32x - The Amazing undiscovered power

[dcware]

I'm posting this on behalf of BelPowerSlave, as It doesn't look like he's going to post here (he did on RGVS newsgroup).

'ello all,

Well, just got done converting, uploading and posting the 32X Demo Tape to the
site. You can view it in the 32X review(at the very bottom of the page):

http://www.whipassgaming.com/genesisreviews/32X.html

It's been encoded in Divx, so be sure you have the codec to play it. I managed
to shrink it down from 50 megs to about 32, so that's not bad at all. As for
the quality, wasn't really a whole lot I could do about that...

Major thanks go out to Daniel Crocker for helping me out on this one! Thanks
man!!!

[MegaDrive20XX]

Creepy, it's almost near N64's graphics...something out of "Turok 1"

[THATinkjar]

Quite impressive. Well worth the watch! Thanks for that.

[fishsandwich]

I'm downloading this now... has this been on the net before? It reminds me of one that I watched a while back with canyons and some footage of A.M.O.K.- a game that eventually made it to the Saturn. If it's the same, it IS mighty impressive. If it's not, I will so so deliciously happy (or as happy as one can get from footage from a dead console.)

[Vectorman0]

What an amazing video, and another example of how Sega was always too far ahead with what they were doing.

[Ed Oscuro]

What an amazing video, and another example of how Sega was always too far ahead with what they were doing.

Apparently Sega massively fail to capitalize on an apparently huge hardware lead, which isn't exactly praise-worthy. Perhaps they were on the forefront, but if you're going to deliver a 3D system you'd better know how to DO 3D.

Edit: Wait, after watching it, what was so special? Not very many polygons there in truth. There weren't any vehicles visible, just background geometry. Nice fly-throughs, but nothing gamelike visible.

[THATinkjar]

Wait, after watching it, what was so special? Not very many polygons there in truth. There weren't any vehicles visible, just background geometry. Nice fly-throughs, but nothing gamelike visible.

Well, I was thinking the same thing at first. Plug in some AI, gameplay etc... and watch those framerates tumble! But you have to remember, this hardware came at a time where that would have looked like Unreal Engine 3 :P

[Ed Oscuro]

Really? The original PlayStation was out since December '94, and we know how well that one handled 3D! For a really notable '95 game in 3D, there's Duke Nukem 3D - quite different from that flythrough. Next year you had Quake, though, and suddenly 32x graphics just didn't cut it at all. From that video, the 32x had good 2D graphics power but not nearly enough polygons. The effects were nice, but they had to do those all in software.

[Steven]

Ahhh Bel... tell him to join up and post here at DP! His presence would be a welcomed sight.

Let's get KKC and ScottH here too

[dcware]

Bel is actually already a member, but he hasn't posted since Janurary, and even that was his first most in many months.

[RetroYoungen]

Wow, that was really incredible, it did look almost N64 level. Pretty far beyond what I thought the 32X was capable of...

[Daniel Thomas]

The demo seemed to show better use of 3D than the Saturn did at the time. It's hard to tell how well those graphics would have held up in real games, but it's an impressive demo nontheless. Too bad Sega was so determined to self-destruct...

[THATinkjar]

Was that demo done in 1994?

[fishsandwich]

I think a lot of us in the Retro/hardcore VG community realize that the 32x had some (if not a lot) of untapped potential. The casual gamer who remembers the 32x most likely equates it with somewhat upgraded Genesis ports and the whole stigma of the 32x being an upgrade to bring the Genesis up to SNES standards.

The 32x obviously didin't like long enough to realize its true potential, or even part of it. Had it taken off in the marketplace, we would have seen a lot more games that really showed what it could do. Instead, we are left with video like this. The 32x was no PSone or Saturn, but it was a whole lot more powerful than it got credit for.

The 32x could run circles around the SNES when it came to pushing polygons, and its 3-D power was barely touched. Its dual processor/GPU/Genny CPU setup was hard to program, but developers would have eventually gotten a lot more out of it than we ever saw.

[segagamer4life]

cool stuff I will check this out when I get home from work today...

[Jive3D]

The shading effects in the video look great! Something similar to Silent Hill would have done well on that hardware.

[THATinkjar]

The shading effects in the video look great! Something similar to Silent Hill would have done well on that hardware.

Yeah, that house looked like something out of Silent Hill. And plenty of fog too... another great aspect of Silent Hill!

[Bratwurst]

The key thing 32X detractors seem to forget or omit is that it was sold under the guise of an affordable 150 dollar upgrade instead of say, shelling out 400-700 bucks for launch hardware of the upcoming next generation. Its only fault was bad timing.

I have always suspected the capabilities of the 32X hovered around the specs of a 486 PC. Having watched this demo before, I wouldn't doubt something like Terminal Velocity or even Duke3D would have been possible, although with some serious tweaking and prowess on the programmer's end.

[suppafly]

I agree with Bratwurst. That demo looks very similar to the "terminal velocity" games on PC

[sharp]

I'm not that impressed, but I'm not a big fan of this kind of demos. They are to boring for me, so I just skipped a bit through it.