The art and engineering of Sega CD Silpheed

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iibobev about 8 hours ago 38 commentsRead Article on fabiensanglard.net

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jonhohle•about 8 hours ago

The Sega CD is my favorite console and I was fortunate enough to have one growing up. Silpheed was unlike anything else. Unlike most FMV games, Silpheed actually felt like controlling a movie. During the first level when laser blasts are tearing through the fleet gigantic ships filling the screen with debris, I could barely believe what I was seeing.

As the article points out, while it is an FMV game, it tries to fool you into thinking it’s a polygon based game. The Sega CD had no 3D capabilities at all (just 2D rotation and scale). But GameArts pulls off the FMV so convincingly, down to the aliasing, that it’s hard to understand (at least to my 12-year old self) how it could be anything other than 3D rendering.

It’s often panned as not the best shooter, but the gameplay was secondary to the experience. I don’t know how it would play for someone who didn’t experience it at the time, but it will always be one of my favorites on the system.

ndiddy•about 7 hours ago

Yeah Silpheed is a great example of designing a game around the strengths of its target hardware. Because they were able to focus the art design around what could be streamed at high quality off a 1x CD drive, the FMV works a lot better than it did in games like Night Trap and Wirehead that tried to shoehorn live action video into a console that wasn't capable of displaying it at a decent quality. The actual gameplay is similar to an early 1980s arcade game like Galaga, but I agree with you that the presentation makes it worth playing at least a few levels of Silpheed even now.

xutopia•about 7 hours ago

I remember when people would talk about a new game they hadn't yet tried and the first question was "How are the graphics?". They truly did amazing work back then to push the limits of systems so they could present things that the machine wasn't expressly built to accomplish.

Eric_WVGG•about 5 hours ago

The soundtrack is absolutely phenomenal. I pull it up on Youtube once a year or so just for kicks.

Silpheed by Sierra On-Line for the PC — ported from the Japanese PC-8801 — was similarly good, possibly the first game I played with a proper sound card. The MT-32 version blew my twelve-year-old mind.

montag•about 2 hours ago

Agreed :) lots here to play with: https://chiptune.app?q=silpheed

sillywalk•about 5 hours ago

> Silpheed by Sierra On-Line for the PC — ported from the Japanese PC-8801 — was similarly good, possibly the first game I played with a proper sound card.

I had a similar experience, as it came bundled[0] with the soundcard for my IBM PS/1 286, and it even had speech(!) during the introduction.

[0] https://pixelatedarcade.com/tech_attributes/overview/ibm-ps-...

glimshe•about 6 hours ago

I just saw a video of it. Impressive. Were the enemy ships hand drawn 3D plastered on sprites? Or was there some actual realtime 3D rendered by the CPU? The boss ship I saw looked like realtime 3D.

toast0•about 5 hours ago

There's no realtime 3D. This boss fight [1] looks super impressive, but the boss structure is FMV, your ship and bullets and stuff is all sprites overlaid on the FMV. (and the FMV is decoded to sprites too)

(Stated confidently to ensure a correction if I'm wrong)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMO_tdlUvnc

chromadon•about 4 hours ago

If you've never seen Overdrive 2 by Titan (a demo scene group), it's unbelievable what the MegaDrive can do stock.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWVmPtr9O0g

I'm reasonably familiar with the hardware, I've written some games from scratch and I still have absolutely no idea how they did most of it.

bantunes•about 8 hours ago

This was submitted by a bot :D I subscribe to Fabien's RSS and he must have changed something in the server because I got this post on my RSS reader (again, as it's an old post), and here it is submitted to HN (again)

fabiensanglard•about 4 hours ago

I manage my RSS by hand (I should really fix this) and update it when I am ready to publish something.

Someone emailed me to tell I had a typo in the URL of the Silpheed article. This must have unlocked the bot maybe?

fredoralive•about 6 hours ago

I think the article is sorta wrong about the sound setup, the Mega Drive I does have a sound input on the expansion port, and mixes it into its sound output. Otherwise stuff like RF cables wouldn't get Mega CD based audio (and you can do silly stuff like a Mega Drive II, which doesn't have a headphone port, with a Mega CD I).

I was going to say the patch cable setup was just a passive aid to take the Mega Drive I's minijack stereo output (the big DIN AV connector on the rear only does mono) to a more serious two RCA jack setup. But looking at a schematic to check, it does do more stuff, and apparently connecting the patch cable will reroute stuff so the sound mixing is done on the Mega CD side, not the Mega Drive side (early Mega Drive revisions are somewhat infamous for showing that Sega hadn’t quite mastered the dark arts of analogue sound circuitry).

(I would double check some of this, but my Mega Drive / Mega CD setup isn't to hand, and the CD drive is broken anyway, although I understand the JP/PAL piano tune on the logo screen is all from the Mega CD side?).

mikepavone•about 4 hours ago

So the problem with the Model 1 that the mixing cable is trying to solve is that the expansion port on that model has audio input pins, but no audio output pins. Now strictly speaking, this is sufficient if you just want to use the MD1's headphone jack (stereo) or A/V out (mono), but in addition to the analog audio circuitry not being amazing (though honestly the MD1 is much better than the MD2 here in general) it also imposes a fairly aggressive low-pass filter. This is rather undesirable for 44.1 kHz CDDA. As you note, the mixing cable allows the RCA outputs to be mixed on the CD hardware side which works around this issue.

On the MD2, they added audio output pins to the expansion port in addition to the existing audio input pins. This allows them to achieve the same effect with no mixing cable.

ndiddy•about 5 hours ago

The Sega CD manual says that the RCA jacks are for connecting the Sega CD to a stereo system or stereo TV. I guess they found that doing the sound mixing on the Sega CD made the output cleaner which would have been useful for people wanting to use it as a CD player instead of just for games. The mixing cable is necessary to use the RCA jacks on the Genesis 1 because the system does not have a sound OUTPUT on the expansion connector, only a sound INPUT. The Genesis 2 repurposed a couple of previously unused expansion pins as sound outputs, which let the model 2 Sega CD do the audio mixing without needing a patch cable.

bbminner•about 4 hours ago

https://youtu.be/IehwV2K60r8?is=WWZU3R1PMAQksHhj

How they fit the Sonic 3D intro onto a sega mega drive _cartridge_!

vikingerik•about 1 hour ago

Summary:

It's low resolution at only 256 x 80, stretched vertically to the screen size.

It's only 16 colors so only 4 bits/pixel.

That comes to 10kb per frame.

A variant of Huffman coding gets it to 3.52kb per frame.

It's at 15 fps and is 12.5 seconds in length.

15 x 12.5 x 3.52kb = 660kb, which fits in a 4mb cartridge.

There is dithering to give the appearance of more colors, and it's done in vertical stripes rather than checkerboards because that compresses better. Then at runtime, every other scanline is offset by 1 pixel, and in opposite directions every other frame, so the dithering blurs back together to give the appearance of many more colors.

pram•about 8 hours ago

Cool article, but Silpheed is a genuinely awful game. Just warning if you are tempted to play it after this lol

knodi123•about 3 hours ago

The DOS version has a special place in my heart. I memorized the opening text and thought it was an eerie and cool bit of original poetry, before learning much later that it was a quote from Shakespeare's _Julius Caesar_. I still remember my preferred weapon loadout.

Yeah, it doesn't hold up by today's standards, but it was stunning in its day.

bluescrn•about 7 hours ago

Somewhat enjoyed the (less-visually-impressive) PC version way back in the day, there weren't many good shoot-em-ups on a 286 PC that could barely scroll the screen, but Silpheed played fairly well on it, and IIRC it was one of the few games that supported the non-standard sound card on my parents IBM PS/1. Actually think it might have been bundled with that PS/1

sillywalk•about 2 hours ago

> one of the few games that supported the non-standard sound card on my parents IBM PS/1. Actually think it might have been bundled with that PS/1

It was.

https://pixelatedarcade.com/tech_attributes/overview/ibm-ps-...

mitthrowaway2•about 6 hours ago

I've replayed it hundreds of times. It's pretty fun. I got to the final boss but didn't win.

AdmiralAsshat•about 7 hours ago

Sounds like a great candidate to watch a LongPlay instead!

toast0•about 8 hours ago

I mean, the gameplay isn't amazing. But I wouldn't call it awful. I've played games that are a lot worse... many of which are less fun while also being much less visually appealing. IIRC the sound design for silpheed is good too?

jonhohle•about 6 hours ago

The sound design is amazing! Having the squadron announcing incoming threats on comms in full CD quality was also a unique and fresh experience. I’m sure Wing Commander and others did it earlier on PC, but for a console game it was very immersive. Seeing gigantic lasers take out huge ships and hearing the panic from the other pilots is fun, even if it plays out the same way every time.

7 of the audio tracks are CDDA audio as well. I seem to recall playing those in my discman at the time.

Eric_WVGG•about 5 hours ago

It’s a shmup, they can’t all be Ikaruga.

ihgfhkihh•about 6 hours ago

> I’ve played games that are a lot worse…

These things aren’t mutually exclusive. This can be an awful game (which it is) and not be the worst game ever made. And as with anything, it has its strong points too, just that as a complete package, it can’t be called a good game.

toast0•about 5 hours ago

If your scale has only good and awful, you miss nuance.

I don't think the same adjective should be used to describe both both Trolls on Treasure Island and Silpheed. :P

3lit3krew•about 7 hours ago

Agreed, the original is awful too.

flockonus•about 6 hours ago

> That was a departure from how I normally work since I did not write a single line of code. I will likely write something about my A.I framework (and opensource it) next month.

If the author is around, super curious how they got to enjoy their workflow here in a side project, working with AI. This kind of situation, to me, is often where the joy is gone.

fabiensanglard•about 4 hours ago

I have a writeup I want to publish about it.

- I felt like Tony Stark inverting Möbius strip to solve time-space navigation with AI.

- Any idea or gut feeling I had, I could verify very fast.

- I had to write a mini Genesis emulator to test the pipeline and it was very pleasant to direct the LLM to write it for me (with clean code and architecture).

actionfromafar•about 8 hours ago

Using the ASIC meant for bitmap rotation and font rendering in an almost MPEG like fashion. Super clever.