ring

Plasma Ring

@ring

nearly-stable torus, self-similar

  • solid he, nebulous they

I'm Ring ᐠ( ᐛ )ᐟ I strive to be your web sight's reliable provider of big scruffy guys getting bullied by ≥7-foot tall monster femboys


You will never guess where to find my art account! Hahahaha! My security is impenetrable! (it's @PlasmaRing)

log inask
ring
@ring
autumndidact
@autumndidact
dog
@dog

When I saw there was a PS1 port of an old PC visual novel I was looking into, I thought, "oh, I guess they must have redrawn the art at lower res but with more colours to fit the hardware". I wasn't prepared for them to have kept the high-res 640x400 source art intact?? They even touched it up with some new shading.

Left: PlayStation; right: FM Towns.

dog
@dog

Here's another example from dialogue scenes. Left: PlayStation, right: FM Towns.

dog
@dog

Oh right, I didn't explain why this was surprising

The high-res visual novel art you might have seen from 16-bit Japanese computer games usually comes from the PC-981, with the aesthetic heavily influenced by hardware limitations. Many PC-98 models were limited to 16 colours and had no hardware sprites, but it did default to high-resolution graphics - hence the many games with detailed, high-quality 640x400 spritework and the distinctive dithered style that tried to imply many more colours than the system was actually capable of rendering.2

The 32-bit console era, meanwhile, was the first time that detailed 15/24-bit colour artwork became feasible on consoles, and also the first time that consoles had enough RAM to render high-resolution 640x480 artwork... but this tended to be an either/or proposition. 640x480 2D art in high resolution consumes a lot of RAM, especially when there's any animation at all. As a result, the vast majority of games chose to redraw their art at a lower resolution but with much higher-detail colour. If I had to guess, I suppose lower-res art with better colour detail felt more futuristic and advanced in 1994.

Here's a few more representative examples - Saturn on the left, PC-98 on the right. That Silent Möbius game is an incredible outlier by having lower-colour but high-detail art instead of this kind of total redraw.

  1. The other two popular 16-bit Japanese PCs, FM Towns and X68000, were more niche platforms, but they also had very different hardware. They had much better support for fast-moving action games, so a lot of their exclusive software tended to look more like high-end 16-bit console games.

  2. What about the western PCs? DOS and Windows PCs were incredibly niche until Windows 95, so the vast majority of Japanese-developed software before that tended to be low-end single developer freeware/shareware stuff. The Mac did have a notable Japanese market, but Mac players enjoyed different kinds of games. It had very little overlap with the PC-98/FM Towns/X68000.

@ring shared with:
You must log in to comment.

in reply to @dog's post:

in reply to @dog's post:

modulusshift
@modulusshift

Really feels like 2D shouldn't be that hard when basic 3D was handled fairly well, but I suppose it makes sense that it's not that far ahead of the SNES's capabilities given the timeframe.

login to reply
dog
@dog

3D has the advantage of the fact that you can render the same models and textures at higher res. For 2D games, the RAM budget gets a lot tighter a lot faster. I think if you have to budget less detail and fewer frames but higher resolution, it was an easy choice to pick lower res but better detail.

login to reply
modulusshift
@modulusshift

oh this is probably the "NTSC doesn't use square pixels" problem, isn't it? NTSC CRT TVs have 11:10 pixels, slightly taller than wide, and so should be stretched by that amount for display on square pixel displays. Probably the FM Towns display used square pixels.

login to reply
dog
@dog

Other way around in this case, which makes it weirder! The PC-98, which it was drawn for, has non-square pixels. It was drawn for 640x400. The PS1 version runs at 640x480.

login to reply