Mode 5 colour limitations?

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kulor
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Re: Mode 5 colour limitations?

Post by kulor »

Oh hey people are talking about my thing!
lidnariq wrote: Sat Apr 30, 2022 11:28 am 1) It's much harder than using other video modes
2) Results will be lackluster
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.
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.
Well, I've been sharing this around on Discord anyway, so may as well...
Image
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
iNCEPTIONAL

Re: Mode 5 colour limitations?

Post by iNCEPTIONAL »

kulor wrote: Sat Apr 30, 2022 11:43 pm http://kulor.arnoldascher.com/shmup49.gif
I'm sorry, but the fact I've had to put up with so many people basically shutting down the very notion that Mode 5 would be worth using, only to see you post that--and it's gorgeous--just makes me even more angry at the completely dismissive attitude of some people in here, who it seems would basically cancel anything potentially awesome if they had their say.

Thank God I didn't just give up on the idea of using Mode 5 in a game, which I really could have done if I'd just bought into everything those certain people were saying without challenging their assertions that are clearly based on little other than seeing garbage and limited uses of Mode 5 from decades ago and simply not being able to look beyond that. >:-(

Thank God for people like you, who are actually inspiring because you think outside the box, try these new ideas, and challenge what's come before and push to do more! :-)
Last edited by iNCEPTIONAL on Sun May 01, 2022 6:54 am, edited 1 time in total.
iNCEPTIONAL

Re: Mode 5 colour limitations?

Post by iNCEPTIONAL »

By they way, how about this as an idea for a high-res high-colour Punch-Out!! style game: Use the main background layer in Mode 5 for the lovely high-res high-colour single-layer level and player graphics (just like on NES), and then use the high-res low-colour 2bpp layer for the opponents. Or you can flip it around if it makes more sense to have the background and player on the high-res low-colour background layer and the opponents on the high-res high-colour layer. Whatever makes more sense and gives the nicer look. And all the sprites would still be available to be used for God knows what else*. Or you could do the background using one high-res layer, the opponent using the other high-res layer, and the player using the sprites, so at least two out of the three major elements are in high-res and/or full colour.

I think that could be very cool if done well.

*Like maybe faking some in-between frames of animation, that, while being in low-res, would be hidden in among fast movements and the high-res frames, so you could get more and smoother animation, that blends between normal and high-res animation frames (tiles/sprites) for a still slightly better effect than less frames of animation with every frame being on low-res as on normal resolution SNES games.

Does that make sense? Like say the character has six frames of animation for a punch attack, then the key frames or every second frame could be high-res and the in-betweens or every alternate second frame could be low-res. Twice as many frames at an average of 1.5x the resolution.

Just a thought.

Edit: Just to clarify from below, the game still runs in high-res all the time overall (no resolution switching is involved), but the low-res sprites would be used for extra animation frames (like every other frame or whatever), which, when viewing all the frames and animation in sequence at 60ps, would be more like 1.5x the resolution of a normal SNES game rather than 2x the resolution (sorely on the character that's using them) but it offers the potential for far more animation frames to be used for every action and therefore smoother motion overall. 1.5x the res plus more animation (only the character that uses such a method. The rest of the game would always look high res visually as it should)--seems like a net win to me. :)
Last edited by iNCEPTIONAL on Sun May 01, 2022 8:30 am, edited 3 times in total.
calima
Posts: 1745
Joined: Tue Oct 06, 2015 10:16 am

Re: Mode 5 colour limitations?

Post by calima »

If you change the resolution or interlacing between frames, on some modern TVs that means a black screen for 1-2s.

...not sure why I bother.
iNCEPTIONAL

Re: Mode 5 colour limitations?

Post by iNCEPTIONAL »

calima wrote: Sun May 01, 2022 8:05 am If you change the resolution or interlacing between frames, on some modern TVs that means a black screen for 1-2s.

...not sure why I bother.
No, you didn't quite get what I meant. The game would always run in high res, but every second frame of animation for the player specifically/only would use the sprites rather than the high res background layer. So you get way more frames of animation yet still at an overall 1.5x resolution visually as the game plays away at 60fps. And, because a bunch of these sprites would be loaded into the game already to be instantly used as extra frames, which also means you wouldn't have to load in new tiles so often for the player's animation frames that use the background tiles either (only every second frame at max--although I have an idea for using a simple window/mask to have a whole bunch of these frames already in the background tile set and just move the background to that frame position too), I presume it would be a little less taxing on the old SNES processors too.

Does that make sense?

It's just a novel way to maybe use those all those spare sprites that doesn't mean just having obvious lower res sprites visible all the time.

I presume you were talking to me, right?
Last edited by iNCEPTIONAL on Sun May 01, 2022 8:25 am, edited 7 times in total.
calima
Posts: 1745
Joined: Tue Oct 06, 2015 10:16 am

Re: Mode 5 colour limitations?

Post by calima »

Yes, that would work.
iNCEPTIONAL

Re: Mode 5 colour limitations?

Post by iNCEPTIONAL »

calima wrote: Sun May 01, 2022 8:12 am Yes, that would work.
Coolio.
iNCEPTIONAL

Re: Mode 5 colour limitations?

Post by iNCEPTIONAL »

kulor wrote: Sat Apr 30, 2022 11:43 pm Oh hey people are talking about my thing!
lidnariq wrote: Sat Apr 30, 2022 11:28 am 1) It's much harder than using other video modes
2) Results will be lackluster
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.
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.
Well, I've been sharing this around on Discord anyway, so may as well...
Image
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
By the way, if you're doing a high-res vertical shmup, Mode 6 should absolutely be on your radar. It may only be one layer, but if you do an effect like this high-res and high-colour for one of your levels, I think it would look gorgeous:

https://rasterscroll.com/wp-content/upl ... SHA-02.mp4

https://rasterscroll.com/wp-content/upl ... a-2-02.mp4

https://youtu.be/_5127y1sw6A?t=189

https://youtu.be/w8wYdFLOvCE?t=1258

Ignore the extra foreground layer detail that use the second background layer on Genesis.

And, by God, it might be thee first use of Mode 6--I thought of it! LOL
Last edited by iNCEPTIONAL on Sun May 01, 2022 9:13 am, edited 1 time in total.
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dougeff
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Re: Mode 5 colour limitations?

Post by dougeff »

Joe wrote: Sat Apr 30, 2022 6:26 pm
rainwarrior wrote: Sat Apr 30, 2022 5:30 pmDougeff posted an experiment earlier today, which I thought was interesting. Basically trying to observe the quality of 4bpp vs 8bpp vs hires vs interlaced.
The "flatscreen with mode 5 + interlaced" photo is clearly a CRT... I don't doubt the results, but I would still like to see the correct photo.
Oh, I think you're right. I posted the wrong picture. I think this is the correct picture for Flatscreen Mode 5 + interlaced

https://twitter.com/nesdoug2/status/152 ... 99584?s=19
nesdoug.com -- blog/tutorial on programming for the NES
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dougeff
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Re: Mode 5 colour limitations?

Post by dougeff »

iNCEPTIONAL wrote: Mode 6 should absolutely be on your radar. It may only be one layer, but if you do an effect like this high-res and high-colour for one of your levels, I think it would look gorgeous:

...

And, by God, it might be thee first use of Mode 6--I thought of it! LOL
That effect can be done by loading new tiles to the VRAM every few frames, and could be done in any mode, and wouldn't require Offset Per Tile Modes.

As a programmer, I would prefer a mode with more layers.
nesdoug.com -- blog/tutorial on programming for the NES
Joe
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Re: Mode 5 colour limitations?

Post by Joe »

kulor wrote: Sat Apr 30, 2022 11:43 pmSomething 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.
That looks like the same distortion that appears when an adaptive deinterlacer decides two fields are not similar enough to be displayed together. You may see similar distortion on an HDTV, and it will vary from one TV to another.
iNCEPTIONAL

Re: Mode 5 colour limitations?

Post by iNCEPTIONAL »

dougeff wrote: Sun May 01, 2022 9:13 am
Joe wrote: Sat Apr 30, 2022 6:26 pm
rainwarrior wrote: Sat Apr 30, 2022 5:30 pmDougeff posted an experiment earlier today, which I thought was interesting. Basically trying to observe the quality of 4bpp vs 8bpp vs hires vs interlaced.
The "flatscreen with mode 5 + interlaced" photo is clearly a CRT... I don't doubt the results, but I would still like to see the correct photo.
Oh, I think you're right. I posted the wrong picture. I think this is the correct picture for Flatscreen Mode 5 + interlaced

https://twitter.com/nesdoug2/status/152 ... 99584?s=19
Basically, I was right about Mode 5 high-res high-colour being awesome, no matter the screen. :-P
iNCEPTIONAL

Re: Mode 5 colour limitations?

Post by iNCEPTIONAL »

Joe wrote: Sun May 01, 2022 9:19 am
kulor wrote: Sat Apr 30, 2022 11:43 pmSomething 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.
That looks like the same distortion that appears when an adaptive deinterlacer decides two fields are not similar enough to be displayed together. You may see similar distortion on an HDTV, and it will vary from one TV to another.
Isn't fixing this on such HDTVs possibly just a matter of turning on/off certain crappy display options/modes, much like turning off sh*tty "motion smoothing" kinda fixes everything in terms of not making movies look like rubbish handy-cam footage or some TV sitcom?

https://youtu.be/B_dE6HPIAJM

Or, as Tom Cruise puts it: https://youtu.be/1J0Dan0WaZk

My point being, is it REALLY the TVs, or is it morons who bought an HDTV because it's all high-res but didn't think to tweak some of the options to get the best out of it, so they've actually been watching movies in crap mode all this time and thinking they were sooo cool for shelling out a thousand bucks on the very latest 4K TV.

Also much like people who set their PC games to max settings and the highest possible resolution and 120fps, yet their game isn't even running at a steady framerate, so it's actually a stuttery mess jumping from 120fps to 96fps to 120fps to 112fps to 120fps again, which is worse than if they'd just locked it at a steady 60fps.

Just checking, because it would be real funny if all these complaints about SNES high-res games looking terrible on modern TVs and the like came down to a simple toggle or two in the HDTVs settings. LOL
iNCEPTIONAL

Re: Mode 5 colour limitations?

Post by iNCEPTIONAL »

dougeff wrote: Sun May 01, 2022 9:18 am
iNCEPTIONAL wrote: Mode 6 should absolutely be on your radar. It may only be one layer, but if you do an effect like this high-res and high-colour for one of your levels, I think it would look gorgeous:

...

And, by God, it might be thee first use of Mode 6--I thought of it! LOL
That effect can be done by loading new tiles to the VRAM every few frames, and could be done in any mode, and wouldn't require Offset Per Tile Modes.

As a programmer, I would prefer a mode with more layers.
Well, true, it can be faked with simple animated tiles, BUT there's clearly a downside to that method over doing it via actual hardware column scrolling (or there's likely just some particular column scrolling effects you can't really fake via the animated tile method) or else literally no one would ever bother using column scrolling--right?

So, I'm obviously talking about that time, those times, where it actually makes sense to use [high-re high-colour] column scrolling to its full capacity.

And it definitely can't be done in ANY of other Modes in TRUE HIGH-RES and high-colour: https://youtu.be/5SBEAZIfDAg?t=458

Maybe you could use it [along with many other possible ideas] like this, or some variation of, in some capacity in your vertical shmup for example: https://youtu.be/YMVNeMp9HX4?t=980 (maybe for an undulating high-res fleshy boss who flies horizontally back and forth across the screen).

And you could do some background stars like this using sprites so the rest of the screen never looks empty and the full effect is achieved (with your lovely HD giant undulating boss thing on top of simple sprite stars that will look fine in low res): https://youtu.be/DM9B36ZvH7M?t=425 (the entire space background of stars and all the ships and bullets, and even the HUD is done here with just the available sprites)

Is this going to turn into another one of those arguments where someone tries to convince me that now Mode 6 high-res column scrolling is worthless too and I just don't know anything and no one else ever used it for a reason and I haven't done it myself and I'm just an "ideas guy", so . . . >:-(
Joe
Posts: 650
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Re: Mode 5 colour limitations?

Post by Joe »

iNCEPTIONAL wrote: Sun May 01, 2022 9:32 amIsn't fixing this on such HDTVs possibly just a matter of turning on/off certain crappy display options/modes
You can't turn off the deinterlacer when the input is interlaced. And, at least in my experience, most TVs have no settings to control the deinterlacer.
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