Thanks so much for the directions, with no ZX presence where I live it's hard to gauge where's a good place to go. Tools too, awesome.

Thank you for the information, so such modes were only for a small number of EGA card owners. My buddy's first EGA card wasn't likely 256k as parts were quite expensive back then for a 'special' card, we did go halfsies on a Gravis Ultrasound since PC squeeker sucked.

I did come across the high res EGA stuff and it was a little spotty in usage which is most likely from a lack of card memory in most cases. I was interested since high contrast color dither looks much better at 640 than 320. This form of high res pixel art wasn't used much outside of Japan and most of the better examples were NSFW.
http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/timequest/screenshots
http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/spellcasting-101-sorcerers-get-all-the-girls/screenshots

I see also in that thread some mentioning of the Amstrad CPC which I too found similar in color palette contrast to EGA which is also like Master System pixel art as well imo.

Well smoother scrolling and faster sprite blitting do take priority in action games so I can only concur with the choice to get the fastest performance out of the hardware that most PC users had.

Yeah I thought Gods was quite impressive too, very nice 16 color work. I think it was a progression practice to support both standards until VGA took hold, I think the same thing was done in Rastan as well with a switch to a more balanced but still 16 color palette for VGA cards.
http://www.mobygames.com/game/dos/rastan/screenshots

Thanks for the compliment, I think I'm getting better but I still struggle with shading depth. I'll see what I can do about a full mockup but best not to hold your breath since this EGA experimenting was mostly an offshoot of a larger research into first person perspective games during the 8-bit to 16-bit era which was mostly 2D in setup.

I like the subtle scanlines and grid filter options but the hard black lines don't look great with low resolution graphics. The circular pixel look is kind of neat, maybe a more soft subtle version of that would be good.

It looks like you can only change one of 2 things which is the TV used or the video output of your Mega Drive to get rid of the bad pixel visuals.

Consider getting a SD-TV for your Dad's pad, or more specifically a high end model with a quality tube. With flat screens all the rage most people are getting rid of them for low prices or free which is what I paid for the 32" Trinitron I use for my older consoles. This gets you out of the more expensive options everybody has already mentioned.

Regardless of display used higher quality video output is always good since it cuts down on the picture noise. If you have the Model 1 Mega Drive they have RGB SCART cables that will clean up the picture quite a bit. Here in the west we can patch SCART to work on our TVs but its way more expensive to get it to do RGB output that popular mods settle for S-video and Component outputs instead. So if you have native SCART for heavens sake use it.

Still I should ask what does the output look like on your Mega Drive, how many pins on the DIN end? Over here our Model 2 Genesis removed the superior DIN connector that offered C64/others monitor support. More noise and rainbow bands in the second revision I'm afraid.

Upscalers are quite good from what I've seen and the SLG 3000 looks interesting but I'm still on the fence about scanlines inherent value, technically its authentic but I quite like seeing the pixels au naturel.

Well that's all I can say, hope it helps.

yeah I can imagine that, sounds painful, and is like a masochistic thing to do in the current era although the restrictions give you strict directions and choices, and is a challenge to be had (albeit it a tad masochistic )

It depends, for a pixel artists its like Hell but to a programmer its Heaven since its pure code and they do all tasks themselves with complete control unlike their jobs in real life. 6502 machine language is hard but any coder worth his weight should have a strong grasp of assembler or similar languages since its all about the fundamentals with retroware.
Don't get me wrong since there are a wealth of tools made by some very nice and talented people but beyond the basics or typical defaults of the 2600 is where you have to do a lot research.

and the Odyssey2 sounds interesting to some degree, wouldn't mind seeing the screen space restrictions and character set, see what's possible, it fascinates me what imagination ascii level graphics and below can evoke in the right context.

Thank you to atari2600land for finding this and posting it for me to see.

Not quite as much variety as ASCII but more specific in shapes. There's also a line drawing unit I don't quite understand yet but I see how it works.

yeah, quite a few interesting projects, including the evolving self-learning automatons like Asimo and a few other creepy ones 

Yeah the "androids" are the worst since maybe 1% look approachable.

yeah definetly has more of a western feel, and a darker type of game that wasn't too common on the console, but I've noticed dark mature style games were more common on the Megadrive/genesis, probably in part due to Nintendo's strict attitude toward game violence and their power as a censor, I also find funny that games that got approved by Nintendo quite often got scrutinized and censored in the US, like pentagrams being removed, blasphemy being altered, and an example fresh in my mind Shadowrun the morgue was called the chop shop and it was censored in the US and just called the morgue quite sure there were a few other examples in that game alone, also that game was developed here in Australia by Beam software who later went on to became Melbourne house, apparently the keyword acquiring dialogue system wasn't something that had been done at the time.

Nintendo had some bizarre puritan ideals back in the day that is for sure. What makes me laugh most is that more often than not you're fighting evil not joining it EG. Doom,Splatterhouse, Devil World.
Interesting to hear about Australian game development since it doesn't come up often.

and Dark saviour has a much more anime feel, like mature 80s anime, and the gritty scifi theme wasn't western persay, but the character's were less SD LandStalker making it lean toward Light Crusader in that respect, if that counts. and haha I think it's just plain weird, ruins the illusion for me that was one thing that made it feel a bit odd, the puzzle mechanics often rely on the less than stellar slidey/pushy physics, I prefer the grab crate drop crate mechanic in landstalker, less frustrating too.

I know what you mean, mature 80s anime was my first experience with that world, Akira is still a favorite, Golgo, gritty time that was compared to now.
Yeah I too think picking up objects is a game mechanic that is totally underutilized.


I saw some of your perspective works in other threads, very nice and you seem to have a great grasp on the subject from many angles.