seanstar
I recently acquired local copies of the original Genesis Sonic 3 and Sonic & Knuckles after noticing something very odd in speedruns- far-backgrounds with overlapping parallax elements. See: the trees before the Sonic path boss in AIZ2, the columns in the background of HZ, the trees in MHZ, the cave far-backdrop in LRZ, etc. Similarly, in MGZ and the boss of FBZ2, there are segments where one layer of background runs over another layer of background... on top of a raster-parallaxing far-bg. Now, I believe the Genesis only has 2 background layers and a sprite layer. A few of these effects could be explained away by creative use of large sprites, a few more by creative tile rewriting, but a few of them seem to be well and truly happening in the backgrounds in a way too complex to want to do by constant brute-force access.
One possible hint is that in levels where some other complex backgorund effects are happening (notably MGZ), the far-background is strictly raster-parallax with no intriguing overlap-parallax elements...
Any idea what's going on here?
jetboy
You lost me there sorry...
But Sonic's backgrounds are known to be VERY complex... the Mega Drive was better than the SNES (despite popular opinion) and Sonic demonstrated this quite clearly.
Of note there are THREE background planes on a Mega Drive... (Window, ScrollA and ScrollB.) Since Window and ScrollA share the same screen space maybe you are confusing them as being the same thing?