The images below are possible on SNES using nothing other than the standard settings of Modes 3 (and Mode 4), which are capable of displaying 8bpp 256 colours total on-screen taken from the massive 32,768-colour master palette:
Note: Any black bars/borders you see on any of those images above are only there because I quickly shrunk the original source images down from real art examples to 256×224, and then I converted them to SNES colours using Rilden’s palette quantization tool.
And this is before any HDMA or colour math or any raster tricks and the like are applied. There’s also enough VRAM and CPU resources spare to have a little scrolling and stuff as well, along with maybe a simple second background layer for some parallax and/or some sprites in there as well. And, with very careful resource management, this is possible even during normal gameplay too. But, even just as static images and nothing else, they can look beautiful, and far beyond anything I’ve ever seen in any commercial SNES titles or even modern SNES indie games to date.
I already posted the video below before, but you can see how much potential there is in taking advantage of all those colours properly in other ways too (full credit to Brad there):
And that’s just some extremely simple colour stuff. There’s a lot more that SNES can do than just show a lot of colours. For example, here are a couple of SNES-spec Mode 3/4 mockups I made that do more than just show lovely static images:
Self plug: I also made some Mode 0 concepts that I’ve posted before but will post here again as well:
Note: A couple of my Mode 0 test have actually been properly coded up to run on SNES by a few talented SNES programmers, and they work as intended, so these aren’t just misguided speculations by someone who has no real clue how SNES actually works, but examples showing real potential there.
The stuff we could be seeing on SNES, especially if we took full advantage of all of its [deadpan] Colour Blasting power. . . .
iNCEPTIONAL 