04. [FPGA 4K] The Flintstones (Genesis) - Hard - Dino Express
0No Commentary / Blind-ish Run / 4k60 (x9 Integer Upscale) / High Res Audio
Normal Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7IEN-HGlR456vo5OmPKFH4BW0DhDWgaa
Hard Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL7IEN-HGlR47zjySpdEtPM-sXVfR-ZVrA
I feel like "Hard" represents the true potential of this game with more enemies and challenge but bosses take overlong. "Normal" is good for a casual play but you get the bad ending!
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 land lossless! Details below in Technical Notes!
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Yabba-dabba-doo~! This here's a fairly average platformer by Taito. The Flintstone characters are lovingly rendered even if Fred has a terrifying "duck" animation. I love how he runs in mid-air for a moment so you can grab back on an edge you ran off of! Lots of collectables but really the black hearts are the most important since they increase your life meter. I like how the game transitions between a few playstyles while remaining simplistic and approachable!
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Technical Notes:
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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!