So, to chime in a bit, ever since the start I've sorta been the mode 5 defender in the Discord. I actually originally started messing with SNES dev partially because there didn't seem to be a straight answer to whether it was 16 colors on-screen (which is a figure you commonly see people citing), or if it was like the other modes with 8x 16 color palettes (which, to be clear, is what it's capable of), so I had to mess with it myself and find out. I was pretty surprised at how nice it is, it's a little baffling to me that it wasn't used more frequently.
Based on what I've seen trying to use it so far, I don't believe it's harder to use than other video modes. DMA bandwidth isn't as much of a concern in my opinion, because honestly you're probably not dynamically DMAing that many tiles for background graphics anyway, and sprites always render at 256-wide, so the bandwidth you'd use for dynamic sprite DMA isn't affected. You could maybe make the case that, if you forced sprites to be interlaced, you could have sprites with twice the vertical resolution as usual, which would need more bandwidth, but that's a weird use case and not one that I've messed with. Might be cool though, but that obviously would take up more bandwidth and be harder to manage.
I also don't think VRAM is a concern, because, while it's true that you need 4x more VRAM for the same coverage for your graphics, you also lose out on a whole 4bpp layer's worth of VRAM consumption, since mode 5 trades a 4bpp layer for that extra horizontal crispness.
As for the results being lackluster, I don't believe so. Mode 5 is pretty gorgeous in my opinion. I've tested it on 3 different consumer CRTs: a 36" set, a ~12" set, and a 3" set, all via composite, and on all 3, mode 5 is noticeably more crisp. Obviously the improvement is more marginal on the 3" set compared to the larger ones, but it does still look nicer. It's also worth mentioning that any interlace artifacting or extra blur isn't a concern at all on a CRT like this. The image looks like it's just rendering at a higher resolution, as you would expect.
So why didn't more people use it back then, if it's so great? Well, the main thing that stands out to me is that all that extra crispness can only really be appreciated when the screen is either stationary or moving very slowly. In a lot of cases it doesn't really make sense to use a high-res mode like this during gameplay, with the screen scrolling around all quickly and preventing you from really taking in all that extra detail, when instead they could pick a lower-res mode with more layers for parallax, which you will definitely notice when things are moving around quickly. That's not to say the SNES couldn't move things around quickly in mode 5, it'd be just as easy as moving things around quickly in any other mode, it just wouldn't really be a worthwhile use of the mode.
Well, I've been sharing this around on Discord anyway, so may as well...rainwarrior wrote: ↑Sat Apr 30, 2022 5:30 pm Did Kulor ever post video or screenshots of the mode 5 thing? I'm curious what it looked like. Though, from the description it just sounded like he wanted to make use of it in one level just for the sake of trying it out.
All the assets are placeholders that are stolen from other games, aside from the ship, which was expertly drawn by Picto. Something to note, the emulator I use sometimes doesn't draw both fields correctly, so you get these weird distortion glitch effects as it scrolls sometimes, which doesn't happen on real hardware. The reason I haven't been posting about this on here yet is because it's still in a really early state, and I don't want people getting all excited and talking my project up before it's ready to actually show off, which already happened on this forum once before. But basically, one of the core ideas behind this project is to kinda show off some novel uses of the less-used graphics modes on the SNES. I've got ideas for mode 5, mode 4, mode 0, and of course mode 7 (not less-used, but obligatory). For a level where you're flying through space with stuff scrolling by slowly in the distance, mode 5 works perfectly. I'm also probably going to be using it for various cutscene-type things.
Most of the engine coding is done, but I'm just some dude who's never coded an SNES game before, doing this in my spare time while working a 9-5 trying to pay the bills, so it may be a moment before I can really show this thing off.
EDIT: Image doesn't seem to want to embed on mobile, so here's a direct link: http://kulor.arnoldascher.com/shmup49.gif