Poll of the Day > It's really amazing how much better FF6 looks than 5 and 4.

(+) Yeah! (+)

They really learned how to push the SNES to its limits.

Games looked amazing near the end of the SNES run. Donkey Kong Country 2 and 3 came out the next 2 years after that and those were some of the prettiest games on the system. They really mastered that console by the end

they put "team b" in charge and let them do what they wanted
and they changed the tiles for the world map so it didn't look like 4 and 5

ff6's monster sprite work is still unmatched to this day

And then...FF7. It was a weird time. :)

Some of the shit they did with the graphics in late-stage SNES/SEGA games was impressive as hell. Shame a lot of those tricks they used don't work on non-CRT TVs. There's a reason people say those games looked better back then.

I read this as FF8 and seriously went along with the joke, entertaining what it would be like, how it would (not) work, ect.

To be fair with IV, IV was originally meant to be on the NES, but it took so long to make, they put it on SNES.

FrozenBananas posted...

Games looked amazing near the end of the SNES run. Donkey Kong Country 2 and 3 came out the next 2 years after that and those were some of the prettiest games on the system. They really mastered that console by the end

Like Tales of Phantasia and the first Star Ocean. Those really pushed the system's limits, including the implementation of reflecting your characters' sprites on water... in a SNES game.

I don't know of Tales of Phantasia had any special hardware, it does have clean voice samples on the SNES unlike all the sports games on there

Star Ocean, however, did have a unique hardware chip, the S-DD1, which was only also used in Street Fighter Alpha 2. It's functionally a chip dedicated to compressing images.

No idea how efficient ABS Lossless Entropy Algorithm is compared to, like, JPG or other lossless formats... but I don't know if JPG existed at the time or not

yeah, star ocean and even megaman x2 had additional hardware on-cartridge to actually work

Interesting stuff about other SNES chips (since I was googlin' that)

There is a unique AI co-processor used in 3 games, a racing game and 2 Shogi game... I'm guessing so that the game AI doesn't have to run off the SNES CPU

Two different chips for Real Time Clock support.

Also, apparently a Brazillian romhacker made some simple changes to a few games (most notably Contra 3) to simply add SA1 support (A chip used in a lot of high intensity games like Mario RPG and Kirby Superstar) and it greatly speeds up the games

yeah there was quite a few

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Super_NES_enhancement_chips