The images below are doing nothing other than using what is possible in Mode 3 on SNES with its 8bpp and 256-colours total onscreen from the 32,768 colour palette. And this is even before any HDMA or colour math or any raster tricks and the like are applied. There’s even enough VRAM spare to maybe have a little scrolling and stuff too, along with a simple second background layer for some parallax and maybe even some sprites in there also. 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:
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 thenI reduced them to SNES colours and posterized them to 32 levels to match its palette.
And, I already posted the video below before, but you can see how much potential there is in taking advantage of all those colours properly (and this stuff still isn’t even fully optimized for SNES):
Note. Even though Brad actually coded this 8bpp 256-colour palette cycling stuff (kudos), it was my idea in a thread on SNESdev that he was part of that led to him even bother doing so, when most other people were actually very dismissive of the suggestion or were trying to unnecessarily gimp it in some way out the gate.
So, why aren’t any SNES indie guys using this kind of quality of stuff in their games, even for menus and cutscenes and the like? And, on that note, where are all the impressive new games for SNES anyway, like Genesis has been seeing for ages now?
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. But we’re not really seeing much of it.
It’s crazy that I, as some random who can’t even program on SNES directly, seem to be suggesting stuff the SNES development community isn’t even bothering with for the most part, be it with high-colour stuff like the examples above, or even my Mode 0 concepts that I’ve posted before but will post here again:
Where is the SNES dev-scene’s drive and passion to actually show off this console, which presumably they are supposed to love, and push it to its limits in modern times? There are a few people doing stellar work, like Vitor Vilela, but not enough imo, and there are still very few actual new SNES titles either way.
The stuff we could be seeing on SNES. . . .
iNCEPTIONAL 