Yes, This Is Castlevania: Symphony Of The Night On The Sega Mega Drive

Well the music sounds better than I could have imagined and it'd be fun to play it as a level based experience, especially as I only recently beat the PS4 Requiem version

This is shaping up to be awesome. Blast processing at its finest!

It's coming along beautifully.

Interestingly though, the SNES is actually better suited for a port of this particular game in many ways: It's the same resolution as the original PlayStation version, can show far more accurate colours than Genesis, can have more overlapping background layers than Genesis, can display similar proper multi-coloured semi-transparency to PS, can do some of the Mode 7 style effects much easier, the PCM audio is better matched to the orchestrated music of the original, the SNES' standard controller's buttons and layout is better suited to match the original game, etc.

And I personally really would love to see a port of SotN on the SNES too.

In general, I really would like to see SNES get a similar level of support from the homebrew/dev scene in moderns times as the Genesis is seeing, as it really isn't getting anywhere near the love it deserves imo. Shame that's unlikely to happen for the time being, since there's currently not a properly mature and accessible SDK for SNES, which makes stuff like this just too much effort for most homebrew/dev guys to bother with, as it requires a lot more time and dedication than it does just getting something up and running on Genesis right now. But hopefully that is only a matter of time.

Regardless, this looks like it's going to be another solid addition to the Genesis homebrew library.

@rob7979 That's not "Blast Processing", by the way.

This is "Blast Processing":

http://gendev.spritesmind.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=3341

I think we've moved far enough past our childhoods and Sega's ability to pull the wool over our eyes with marketing gimmicks to start talking about things as they actually are now, right.

What we have with the SoTN port here is simply someone putting in the time and effort to make a modified version of the game run on Genesis and doing a great job. The Sega marketing lie has nothing to do with it.

Very cool. I remember seeing a video about this about a year ago. Would love to try out the full game when it's finally finished.

Hope they include the Sega Saturn-exclusive areas as playable levels. That would be awesome

@RetroGames the SNES really isn't more suited than the MD.

It's a pain and difficult to work with in ASM compared to the sega genesis development kit c compiler on the MD.

The 68000 cpu is far quicker than what the snes offers and the RAM is easier to access too.

There are legitimate reasons behind the snes lack of homebrew.

@RetroGames couldn't agree more, imagine the Snes pushed technically like the Megadrive is getting.

I am wowed more by the music than the visuals. The visuals are great, but my jaw dropped when the music started playing.

The graphics is very good but without the music quality, it's just not the same experience. The music is a big part of what make castlevania sotn, and the megadrive sound hardware just doesn't cut it.

Maybe it's better if the game is ported to snes since the snes has realy good sound hardware compared to megadrive.

@X68000 The current development environment and tools is not an indicator of how well a console is technically suited for a port of a particular game, but rather how easy or indeed how much hassle it is to simply make something for said console.

There is no doubt the SNES' specs and capabilities are better suited to a more accurate port of this game for all the reasons I listed previously, just as there is no doubt the Genesis' development tools are simply much more user friendly right now and therefore such a port is currently more practical on that system at the present time. The recent announcement of SNES support in Retro Game Forge, previously known as NESmaker, should hopefully help the SNES side of things there in the not too distant future though.

And technically the SNES more than capable of a great port of Symphony of the Night with some concessions just like the Genesis port obviously. To try to suggest otherwise is disingenuous. The SNES has two great Castlevania games already that pull off plenty cool tricks of their own, someone has started a port of Bloodlines to it recently with some additional graphics effects too, and a port of SotN is not a matter of if it's possible but simply how to go about it and whether someone will actually give it a go at some point. In fact, if "SNESmaker" works as I hope it does and indeed as it should, I might even try making a small demo of a level from SotN on SNES myself just as a proof of concept.

But the point I'd like to make is to not conflate the two things that are actually different, that being the hassle of doing something due to currently immature development tools and a system being technically suited or not to such as thing.

Genesis is getting a pretty solid port of this game. And I think it would be great to see SNES get the same.

@Axelay71 Have you seen the very early demo of the opening area from Bloodlines that someone did for SNES?

It's pretty interesting that they're adding some extra effects there like a layer of rain or semi-transparent fog, some flashing lightning, a proper fully overlapping HUD/GUI, some additional background parallax, and even a random extra texture on one of the stones in the foreground.

It's all early and very rough right now, and I have zero clue how far they are planning on going with this or indeed if they have enough talent to truly do a great job of it--I'll be honest and say I'm a little skeptical--but it's an interesting start at least.

@RetroGames yes mate looks very promising, if it comes to fruition remains to be seen.

@RetroGames If I remember right, wasn't Sonic's main trick for speed just DMA? It wasn't widely used yet so it was a leap from a technical standpoint.

@Daggot Dunno, but there's games on SNES and even NES that move just as fast as Sonic the Hedgehog on Genesis, including a fan demo of the first level of Sonic the Hedgehog on SNES, so I don't think Sonic moving fast was truly some special or unique technical achievement so much as it was just impressive to see him running around like that at that time.

It was impressive though, right, and certainly something Sega's marketing team fully leaned into.

But the DMA stuff is mostly useful for switching in some more new tiles and such slightly faster basically, as far as I understand it, which can be useful if you have very large animated characters or lots of characters that you want to animate separately and want to avoid using forced blank (the black bars you sometimes see at the top and bottom of the screen in some games, more often on SNES than Genesis).

Another way you can do that is by using smaller memory tiles, where you use less colours per tile, if you have such an option as a built-in feature. Standard 2bpp NES tiles take up half the memory space of standard 4bpp Genesis and SNES tiles for example, and the SNES also has a standard option to use these 2bpp tiles for at least the background(s) if desired. It does mean working with less colours per tile in the 2bpp background(s), kind of like a souped-up NES in that regard, but that's a tradeoff for actually being able to stream in/out even more background tiles per frame than Genesis there. And, because of how the SNES' colours work in general, the fact it's still 24 visible colours per layer and even still 96 colours total on-screen for backgrounds alone if using Mode 0 for example (plus another 128 colours for sprites), along with the SNES' huge 32,768-colour master palettes' colour gamut, it's not quite as big a challenge as it might initially seem to work with less colours than normal there.

There's basically lots of different options on these consoles for trying a bunch of interesting tricks if you know where to look.

@RetroGames People who were around and read game magazines at the time knew blast processing was a marketing gimmick. EGM talked about it, Next Generation talked about it. In fact, Next Generation, when interviewing Kalinske about the Saturn, asked Kalinske to admit BP was marketing (of course well after the Genesis was competitive, and of course he refused).

I’d also like to see the SNES get some more homebrew love. It’s starting to happen, but the mere fact that SNES was more mainstream and there were and are a more rabid fanbase for the Genesis/Mega Drive means there are more folks predisposed to take the time for making Sega magic. 🤷‍♂️

@UtopiaNemo I'd love to see more homebrew games for SNES too alongside the Genesis.

Yeah, I think right now the Genesis has much better development tools and is also just much easier to work with in general because of its simpler internal design, only one background mode on Genesis where you can use all its tricks vs a very convoluted eight to choose from on SNES that each have different special features for example, which I think has really helped there.

It will be interesting to see what the homebrew scene is like for each system in a few years from now, especially as the various tools continue to develop and also now that it seems the SNES is about to get its first proper development tool that actual laymen can use too (the "SNESmaker" part of NESmaker's new Retro Game Forge).

I'm hoping both systems have a very healthy and exciting future ahead in that regard.

@X68000
The Megadrive may be easier to be accsessed, but also is the Dreamcast and has much Homebrew because of it, but nothing of it is graphically stunning.
But in the End a Console can be better or worse for something, it depends on the Programmer on what he can handle better and feels more comfortable with to squeeze out the best of the Device.

@wiiware Maybe I am weird, but I played through SOTN a couple times through when it was new. But as an adult none of the tracks stuck with me. I downloaded the sound track a couple years ago, and it just sounded boring and flat. This is the opposite experience I had with the NES, Genesis, PC Engine and SNES original games. Every time I hear those tracks I am jamming away.

Just now I was playing the Genesis SOTN clip below and I was thinking to myself how the music finally has some life and character.

I personally feel like the Konami folks weren’t really sure how to make the best of CD audio at the time? But then again Rondo’s tracks were fire. Maybe its just a me thing.

-edit Just read the comment above yours. I guess I am not alone. Genesis music for SOTN bumps.

@DestructoDisk I think there are track that stuck with you in the levels but not when you heard it on headphone without the games, I like sotn soundtrack but I rarely listened them outside the game. But some games soundtrack like cyber shadow, I downloaded them and sometimes listen to them while I'm using my pc.