-07 | No Commentary / Curated Turn Time / S-RankPlaylist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7IEN-HGlR46OzPri4_kH1w1VEXkOZOVwI'm showing all animations and dialogue BUT edit turn-time so that there's little to no wait between moves!----I don't have too much to say yet, but I am REALLY excited to see Advance Wars back and shinier than ever! I hope you guys enjoy the gameplay!
08M. (S-Rank) Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp - Classic Campaign 08 (Max) - Sniper! WhiteKhakis 2023-05-05 | No Commentary / Curated Turn Time / S-RankPlaylist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7IEN-HGlR46OzPri4_kH1w1VEXkOZOVwI'm showing all animations and dialogue BUT edit turn-time so that there's little to no wait between moves!----I don't have too much to say yet, but I am REALLY excited to see Advance Wars back and shinier than ever! I hope you guys enjoy the gameplay!
07M. (S-Rank) Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp - Classic Campaign 07 (Max) - Max Strikes! WhiteKhakis 2023-05-04 | No Commentary / Curated Turn Time / S-RankPlaylist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7IEN-HGlR46OzPri4_kH1w1VEXkOZOVwI'm showing all animations and dialogue BUT edit turn-time so that there's little to no wait between moves!----I don't have too much to say yet, but I am REALLY excited to see Advance Wars back and shinier than ever! I hope you guys enjoy the gameplay!
06. (S-Rank) Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp - Classic Campaign 06 - Air Ace! WhiteKhakis 2023-05-03 | No Commentary / Curated Turn Time / S-RankPlaylist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7IEN-HGlR46OzPri4_kH1w1VEXkOZOVwI'm showing all animations and dialogue BUT edit turn-time so that there's little to no wait between moves!----I don't have too much to say yet, but I am REALLY excited to see Advance Wars back and shinier than ever! I hope you guys enjoy the gameplay!
05. (S-Rank) Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp - Classic Campaign 05 - Sniper! WhiteKhakis 2023-05-02 | No Commentary / Curated Turn Time / S-RankPlaylist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7IEN-HGlR46OzPri4_kH1w1VEXkOZOVwI'm showing all animations and dialogue BUT edit turn-time so that there's little to no wait between moves!----I don't have too much to say yet, but I am REALLY excited to see Advance Wars back and shinier than ever! I hope you guys enjoy the gameplay!
07. [FPGA 4K] Steel Empire (Genesis) - Stage 7 - Lunar Space WhiteKhakis 2023-05-02 | No Commentary / 4k60 (x9 Integer9 Upscale) / High Res Audio / Good PlayerPlaylist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7IEN-HGlR46PbQZRbXzsF6W-iBldSbyxThis is being played on an "Analogue Mega Sg" FPGA game console allowing for clear output in sound and audio! The video provided to YouTube is 4:4:4 and lossless! Details below in Technical Notes!----A steam-punk shooter on the Genesis! This one is neat because it's all made in the conceit that it's an old-timey war-film, so don't adjust your sets! The cutscenes are meant to flicker.Besides the aesthetic, the game has a couple uncommon shooter mechanics: The ability to shoot in either direction, and a persistent level-up system. Each time you grab an EX item you fill up one of three slots in your status bar. Once that fills and rolls over you gain a level giving you and your wingmen additional firepower. Even if you lose a life your weapons keep their strength!Other items include an "S" for addional speed, an "O" which grants you wingmen ("options"), and a "B" for an additional smart bomb!Bosses with multiple weapons that van be individually wrecked are featured and are destroyed once you demolish their core!I choose to pilot the blimp for the first couple levels simply because it has more health. I don't care much for the way it lobs bombs or its mobility. The smaller craft you can pilot zips around and can fit between projectiles more readily. Once you've leveled up a bit the health is more than satisfactory!----Technical Notes:------Check out the demo video for the explanation here:youtube.com/watch?v=FPfN6ZHJR84
06. [FPGA 4K] Steel Empire (Genesis) - Stage 6 - Germburn Fortress WhiteKhakis 2023-05-01 | No Commentary / 4k60 (x9 Integer9 Upscale) / High Res Audio / Good PlayerPlaylist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7IEN-HGlR46PbQZRbXzsF6W-iBldSbyxThis is being played on an "Analogue Mega Sg" FPGA game console allowing for clear output in sound and audio! The video provided to YouTube is 4:4:4 and lossless! Details below in Technical Notes!----A steam-punk shooter on the Genesis! This one is neat because it's all made in the conceit that it's an old-timey war-film, so don't adjust your sets! The cutscenes are meant to flicker.Besides the aesthetic, the game has a couple uncommon shooter mechanics: The ability to shoot in either direction, and a persistent level-up system. Each time you grab an EX item you fill up one of three slots in your status bar. Once that fills and rolls over you gain a level giving you and your wingmen additional firepower. Even if you lose a life your weapons keep their strength!Other items include an "S" for addional speed, an "O" which grants you wingmen ("options"), and a "B" for an additional smart bomb!Bosses with multiple weapons that van be individually wrecked are featured and are destroyed once you demolish their core!I choose to pilot the blimp for the first couple levels simply because it has more health. I don't care much for the way it lobs bombs or its mobility. The smaller craft you can pilot zips around and can fit between projectiles more readily. Once you've leveled up a bit the health is more than satisfactory!----Technical Notes:------Check out the demo video for the explanation here:youtube.com/watch?v=FPfN6ZHJR84
04. (S-Rank) Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp - Classic Campaign 04 - Its War! WhiteKhakis 2023-05-01 | No Commentary / Curated Turn Time / S-RankPlaylist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7IEN-HGlR46OzPri4_kH1w1VEXkOZOVwI'm showing all animations and dialogue BUT edit turn-time so that there's little to no wait between moves!----I don't have too much to say yet, but I am REALLY excited to see Advance Wars back and shinier than ever! I hope you guys enjoy the gameplay!
03. (S-Rank) Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp - Classic Campaign 03 - Fog of War! WhiteKhakis 2023-04-23 | No Commentary / Curated Turn Time / S-RankPlaylist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7IEN-HGlR46OzPri4_kH1w1VEXkOZOVwI'm showing all animations and dialogue BUT edit turn-time so that there's little to no wait between moves!----I don't have too much to say yet, but I am REALLY excited to see Advance Wars back and shinier than ever! I hope you guys enjoy the gameplay!
05. [FPGA 4K] Steel Empire (Genesis) - Stage 5 - Dama City WhiteKhakis 2023-04-23 | No Commentary / 4k60 (x9 Integer9 Upscale) / High Res Audio / Good PlayerPlaylist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7IEN-HGlR46PbQZRbXzsF6W-iBldSbyxThis is being played on an "Analogue Mega Sg" FPGA game console allowing for clear output in sound and audio! The video provided to YouTube is 4:4:4 and lossless! Details below in Technical Notes!----A steam-punk shooter on the Genesis! This one is neat because it's all made in the conceit that it's an old-timey war-film, so don't adjust your sets! The cutscenes are meant to flicker.Besides the aesthetic, the game has a couple uncommon shooter mechanics: The ability to shoot in either direction, and a persistent level-up system. Each time you grab an EX item you fill up one of three slots in your status bar. Once that fills and rolls over you gain a level giving you and your wingmen additional firepower. Even if you lose a life your weapons keep their strength!Other items include an "S" for addional speed, an "O" which grants you wingmen ("options"), and a "B" for an additional smart bomb!Bosses with multiple weapons that van be individually wrecked are featured and are destroyed once you demolish their core!I choose to pilot the blimp for the first couple levels simply because it has more health. I don't care much for the way it lobs bombs or its mobility. The smaller craft you can pilot zips around and can fit between projectiles more readily. Once you've leveled up a bit the health is more than satisfactory!----Technical Notes:------Check out the demo video for the explanation here:youtube.com/watch?v=FPfN6ZHJR84
02. (S-Rank) Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp - Classic Campaign 02 - Copter Tactics! WhiteKhakis 2023-04-22 | No Commentary / Curated Turn Time / S-RankPlaylist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7IEN-HGlR46OzPri4_kH1w1VEXkOZOVwI'm showing all animations and dialogue BUT edit turn-time so that there's little to no wait between moves!----I don't have too much to say yet, but I am REALLY excited to see Advance Wars back and shinier than ever! I hope you guys enjoy the gameplay!
04. [FPGA 4K] Steel Empire (Genesis) - Stage 4 - Gardandi Beach WhiteKhakis 2023-04-22 | No Commentary / 4k60 (x9 Integer9 Upscale) / High Res Audio / Good PlayerPlaylist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7IEN-HGlR46PbQZRbXzsF6W-iBldSbyxThis is being played on an "Analogue Mega Sg" FPGA game console allowing for clear output in sound and audio! The video provided to YouTube is 4:4:4 and lossless! Details below in Technical Notes!----A steam-punk shooter on the Genesis! This one is neat because it's all made in the conceit that it's an old-timey war-film, so don't adjust your sets! The cutscenes are meant to flicker.Besides the aesthetic, the game has a couple uncommon shooter mechanics: The ability to shoot in either direction, and a persistent level-up system. Each time you grab an EX item you fill up one of three slots in your status bar. Once that fills and rolls over you gain a level giving you and your wingmen additional firepower. Even if you lose a life your weapons keep their strength!Other items include an "S" for addional speed, an "O" which grants you wingmen ("options"), and a "B" for an additional smart bomb!Bosses with multiple weapons that van be individually wrecked are featured and are destroyed once you demolish their core!I choose to pilot the blimp for the first couple levels simply because it has more health. I don't care much for the way it lobs bombs or its mobility. The smaller craft you can pilot zips around and can fit between projectiles more readily. Once you've leveled up a bit the health is more than satisfactory!----Technical Notes:------Check out the demo video for the explanation here:youtube.com/watch?v=FPfN6ZHJR84
01. (S-Rank) Advance Wars 1+2: Re-Boot Camp - Classic Campaign 01 - Tank Ops! WhiteKhakis 2023-04-22 | No Commentary / Curated Turn Time / S-RankPlaylist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7IEN-HGlR46OzPri4_kH1w1VEXkOZOVwI'm showing all animations and dialogue BUT edit turn-time so that there's little to no wait between moves!----I don't have too much to say yet, but I am REALLY excited to see Advance Wars back and shinier than ever! I hope you guys enjoy the gameplay!!
03. [FPGA 4K] Steel Empire (Genesis) - Stage 3 - Sky District Zektor WhiteKhakis 2023-04-21 | No Commentary / 4k60 (x9 Integer9 Upscale) / High Res Audio / Good PlayerPlaylist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7IEN-HGlR46PbQZRbXzsF6W-iBldSbyxThis is being played on an "Analogue Mega Sg" FPGA game console allowing for clear output in sound and audio! The video provided to YouTube is 4:4:4 and lossless! Details below in Technical Notes!----A steam-punk shooter on the Genesis! This one is neat because it's all made in the conceit that it's an old-timey war-film, so don't adjust your sets! The cutscenes are meant to flicker.Besides the aesthetic, the game has a couple uncommon shooter mechanics: The ability to shoot in either direction, and a persistent level-up system. Each time you grab an EX item you fill up one of three slots in your status bar. Once that fills and rolls over you gain a level giving you and your wingmen additional firepower. Even if you lose a life your weapons keep their strength!Other items include an "S" for addional speed, an "O" which grants you wingmen ("options"), and a "B" for an additional smart bomb!Bosses with multiple weapons that van be individually wrecked are featured and are destroyed once you demolish their core!I choose to pilot the blimp for the first couple levels simply because it has more health. I don't care much for the way it lobs bombs or its mobility. The smaller craft you can pilot zips around and can fit between projectiles more readily. Once you've leveled up a bit the health is more than satisfactory!----Technical Notes:------Check out the demo video for the explanation here:youtube.com/watch?v=FPfN6ZHJR84
BONUS 01. [FPGA 4K] Steel Empire (Genesis) - Title & Demo WhiteKhakis 2023-04-20 | No Commentary / 4k60 (x9 Integer9 Upscale) / High Res Audio / Good PlayerPlaylist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7IEN-HGlR46PbQZRbXzsF6W-iBldSbyxThis is being played on an "Analogue Mega Sg" FPGA game console allowing for clear output in sound and audio! The video provided to YouTube is 4:4:4 and lossless! Details below in Technical Notes!----A steam-punk shooter on the Genesis! This one is neat because it's all made in the conceit that it's an old-timey war-film, so don't adjust your sets! The cutscenes are meant to flicker.More details next video!----Technical Notes:------TL;DR: YouTube was provided a perfect video so pixels are sharp and shapes are correct. Audio is "high resolution" compared to a Genesis system due to no processing constraints. Watch in 4k or 1440p if your computer can handle it.This video has suffered no lossy compression before reaching YouTube! It's a lossless video file with no chroma subsampling (4:4:4). Essentially, it's a perfect copy until YouTube works its magic which now makes it a 4:2:0 video with lossy compression, yes. However, the better the initial copy... the better!The video was originally captured in a 320 x 224 resolution, the native "square pixel" resolution of most NTSC Genesis games, and then integer upscaled x9 times to 2880 x 2016 with black borders added along the outside for a clean 4k display!This results in a "pixel perfect" output that is slightly wider than what you might have seen on your old CRT TV set! However, the pixels are sharp this way AND the art was designed in this "pixel perfect" resolution before being squashed to 4:3 back in the day. In short: Pixels are sharp AND circles are circles and squares are squares.Some games were a 256 x 224 resolution, originally. These will be uploaded in 1440p to fill the screen as much as possible and maintain a pixel perfect integer upscale. The native resolution is far too thin for what the game looked like on a CRT OR for the art, so the width is integer scaled a step higher to result in a 4:3 aspect ratio (256 x 7 for 1792 and 224 x 6 for 1344 = 1792 x 1344). These will look a little thinner than the 320 x 224 games I'm uploading, but the art will be crisp AND be how it looked in the old days!Some games switch between 320 x 224 resolution and 256 x 224 resolution (Sonic 2 special stage, Lion King Stampede level, etc.). I will generally upload levels containing large sections in 256 x 224 resolution as 1440p to maintain perfect integer upscales and preferred ratios. 320 x 224 does not change ratio between 4k or 1440p. You will know when the genesis is using 256 x 224 'cause the screen will shrink a little in these videos!About the Mega SG... It's a FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) based game system which to explain in layman's terms (BY a layman): It's a "chip" dense with circuits and stuff that can be programmed to use only so many in whatever ways necessary to replicate another "chip". Basically, if you can reverse engineer a genesis exactly, you can pretty much program this "chip" to behave like a genesis exactly. Which is what this is.I'm playing in "Zero Delay" mode so the game is running marginally faster. 0.15%, to be exact. That's less than 1/7th of a single percent. I've also cropped out the colored border Genesis games tend to have.The sound has been tweaked slightly per FirebrandX's recommendations, I've enabled "YM2612 High Quality Mode" for uncompressed audio, and I have not engaged the ladder effect or lowpass filter. This will definitely sound different than a normal genesis because of the latter option. It's essentially listening closer to what the source sound would be like before the Genesis muffles it a bit.I also want to mention dithering for just a moment here. In Genesis games you'll often see lines of color alternating here and there, this is because on an old CRT tv the screen would be a bit blurry resulting in those colors bleeding together and becoming a mix of the two. This can also result in transparencies if used correctly. Unfortunately with a clean digital image this won't happen. The only way to enable these "extra colors" is to blur the digital image and this certainly would not be "pixel perfect" as is my goal. I like to think that we are now able to see how the artists tried to achieve their effect! You can always squint your eyes a bit if you want to try to replicate the blurriness!
02. [FPGA 4K] Steel Empire (Genesis) - Stage 2 - The Liedengel Caverns WhiteKhakis 2023-04-20 | No Commentary / 4k60 (x9 Integer9 Upscale) / High Res Audio / Good PlayerPlaylist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7IEN-HGlR46PbQZRbXzsF6W-iBldSbyxThis is being played on an "Analogue Mega Sg" FPGA game console allowing for clear output in sound and audio! The video provided to YouTube is 4:4:4 and lossless! Details below in Technical Notes!----A steam-punk shooter on the Genesis! This one is neat because it's all made in the conceit that it's an old-timey war-film, so don't adjust your sets! The cutscenes are meant to flicker.Besides the aesthetic, the game has a couple uncommon shooter mechanics: The ability to shoot in either direction, and a persistent level-up system. Each time you grab an EX item you fill up one of three slots in your status bar. Once that fills and rolls over you gain a level giving you and your wingmen additional firepower. Even if you lose a life your weapons keep their strength!Other items include an "S" for addional speed, an "O" which grants you wingmen ("options"), and a "B" for an additional smart bomb!Bosses with multiple weapons that van be individually wrecked are featured and are destroyed once you demolish their core!I choose to pilot the blimp for the first couple levels simply because it has more health. I don't care much for the way it lobs bombs or its mobility. The smaller craft you can pilot zips around and can fit between projectiles more readily. Once you've leveled up a bit the health is more than satisfactory!----Technical Notes:------Check out the demo video for the explanation here:youtube.com/watch?v=FPfN6ZHJR84
01. [FPGA 4K] Steel Empire (Genesis) - Stage 1 - The Mine City of Rahl WhiteKhakis 2023-04-19 | No Commentary / 4k60 (x9 Integer9 Upscale) / High Res Audio / Good PlayerPlaylist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7IEN-HGlR46PbQZRbXzsF6W-iBldSbyxThis is being played on an "Analogue Mega Sg" FPGA game console allowing for clear output in sound and audio! The video provided to YouTube is 4:4:4 and lossless! Details below in Technical Notes!----A steam-punk shooter on the Genesis! This one is neat because it's all made in the conceit that it's an old-timey war-film, so don't adjust your sets! The cutscenes are meant to flicker.Besides the aesthetic, the game has a couple uncommon shooter mechanics: The ability to shoot in either direction, and a persistent level-up system. Each time you grab an EX item you fill up one of three slots in your status bar. Once that fills and rolls over you gain a level giving you and your wingmen additional firepower. Even if you lose a life your weapons keep their strength!Other items include an "S" for addional speed, an "O" which grants you wingmen ("options"), and a "B" for an additional smart bomb!Bosses with multiple weapons that van be individually wrecked are featured and are destroyed once you demolish their core!I choose to pilot the blimp for the first couple levels simply because it has more health. I don't care much for the way it lobs bombs or its mobility. The smaller craft you can pilot zips around and can fit between projectiles more readily. Once you've leveled up a bit the health is more than satisfactory!----Technical Notes:------Check out earlier videos for the explanation here.
07. [FPGA 4K] Fatal Labyrinth (Genesis) - Levels 30-31 WhiteKhakis 2023-04-17 | No Commentary / 4k60 (x9 Integer9 Upscale) / High Res Audio / Capable PlayerPlaylist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7IEN-HGlR47OU4Tbpv0lXhiKnHJ0JfTSThis is being played on an "Analogue Mega Sg" FPGA game console allowing for clear output in sound and audio! The video provided to YouTube is 4:4:4 and lossless! Details below in Technical Notes!----Time for some hints and tips! (More general info in first video)As long as you have any amount of food you will heal as time passes. Very handy! Without food you lose health as time passes. You identify items by using them and some can curse you or worse so be prepared!Elemental rings are weird. You don't wear them and use spells... you throw them at your enemy to activate a one time use elemental bomb. You can also throw bad potions at enemies."Chaos" is one of the best spells forcing creatures to "dance" around aimlessly. They will attack if adjacent, however. If you choose to use or throw an item you will not change directions if you're confused.That's all I've got for now!----Technical Notes:------TL;DR: YouTube was provided a perfect video so pixels are sharp and shapes are correct. Audio is "high resolution" compared to a Genesis system due to no processing constraints. Watch in 4k or 1440p if your computer can handle it.This video has suffered no lossy compression before reaching YouTube! It's a lossless video file with no chroma subsampling (4:4:4). Essentially, it's a perfect copy until YouTube works its magic which now makes it a 4:2:0 video with lossy compression, yes. However, the better the initial copy... the better!The video was originally captured in a 320 x 224 resolution, the native "square pixel" resolution of most NTSC Genesis games, and then integer upscaled x9 times to 2880 x 2016 with black borders added along the outside for a clean 4k display!This results in a "pixel perfect" output that is slightly wider than what you might have seen on your old CRT TV set! However, the pixels are sharp this way AND the art was designed in this "pixel perfect" resolution before being squashed to 4:3 back in the day. In short: Pixels are sharp AND circles are circles and squares are squares.Some games were a 256 x 224 resolution, originally. These will be uploaded in 1440p to fill the screen as much as possible and maintain a pixel perfect integer upscale. The native resolution is far too thin for what the game looked like on a CRT OR for the art, so the width is integer scaled a step higher to result in a 4:3 aspect ratio (256 x 7 for 1792 and 224 x 6 for 1344 = 1792 x 1344). These will look a little thinner than the 320 x 224 games I'm uploading, but the art will be crisp AND be how it looked in the old days!Some games switch between 320 x 224 resolution and 256 x 224 resolution (Sonic 2 special stage, Lion King Stampede level, etc.). I will generally upload levels containing large sections in 256 x 224 resolution as 1440p to maintain perfect integer upscales and preferred ratios. 320 x 224 does not change ratio between 4k or 1440p. You will know when the genesis is using 256 x 224 'cause the screen will shrink a little in these videos!About the Mega SG... It's a FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) based game system which to explain in layman's terms (BY a layman): It's a "chip" dense with circuits and stuff that can be programmed to use only so many in whatever ways necessary to replicate another "chip". Basically, if you can reverse engineer a genesis exactly, you can pretty much program this "chip" to behave like a genesis exactly. Which is what this is.I'm playing in "Zero Delay" mode so the game is running marginally faster. 0.15%, to be exact. That's less than 1/7th of a single percent. I've also cropped out the colored border Genesis games tend to have.The sound has been tweaked slightly per FirebrandX's recommendations, I've enabled "YM2612 High Quality Mode" for uncompressed audio, and I have not engaged the ladder effect or lowpass filter. This will definitely sound different than a normal genesis because of the latter option. It's essentially listening closer to what the source sound would be like before the Genesis muffles it a bit.I also want to mention dithering for just a moment here. In Genesis games you'll often see lines of color alternating here and there, this is because on an old CRT tv the screen would be a bit blurry resulting in those colors bleeding together and becoming a mix of the two. This can also result in transparencies if used correctly. Unfortunately with a clean digital image this won't happen. The only way to enable these "extra colors" is to blur the digital image and this certainly would not be "pixel perfect" as is my goal. I like to think that we are now able to see how the artists tried to achieve their effect! You can always squint your eyes a bit if you want to try to replicate the blurriness!
06. [FPGA 4K] Fatal Labyrinth (Genesis) - Levels 25-29 WhiteKhakis 2023-04-16 | No Commentary / 4k60 (x9 Integer9 Upscale) / High Res Audio / Capable PlayerPlaylist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7IEN-HGlR47OU4Tbpv0lXhiKnHJ0JfTSThis is being played on an "Analogue Mega Sg" FPGA game console allowing for clear output in sound and audio! The video provided to YouTube is 4:4:4 and lossless! Details below in Technical Notes!----Time for some hints and tips! (More general info in first video)As long as you have any amount of food you will heal as time passes. Very handy! Without food you lose health as time passes. You identify items by using them and some can curse you or worse so be prepared!Elemental rings are weird. You don't wear them and use spells... you throw them at your enemy to activate a one time use elemental bomb. You can also throw bad potions at enemies."Chaos" is one of the best spells forcing creatures to "dance" around aimlessly. They will attack if adjacent, however. If you choose to use or throw an item you will not change directions if you're confused.That's all I've got for now!----Technical Notes:------TL;DR: YouTube was provided a perfect video so pixels are sharp and shapes are correct. Audio is "high resolution" compared to a Genesis system due to no processing constraints. Watch in 4k or 1440p if your computer can handle it.This video has suffered no lossy compression before reaching YouTube! It's a lossless video file with no chroma subsampling (4:4:4). Essentially, it's a perfect copy until YouTube works its magic which now makes it a 4:2:0 video with lossy compression, yes. However, the better the initial copy... the better!The video was originally captured in a 320 x 224 resolution, the native "square pixel" resolution of most NTSC Genesis games, and then integer upscaled x9 times to 2880 x 2016 with black borders added along the outside for a clean 4k display!This results in a "pixel perfect" output that is slightly wider than what you might have seen on your old CRT TV set! However, the pixels are sharp this way AND the art was designed in this "pixel perfect" resolution before being squashed to 4:3 back in the day. In short: Pixels are sharp AND circles are circles and squares are squares.Some games were a 256 x 224 resolution, originally. These will be uploaded in 1440p to fill the screen as much as possible and maintain a pixel perfect integer upscale. The native resolution is far too thin for what the game looked like on a CRT OR for the art, so the width is integer scaled a step higher to result in a 4:3 aspect ratio (256 x 7 for 1792 and 224 x 6 for 1344 = 1792 x 1344). These will look a little thinner than the 320 x 224 games I'm uploading, but the art will be crisp AND be how it looked in the old days!Some games switch between 320 x 224 resolution and 256 x 224 resolution (Sonic 2 special stage, Lion King Stampede level, etc.). I will generally upload levels containing large sections in 256 x 224 resolution as 1440p to maintain perfect integer upscales and preferred ratios. 320 x 224 does not change ratio between 4k or 1440p. You will know when the genesis is using 256 x 224 'cause the screen will shrink a little in these videos!About the Mega SG... It's a FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) based game system which to explain in layman's terms (BY a layman): It's a "chip" dense with circuits and stuff that can be programmed to use only so many in whatever ways necessary to replicate another "chip". Basically, if you can reverse engineer a genesis exactly, you can pretty much program this "chip" to behave like a genesis exactly. Which is what this is.I'm playing in "Zero Delay" mode so the game is running marginally faster. 0.15%, to be exact. That's less than 1/7th of a single percent. I've also cropped out the colored border Genesis games tend to have.The sound has been tweaked slightly per FirebrandX's recommendations, I've enabled "YM2612 High Quality Mode" for uncompressed audio, and I have not engaged the ladder effect or lowpass filter. This will definitely sound different than a normal genesis because of the latter option. It's essentially listening closer to what the source sound would be like before the Genesis muffles it a bit.I also want to mention dithering for just a moment here. In Genesis games you'll often see lines of color alternating here and there, this is because on an old CRT tv the screen would be a bit blurry resulting in those colors bleeding together and becoming a mix of the two. This can also result in transparencies if used correctly. Unfortunately with a clean digital image this won't happen. The only way to enable these "extra colors" is to blur the digital image and this certainly would not be "pixel perfect" as is my goal. I like to think that we are now able to see how the artists tried to achieve their effect! You can always squint your eyes a bit if you want to try to replicate the blurriness!
05. [FPGA 4K] Fatal Labyrinth (Genesis) - Levels 16-24 WhiteKhakis 2023-04-15 | No Commentary / 4k60 (x9 Integer9 Upscale) / High Res Audio / Capable PlayerPlaylist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7IEN-HGlR47OU4Tbpv0lXhiKnHJ0JfTSThis is being played on an "Analogue Mega Sg" FPGA game console allowing for clear output in sound and audio! The video provided to YouTube is 4:4:4 and lossless! Details below in Technical Notes!----Time for some hints and tips! (More general info in first video)As long as you have any amount of food you will heal as time passes. Very handy! Without food you lose health as time passes. You identify items by using them and some can curse you or worse so be prepared!Elemental rings are weird. You don't wear them and use spells... you throw them at your enemy to activate a one time use elemental bomb. You can also throw bad potions at enemies."Chaos" is one of the best spells forcing creatures to "dance" around aimlessly. They will attack if adjacent, however. If you choose to use or throw an item you will not change directions if you're confused.That's all I've got for now!----Technical Notes:------TL;DR: YouTube was provided a perfect video so pixels are sharp and shapes are correct. Audio is "high resolution" compared to a Genesis system due to no processing constraints. Watch in 4k or 1440p if your computer can handle it.This video has suffered no lossy compression before reaching YouTube! It's a lossless video file with no chroma subsampling (4:4:4). Essentially, it's a perfect copy until YouTube works its magic which now makes it a 4:2:0 video with lossy compression, yes. However, the better the initial copy... the better!The video was originally captured in a 320 x 224 resolution, the native "square pixel" resolution of most NTSC Genesis games, and then integer upscaled x9 times to 2880 x 2016 with black borders added along the outside for a clean 4k display!This results in a "pixel perfect" output that is slightly wider than what you might have seen on your old CRT TV set! However, the pixels are sharp this way AND the art was designed in this "pixel perfect" resolution before being squashed to 4:3 back in the day. In short: Pixels are sharp AND circles are circles and squares are squares.Some games were a 256 x 224 resolution, originally. These will be uploaded in 1440p to fill the screen as much as possible and maintain a pixel perfect integer upscale. The native resolution is far too thin for what the game looked like on a CRT OR for the art, so the width is integer scaled a step higher to result in a 4:3 aspect ratio (256 x 7 for 1792 and 224 x 6 for 1344 = 1792 x 1344). These will look a little thinner than the 320 x 224 games I'm uploading, but the art will be crisp AND be how it looked in the old days!Some games switch between 320 x 224 resolution and 256 x 224 resolution (Sonic 2 special stage, Lion King Stampede level, etc.). I will generally upload levels containing large sections in 256 x 224 resolution as 1440p to maintain perfect integer upscales and preferred ratios. 320 x 224 does not change ratio between 4k or 1440p. You will know when the genesis is using 256 x 224 'cause the screen will shrink a little in these videos!About the Mega SG... It's a FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) based game system which to explain in layman's terms (BY a layman): It's a "chip" dense with circuits and stuff that can be programmed to use only so many in whatever ways necessary to replicate another "chip". Basically, if you can reverse engineer a genesis exactly, you can pretty much program this "chip" to behave like a genesis exactly. Which is what this is.I'm playing in "Zero Delay" mode so the game is running marginally faster. 0.15%, to be exact. That's less than 1/7th of a single percent. I've also cropped out the colored border Genesis games tend to have.The sound has been tweaked slightly per FirebrandX's recommendations, I've enabled "YM2612 High Quality Mode" for uncompressed audio, and I have not engaged the ladder effect or lowpass filter. This will definitely sound different than a normal genesis because of the latter option. It's essentially listening closer to what the source sound would be like before the Genesis muffles it a bit.I also want to mention dithering for just a moment here. In Genesis games you'll often see lines of color alternating here and there, this is because on an old CRT tv the screen would be a bit blurry resulting in those colors bleeding together and becoming a mix of the two. This can also result in transparencies if used correctly. Unfortunately with a clean digital image this won't happen. The only way to enable these "extra colors" is to blur the digital image and this certainly would not be "pixel perfect" as is my goal. I like to think that we are now able to see how the artists tried to achieve their effect! You can always squint your eyes a bit if you want to try to replicate the blurriness!
04. [FPGA 4K] Fatal Labyrinth (Genesis) - Levels 15-19 WhiteKhakis 2023-04-10 | No Commentary / 4k60 (x9 Integer9 Upscale) / High Res Audio / Capable PlayerPlaylist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7IEN-HGlR47OU4Tbpv0lXhiKnHJ0JfTSThis is being played on an "Analogue Mega Sg" FPGA game console allowing for clear output in sound and audio! The video provided to YouTube is 4:4:4 and lossless! Details below in Technical Notes!----Time for some hints and tips! (More general info in first video)As long as you have any amount of food you will heal as time passes. Very handy! Without food you lose health as time passes. You identify items by using them and some can curse you or worse so be prepared!Elemental rings are weird. You don't wear them and use spells... you throw them at your enemy to activate a one time use elemental bomb. You can also throw bad potions at enemies."Chaos" is one of the best spells forcing creatures to "dance" around aimlessly. They will attack if adjacent, however. If you choose to use or throw an item you will not change directions if you're confused.That's all I've got for now!----Technical Notes:------TL;DR: YouTube was provided a perfect video so pixels are sharp and shapes are correct. Audio is "high resolution" compared to a Genesis system due to no processing constraints. Watch in 4k or 1440p if your computer can handle it.This video has suffered no lossy compression before reaching YouTube! It's a lossless video file with no chroma subsampling (4:4:4). Essentially, it's a perfect copy until YouTube works its magic which now makes it a 4:2:0 video with lossy compression, yes. However, the better the initial copy... the better!The video was originally captured in a 320 x 224 resolution, the native "square pixel" resolution of most NTSC Genesis games, and then integer upscaled x9 times to 2880 x 2016 with black borders added along the outside for a clean 4k display!This results in a "pixel perfect" output that is slightly wider than what you might have seen on your old CRT TV set! However, the pixels are sharp this way AND the art was designed in this "pixel perfect" resolution before being squashed to 4:3 back in the day. In short: Pixels are sharp AND circles are circles and squares are squares.Some games were a 256 x 224 resolution, originally. These will be uploaded in 1440p to fill the screen as much as possible and maintain a pixel perfect integer upscale. The native resolution is far too thin for what the game looked like on a CRT OR for the art, so the width is integer scaled a step higher to result in a 4:3 aspect ratio (256 x 7 for 1792 and 224 x 6 for 1344 = 1792 x 1344). These will look a little thinner than the 320 x 224 games I'm uploading, but the art will be crisp AND be how it looked in the old days!Some games switch between 320 x 224 resolution and 256 x 224 resolution (Sonic 2 special stage, Lion King Stampede level, etc.). I will generally upload levels containing large sections in 256 x 224 resolution as 1440p to maintain perfect integer upscales and preferred ratios. 320 x 224 does not change ratio between 4k or 1440p. You will know when the genesis is using 256 x 224 'cause the screen will shrink a little in these videos!About the Mega SG... It's a FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) based game system which to explain in layman's terms (BY a layman): It's a "chip" dense with circuits and stuff that can be programmed to use only so many in whatever ways necessary to replicate another "chip". Basically, if you can reverse engineer a genesis exactly, you can pretty much program this "chip" to behave like a genesis exactly. Which is what this is.I'm playing in "Zero Delay" mode so the game is running marginally faster. 0.15%, to be exact. That's less than 1/7th of a single percent. I've also cropped out the colored border Genesis games tend to have.The sound has been tweaked slightly per FirebrandX's recommendations, I've enabled "YM2612 High Quality Mode" for uncompressed audio, and I have not engaged the ladder effect or lowpass filter. This will definitely sound different than a normal genesis because of the latter option. It's essentially listening closer to what the source sound would be like before the Genesis muffles it a bit.I also want to mention dithering for just a moment here. In Genesis games you'll often see lines of color alternating here and there, this is because on an old CRT tv the screen would be a bit blurry resulting in those colors bleeding together and becoming a mix of the two. This can also result in transparencies if used correctly. Unfortunately with a clean digital image this won't happen. The only way to enable these "extra colors" is to blur the digital image and this certainly would not be "pixel perfect" as is my goal. I like to think that we are now able to see how the artists tried to achieve their effect! You can always squint your eyes a bit if you want to try to replicate the blurriness!
03. [FPGA 4K] Fatal Labyrinth (Genesis) - Levels 10-14 WhiteKhakis 2023-04-09 | No Commentary / 4k60 (x9 Integer9 Upscale) / High Res Audio / Capable PlayerPlaylist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7IEN-HGlR47OU4Tbpv0lXhiKnHJ0JfTSThis is being played on an "Analogue Mega Sg" FPGA game console allowing for clear output in sound and audio! The video provided to YouTube is 4:4:4 and lossless! Details below in Technical Notes!----Time for some hints and tips! (More general info in first video)As long as you have any amount of food you will heal as time passes. Very handy! Without food you lose health as time passes. You identify items by using them and some can curse you or worse so be prepared!Elemental rings are weird. You don't wear them and use spells... you throw them at your enemy to activate a one time use elemental bomb. You can also throw bad potions at enemies."Chaos" is one of the best spells forcing creatures to "dance" around aimlessly. They will attack if adjacent, however. If you choose to use or throw an item you will not change directions if you're confused.That's all I've got for now!----Technical Notes:------TL;DR: YouTube was provided a perfect video so pixels are sharp and shapes are correct. Audio is "high resolution" compared to a Genesis system due to no processing constraints. Watch in 4k or 1440p if your computer can handle it.This video has suffered no lossy compression before reaching YouTube! It's a lossless video file with no chroma subsampling (4:4:4). Essentially, it's a perfect copy until YouTube works its magic which now makes it a 4:2:0 video with lossy compression, yes. However, the better the initial copy... the better!The video was originally captured in a 320 x 224 resolution, the native "square pixel" resolution of most NTSC Genesis games, and then integer upscaled x9 times to 2880 x 2016 with black borders added along the outside for a clean 4k display!This results in a "pixel perfect" output that is slightly wider than what you might have seen on your old CRT TV set! However, the pixels are sharp this way AND the art was designed in this "pixel perfect" resolution before being squashed to 4:3 back in the day. In short: Pixels are sharp AND circles are circles and squares are squares.Some games were a 256 x 224 resolution, originally. These will be uploaded in 1440p to fill the screen as much as possible and maintain a pixel perfect integer upscale. The native resolution is far too thin for what the game looked like on a CRT OR for the art, so the width is integer scaled a step higher to result in a 4:3 aspect ratio (256 x 7 for 1792 and 224 x 6 for 1344 = 1792 x 1344). These will look a little thinner than the 320 x 224 games I'm uploading, but the art will be crisp AND be how it looked in the old days!Some games switch between 320 x 224 resolution and 256 x 224 resolution (Sonic 2 special stage, Lion King Stampede level, etc.). I will generally upload levels containing large sections in 256 x 224 resolution as 1440p to maintain perfect integer upscales and preferred ratios. 320 x 224 does not change ratio between 4k or 1440p. You will know when the genesis is using 256 x 224 'cause the screen will shrink a little in these videos!About the Mega SG... It's a FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) based game system which to explain in layman's terms (BY a layman): It's a "chip" dense with circuits and stuff that can be programmed to use only so many in whatever ways necessary to replicate another "chip". Basically, if you can reverse engineer a genesis exactly, you can pretty much program this "chip" to behave like a genesis exactly. Which is what this is.I'm playing in "Zero Delay" mode so the game is running marginally faster. 0.15%, to be exact. That's less than 1/7th of a single percent. I've also cropped out the colored border Genesis games tend to have.The sound has been tweaked slightly per FirebrandX's recommendations, I've enabled "YM2612 High Quality Mode" for uncompressed audio, and I have not engaged the ladder effect or lowpass filter. This will definitely sound different than a normal genesis because of the latter option. It's essentially listening closer to what the source sound would be like before the Genesis muffles it a bit.I also want to mention dithering for just a moment here. In Genesis games you'll often see lines of color alternating here and there, this is because on an old CRT tv the screen would be a bit blurry resulting in those colors bleeding together and becoming a mix of the two. This can also result in transparencies if used correctly. Unfortunately with a clean digital image this won't happen. The only way to enable these "extra colors" is to blur the digital image and this certainly would not be "pixel perfect" as is my goal. I like to think that we are now able to see how the artists tried to achieve their effect! You can always squint your eyes a bit if you want to try to replicate the blurriness!
02. [FPGA 4K] Fatal Labyrinth (Genesis) - Levels 05-09 WhiteKhakis 2023-04-08 | No Commentary / 4k60 (x9 Integer9 Upscale) / High Res Audio / Capable PlayerPlaylist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7IEN-HGlR47OU4Tbpv0lXhiKnHJ0JfTSThis is being played on an "Analogue Mega Sg" FPGA game console allowing for clear output in sound and audio! The video provided to YouTube is 4:4:4 and lossless! Details below in Technical Notes!----Time for some hints and tips! (More general info in first video)As long as you have any amount of food you will heal as time passes. Very handy! Without food you lose health as time passes. You identify items by using them and some can curse you or worse so be prepared!Elemental rings are weird. You don't wear them and use spells... you throw them at your enemy to activate a one time use elemental bomb. You can also throw bad potions at enemies."Chaos" is one of the best spells forcing creatures to "dance" around aimlessly. They will attack if adjacent, however. If you choose to use or throw an item you will not change directions if you're confused.That's all I've got for now!----Technical Notes:------TL;DR: YouTube was provided a perfect video so pixels are sharp and shapes are correct. Audio is "high resolution" compared to a Genesis system due to no processing constraints. Watch in 4k or 1440p if your computer can handle it.This video has suffered no lossy compression before reaching YouTube! It's a lossless video file with no chroma subsampling (4:4:4). Essentially, it's a perfect copy until YouTube works its magic which now makes it a 4:2:0 video with lossy compression, yes. However, the better the initial copy... the better!The video was originally captured in a 320 x 224 resolution, the native "square pixel" resolution of most NTSC Genesis games, and then integer upscaled x9 times to 2880 x 2016 with black borders added along the outside for a clean 4k display!This results in a "pixel perfect" output that is slightly wider than what you might have seen on your old CRT TV set! However, the pixels are sharp this way AND the art was designed in this "pixel perfect" resolution before being squashed to 4:3 back in the day. In short: Pixels are sharp AND circles are circles and squares are squares.Some games were a 256 x 224 resolution, originally. These will be uploaded in 1440p to fill the screen as much as possible and maintain a pixel perfect integer upscale. The native resolution is far too thin for what the game looked like on a CRT OR for the art, so the width is integer scaled a step higher to result in a 4:3 aspect ratio (256 x 7 for 1792 and 224 x 6 for 1344 = 1792 x 1344). These will look a little thinner than the 320 x 224 games I'm uploading, but the art will be crisp AND be how it looked in the old days!Some games switch between 320 x 224 resolution and 256 x 224 resolution (Sonic 2 special stage, Lion King Stampede level, etc.). I will generally upload levels containing large sections in 256 x 224 resolution as 1440p to maintain perfect integer upscales and preferred ratios. 320 x 224 does not change ratio between 4k or 1440p. You will know when the genesis is using 256 x 224 'cause the screen will shrink a little in these videos!About the Mega SG... It's a FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) based game system which to explain in layman's terms (BY a layman): It's a "chip" dense with circuits and stuff that can be programmed to use only so many in whatever ways necessary to replicate another "chip". Basically, if you can reverse engineer a genesis exactly, you can pretty much program this "chip" to behave like a genesis exactly. Which is what this is.I'm playing in "Zero Delay" mode so the game is running marginally faster. 0.15%, to be exact. That's less than 1/7th of a single percent. I've also cropped out the colored border Genesis games tend to have.The sound has been tweaked slightly per FirebrandX's recommendations, I've enabled "YM2612 High Quality Mode" for uncompressed audio, and I have not engaged the ladder effect or lowpass filter. This will definitely sound different than a normal genesis because of the latter option. It's essentially listening closer to what the source sound would be like before the Genesis muffles it a bit.I also want to mention dithering for just a moment here. In Genesis games you'll often see lines of color alternating here and there, this is because on an old CRT tv the screen would be a bit blurry resulting in those colors bleeding together and becoming a mix of the two. This can also result in transparencies if used correctly. Unfortunately with a clean digital image this won't happen. The only way to enable these "extra colors" is to blur the digital image and this certainly would not be "pixel perfect" as is my goal. I like to think that we are now able to see how the artists tried to achieve their effect! You can always squint your eyes a bit if you want to try to replicate the blurriness!
01. [FPGA 4K] Fatal Labyrinth (Genesis) - Levels 01-04 WhiteKhakis 2023-04-05 | No Commentary / 4k60 (x9 Integer9 Upscale) / High Res Audio / Capable PlayerPlaylist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7IEN-HGlR47OU4Tbpv0lXhiKnHJ0JfTSThis is being played on an "Analogue Mega Sg" FPGA game console allowing for clear output in sound and audio! The video provided to YouTube is 4:4:4 and lossless! Details below in Technical Notes!----A Rogue-lite, on the Sega Genesis!? Well, considering the original, Rogue, came out in 1980 this shouldn't be too much a surprise.The game is turn-based, so baddies only move if you do so or take an action or skip your turn. Checkpoint every 5th floor you return to if you die.Quick break-down of the stats:L## = The floor you are on."TITLE" = Your character level giving you better health and stats.HP = Hit PointsF = Food. Go over 80 and you slow. Over 99 and you DIE.G = Gold. ONLY good for buying your tombstone if you DIE.PW = Power. Changes dynamically with weapons and other modifiers.AR = Armor. Same as above but armorwise.All items are randomly assigned a color and unknown until you use them.I'll share a few tricks next video!----Technical Notes:------TL;DR: YouTube was provided a perfect video so pixels are sharp and shapes are correct. Audio is "high resolution" compared to a Genesis system due to no processing constraints. Watch in 4k or 1440p if your computer can handle it.This video has suffered no lossy compression before reaching YouTube! It's a lossless video file with no chroma subsampling (4:4:4). Essentially, it's a perfect copy until YouTube works its magic which now makes it a 4:2:0 video with lossy compression, yes. However, the better the initial copy... the better!The video was originally captured in a 320 x 224 resolution, the native "square pixel" resolution of most NTSC Genesis games, and then integer upscaled x9 times to 2880 x 2016 with black borders added along the outside for a clean 4k display!This results in a "pixel perfect" output that is slightly wider than what you might have seen on your old CRT TV set! However, the pixels are sharp this way AND the art was designed in this "pixel perfect" resolution before being squashed to 4:3 back in the day. In short: Pixels are sharp AND circles are circles and squares are squares.Some games were a 256 x 224 resolution, originally. These will be uploaded in 1440p to fill the screen as much as possible and maintain a pixel perfect integer upscale. The native resolution is far too thin for what the game looked like on a CRT OR for the art, so the width is integer scaled a step higher to result in a 4:3 aspect ratio (256 x 7 for 1792 and 224 x 6 for 1344 = 1792 x 1344). These will look a little thinner than the 320 x 224 games I'm uploading, but the art will be crisp AND be how it looked in the old days!Some games switch between 320 x 224 resolution and 256 x 224 resolution (Sonic 2 special stage, Lion King Stampede level, etc.). I will generally upload levels containing large sections in 256 x 224 resolution as 1440p to maintain perfect integer upscales and preferred ratios. 320 x 224 does not change ratio between 4k or 1440p. You will know when the genesis is using 256 x 224 'cause the screen will shrink a little in these videos!About the Mega SG... It's a FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) based game system which to explain in layman's terms (BY a layman): It's a "chip" dense with circuits and stuff that can be programmed to use only so many in whatever ways necessary to replicate another "chip". Basically, if you can reverse engineer a genesis exactly, you can pretty much program this "chip" to behave like a genesis exactly. Which is what this is.I'm playing in "Zero Delay" mode so the game is running marginally faster. 0.15%, to be exact. That's less than 1/7th of a single percent. I've also cropped out the colored border Genesis games tend to have.The sound has been tweaked slightly per FirebrandX's recommendations, I've enabled "YM2612 High Quality Mode" for uncompressed audio, and I have not engaged the ladder effect or lowpass filter. This will definitely sound different than a normal genesis because of the latter option. It's essentially listening closer to what the source sound would be like before the Genesis muffles it a bit.I also want to mention dithering for just a moment here. In Genesis games you'll often see lines of color alternating here and there, this is because on an old CRT tv the screen would be a bit blurry resulting in those colors bleeding together and becoming a mix of the two. This can also result in transparencies if used correctly. Unfortunately with a clean digital image this won't happen. The only way to enable these "extra colors" is to blur the digital image and this certainly would not be "pixel perfect" as is my goal. I like to think that we are now able to see how the artists tried to achieve their effect! You can always squint your eyes a bit if you want to try to replicate the blurriness!
BONUS 01. [FPGA 4K] Fatal Labyrinth (Genesis) - Title Loop (No Demo!) WhiteKhakis 2023-04-05 | No Commentary / 4k60 (x9 Integer9 Upscale) / High Res Audio / Capable PlayerPlaylist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7IEN-HGlR47OU4Tbpv0lXhiKnHJ0JfTSThis is being played on an "Analogue Mega Sg" FPGA game console allowing for clear output in sound and audio! The video provided to YouTube is 4:4:4 and lossless! Details below in Technical Notes!----A Rogue-lite, on the Sega Genesis!? Well, considering the original, Rogue, came out in 1980 this shouldn't be too much a surprise.The game is turn-based, so baddies only move if you do so or take an action or skip your turn.Quick break-down of the stats:L## = The floor you are on."TITLE" = Your character level giving you better health and stats.HP = Hit PointsF = Food. Go over 80 and you slow. Over 99 and you DIE.G = Gold. ONLY good for buying your tombstone if you DIE.PW = Power. Changes dynamically with weapons and other modifiers.AR = Armor. Same as above but armorwise.All items are randomly assigned a color and unknown until you use them. So it's best to be a guinea pig early on!I'll share a few tricks next video!----Technical Notes:------TL;DR: YouTube was provided a perfect video so pixels are sharp and shapes are correct. Audio is "high resolution" compared to a Genesis system due to no processing constraints. Watch in 4k or 1440p if your computer can handle it.This video has suffered no lossy compression before reaching YouTube! It's a lossless video file with no chroma subsampling (4:4:4). Essentially, it's a perfect copy until YouTube works its magic which now makes it a 4:2:0 video with lossy compression, yes. However, the better the initial copy... the better!The video was originally captured in a 320 x 224 resolution, the native "square pixel" resolution of most NTSC Genesis games, and then integer upscaled x9 times to 2880 x 2016 with black borders added along the outside for a clean 4k display!This results in a "pixel perfect" output that is slightly wider than what you might have seen on your old CRT TV set! However, the pixels are sharp this way AND the art was designed in this "pixel perfect" resolution before being squashed to 4:3 back in the day. In short: Pixels are sharp AND circles are circles and squares are squares.Some games were a 256 x 224 resolution, originally. These will be uploaded in 1440p to fill the screen as much as possible and maintain a pixel perfect integer upscale. The native resolution is far too thin for what the game looked like on a CRT OR for the art, so the width is integer scaled a step higher to result in a 4:3 aspect ratio (256 x 7 for 1792 and 224 x 6 for 1344 = 1792 x 1344). These will look a little thinner than the 320 x 224 games I'm uploading, but the art will be crisp AND be how it looked in the old days!Some games switch between 320 x 224 resolution and 256 x 224 resolution (Sonic 2 special stage, Lion King Stampede level, etc.). I will generally upload levels containing large sections in 256 x 224 resolution as 1440p to maintain perfect integer upscales and preferred ratios. 320 x 224 does not change ratio between 4k or 1440p. You will know when the genesis is using 256 x 224 'cause the screen will shrink a little in these videos!About the Mega SG... It's a FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) based game system which to explain in layman's terms (BY a layman): It's a "chip" dense with circuits and stuff that can be programmed to use only so many in whatever ways necessary to replicate another "chip". Basically, if you can reverse engineer a genesis exactly, you can pretty much program this "chip" to behave like a genesis exactly. Which is what this is.I'm playing in "Zero Delay" mode so the game is running marginally faster. 0.15%, to be exact. That's less than 1/7th of a single percent. I've also cropped out the colored border Genesis games tend to have.The sound has been tweaked slightly per FirebrandX's recommendations, I've enabled "YM2612 High Quality Mode" for uncompressed audio, and I have not engaged the ladder effect or lowpass filter. This will definitely sound different than a normal genesis because of the latter option. It's essentially listening closer to what the source sound would be like before the Genesis muffles it a bit.I also want to mention dithering for just a moment here. In Genesis games you'll often see lines of color alternating here and there, this is because on an old CRT tv the screen would be a bit blurry resulting in those colors bleeding together and becoming a mix of the two. This can also result in transparencies if used correctly. Unfortunately with a clean digital image this won't happen. The only way to enable these "extra colors" is to blur the digital image and this certainly would not be "pixel perfect" as is my goal. I like to think that we are now able to see how the artists tried to achieve their effect! You can always squint your eyes a bit if you want to try to replicate the blurriness!
05. [FPGA 4K] Dinosaurs for Hire (Genesis) - Level Five WhiteKhakis 2023-04-03 | No Commentary / 4k60 (x9 Integer9 Upscale) / High Res Audio / Capable PlayerPlaylist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7IEN-HGlR47cFeVP5ZPojNHCpuwcSEUXFull Title: "Tom Mason's Dinosaurs for Hire"This is being played on an "Analogue Mega Sg" FPGA game console allowing for clear output in sound and audio! The video provided to YouTube is 4:4:4 and lossless! Details below in Technical Notes!----Originally a comic book, this game is about 3 wisecracking dinosaurs that are actually aliens who LOOK like small dinosaurs running a mercenary gig while wielding ginormous firearms.It's better not to worry about it.This is contra-esque run and gun with some wonky platforming and design choices - but - overall is a fine brainless time once you know what's coming.----Technical Notes:------TL;DR: YouTube was provided a perfect video so pixels are sharp and shapes are correct. Audio is "high resolution" compared to a Genesis system due to no processing constraints. Watch in 4k or 1440p if your computer can handle it.This video has suffered no lossy compression before reaching YouTube! It's a lossless video file with no chroma subsampling (4:4:4). Essentially, it's a perfect copy until YouTube works its magic which now makes it a 4:2:0 video with lossy compression, yes. However, the better the initial copy... the better!The video was originally captured in a 320 x 224 resolution, the native "square pixel" resolution of most NTSC Genesis games, and then integer upscaled x9 times to 2880 x 2016 with black borders added along the outside for a clean 4k display!This results in a "pixel perfect" output that is slightly wider than what you might have seen on your old CRT TV set! However, the pixels are sharp this way AND the art was designed in this "pixel perfect" resolution before being squashed to 4:3 back in the day. In short: Pixels are sharp AND circles are circles and squares are squares.Some games were a 256 x 224 resolution, originally. These will be uploaded in 1440p to fill the screen as much as possible and maintain a pixel perfect integer upscale. The native resolution is far too thin for what the game looked like on a CRT OR for the art, so the width is integer scaled a step higher to result in a 4:3 aspect ratio (256 x 7 for 1792 and 224 x 6 for 1344 = 1792 x 1344). These will look a little thinner than the 320 x 224 games I'm uploading, but the art will be crisp AND be how it looked in the old days!Some games switch between 320 x 224 resolution and 256 x 224 resolution (Sonic 2 special stage, Lion King Stampede level, etc.). I will generally upload levels containing large sections in 256 x 224 resolution as 1440p to maintain perfect integer upscales and preferred ratios. 320 x 224 does not change ratio between 4k or 1440p. You will know when the genesis is using 256 x 224 'cause the screen will shrink a little in these videos!About the Mega SG... It's a FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) based game system which to explain in layman's terms (BY a layman): It's a "chip" dense with circuits and stuff that can be programmed to use only so many in whatever ways necessary to replicate another "chip". Basically, if you can reverse engineer a genesis exactly, you can pretty much program this "chip" to behave like a genesis exactly. Which is what this is.I'm playing in "Zero Delay" mode so the game is running marginally faster. 0.15%, to be exact. That's less than 1/7th of a single percent. I've also cropped out the colored border Genesis games tend to have.The sound has been tweaked slightly per FirebrandX's recommendations, I've enabled "YM2612 High Quality Mode" for uncompressed audio, and I have not engaged the ladder effect or lowpass filter. This will definitely sound different than a normal genesis because of the latter option. It's essentially listening closer to what the source sound would be like before the Genesis muffles it a bit.I also want to mention dithering for just a moment here. In Genesis games you'll often see lines of color alternating here and there, this is because on an old CRT tv the screen would be a bit blurry resulting in those colors bleeding together and becoming a mix of the two. This can also result in transparencies if used correctly. Unfortunately with a clean digital image this won't happen. The only way to enable these "extra colors" is to blur the digital image and this certainly would not be "pixel perfect" as is my goal. I like to think that we are now able to see how the artists tried to achieve their effect! You can always squint your eyes a bit if you want to try to replicate the blurriness!
04. [FPGA 4K] Dinosaurs for Hire (Genesis) - Level Four WhiteKhakis 2023-03-31 | No Commentary / 4k60 (x9 Integer9 Upscale) / High Res Audio / Capable PlayerPlaylist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7IEN-HGlR47cFeVP5ZPojNHCpuwcSEUXFull Title: "Tom Mason's Dinosaurs for Hire"This is being played on an "Analogue Mega Sg" FPGA game console allowing for clear output in sound and audio! The video provided to YouTube is 4:4:4 and lossless! Details below in Technical Notes!----Originally a comic book, this game is about 3 wisecracking dinosaurs that are actually aliens who LOOK like small dinosaurs running a mercenary gig while wielding ginormous firearms.It's better not to worry about it.This is contra-esque run and gun with some wonky platforming and design choices - but - overall is a fine brainless time once you know what's coming.----Technical Notes:------TL;DR: YouTube was provided a perfect video so pixels are sharp and shapes are correct. Audio is "high resolution" compared to a Genesis system due to no processing constraints. Watch in 4k or 1440p if your computer can handle it.This video has suffered no lossy compression before reaching YouTube! It's a lossless video file with no chroma subsampling (4:4:4). Essentially, it's a perfect copy until YouTube works its magic which now makes it a 4:2:0 video with lossy compression, yes. However, the better the initial copy... the better!The video was originally captured in a 320 x 224 resolution, the native "square pixel" resolution of most NTSC Genesis games, and then integer upscaled x9 times to 2880 x 2016 with black borders added along the outside for a clean 4k display!This results in a "pixel perfect" output that is slightly wider than what you might have seen on your old CRT TV set! However, the pixels are sharp this way AND the art was designed in this "pixel perfect" resolution before being squashed to 4:3 back in the day. In short: Pixels are sharp AND circles are circles and squares are squares.Some games were a 256 x 224 resolution, originally. These will be uploaded in 1440p to fill the screen as much as possible and maintain a pixel perfect integer upscale. The native resolution is far too thin for what the game looked like on a CRT OR for the art, so the width is integer scaled a step higher to result in a 4:3 aspect ratio (256 x 7 for 1792 and 224 x 6 for 1344 = 1792 x 1344). These will look a little thinner than the 320 x 224 games I'm uploading, but the art will be crisp AND be how it looked in the old days!Some games switch between 320 x 224 resolution and 256 x 224 resolution (Sonic 2 special stage, Lion King Stampede level, etc.). I will generally upload levels containing large sections in 256 x 224 resolution as 1440p to maintain perfect integer upscales and preferred ratios. 320 x 224 does not change ratio between 4k or 1440p. You will know when the genesis is using 256 x 224 'cause the screen will shrink a little in these videos!About the Mega SG... It's a FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) based game system which to explain in layman's terms (BY a layman): It's a "chip" dense with circuits and stuff that can be programmed to use only so many in whatever ways necessary to replicate another "chip". Basically, if you can reverse engineer a genesis exactly, you can pretty much program this "chip" to behave like a genesis exactly. Which is what this is.I'm playing in "Zero Delay" mode so the game is running marginally faster. 0.15%, to be exact. That's less than 1/7th of a single percent. I've also cropped out the colored border Genesis games tend to have.The sound has been tweaked slightly per FirebrandX's recommendations, I've enabled "YM2612 High Quality Mode" for uncompressed audio, and I have not engaged the ladder effect or lowpass filter. This will definitely sound different than a normal genesis because of the latter option. It's essentially listening closer to what the source sound would be like before the Genesis muffles it a bit.I also want to mention dithering for just a moment here. In Genesis games you'll often see lines of color alternating here and there, this is because on an old CRT tv the screen would be a bit blurry resulting in those colors bleeding together and becoming a mix of the two. This can also result in transparencies if used correctly. Unfortunately with a clean digital image this won't happen. The only way to enable these "extra colors" is to blur the digital image and this certainly would not be "pixel perfect" as is my goal. I like to think that we are now able to see how the artists tried to achieve their effect! You can always squint your eyes a bit if you want to try to replicate the blurriness!
03. [FPGA 4K] Dinosaurs for Hire (Genesis) - Level Three WhiteKhakis 2023-03-29 | No Commentary / 4k60 (x9 Integer9 Upscale) / High Res Audio / Capable PlayerPlaylist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7IEN-HGlR47cFeVP5ZPojNHCpuwcSEUXFull Title: "Tom Mason's Dinosaurs for Hire"This is being played on an "Analogue Mega Sg" FPGA game console allowing for clear output in sound and audio! The video provided to YouTube is 4:4:4 and lossless! Details below in Technical Notes!----Originally a comic book, this game is about 3 wisecracking dinosaurs that are actually aliens who LOOK like small dinosaurs running a mercenary gig while wielding ginormous firearms.It's better not to worry about it.This is contra-esque run and gun with some wonky platforming and design choices - but - overall is a fine brainless time once you know what's coming.----Technical Notes:------TL;DR: YouTube was provided a perfect video so pixels are sharp and shapes are correct. Audio is "high resolution" compared to a Genesis system due to no processing constraints. Watch in 4k or 1440p if your computer can handle it.This video has suffered no lossy compression before reaching YouTube! It's a lossless video file with no chroma subsampling (4:4:4). Essentially, it's a perfect copy until YouTube works its magic which now makes it a 4:2:0 video with lossy compression, yes. However, the better the initial copy... the better!The video was originally captured in a 320 x 224 resolution, the native "square pixel" resolution of most NTSC Genesis games, and then integer upscaled x9 times to 2880 x 2016 with black borders added along the outside for a clean 4k display!This results in a "pixel perfect" output that is slightly wider than what you might have seen on your old CRT TV set! However, the pixels are sharp this way AND the art was designed in this "pixel perfect" resolution before being squashed to 4:3 back in the day. In short: Pixels are sharp AND circles are circles and squares are squares.Some games were a 256 x 224 resolution, originally. These will be uploaded in 1440p to fill the screen as much as possible and maintain a pixel perfect integer upscale. The native resolution is far too thin for what the game looked like on a CRT OR for the art, so the width is integer scaled a step higher to result in a 4:3 aspect ratio (256 x 7 for 1792 and 224 x 6 for 1344 = 1792 x 1344). These will look a little thinner than the 320 x 224 games I'm uploading, but the art will be crisp AND be how it looked in the old days!Some games switch between 320 x 224 resolution and 256 x 224 resolution (Sonic 2 special stage, Lion King Stampede level, etc.). I will generally upload levels containing large sections in 256 x 224 resolution as 1440p to maintain perfect integer upscales and preferred ratios. 320 x 224 does not change ratio between 4k or 1440p. You will know when the genesis is using 256 x 224 'cause the screen will shrink a little in these videos!About the Mega SG... It's a FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) based game system which to explain in layman's terms (BY a layman): It's a "chip" dense with circuits and stuff that can be programmed to use only so many in whatever ways necessary to replicate another "chip". Basically, if you can reverse engineer a genesis exactly, you can pretty much program this "chip" to behave like a genesis exactly. Which is what this is.I'm playing in "Zero Delay" mode so the game is running marginally faster. 0.15%, to be exact. That's less than 1/7th of a single percent. I've also cropped out the colored border Genesis games tend to have.The sound has been tweaked slightly per FirebrandX's recommendations, I've enabled "YM2612 High Quality Mode" for uncompressed audio, and I have not engaged the ladder effect or lowpass filter. This will definitely sound different than a normal genesis because of the latter option. It's essentially listening closer to what the source sound would be like before the Genesis muffles it a bit.I also want to mention dithering for just a moment here. In Genesis games you'll often see lines of color alternating here and there, this is because on an old CRT tv the screen would be a bit blurry resulting in those colors bleeding together and becoming a mix of the two. This can also result in transparencies if used correctly. Unfortunately with a clean digital image this won't happen. The only way to enable these "extra colors" is to blur the digital image and this certainly would not be "pixel perfect" as is my goal. I like to think that we are now able to see how the artists tried to achieve their effect! You can always squint your eyes a bit if you want to try to replicate the blurriness!
02. [FPGA 4K] Dinosaurs for Hire (Genesis) - Level Two WhiteKhakis 2023-03-27 | No Commentary / 4k60 (x9 Integer9 Upscale) / High Res Audio / Capable PlayerPlaylist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7IEN-HGlR47cFeVP5ZPojNHCpuwcSEUXFull Title: "Tom Mason's Dinosaurs for Hire"This is being played on an "Analogue Mega Sg" FPGA game console allowing for clear output in sound and audio! The video provided to YouTube is 4:4:4 and lossless! Details below in Technical Notes!----Originally a comic book, this game is about 3 wisecracking dinosaurs that are actually aliens who LOOK like small dinosaurs running a mercenary gig while wielding ginormous firearms.It's better not to worry about it.This is contra-esque run and gun with some wonky platforming and design choices - but - overall is a fine brainless time once you know what's coming.----Technical Notes:------TL;DR: YouTube was provided a perfect video so pixels are sharp and shapes are correct. Audio is "high resolution" compared to a Genesis system due to no processing constraints. Watch in 4k or 1440p if your computer can handle it.This video has suffered no lossy compression before reaching YouTube! It's a lossless video file with no chroma subsampling (4:4:4). Essentially, it's a perfect copy until YouTube works its magic which now makes it a 4:2:0 video with lossy compression, yes. However, the better the initial copy... the better!The video was originally captured in a 320 x 224 resolution, the native "square pixel" resolution of most NTSC Genesis games, and then integer upscaled x9 times to 2880 x 2016 with black borders added along the outside for a clean 4k display!This results in a "pixel perfect" output that is slightly wider than what you might have seen on your old CRT TV set! However, the pixels are sharp this way AND the art was designed in this "pixel perfect" resolution before being squashed to 4:3 back in the day. In short: Pixels are sharp AND circles are circles and squares are squares.Some games were a 256 x 224 resolution, originally. These will be uploaded in 1440p to fill the screen as much as possible and maintain a pixel perfect integer upscale. The native resolution is far too thin for what the game looked like on a CRT OR for the art, so the width is integer scaled a step higher to result in a 4:3 aspect ratio (256 x 7 for 1792 and 224 x 6 for 1344 = 1792 x 1344). These will look a little thinner than the 320 x 224 games I'm uploading, but the art will be crisp AND be how it looked in the old days!Some games switch between 320 x 224 resolution and 256 x 224 resolution (Sonic 2 special stage, Lion King Stampede level, etc.). I will generally upload levels containing large sections in 256 x 224 resolution as 1440p to maintain perfect integer upscales and preferred ratios. 320 x 224 does not change ratio between 4k or 1440p. You will know when the genesis is using 256 x 224 'cause the screen will shrink a little in these videos!About the Mega SG... It's a FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) based game system which to explain in layman's terms (BY a layman): It's a "chip" dense with circuits and stuff that can be programmed to use only so many in whatever ways necessary to replicate another "chip". Basically, if you can reverse engineer a genesis exactly, you can pretty much program this "chip" to behave like a genesis exactly. Which is what this is.I'm playing in "Zero Delay" mode so the game is running marginally faster. 0.15%, to be exact. That's less than 1/7th of a single percent. I've also cropped out the colored border Genesis games tend to have.The sound has been tweaked slightly per FirebrandX's recommendations, I've enabled "YM2612 High Quality Mode" for uncompressed audio, and I have not engaged the ladder effect or lowpass filter. This will definitely sound different than a normal genesis because of the latter option. It's essentially listening closer to what the source sound would be like before the Genesis muffles it a bit.I also want to mention dithering for just a moment here. In Genesis games you'll often see lines of color alternating here and there, this is because on an old CRT tv the screen would be a bit blurry resulting in those colors bleeding together and becoming a mix of the two. This can also result in transparencies if used correctly. Unfortunately with a clean digital image this won't happen. The only way to enable these "extra colors" is to blur the digital image and this certainly would not be "pixel perfect" as is my goal. I like to think that we are now able to see how the artists tried to achieve their effect! You can always squint your eyes a bit if you want to try to replicate the blurriness!
BONUS 01. [FPGA 4K] Dinosaurs for Hire (Genesis) - Title & Demo WhiteKhakis 2023-03-27 | No Commentary / 4k60 (x9 Integer9 Upscale) / High Res Audio / Capable PlayerPlaylist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7IEN-HGlR47cFeVP5ZPojNHCpuwcSEUXFull Title: "Tom Mason's Dinosaurs for Hire"***Yeah, there's only ONE demo.***This is being played on an "Analogue Mega Sg" FPGA game console allowing for clear output in sound and audio! The video provided to YouTube is 4:4:4 and lossless! Details below in Technical Notes!----Originally a comic book, this game is about 3 wisecracking dinosaurs that are actually aliens who LOOK like small dinosaurs running a mercenary gig while wielding ginormous firearms.It's better not to worry about it.This is contra-esque run and gun with some wonky platforming and design choices - but - overall is a fine brainless time once you know what's coming.----Technical Notes:------TL;DR: YouTube was provided a perfect video so pixels are sharp and shapes are correct. Audio is "high resolution" compared to a Genesis system due to no processing constraints. Watch in 4k or 1440p if your computer can handle it.This video has suffered no lossy compression before reaching YouTube! It's a lossless video file with no chroma subsampling (4:4:4). Essentially, it's a perfect copy until YouTube works its magic which now makes it a 4:2:0 video with lossy compression, yes. However, the better the initial copy... the better!The video was originally captured in a 320 x 224 resolution, the native "square pixel" resolution of most NTSC Genesis games, and then integer upscaled x9 times to 2880 x 2016 with black borders added along the outside for a clean 4k display!This results in a "pixel perfect" output that is slightly wider than what you might have seen on your old CRT TV set! However, the pixels are sharp this way AND the art was designed in this "pixel perfect" resolution before being squashed to 4:3 back in the day. In short: Pixels are sharp AND circles are circles and squares are squares.Some games were a 256 x 224 resolution, originally. These will be uploaded in 1440p to fill the screen as much as possible and maintain a pixel perfect integer upscale. The native resolution is far too thin for what the game looked like on a CRT OR for the art, so the width is integer scaled a step higher to result in a 4:3 aspect ratio (256 x 7 for 1792 and 224 x 6 for 1344 = 1792 x 1344). These will look a little thinner than the 320 x 224 games I'm uploading, but the art will be crisp AND be how it looked in the old days!Some games switch between 320 x 224 resolution and 256 x 224 resolution (Sonic 2 special stage, Lion King Stampede level, etc.). I will generally upload levels containing large sections in 256 x 224 resolution as 1440p to maintain perfect integer upscales and preferred ratios. 320 x 224 does not change ratio between 4k or 1440p. You will know when the genesis is using 256 x 224 'cause the screen will shrink a little in these videos!About the Mega SG... It's a FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) based game system which to explain in layman's terms (BY a layman): It's a "chip" dense with circuits and stuff that can be programmed to use only so many in whatever ways necessary to replicate another "chip". Basically, if you can reverse engineer a genesis exactly, you can pretty much program this "chip" to behave like a genesis exactly. Which is what this is.I'm playing in "Zero Delay" mode so the game is running marginally faster. 0.15%, to be exact. That's less than 1/7th of a single percent. I've also cropped out the colored border Genesis games tend to have.The sound has been tweaked slightly per FirebrandX's recommendations, I've enabled "YM2612 High Quality Mode" for uncompressed audio, and I have not engaged the ladder effect or lowpass filter. This will definitely sound different than a normal genesis because of the latter option. It's essentially listening closer to what the source sound would be like before the Genesis muffles it a bit.I also want to mention dithering for just a moment here. In Genesis games you'll often see lines of color alternating here and there, this is because on an old CRT tv the screen would be a bit blurry resulting in those colors bleeding together and becoming a mix of the two. This can also result in transparencies if used correctly. Unfortunately with a clean digital image this won't happen. The only way to enable these "extra colors" is to blur the digital image and this certainly would not be "pixel perfect" as is my goal. I like to think that we are now able to see how the artists tried to achieve their effect! You can always squint your eyes a bit if you want to try to replicate the blurriness!
BONUS 02. [FPGA 4K] Dinosaurs for Hire (Genesis) - Character Bios WhiteKhakis 2023-03-24 | No Commentary / 4k60 (x9 Integer9 Upscale) / High Res Audio / Capable PlayerPlaylist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7IEN-HGlR47cFeVP5ZPojNHCpuwcSEUXFull Title: "Tom Mason's Dinosaurs for Hire"This is being played on an "Analogue Mega Sg" FPGA game console allowing for clear output in sound and audio! The video provided to YouTube is 4:4:4 and lossless! Details below in Technical Notes!----Originally a comic book, this game is about 3 wisecracking dinosaurs that are actually aliens who LOOK like small dinosaurs running a mercenary gig while wielding ginormous firearms.It's better not to worry about it.This is contra-esque run and gun with some wonky platforming and design choices - but - overall is a fine brainless time once you know what's coming.----Technical Notes:------TL;DR: YouTube was provided a perfect video so pixels are sharp and shapes are correct. Audio is "high resolution" compared to a Genesis system due to no processing constraints. Watch in 4k or 1440p if your computer can handle it.This video has suffered no lossy compression before reaching YouTube! It's a lossless video file with no chroma subsampling (4:4:4). Essentially, it's a perfect copy until YouTube works its magic which now makes it a 4:2:0 video with lossy compression, yes. However, the better the initial copy... the better!The video was originally captured in a 320 x 224 resolution, the native "square pixel" resolution of most NTSC Genesis games, and then integer upscaled x9 times to 2880 x 2016 with black borders added along the outside for a clean 4k display!This results in a "pixel perfect" output that is slightly wider than what you might have seen on your old CRT TV set! However, the pixels are sharp this way AND the art was designed in this "pixel perfect" resolution before being squashed to 4:3 back in the day. In short: Pixels are sharp AND circles are circles and squares are squares.Some games were a 256 x 224 resolution, originally. These will be uploaded in 1440p to fill the screen as much as possible and maintain a pixel perfect integer upscale. The native resolution is far too thin for what the game looked like on a CRT OR for the art, so the width is integer scaled a step higher to result in a 4:3 aspect ratio (256 x 7 for 1792 and 224 x 6 for 1344 = 1792 x 1344). These will look a little thinner than the 320 x 224 games I'm uploading, but the art will be crisp AND be how it looked in the old days!Some games switch between 320 x 224 resolution and 256 x 224 resolution (Sonic 2 special stage, Lion King Stampede level, etc.). I will generally upload levels containing large sections in 256 x 224 resolution as 1440p to maintain perfect integer upscales and preferred ratios. 320 x 224 does not change ratio between 4k or 1440p. You will know when the genesis is using 256 x 224 'cause the screen will shrink a little in these videos!About the Mega SG... It's a FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) based game system which to explain in layman's terms (BY a layman): It's a "chip" dense with circuits and stuff that can be programmed to use only so many in whatever ways necessary to replicate another "chip". Basically, if you can reverse engineer a genesis exactly, you can pretty much program this "chip" to behave like a genesis exactly. Which is what this is.I'm playing in "Zero Delay" mode so the game is running marginally faster. 0.15%, to be exact. That's less than 1/7th of a single percent. I've also cropped out the colored border Genesis games tend to have.The sound has been tweaked slightly per FirebrandX's recommendations, I've enabled "YM2612 High Quality Mode" for uncompressed audio, and I have not engaged the ladder effect or lowpass filter. This will definitely sound different than a normal genesis because of the latter option. It's essentially listening closer to what the source sound would be like before the Genesis muffles it a bit.I also want to mention dithering for just a moment here. In Genesis games you'll often see lines of color alternating here and there, this is because on an old CRT tv the screen would be a bit blurry resulting in those colors bleeding together and becoming a mix of the two. This can also result in transparencies if used correctly. Unfortunately with a clean digital image this won't happen. The only way to enable these "extra colors" is to blur the digital image and this certainly would not be "pixel perfect" as is my goal. I like to think that we are now able to see how the artists tried to achieve their effect! You can always squint your eyes a bit if you want to try to replicate the blurriness!
01. [FPGA 4K] Dinosaurs for Hire (Genesis) - Level One WhiteKhakis 2023-03-24 | No Commentary / 4k60 (x9 Integer9 Upscale) / High Res Audio / Capable PlayerPlaylist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7IEN-HGlR47cFeVP5ZPojNHCpuwcSEUXFull Title: "Tom Mason's Dinosaurs for Hire"This is being played on an "Analogue Mega Sg" FPGA game console allowing for clear output in sound and audio! The video provided to YouTube is 4:4:4 and lossless! Details below in Technical Notes!----Originally a comic book, this game is about 3 wisecracking dinosaurs that are actually aliens who LOOK like small dinosaurs running a mercenary gig while wielding ginormous firearms.It's better not to worry about it.This is contra-esque run and gun with some wonky platforming and design choices - but - overall is a fine brainless time once you know what's coming.----Technical Notes:------TL;DR: YouTube was provided a perfect video so pixels are sharp and shapes are correct. Audio is "high resolution" compared to a Genesis system due to no processing constraints. Watch in 4k or 1440p if your computer can handle it.This video has suffered no lossy compression before reaching YouTube! It's a lossless video file with no chroma subsampling (4:4:4). Essentially, it's a perfect copy until YouTube works its magic which now makes it a 4:2:0 video with lossy compression, yes. However, the better the initial copy... the better!The video was originally captured in a 320 x 224 resolution, the native "square pixel" resolution of most NTSC Genesis games, and then integer upscaled x9 times to 2880 x 2016 with black borders added along the outside for a clean 4k display!This results in a "pixel perfect" output that is slightly wider than what you might have seen on your old CRT TV set! However, the pixels are sharp this way AND the art was designed in this "pixel perfect" resolution before being squashed to 4:3 back in the day. In short: Pixels are sharp AND circles are circles and squares are squares.Some games were a 256 x 224 resolution, originally. These will be uploaded in 1440p to fill the screen as much as possible and maintain a pixel perfect integer upscale. The native resolution is far too thin for what the game looked like on a CRT OR for the art, so the width is integer scaled a step higher to result in a 4:3 aspect ratio (256 x 7 for 1792 and 224 x 6 for 1344 = 1792 x 1344). These will look a little thinner than the 320 x 224 games I'm uploading, but the art will be crisp AND be how it looked in the old days!Some games switch between 320 x 224 resolution and 256 x 224 resolution (Sonic 2 special stage, Lion King Stampede level, etc.). I will generally upload levels containing large sections in 256 x 224 resolution as 1440p to maintain perfect integer upscales and preferred ratios. 320 x 224 does not change ratio between 4k or 1440p. You will know when the genesis is using 256 x 224 'cause the screen will shrink a little in these videos!About the Mega SG... It's a FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) based game system which to explain in layman's terms (BY a layman): It's a "chip" dense with circuits and stuff that can be programmed to use only so many in whatever ways necessary to replicate another "chip". Basically, if you can reverse engineer a genesis exactly, you can pretty much program this "chip" to behave like a genesis exactly. Which is what this is.I'm playing in "Zero Delay" mode so the game is running marginally faster. 0.15%, to be exact. That's less than 1/7th of a single percent. I've also cropped out the colored border Genesis games tend to have.The sound has been tweaked slightly per FirebrandX's recommendations, I've enabled "YM2612 High Quality Mode" for uncompressed audio, and I have not engaged the ladder effect or lowpass filter. This will definitely sound different than a normal genesis because of the latter option. It's essentially listening closer to what the source sound would be like before the Genesis muffles it a bit.I also want to mention dithering for just a moment here. In Genesis games you'll often see lines of color alternating here and there, this is because on an old CRT tv the screen would be a bit blurry resulting in those colors bleeding together and becoming a mix of the two. This can also result in transparencies if used correctly. Unfortunately with a clean digital image this won't happen. The only way to enable these "extra colors" is to blur the digital image and this certainly would not be "pixel perfect" as is my goal. I like to think that we are now able to see how the artists tried to achieve their effect! You can always squint your eyes a bit if you want to try to replicate the blurriness!
09. [FPGA 4K] Sub-Terrania (Genesis) - HARD Mode - Level Nine WhiteKhakis 2023-03-21 | No Commentary / 4k60 (x9 Integer9 Upscale) / High Res AudioPlaylist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7IEN-HGlR45plDi7TC7PeBUFKsd7fjxv***The nuclear item gives me infinite fuel so I take it more slowly here.***This is being played on an "Analogue Mega Sg" FPGA game console allowing for clear output in sound and audio! The video provided to YouTube is 4:4:4 and lossless! Details below in Technical Notes!----Touted as one of the hardest games on the Genesis, Sub-Terrania is an exploratory shooter where gravity is constantly pulling on your ship as you contend against various monstrosities and objectives!I'll be playing the game on Hard difficulty because it turns out that that was the intended experience. It has stronger gravity and inertia which actually affect your motion making it a much more bumpy ride than the other difficulties. When you're dragging things attached to your ship that you'll EXPLODE if the attached component knocks into a wall. Also your shields are weaker.It's one of those "learn what to do then do it all together in future runs" games. Good, tricky fun!----Technical Notes:------TL;DR: YouTube was provided a perfect video so pixels are sharp and shapes are correct. Audio is "high resolution" compared to a Genesis system due to no processing constraints. Watch in 4k or 1440p if your computer can handle it.This video has suffered no lossy compression before reaching YouTube! It's a lossless video file with no chroma subsampling (4:4:4). Essentially, it's a perfect copy until YouTube works its magic which now makes it a 4:2:0 video with lossy compression, yes. However, the better the initial copy... the better!The video was originally captured in a 320 x 224 resolution, the native "square pixel" resolution of most NTSC Genesis games, and then integer upscaled x9 times to 2880 x 2016 with black borders added along the outside for a clean 4k display!This results in a "pixel perfect" output that is slightly wider than what you might have seen on your old CRT TV set! However, the pixels are sharp this way AND the art was designed in this "pixel perfect" resolution before being squashed to 4:3 back in the day. In short: Pixels are sharp AND circles are circles and squares are squares.Some games were a 256 x 224 resolution, originally. These will be uploaded in 1440p to fill the screen as much as possible and maintain a pixel perfect integer upscale. The native resolution is far too thin for what the game looked like on a CRT OR for the art, so the width is integer scaled a step higher to result in a 4:3 aspect ratio (256 x 7 for 1792 and 224 x 6 for 1344 = 1792 x 1344). These will look a little thinner than the 320 x 224 games I'm uploading, but the art will be crisp AND be how it looked in the old days!Some games switch between 320 x 224 resolution and 256 x 224 resolution (Sonic 2 special stage, Lion King Stampede level, etc.). I will generally upload levels containing large sections in 256 x 224 resolution as 1440p to maintain perfect integer upscales and preferred ratios. 320 x 224 does not change ratio between 4k or 1440p. You will know when the genesis is using 256 x 224 'cause the screen will shrink a little in these videos!About the Mega SG... It's a FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) based game system which to explain in layman's terms (BY a layman): It's a "chip" dense with circuits and stuff that can be programmed to use only so many in whatever ways necessary to replicate another "chip". Basically, if you can reverse engineer a genesis exactly, you can pretty much program this "chip" to behave like a genesis exactly. Which is what this is.I'm playing in "Zero Delay" mode so the game is running marginally faster. 0.15%, to be exact. That's less than 1/7th of a single percent. I've also cropped out the colored border Genesis games tend to have.The sound has been tweaked slightly per FirebrandX's recommendations, I've enabled "YM2612 High Quality Mode" for uncompressed audio, and I have not engaged the ladder effect or lowpass filter. This will definitely sound different than a normal genesis because of the latter option. It's essentially listening closer to what the source sound would be like before the Genesis muffles it a bit.I also want to mention dithering for just a moment here. In Genesis games you'll often see lines of color alternating here and there, this is because on an old CRT tv the screen would be a bit blurry resulting in those colors bleeding together and becoming a mix of the two. This can also result in transparencies if used correctly. Unfortunately with a clean digital image this won't happen. The only way to enable these "extra colors" is to blur the digital image and this certainly would not be "pixel perfect" as is my goal. I like to think that we are now able to see how the artists tried to achieve their effect! You can always squint your eyes a bit if you want to try to replicate the blurriness!
08. [FPGA 4K] Sub-Terrania (Genesis) - HARD Mode - Level Eight WhiteKhakis 2023-03-19 | No Commentary / 4k60 (x9 Integer9 Upscale) / High Res AudioPlaylist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7IEN-HGlR45plDi7TC7PeBUFKsd7fjxv***There is no Mission Briefing!***This is being played on an "Analogue Mega Sg" FPGA game console allowing for clear output in sound and audio! The video provided to YouTube is 4:4:4 and lossless! Details below in Technical Notes!----Touted as one of the hardest games on the Genesis, Sub-Terrania is an exploratory shooter where gravity is constantly pulling on your ship as you contend against various monstrosities and objectives!I'll be playing the game on Hard difficulty because it turns out that that was the intended experience. It has stronger gravity and inertia which actually affect your motion making it a much more bumpy ride than the other difficulties. When you're dragging things attached to your ship that you'll EXPLODE if the attached component knocks into a wall. Also your shields are weaker.It's one of those "learn what to do then do it all together in future runs" games. Good, tricky fun!----Technical Notes:------TL;DR: YouTube was provided a perfect video so pixels are sharp and shapes are correct. Audio is "high resolution" compared to a Genesis system due to no processing constraints. Watch in 4k or 1440p if your computer can handle it.This video has suffered no lossy compression before reaching YouTube! It's a lossless video file with no chroma subsampling (4:4:4). Essentially, it's a perfect copy until YouTube works its magic which now makes it a 4:2:0 video with lossy compression, yes. However, the better the initial copy... the better!The video was originally captured in a 320 x 224 resolution, the native "square pixel" resolution of most NTSC Genesis games, and then integer upscaled x9 times to 2880 x 2016 with black borders added along the outside for a clean 4k display!This results in a "pixel perfect" output that is slightly wider than what you might have seen on your old CRT TV set! However, the pixels are sharp this way AND the art was designed in this "pixel perfect" resolution before being squashed to 4:3 back in the day. In short: Pixels are sharp AND circles are circles and squares are squares.Some games were a 256 x 224 resolution, originally. These will be uploaded in 1440p to fill the screen as much as possible and maintain a pixel perfect integer upscale. The native resolution is far too thin for what the game looked like on a CRT OR for the art, so the width is integer scaled a step higher to result in a 4:3 aspect ratio (256 x 7 for 1792 and 224 x 6 for 1344 = 1792 x 1344). These will look a little thinner than the 320 x 224 games I'm uploading, but the art will be crisp AND be how it looked in the old days!Some games switch between 320 x 224 resolution and 256 x 224 resolution (Sonic 2 special stage, Lion King Stampede level, etc.). I will generally upload levels containing large sections in 256 x 224 resolution as 1440p to maintain perfect integer upscales and preferred ratios. 320 x 224 does not change ratio between 4k or 1440p. You will know when the genesis is using 256 x 224 'cause the screen will shrink a little in these videos!About the Mega SG... It's a FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) based game system which to explain in layman's terms (BY a layman): It's a "chip" dense with circuits and stuff that can be programmed to use only so many in whatever ways necessary to replicate another "chip". Basically, if you can reverse engineer a genesis exactly, you can pretty much program this "chip" to behave like a genesis exactly. Which is what this is.I'm playing in "Zero Delay" mode so the game is running marginally faster. 0.15%, to be exact. That's less than 1/7th of a single percent. I've also cropped out the colored border Genesis games tend to have.The sound has been tweaked slightly per FirebrandX's recommendations, I've enabled "YM2612 High Quality Mode" for uncompressed audio, and I have not engaged the ladder effect or lowpass filter. This will definitely sound different than a normal genesis because of the latter option. It's essentially listening closer to what the source sound would be like before the Genesis muffles it a bit.I also want to mention dithering for just a moment here. In Genesis games you'll often see lines of color alternating here and there, this is because on an old CRT tv the screen would be a bit blurry resulting in those colors bleeding together and becoming a mix of the two. This can also result in transparencies if used correctly. Unfortunately with a clean digital image this won't happen. The only way to enable these "extra colors" is to blur the digital image and this certainly would not be "pixel perfect" as is my goal. I like to think that we are now able to see how the artists tried to achieve their effect! You can always squint your eyes a bit if you want to try to replicate the blurriness!
07. [FPGA 4K] Sub-Terrania (Genesis) - HARD Mode - Level Seven WhiteKhakis 2023-03-18 | No Commentary / 4k60 (x9 Integer9 Upscale) / High Res AudioPlaylist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7IEN-HGlR45plDi7TC7PeBUFKsd7fjxvThis is being played on an "Analogue Mega Sg" FPGA game console allowing for clear output in sound and audio! The video provided to YouTube is 4:4:4 and lossless! Details below in Technical Notes!----Touted as one of the hardest games on the Genesis, Sub-Terrania is an exploratory shooter where gravity is constantly pulling on your ship as you contend against various monstrosities and objectives!I'll be playing the game on Hard difficulty because it turns out that that was the intended experience. It has stronger gravity and inertia which actually affect your motion making it a much more bumpy ride than the other difficulties.There are a couple other minor changes with the difficulty but the main one I noticed was how when you're dragging things attached to your ship that you'll EXPLODE if the attached component knocks into a wall. Also your shields are weaker.It's one of those "learn what to do then do it all together in future runs" games. Good, tricky fun!----Technical Notes:------TL;DR: YouTube was provided a perfect video so pixels are sharp and shapes are correct. Audio is "high resolution" compared to a Genesis system due to no processing constraints. Watch in 4k or 1440p if your computer can handle it.This video has suffered no lossy compression before reaching YouTube! It's a lossless video file with no chroma subsampling (4:4:4). Essentially, it's a perfect copy until YouTube works its magic which now makes it a 4:2:0 video with lossy compression, yes. However, the better the initial copy... the better!The video was originally captured in a 320 x 224 resolution, the native "square pixel" resolution of most NTSC Genesis games, and then integer upscaled x9 times to 2880 x 2016 with black borders added along the outside for a clean 4k display!This results in a "pixel perfect" output that is slightly wider than what you might have seen on your old CRT TV set! However, the pixels are sharp this way AND the art was designed in this "pixel perfect" resolution before being squashed to 4:3 back in the day. In short: Pixels are sharp AND circles are circles and squares are squares.Some games were a 256 x 224 resolution, originally. These will be uploaded in 1440p to fill the screen as much as possible and maintain a pixel perfect integer upscale. The native resolution is far too thin for what the game looked like on a CRT OR for the art, so the width is integer scaled a step higher to result in a 4:3 aspect ratio (256 x 7 for 1792 and 224 x 6 for 1344 = 1792 x 1344). These will look a little thinner than the 320 x 224 games I'm uploading, but the art will be crisp AND be how it looked in the old days!Some games switch between 320 x 224 resolution and 256 x 224 resolution (Sonic 2 special stage, Lion King Stampede level, etc.). I will generally upload levels containing large sections in 256 x 224 resolution as 1440p to maintain perfect integer upscales and preferred ratios. 320 x 224 does not change ratio between 4k or 1440p. You will know when the genesis is using 256 x 224 'cause the screen will shrink a little in these videos!About the Mega SG... It's a FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) based game system which to explain in layman's terms (BY a layman): It's a "chip" dense with circuits and stuff that can be programmed to use only so many in whatever ways necessary to replicate another "chip". Basically, if you can reverse engineer a genesis exactly, you can pretty much program this "chip" to behave like a genesis exactly. Which is what this is.I'm playing in "Zero Delay" mode so the game is running marginally faster. 0.15%, to be exact. That's less than 1/7th of a single percent. I've also cropped out the colored border Genesis games tend to have.The sound has been tweaked slightly per FirebrandX's recommendations, I've enabled "YM2612 High Quality Mode" for uncompressed audio, and I have not engaged the ladder effect or lowpass filter. This will definitely sound different than a normal genesis because of the latter option. It's essentially listening closer to what the source sound would be like before the Genesis muffles it a bit.I also want to mention dithering for just a moment here. In Genesis games you'll often see lines of color alternating here and there, this is because on an old CRT tv the screen would be a bit blurry resulting in those colors bleeding together and becoming a mix of the two. This can also result in transparencies if used correctly. Unfortunately with a clean digital image this won't happen. The only way to enable these "extra colors" is to blur the digital image and this certainly would not be "pixel perfect" as is my goal. I like to think that we are now able to see how the artists tried to achieve their effect! You can always squint your eyes a bit if you want to try to replicate the blurriness!
06. [FPGA 4K] Sub-Terrania (Genesis) - HARD Mode - Level Six WhiteKhakis 2023-03-17 | No Commentary / 4k60 (x9 Integer9 Upscale) / High Res AudioPlaylist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7IEN-HGlR45plDi7TC7PeBUFKsd7fjxvThis is being played on an "Analogue Mega Sg" FPGA game console allowing for clear output in sound and audio! The video provided to YouTube is 4:4:4 and lossless! Details below in Technical Notes!----Touted as one of the hardest games on the Genesis, Sub-Terrania is an exploratory shooter where gravity is constantly pulling on your ship as you contend against various monstrosities and objectives!I'll be playing the game on Hard difficulty because it turns out that that was the intended experience. It has stronger gravity and inertia which actually affect your motion making it a much more bumpy ride than the other difficulties.There are a couple other minor changes with the difficulty but the main one I noticed was how when you're dragging things attached to your ship that you'll EXPLODE if the attached component knocks into a wall. Also your shields are weaker.It's one of those "learn what to do then do it all together in future runs" games. Good, tricky fun!----Technical Notes:------TL;DR: YouTube was provided a perfect video so pixels are sharp and shapes are correct. Audio is "high resolution" compared to a Genesis system due to no processing constraints. Watch in 4k or 1440p if your computer can handle it.This video has suffered no lossy compression before reaching YouTube! It's a lossless video file with no chroma subsampling (4:4:4). Essentially, it's a perfect copy until YouTube works its magic which now makes it a 4:2:0 video with lossy compression, yes. However, the better the initial copy... the better!The video was originally captured in a 320 x 224 resolution, the native "square pixel" resolution of most NTSC Genesis games, and then integer upscaled x9 times to 2880 x 2016 with black borders added along the outside for a clean 4k display!This results in a "pixel perfect" output that is slightly wider than what you might have seen on your old CRT TV set! However, the pixels are sharp this way AND the art was designed in this "pixel perfect" resolution before being squashed to 4:3 back in the day. In short: Pixels are sharp AND circles are circles and squares are squares.Some games were a 256 x 224 resolution, originally. These will be uploaded in 1440p to fill the screen as much as possible and maintain a pixel perfect integer upscale. The native resolution is far too thin for what the game looked like on a CRT OR for the art, so the width is integer scaled a step higher to result in a 4:3 aspect ratio (256 x 7 for 1792 and 224 x 6 for 1344 = 1792 x 1344). These will look a little thinner than the 320 x 224 games I'm uploading, but the art will be crisp AND be how it looked in the old days!Some games switch between 320 x 224 resolution and 256 x 224 resolution (Sonic 2 special stage, Lion King Stampede level, etc.). I will generally upload levels containing large sections in 256 x 224 resolution as 1440p to maintain perfect integer upscales and preferred ratios. 320 x 224 does not change ratio between 4k or 1440p. You will know when the genesis is using 256 x 224 'cause the screen will shrink a little in these videos!About the Mega SG... It's a FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) based game system which to explain in layman's terms (BY a layman): It's a "chip" dense with circuits and stuff that can be programmed to use only so many in whatever ways necessary to replicate another "chip". Basically, if you can reverse engineer a genesis exactly, you can pretty much program this "chip" to behave like a genesis exactly. Which is what this is.I'm playing in "Zero Delay" mode so the game is running marginally faster. 0.15%, to be exact. That's less than 1/7th of a single percent. I've also cropped out the colored border Genesis games tend to have.The sound has been tweaked slightly per FirebrandX's recommendations, I've enabled "YM2612 High Quality Mode" for uncompressed audio, and I have not engaged the ladder effect or lowpass filter. This will definitely sound different than a normal genesis because of the latter option. It's essentially listening closer to what the source sound would be like before the Genesis muffles it a bit.I also want to mention dithering for just a moment here. In Genesis games you'll often see lines of color alternating here and there, this is because on an old CRT tv the screen would be a bit blurry resulting in those colors bleeding together and becoming a mix of the two. This can also result in transparencies if used correctly. Unfortunately with a clean digital image this won't happen. The only way to enable these "extra colors" is to blur the digital image and this certainly would not be "pixel perfect" as is my goal. I like to think that we are now able to see how the artists tried to achieve their effect! You can always squint your eyes a bit if you want to try to replicate the blurriness!
05. [FPGA 4K] Sub-Terrania (Genesis) - HARD Mode - Level Five WhiteKhakis 2023-03-16 | No Commentary / 4k60 (x9 Integer9 Upscale) / High Res AudioPlaylist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7IEN-HGlR45plDi7TC7PeBUFKsd7fjxvThis is being played on an "Analogue Mega Sg" FPGA game console allowing for clear output in sound and audio! The video provided to YouTube is 4:4:4 and lossless! Details below in Technical Notes!----Touted as one of the hardest games on the Genesis, Sub-Terrania is an exploratory shooter where gravity is constantly pulling on your ship as you contend against various monstrosities and objectives!I'll be playing the game on Hard difficulty because it turns out that that was the intended experience. It has stronger gravity and inertia which actually affect your motion making it a much more bumpy ride than the other difficulties.There are a couple other minor changes with the difficulty but the main one I noticed was how when you're dragging things attached to your ship that you'll EXPLODE if the attached component knocks into a wall. Also your shields are weaker.It's one of those "learn what to do then do it all together in future runs" games. Good, tricky fun!----Technical Notes:------TL;DR: YouTube was provided a perfect video so pixels are sharp and shapes are correct. Audio is "high resolution" compared to a Genesis system due to no processing constraints. Watch in 4k or 1440p if your computer can handle it.This video has suffered no lossy compression before reaching YouTube! It's a lossless video file with no chroma subsampling (4:4:4). Essentially, it's a perfect copy until YouTube works its magic which now makes it a 4:2:0 video with lossy compression, yes. However, the better the initial copy... the better!The video was originally captured in a 320 x 224 resolution, the native "square pixel" resolution of most NTSC Genesis games, and then integer upscaled x9 times to 2880 x 2016 with black borders added along the outside for a clean 4k display!This results in a "pixel perfect" output that is slightly wider than what you might have seen on your old CRT TV set! However, the pixels are sharp this way AND the art was designed in this "pixel perfect" resolution before being squashed to 4:3 back in the day. In short: Pixels are sharp AND circles are circles and squares are squares.Some games were a 256 x 224 resolution, originally. These will be uploaded in 1440p to fill the screen as much as possible and maintain a pixel perfect integer upscale. The native resolution is far too thin for what the game looked like on a CRT OR for the art, so the width is integer scaled a step higher to result in a 4:3 aspect ratio (256 x 7 for 1792 and 224 x 6 for 1344 = 1792 x 1344). These will look a little thinner than the 320 x 224 games I'm uploading, but the art will be crisp AND be how it looked in the old days!Some games switch between 320 x 224 resolution and 256 x 224 resolution (Sonic 2 special stage, Lion King Stampede level, etc.). I will generally upload levels containing large sections in 256 x 224 resolution as 1440p to maintain perfect integer upscales and preferred ratios. 320 x 224 does not change ratio between 4k or 1440p. You will know when the genesis is using 256 x 224 'cause the screen will shrink a little in these videos!About the Mega SG... It's a FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) based game system which to explain in layman's terms (BY a layman): It's a "chip" dense with circuits and stuff that can be programmed to use only so many in whatever ways necessary to replicate another "chip". Basically, if you can reverse engineer a genesis exactly, you can pretty much program this "chip" to behave like a genesis exactly. Which is what this is.I'm playing in "Zero Delay" mode so the game is running marginally faster. 0.15%, to be exact. That's less than 1/7th of a single percent. I've also cropped out the colored border Genesis games tend to have.The sound has been tweaked slightly per FirebrandX's recommendations, I've enabled "YM2612 High Quality Mode" for uncompressed audio, and I have not engaged the ladder effect or lowpass filter. This will definitely sound different than a normal genesis because of the latter option. It's essentially listening closer to what the source sound would be like before the Genesis muffles it a bit.I also want to mention dithering for just a moment here. In Genesis games you'll often see lines of color alternating here and there, this is because on an old CRT tv the screen would be a bit blurry resulting in those colors bleeding together and becoming a mix of the two. This can also result in transparencies if used correctly. Unfortunately with a clean digital image this won't happen. The only way to enable these "extra colors" is to blur the digital image and this certainly would not be "pixel perfect" as is my goal. I like to think that we are now able to see how the artists tried to achieve their effect! You can always squint your eyes a bit if you want to try to replicate the blurriness!
04. [FPGA 4K] Sub-Terrania (Genesis) - HARD Mode - Level Four WhiteKhakis 2023-03-15 | No Commentary / 4k60 (x9 Integer9 Upscale) / High Res AudioPlaylist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7IEN-HGlR45plDi7TC7PeBUFKsd7fjxvThis is being played on an "Analogue Mega Sg" FPGA game console allowing for clear output in sound and audio! The video provided to YouTube is 4:4:4 and lossless! Details below in Technical Notes!----Touted as one of the hardest games on the Genesis, Sub-Terrania is an exploratory shooter where gravity is constantly pulling on your ship as you contend against various monstrosities and objectives!I'll be playing the game on Hard difficulty because it turns out that that was the intended experience. It has stronger gravity and inertia which actually affect your motion making it a much more bumpy ride than the other difficulties.There are a couple other minor changes with the difficulty but the main one I noticed was how when you're dragging things attached to your ship that you'll EXPLODE if the attached component knocks into a wall. Also your shields are weaker.It's one of those "learn what to do then do it all together in future runs" games. Good, tricky fun!----Technical Notes:------TL;DR: YouTube was provided a perfect video so pixels are sharp and shapes are correct. Audio is "high resolution" compared to a Genesis system due to no processing constraints. Watch in 4k or 1440p if your computer can handle it.This video has suffered no lossy compression before reaching YouTube! It's a lossless video file with no chroma subsampling (4:4:4). Essentially, it's a perfect copy until YouTube works its magic which now makes it a 4:2:0 video with lossy compression, yes. However, the better the initial copy... the better!The video was originally captured in a 320 x 224 resolution, the native "square pixel" resolution of most NTSC Genesis games, and then integer upscaled x9 times to 2880 x 2016 with black borders added along the outside for a clean 4k display!This results in a "pixel perfect" output that is slightly wider than what you might have seen on your old CRT TV set! However, the pixels are sharp this way AND the art was designed in this "pixel perfect" resolution before being squashed to 4:3 back in the day. In short: Pixels are sharp AND circles are circles and squares are squares.Some games were a 256 x 224 resolution, originally. These will be uploaded in 1440p to fill the screen as much as possible and maintain a pixel perfect integer upscale. The native resolution is far too thin for what the game looked like on a CRT OR for the art, so the width is integer scaled a step higher to result in a 4:3 aspect ratio (256 x 7 for 1792 and 224 x 6 for 1344 = 1792 x 1344). These will look a little thinner than the 320 x 224 games I'm uploading, but the art will be crisp AND be how it looked in the old days!Some games switch between 320 x 224 resolution and 256 x 224 resolution (Sonic 2 special stage, Lion King Stampede level, etc.). I will generally upload levels containing large sections in 256 x 224 resolution as 1440p to maintain perfect integer upscales and preferred ratios. 320 x 224 does not change ratio between 4k or 1440p. You will know when the genesis is using 256 x 224 'cause the screen will shrink a little in these videos!About the Mega SG... It's a FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) based game system which to explain in layman's terms (BY a layman): It's a "chip" dense with circuits and stuff that can be programmed to use only so many in whatever ways necessary to replicate another "chip". Basically, if you can reverse engineer a genesis exactly, you can pretty much program this "chip" to behave like a genesis exactly. Which is what this is.I'm playing in "Zero Delay" mode so the game is running marginally faster. 0.15%, to be exact. That's less than 1/7th of a single percent. I've also cropped out the colored border Genesis games tend to have.The sound has been tweaked slightly per FirebrandX's recommendations, I've enabled "YM2612 High Quality Mode" for uncompressed audio, and I have not engaged the ladder effect or lowpass filter. This will definitely sound different than a normal genesis because of the latter option. It's essentially listening closer to what the source sound would be like before the Genesis muffles it a bit.I also want to mention dithering for just a moment here. In Genesis games you'll often see lines of color alternating here and there, this is because on an old CRT tv the screen would be a bit blurry resulting in those colors bleeding together and becoming a mix of the two. This can also result in transparencies if used correctly. Unfortunately with a clean digital image this won't happen. The only way to enable these "extra colors" is to blur the digital image and this certainly would not be "pixel perfect" as is my goal. I like to think that we are now able to see how the artists tried to achieve their effect! You can always squint your eyes a bit if you want to try to replicate the blurriness!
03. [FPGA 4K] Sub-Terrania (Genesis) - HARD Mode - Level Three WhiteKhakis 2023-03-14 | No Commentary / 4k60 (x9 Integer9 Upscale) / High Res AudioPlaylist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7IEN-HGlR45plDi7TC7PeBUFKsd7fjxvThis is being played on an "Analogue Mega Sg" FPGA game console allowing for clear output in sound and audio! The video provided to YouTube is 4:4:4 and lossless! Details below in Technical Notes!----Touted as one of the hardest games on the Genesis, Sub-Terrania is an exploratory shooter where gravity is constantly pulling on your ship as you contend against various monstrosities and objectives!I'll be playing the game on Hard difficulty because it turns out that that was the intended experience. It has stronger gravity and inertia which actually affect your motion making it a much more bumpy ride than the other difficulties.There are a couple other minor changes with the difficulty but the main one I noticed was how when you're dragging things attached to your ship that you'll EXPLODE if the attached component knocks into a wall. Also your shields are weaker.It's one of those "learn what to do then do it all together in future runs" games. Good, tricky fun!----Technical Notes:------TL;DR: YouTube was provided a perfect video so pixels are sharp and shapes are correct. Audio is "high resolution" compared to a Genesis system due to no processing constraints. Watch in 4k or 1440p if your computer can handle it.This video has suffered no lossy compression before reaching YouTube! It's a lossless video file with no chroma subsampling (4:4:4). Essentially, it's a perfect copy until YouTube works its magic which now makes it a 4:2:0 video with lossy compression, yes. However, the better the initial copy... the better!The video was originally captured in a 320 x 224 resolution, the native "square pixel" resolution of most NTSC Genesis games, and then integer upscaled x9 times to 2880 x 2016 with black borders added along the outside for a clean 4k display!This results in a "pixel perfect" output that is slightly wider than what you might have seen on your old CRT TV set! However, the pixels are sharp this way AND the art was designed in this "pixel perfect" resolution before being squashed to 4:3 back in the day. In short: Pixels are sharp AND circles are circles and squares are squares.Some games were a 256 x 224 resolution, originally. These will be uploaded in 1440p to fill the screen as much as possible and maintain a pixel perfect integer upscale. The native resolution is far too thin for what the game looked like on a CRT OR for the art, so the width is integer scaled a step higher to result in a 4:3 aspect ratio (256 x 7 for 1792 and 224 x 6 for 1344 = 1792 x 1344). These will look a little thinner than the 320 x 224 games I'm uploading, but the art will be crisp AND be how it looked in the old days!Some games switch between 320 x 224 resolution and 256 x 224 resolution (Sonic 2 special stage, Lion King Stampede level, etc.). I will generally upload levels containing large sections in 256 x 224 resolution as 1440p to maintain perfect integer upscales and preferred ratios. 320 x 224 does not change ratio between 4k or 1440p. You will know when the genesis is using 256 x 224 'cause the screen will shrink a little in these videos!About the Mega SG... It's a FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) based game system which to explain in layman's terms (BY a layman): It's a "chip" dense with circuits and stuff that can be programmed to use only so many in whatever ways necessary to replicate another "chip". Basically, if you can reverse engineer a genesis exactly, you can pretty much program this "chip" to behave like a genesis exactly. Which is what this is.I'm playing in "Zero Delay" mode so the game is running marginally faster. 0.15%, to be exact. That's less than 1/7th of a single percent. I've also cropped out the colored border Genesis games tend to have.The sound has been tweaked slightly per FirebrandX's recommendations, I've enabled "YM2612 High Quality Mode" for uncompressed audio, and I have not engaged the ladder effect or lowpass filter. This will definitely sound different than a normal genesis because of the latter option. It's essentially listening closer to what the source sound would be like before the Genesis muffles it a bit.I also want to mention dithering for just a moment here. In Genesis games you'll often see lines of color alternating here and there, this is because on an old CRT tv the screen would be a bit blurry resulting in those colors bleeding together and becoming a mix of the two. This can also result in transparencies if used correctly. Unfortunately with a clean digital image this won't happen. The only way to enable these "extra colors" is to blur the digital image and this certainly would not be "pixel perfect" as is my goal. I like to think that we are now able to see how the artists tried to achieve their effect! You can always squint your eyes a bit if you want to try to replicate the blurriness!
02. [FPGA 4K] Sub-Terrania (Genesis) - HARD Mode - Level Two WhiteKhakis 2023-03-13 | No Commentary / 4k60 (x9 Integer9 Upscale) / High Res AudioPlaylist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7IEN-HGlR45plDi7TC7PeBUFKsd7fjxvThis is being played on an "Analogue Mega Sg" FPGA game console allowing for clear output in sound and audio! The video provided to YouTube is 4:4:4 and lossless! Details below in Technical Notes!----Touted as one of the hardest games on the Genesis, Sub-Terrania is an exploratory shooter where gravity is constantly pulling on your ship as you contend against various monstrosities and objectives!I'll be playing the game on Hard difficulty because it turns out that that was the intended experience. It has stronger gravity and inertia which actually affect your motion making it a much more bumpy ride than the other difficulties.There are a couple other minor changes with the difficulty but the main one I noticed was how when you're dragging things attached to your ship that you'll EXPLODE if the attached component knocks into a wall. Also your shields are weaker.It's one of those "learn what to do then do it all together in future runs" games. Good, tricky fun!----Technical Notes:------TL;DR: YouTube was provided a perfect video so pixels are sharp and shapes are correct. Audio is "high resolution" compared to a Genesis system due to no processing constraints. Watch in 4k or 1440p if your computer can handle it.This video has suffered no lossy compression before reaching YouTube! It's a lossless video file with no chroma subsampling (4:4:4). Essentially, it's a perfect copy until YouTube works its magic which now makes it a 4:2:0 video with lossy compression, yes. However, the better the initial copy... the better!The video was originally captured in a 320 x 224 resolution, the native "square pixel" resolution of most NTSC Genesis games, and then integer upscaled x9 times to 2880 x 2016 with black borders added along the outside for a clean 4k display!This results in a "pixel perfect" output that is slightly wider than what you might have seen on your old CRT TV set! However, the pixels are sharp this way AND the art was designed in this "pixel perfect" resolution before being squashed to 4:3 back in the day. In short: Pixels are sharp AND circles are circles and squares are squares.Some games were a 256 x 224 resolution, originally. These will be uploaded in 1440p to fill the screen as much as possible and maintain a pixel perfect integer upscale. The native resolution is far too thin for what the game looked like on a CRT OR for the art, so the width is integer scaled a step higher to result in a 4:3 aspect ratio (256 x 7 for 1792 and 224 x 6 for 1344 = 1792 x 1344). These will look a little thinner than the 320 x 224 games I'm uploading, but the art will be crisp AND be how it looked in the old days!Some games switch between 320 x 224 resolution and 256 x 224 resolution (Sonic 2 special stage, Lion King Stampede level, etc.). I will generally upload levels containing large sections in 256 x 224 resolution as 1440p to maintain perfect integer upscales and preferred ratios. 320 x 224 does not change ratio between 4k or 1440p. You will know when the genesis is using 256 x 224 'cause the screen will shrink a little in these videos!About the Mega SG... It's a FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) based game system which to explain in layman's terms (BY a layman): It's a "chip" dense with circuits and stuff that can be programmed to use only so many in whatever ways necessary to replicate another "chip". Basically, if you can reverse engineer a genesis exactly, you can pretty much program this "chip" to behave like a genesis exactly. Which is what this is.I'm playing in "Zero Delay" mode so the game is running marginally faster. 0.15%, to be exact. That's less than 1/7th of a single percent. I've also cropped out the colored border Genesis games tend to have.The sound has been tweaked slightly per FirebrandX's recommendations, I've enabled "YM2612 High Quality Mode" for uncompressed audio, and I have not engaged the ladder effect or lowpass filter. This will definitely sound different than a normal genesis because of the latter option. It's essentially listening closer to what the source sound would be like before the Genesis muffles it a bit.I also want to mention dithering for just a moment here. In Genesis games you'll often see lines of color alternating here and there, this is because on an old CRT tv the screen would be a bit blurry resulting in those colors bleeding together and becoming a mix of the two. This can also result in transparencies if used correctly. Unfortunately with a clean digital image this won't happen. The only way to enable these "extra colors" is to blur the digital image and this certainly would not be "pixel perfect" as is my goal. I like to think that we are now able to see how the artists tried to achieve their effect! You can always squint your eyes a bit if you want to try to replicate the blurriness!
01. [FPGA 4K] Sub-Terrania (Genesis) - HARD Mode - Level One WhiteKhakis 2023-03-12 | No Commentary / 4k60 (x9 Integer9 Upscale) / High Res AudioPlaylist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7IEN-HGlR45plDi7TC7PeBUFKsd7fjxvThis is being played on an "Analogue Mega Sg" FPGA game console allowing for clear output in sound and audio! The video provided to YouTube is 4:4:4 and lossless! Details below in Technical Notes!----Touted as one of the hardest games on the Genesis, Sub-Terrania is an exploratory shooter where gravity is constantly pulling on your ship as you contend against various monstrosities and objectives!I'll be playing the game on Hard difficulty because it turns out that that was the intended experience. It has stronger gravity and inertia which actually affect your motion making it a much more bumpy ride than the other difficulties.There are a couple other minor changes with the difficulty but the main one I noticed was how when you're dragging things attached to your ship that you'll EXPLODE if the attached component knocks into a wall. Also your shields are weaker.It's one of those "learn what to do then do it all together in future runs" games. Good, tricky fun!----Technical Notes:------TL;DR: YouTube was provided a perfect video so pixels are sharp and shapes are correct. Audio is "high resolution" compared to a Genesis system due to no processing constraints. Watch in 4k or 1440p if your computer can handle it.This video has suffered no lossy compression before reaching YouTube! It's a lossless video file with no chroma subsampling (4:4:4). Essentially, it's a perfect copy until YouTube works its magic which now makes it a 4:2:0 video with lossy compression, yes. However, the better the initial copy... the better!The video was originally captured in a 320 x 224 resolution, the native "square pixel" resolution of most NTSC Genesis games, and then integer upscaled x9 times to 2880 x 2016 with black borders added along the outside for a clean 4k display!This results in a "pixel perfect" output that is slightly wider than what you might have seen on your old CRT TV set! However, the pixels are sharp this way AND the art was designed in this "pixel perfect" resolution before being squashed to 4:3 back in the day. In short: Pixels are sharp AND circles are circles and squares are squares.Some games were a 256 x 224 resolution, originally. These will be uploaded in 1440p to fill the screen as much as possible and maintain a pixel perfect integer upscale. The native resolution is far too thin for what the game looked like on a CRT OR for the art, so the width is integer scaled a step higher to result in a 4:3 aspect ratio (256 x 7 for 1792 and 224 x 6 for 1344 = 1792 x 1344). These will look a little thinner than the 320 x 224 games I'm uploading, but the art will be crisp AND be how it looked in the old days!Some games switch between 320 x 224 resolution and 256 x 224 resolution (Sonic 2 special stage, Lion King Stampede level, etc.). I will generally upload levels containing large sections in 256 x 224 resolution as 1440p to maintain perfect integer upscales and preferred ratios. 320 x 224 does not change ratio between 4k or 1440p. You will know when the genesis is using 256 x 224 'cause the screen will shrink a little in these videos!About the Mega SG... It's a FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) based game system which to explain in layman's terms (BY a layman): It's a "chip" dense with circuits and stuff that can be programmed to use only so many in whatever ways necessary to replicate another "chip". Basically, if you can reverse engineer a genesis exactly, you can pretty much program this "chip" to behave like a genesis exactly. Which is what this is.I'm playing in "Zero Delay" mode so the game is running marginally faster. 0.15%, to be exact. That's less than 1/7th of a single percent. I've also cropped out the colored border Genesis games tend to have.The sound has been tweaked slightly per FirebrandX's recommendations, I've enabled "YM2612 High Quality Mode" for uncompressed audio, and I have not engaged the ladder effect or lowpass filter. This will definitely sound different than a normal genesis because of the latter option. It's essentially listening closer to what the source sound would be like before the Genesis muffles it a bit.I also want to mention dithering for just a moment here. In Genesis games you'll often see lines of color alternating here and there, this is because on an old CRT tv the screen would be a bit blurry resulting in those colors bleeding together and becoming a mix of the two. This can also result in transparencies if used correctly. Unfortunately with a clean digital image this won't happen. The only way to enable these "extra colors" is to blur the digital image and this certainly would not be "pixel perfect" as is my goal. I like to think that we are now able to see how the artists tried to achieve their effect! You can always squint your eyes a bit if you want to try to replicate the blurriness!
EXTRA 01. [FPGA 4K] Sub-Terrania (Genesis) - HARD Mode - Difficulty Differences in Gravity WhiteKhakis 2023-03-12 | No Commentary / 4k60 (x9 Integer9 Upscale) / High Res AudioPlaylist: youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7IEN-HGlR45plDi7TC7PeBUFKsd7fjxv***This video shows the differences in difficulties when it comes to thrust and momentum. You have the same amount of time in fuel for all difficulties, but the stronger gravity in hard makes it feel like you have less and is harder to manage. Not shown here is the max speed you can reach appears to be higher on harder difficulties. ALSO your ship takes longer to stop on its own.***This is being played on an "Analogue Mega Sg" FPGA game console allowing for clear output in sound and audio! The video provided to YouTube is 4:4:4 and lossless! Details below in Technical Notes!--------Technical Notes:------TL;DR: YouTube was provided a perfect video so pixels are sharp and shapes are correct. Audio is "high resolution" compared to a Genesis system due to no processing constraints. Watch in 4k or 1440p if your computer can handle it.This video has suffered no lossy compression before reaching YouTube! It's a lossless video file with no chroma subsampling (4:4:4). Essentially, it's a perfect copy until YouTube works its magic which now makes it a 4:2:0 video with lossy compression, yes. However, the better the initial copy... the better!The video was originally captured in a 320 x 224 resolution, the native "square pixel" resolution of most NTSC Genesis games, and then integer upscaled x9 times to 2880 x 2016 with black borders added along the outside for a clean 4k display!This results in a "pixel perfect" output that is slightly wider than what you might have seen on your old CRT TV set! However, the pixels are sharp this way AND the art was designed in this "pixel perfect" resolution before being squashed to 4:3 back in the day. In short: Pixels are sharp AND circles are circles and squares are squares.Some games were a 256 x 224 resolution, originally. These will be uploaded in 1440p to fill the screen as much as possible and maintain a pixel perfect integer upscale. The native resolution is far too thin for what the game looked like on a CRT OR for the art, so the width is integer scaled a step higher to result in a 4:3 aspect ratio (256 x 7 for 1792 and 224 x 6 for 1344 = 1792 x 1344). These will look a little thinner than the 320 x 224 games I'm uploading, but the art will be crisp AND be how it looked in the old days!Some games switch between 320 x 224 resolution and 256 x 224 resolution (Sonic 2 special stage, Lion King Stampede level, etc.). I will generally upload levels containing large sections in 256 x 224 resolution as 1440p to maintain perfect integer upscales and preferred ratios. 320 x 224 does not change ratio between 4k or 1440p. You will know when the genesis is using 256 x 224 'cause the screen will shrink a little in these videos!About the Mega SG... It's a FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) based game system which to explain in layman's terms (BY a layman): It's a "chip" dense with circuits and stuff that can be programmed to use only so many in whatever ways necessary to replicate another "chip". Basically, if you can reverse engineer a genesis exactly, you can pretty much program this "chip" to behave like a genesis exactly. Which is what this is.I'm playing in "Zero Delay" mode so the game is running marginally faster. 0.15%, to be exact. That's less than 1/7th of a single percent. I've also cropped out the colored border Genesis games tend to have.The sound has been tweaked slightly per FirebrandX's recommendations, I've enabled "YM2612 High Quality Mode" for uncompressed audio, and I have not engaged the ladder effect or lowpass filter. This will definitely sound different than a normal genesis because of the latter option. It's essentially listening closer to what the source sound would be like before the Genesis muffles it a bit.I also want to mention dithering for just a moment here. In Genesis games you'll often see lines of color alternating here and there, this is because on an old CRT tv the screen would be a bit blurry resulting in those colors bleeding together and becoming a mix of the two. This can also result in transparencies if used correctly. Unfortunately with a clean digital image this won't happen. The only way to enable these "extra colors" is to blur the digital image and this certainly would not be "pixel perfect" as is my goal. I like to think that we are now able to see how the artists tried to achieve their effect! You can always squint your eyes a bit if you want to try to replicate the blurriness!
