The art and engineering of Sega CD Silpheed
The 90's was a decade of considerable improvement in the world of video-game consoles [1] . Each new model brought advanced processing power and better graphics without compromise.
The mid-90s emergence of CD-ROM drives however was an oddity. While the 640 MiB storage was 320x a cartridge capacity [2] , the access time (800ms [3] ) and bandwidth (single-speed 150 KiB/s) were an eye-watering 4,000,000x and 35x slower.
The Mega-CD was Sega's idea to bring CD-ROM to its Genesis console. Nearly 200 [4] titles were produced for the platform. A few great games like Sonic CD , Snatcher , Final Fight CD , and RPGs came out. But an endless series of titles relying heavily on Full Motion Video (FMV) gave Sega's add-on an infamous reputation ( Night Trap , Prize Fighter , Slam City , Corpse Killer , Supreme Warrior , WireHead , and A/X-101 ).
And then, there is Silpheed . Armed with exquisite artistic taste and an engine capable of jaw-dropping animation, it made the press go wild [5] [6] . Players pondered what was real-time 3D and what was pre-calculated [7] . It received praises which, to this day, persist [8] [9] .
For those still unimpressed, keep in mind these near-fullscreen cutscenes run on a 12.5MHz m68k CPU, use 16 colors, and consume 150 KiB/s. With 16-bit 16kHz music, the 15fps video stream was left with a mere 8 KiB per frame.
I spent the past two weeks reverse engineering the FMV format in my spare time. That was a departure from how I normally work since I did not write a single line of code. I will likely write something about my A.I framework (and opensource it) next month. But I can already tell this is an overall pleasant way to work.