Top Tweets for #blastprocessing

** MegaDrive Transparency - Part 4 ** For a while I've been wanting to explore the magical Debug Register on the Sega Megadrive - this is my first play with it. Amongst other things you can affect the way layers and sprites are rendered to the screen. One interesting thing is you can blend the background into sprites and/or forground to create transparency effects. So in this version we have 4 ghosts, 3 colored ghosts and a Shadow Ghost (darker transparency) . This isn't superior to part 3 (software + S&H) in my view but its worth exploring as it has some benefits / drawbacks. Pros/Cons : - Pro : This affect is free on cpu . The whole demo runs at about 10 % cpu and all of that is the logic. The combining of the BG plane to Sprites is a hardware effect in this debug mode. It can go full screen without any impact on CPU. - Con : Unfortunately theres no overlapping transparency in this demo , eg two transparencies on top seeing through to the BG layer. It maybe possibly using forground then layering the sprites on top but I'm not optimistic. Palette layout is really important and its tricky to get it right. - Con : Very hard to create any outline (yet) as sprite layer gets completely AND masked with the background layer . So to make a solid white or black or any solid color on the sprites seems tricky. There is only one way i have thought of and its a massive effort - possibly will do at some stage. This leaves the ghosts monocromatic although each is 8 shades of their given color. - Con : Likely the biggest issue this one - reportedly it only runs correctly on about 70% of MDs, early models don't have the correct version of VDP for this effect. We have tried VA3 / VA4 and neither work correctly but VA6, MA5 , MD2 / Wondermega models we have tested all work correctly. So to include in a game this feature would require a select option / with fallback option. - Con : There is some garbage the vertical border areas, on my PVM this was pretty much cut out of view but on emulator it shows up as you can see. #SGDK #SegaGenesis #MegaDrive