Interestingly, the Japanese version of Sonic, which came out a month after the North American version, featured an addition to this stage: a line scrolling sine wave ripple effect underwater. Sonic the Hedgehog in fact came out six months after Gaiares, so Gaiares may have served as inspiration for how the effect was realized in Sonic. The effect here is similar to the one in Gaiares-there is a layer of flashing wave sprites obscuring the CRAM dots. An additional nice point to this scene is the line scrolling that occurs underwater (scrolling along a sine wave pattern) to really give the impression of water.Īnother well-known example of the water effect is from Sonic the Hedgehog: The water in this scene from Sonic the Hedgehog is also created using a mid-frame palette swap. Notice the flashing wave sprites that obscure the top of the water-these are used to hide the CRAM dots. The palette swap occurs at the water line, and it gradually shifts up the screen each frame to give the appearance that the water is rising. Gaiares features a very impressive scene with rising water, shown here: The water in this scene from Gaiares is created using a mid-frame palette swap. This creates the illusion of partial transparency. The tiles themselves are not changing–just the color palette they reference.Īn interesting effect that can be done using palette swapping is to create water that covers only the bottom of the screen anything underwater uses a different palette, typically with a green or blue hue. It’s the same method used to animate the water in the background of the first stage of Sonic the Hedgehog, but done here at 60 fps with more colors. If you’re curious how the scrolling water effect works in Burning Force: it’s just palette animation, done by shifting palette colors each frame on a static background plane. The dots are not so noticeable at the horizon since there is so much animation already and the color of the CRAM dots matches the water, but they are quite jarring near the cockpit display. In the case of Burning Force, the developers did not attempt to hide the CRAM dots. Note that most emulators do not show these dots-the above video was taken from the emulator BlastEm. This is most obvious on the scanlines where two palettes are changed at once, near the cockpit displays. At each of these points, there are noticeable CRAM dots. The third point is just above the bottom cockpit display (just below the water). The second point is the horizon-where the sky meets the water. The first point is just below the cockpit display at the top of the screen (just above the sky). Now, re-watch the above video clip and try to identify where the palettes are changed by mentally aligning the diagram with the video. This palette is changed three times in a single frame, at the vertical positions where the colors change in the diagram. The leftmost 16 columns represent the first palette. The vertical position where the color changes on the diagram corresponds to the vertical position of the change on the display. A column with more than one color indicates a mid-frame color change. Each column represents an entry on a color palette.
If we map out the color palettes for each horizontal line of the display, we get this:Ī representation of the color palettes in the above Burning Force example. Let’s look at an example of mid-frame palette swapping from Burning Force: Colors are swapped mid-frame several times in this scene from Burning Force. However, sometimes CRAM dots were left as-is. Developers often obscured these dots using sprites, as we will see in some examples below.
The more colors written to CRAM at a time, the more CRAM dots will appear. Any time a color is written to CRAM while the screen is being actively rendered, that color will appear on the screen in a single pixel rather than the intended color. One of the tradeoffs to mid-frame palette swapping is that artifacts will often appear on the screen. This technique can be used to surpass the color limitations of the VDP, although it comes with tradeoffs. The process can be repeated more than once per frame. This raster effect results in one vertical section of the screen being drawn with one set of palettes, while another section is drawn with another set of palettes. Palette colors can be changed in CRAM while the VDP is in the middle of rendering a frame and then changed back at the end of the frame, a process known as mid-frame palette swapping. Return to Table of Contents Palette Swapping
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