HN user
Huh? Those are the original MIDI versions of the music, which is how Bobby Prince composed them on a Roland SC-55. There is no more authentic sound.
I doubt anyone in 1993 thought the OPL2 version of the music sounded better. General MIDI was mind-blowing in comparison.
Candid does not mean "secretive and very guarded", though. People misunderstand the meaning of candid camera and assume it means "secret camera" and so use it that way, but that hasn't reached a level of misuse to redefine the meaning of candid.
What does any of that have to do with the article, which is about the branding and logo of JR?
You're greatly misunderstanding that second link: that's the breakdown of what happens to collected municipal waste within each country (notice they all add up to 100% for each country). That says nothing about total amounts of plastic waste collected or recycled.
See Table 1 here and its sources:
https://circulareconomy.earth/publications/how-japan-is-usin...
Japan recycles about 24% of its used consumer plastics into new products, while the US recycles about 8%. That's NOT factoring in thermal recycling, which Japan is far better at than the US.
Yes, if the resulting energy is captured:
Japan burns about half of its collected plastic via thermal recycling (recovering the energy) and recycles about a third into new products.
The key point is that Japan recycles 85% of its plastic waste, which is excellent compared with a country like the US that recycles about 10%. And, the per capita plastic use in the US is far more than in Japan.
This whole point pops up on the internet so frequently because tourists go to Japan and see lots of individually packaged items in supermarkets and convenience stores. Yes, there is room for improvement there, but overall the situation is not as bad as many countries and probably doesn't deserve the attention it gets.
Japan is nowhere near the worst for plastic waste per capita, and it has very high recycling rates.
Rely more on statistics and less on personal observation.
You make it sound like he's some young'un, but Fabien has been programming since 1983.
If it's a hardware limitation, there are no exceptions. Which is it?
Don't you know - everyone's an expert because they saw a YouTube video about how modern pixel art isn't authentic...
Seriously, this game is a miracle, and the amount of love Ancient put into it is unlike anything we've ever seen for a modern commercial release on hardware that came out in 1988!
It certainly beats out a good portion of the games originally released on the Mega Drive.
Doesn't that mean it's not the hardware's color limitations, but rather how color is used by the artists?
There are plenty of gorgeous games on the Mega Drive in terms of color. 61 colors on screen at once is more than enough.
Are you referring to Earthion specifically or just making some grandiose comment about pixel art in the good old days?
What are "CRT bloom and blending"? Are you referring to artifacts caused by composite video output? That is not due to the CRT but rather the signal distortion. RGB output on a CRT will look pixel perfect and colors will not merge. I'd say most gamers using original hardware on CRTs these days are using RGB, so if anything, it reflects the current user trends if the Earthion designer did not use dithering (which he did, making this comment irrelevant).
I suspect the developers had enough foresight to not include text outside the display window.
The game makes good use of dithering throughout.
Pixel bleeding? Are you referring to color distortion caused by the use of composite video? Why would you expect to see that in a screenshot viewed on your LCD screen? You'd have to actually see the game output via composite from a Mega Drive to a CRT to see it (which you would, since the art uses dithering well).
This is one of the best-looking Mega Drive games released in a very long time, developed by the company responsible for games like Streets of Rage and Beyond Oasis.
Correction: Hideki Sato didn't directly design all Sega's consoles, but rather oversaw their development as head of the R&D department. He was only directly involved in designing the earlier consoles.
The Saturn hardware, for example, was designed by Kazuhiko Hamada and a team of about a dozen engineers who had previously made the System 32 arcade hardware.
In addition to his work leading Sega's R&D efforts, Sato should also be remembered as one of the primary reasons why Sega began investing more into arcade video game development in the 1970s.
Oops! Fixed.
In Rosen's last Sega-related interview with Keith Stuart for the book Mega Drive Collected Works, he disagrees with the Sega internal conflict narrative as presented in Console Wars and says it was just Sega of America CEO Tom Kalinske being unable to understand why certain decisions had to be made.
After Console Wars, he apparently stopped giving interviews because he didn't like that game historians were constantly getting the Sega story wrong.
And if you keep reading (at whatever speed), you get to the actual point of the article:
So I tried slowing down even more, and discovered something. I slowed to a pace that felt almost absurd, treating each sentence as though it might be a particularly important one. I gave each one maybe triple the usual time and attention, ignoring the fact that there are hundreds of pages to go.
Good to hear. Thanks for replying.
How does the PicoIDE compare with the ZuluIDE? Are they direct competitors or are there different use cases?
I've been on the fence about getting a ZuluIDE for a while because of the price and because I don't exactly need one... I'll wait and see how the PicoIDE is priced.
Sony of America essentially tried to do the same with the PlayStation.
SCE in Japan fought back and eventually positioned themselves within the company to be able to fire nearly all of the upper management in the US in order to promote their vision of the console.
It turned out no consumer in the US cared enough about the name, the size of the controller, or the color and look of the console to not buy it.
Thank you for posting this!
What an odd comment. Dragon Ball, which is absolutely huge in Japan, is an original creation of Akira Toriyama. I mean, the top-earning Japanese film of 2018 was Dragon Ball Super: Broly, which sold 3 million+ tickets in Japan. Dragon Ball became the basis for how Jump structured all of its shonen manga. Its impact on the industry is incalculable. You'll be hard-pressed to find a Japanese person under 50 who isn't familiar with Dragon Ball.
Dragon Quest, a video game series that was very popular in Japan in the 1980s, featured character art by Toriyama. I wouldn't exactly call Dragon Quest "Toriyama's work". And while Dragon Quest is very popular among a certain audience, it doesn't have nearly the reach and broad appeal of Dragon Ball.
Yes, the article is more about the (often incorrect) Western perception of the PC-98 than what it existed as in Japan.
A good source for such photos are the ads in old Japanese computer magazines, such as Micom Basic. Archive.org has the entire run (I think) from the 80s and 90s. Here's April 1985:
The Hitachi product site for this is still online (from 1995; Japanese):
https://www.hitachi.co.jp/New/cnews/9512/1201.html
It was intended as an in-car game console / GPS navigation combo unit.
One of the unique selling points was that it could use the Saturn hardware to create a 3D map simulation of a planned route that you could view in advance of going on a trip. So, you could take it in the house, watch the simulation, then put it in the car for the actual trip and use the GPS navigation.
PCem and 86box are focused on accurate hardware emulation.
There's a solution to all of your problems: kashikiri (private / reserved) onsen.
These are smaller, private onsen designed for families or couples (or, I suppose, the shy foreigner). They're fairly common.
Small correction: the example of "Mode-7 like effects" in Batman and Robin on the Mega Drive is not done in software (where "software" implies the CPU is drawing the pixels).
The Mega Drive's VDP is capable of both line scrolling and column scrolling, and the effect (commonly called "tilting") is a combination of line and column scrolling.
Tilting can be done via hardware on the VDP quite easily. Both line and column scrolling are easy to set up. One disadvantage is that a background can only be tilted to a certain degree before the illusion is broken (which makes it different from true Mode-7 rotation). Another disadvantage is that there's a bug in the VDP such that when both forms of scrolling are used concurrently, the leftmost column has garbage data. Most developers would hide this column with a black bar (as seen in Batman and Robin).
Some more examples can be seen towards the bottom here:
https://rasterscroll.com/mdgraphics/graphical-effects/tiltin...
The argument is that Sega's global success with the Genesis came from its products - not the marketing (despite what the marketers say). One piece of support for that is that the console succeeded against Nintendo in most territories, despite all being under different marketing leadership and following different strategies.
When the Sega of America marketers were put in charge of product development and stopped relying on Japanese products, they were unable to replicate their success. They followed questionable practices derived from the toy industry (from where CEO Tom Kalinske emerged), such as a heavy emphasis on expensive licensed titles over original franchises.