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The art and engineering of Silpheed

The article explores the technical achievements of the 1990s video game Silpheed on Sega's Mega-CD, focusing on its impressive FMV (Full Motion Video) capabilities despite hardware limitations. The author details how the game managed to deliver near-fullscreen cutscenes on a 12.5MHz m68k CPU with only 16 colors and 150 KiB/s bandwidth. The piece also mentions the author's recent reverse engineering of the game's FMV format.

Background

Silpheed was a 1990s shoot 'em up video game developed by Game Arts and published by Sega for the Mega-CD add-on to the Sega Genesis console. The game was notable for its impressive use of pre-rendered 3D graphics and FMV technology during an era when CD-ROM technology was still emerging in gaming consoles.

Source
Lobsters
Published
Jun 2, 2026 at 05:13 AM
Score
5.0 / 10