I saw in many SNES games, they would have the sprite zoom in big time compared to games on Genesis. But since the 2D effect seemed so common amongst SNES games, was this somethign develoeprs progammed on thier own, or was there a SDK feature that Nintendo provided that allowed the developers to easily do that effect?
Since most consoles didn't have fleshed out SDKs (software wise) until the 32 bit era, all effects were programmed in, with some taking advantage of hardware features built into the various consoles (like the SNES mode 7) most scaling operations were performed in software, with the extent of those effects being controlled by the hardware design and limitations (number of background layers, sprites ect) The reason most effects looked common as they were created with the particular consoles design in mind (sprite size, colors etc). It was up to the devs to be creative with the hardware given them, and alot of them werent. The best devs obviously were.
The SNES has a graphical mode (mode 7) that allows you to scale and rotate a background layer. The SNES also supports a fairly large number of sprites on screen. Some games like Super Castlevania IV will have a moving object actually drawn on the background layer to allow it to scale or rotate. It can make up the rest of the screen with sprites if there isn't too much to draw. SC4 with the swinging chandelier is like this. The blocks you can stand on are sprites while the chandelier is a background layer being rotated to look like it is swinging. The game Contra III has top down levels that have an intro where the level is zoomed in on starting. This again is likely "mode 7" which allows scaling and rotation of a background layer. And then something else that is Mode 7 but also uses other features. Games like F-Zero and Super Mario Kart have a somewhat 3D looking perspective of a track you drive over. This uses Mode 7 for its scaling and rotation ability but it also uses features that allow rendering parameters to change every single line if desired. What happens is the Mode 7 parameters are adjusted each line to give the illusion of depth of the field. So a line in the distance is drawn scaled/shrunk down. A line much closer than that will be drawn scaled up. That's the basic idea atleast. Mode 7 is a hardware feature of SNES that makes scaling and rotation of a background layer in real time possible. This is different from being able to rotate or scale sprites in real time. Neither the SNES or Genesis can scale sprites by hardware features. Both can give that effect via software programming methods. The NeoGeo has some sprite zooming capability.
