Genesis Plus GX: sprite limit question

Libretro Cores
#1

Games such as Contra: Hard Corps, Gunstar Heroes and Ballz 3D seem to suffer mildly from fickering issues (same happens on real hardware) while with spire limit off option on GenesisPlus GX, everything becomes perfect.

However, I don’t know if any games would have issues with it permanently on, for example, do any titles take advantage of that limitation for a visual effect or feature? Generally, is there any known incompatibility whatsoever?

I believe that ekeeke is the person who would know best about this but I don’t want to bother him since this is not a bug report. Thanks in advance!

#2

I’ve never once turned it off, and in all my time of playing I haven’t seen anything that stood out. Though, I am curious now from a development perspective if this was ever exploited.

#3

I’ve never heard of anyone using sprite flicker for artistic effect on any platform. It tends to be a pretty ugly/glitchy affair, so I think it would be difficult to use it for anything other than what it is.

#4

turn that feature ON always, until you do see issues… solved.

1 Like
#5

Wait what? Isn’t that used to (for instance) hide sprites in like a gazillion NES games? Don’t think I’ve heard of it ever being used in the 16-bit era, though.

#6

What I mean is: it wasn’t “used” for anything AFAIK. It’s just a limitation of the hardware. A limited number of sprites can be present on a given scanline, and when that number is exceeded, sprites start to flicker.

#7

Sonic The Hedgehog title screen animation requires it.

4 Likes
#8

good catch! Yeah, this is a clever use for it:

q0TeJWk.png1003×768

1 Like
#9

Verified! Well then, time to live with flickering, not that fond of Sonic’s lower half.

#10

Holy shit I knew that didn’t look right! I just hadn’t gotten out my cartridge to compare lol.

There should really be a resource of dev-tricks like this for retro consoles somewhere online.