The Sega CD is my favorite console and I was fortunate enough to have one growing up. Silpheed was unlike anything else. Unlike most FMV games, Silpheed actually felt like controlling a movie. During the first level when laser blasts are tearing through the fleet gigantic ships filling the screen with debris, I could barely believe what I was seeing.
As the article points out, while it is an FMV game, it tries to fool you into thinking it’s a polygon based game. The Sega CD had no 3D capabilities at all (just 2D rotation and scale). But GameArts pulls off the FMV so convincingly, down to the aliasing, that it’s hard to understand (at least to my 12-year old self) how it could be anything other than 3D rendering.
It’s often panned as not the best shooter, but the gameplay was secondary to the experience. I don’t know how it would play for someone who didn’t experience it at the time, but it will always be one of my favorites on the system.
Watching the video linked at the end of the article my first thought was "Starfox, eat your heart out", but watching the gameplay I noted that at its core its a really basic shooter and it can be quite hard to keep track of the enemies and projectiles with the background going nuts like that.
This was submitted by a bot :D I subscribe to Fabien's RSS and he must have changed something in the server because I got this post on my RSS reader (again, as it's an old post), and here it is submitted to HN (again)
> That was a departure from how I normally work since I did not write a single line of code. I will likely write something about my A.I framework (and opensource it) next month.
If the author is around, super curious how they got to enjoy their workflow here in a side project, working with AI. This kind of situation, to me, is often where the joy is gone.
Personally, I find LLMs really fun to work with, and the more capable they are the more fun it will get. It's one hell of a force multiplier.
It is fun in a totally different way than programming is. The "fun" or "joy" isn't coming from the sense of accomplishment of writing code or building software per se. Now it feels like it is just the joy of being able to prototype or debug or reverse engineer literally anything at a pace way beyond what you could've ever hoped to before. Have you ever dreamed of developing some software, but realized it was simply too big of a scope for one person? It might not be, anymore, even if you don't go full vibecoder.
The only real problem I ever had with this was the quality of the code. Sometimes it doesn't matter, like for pure prototypes or even reverse engineering, but sometimes it does. My heart sank a bit when I tried Fable to find that it was much better at long tasks and more ambitious in general, but I still didn't like the code much more than Opus 4.7 or 4.8. However, I'm pretty pleased with the code quality of GPT 5.6 Sol. This is a silly thing to care about but I love that by default it doesn't print code comments like a CVS receipt printer adding all kinds of pointless crap that is either apparent from context or irrelevant outside of the conversation you were having. Generally I've also found it to be super good at debugging, usually able to zero in on the actual problem with surprisingly little effort, even with not much context; I wish my debugging foo was that good. I gave Codex a spare machine to test something with real hardware and it has done a fantastic job making use of it.
Then of course there's the problem that I really don't like OpenAI or Anthropic very much. But it seems the news is good there too: even if we assume open weight Chinese models are at least less than 12 months behind on coding performance, then by next year we should have quite a lot of options for how to go about things. Evidence suggests 12 months is probably an over-estimation, and even now I use GLM 5.2 quite a lot at work since it is simply good enough. So... we're getting there too.
Obviously it's a little scary to think the world may need fewer programmers when you are one, and this is maybe not the way that I wanted programming to become accessible and democratized, but beggars can't be choosers. If the future is me being able to run an army of virtual programmers on a GPU cluster, I am interested in seeing what cool shit can be done with it. And when the hype and doom cycle finally ends, I hope everyone else will realize how fucking cool it is, too.
I think the article is sorta wrong about the sound setup, the Mega Drive I does have a sound input on the expansion port, and mixes it into its sound output. Otherwise stuff like RF cables wouldn't get Mega CD based audio (and you can do silly stuff like a Mega Drive II, which doesn't have a headphone port, with a Mega CD I).
I was going to say the patch cable setup was just a passive aid to take the Mega Drive I's minijack stereo output (the big DIN AV connector on the rear only does mono) to a more serious two RCA jack setup. But looking at a schematic to check, it does do more stuff, and apparently connecting the patch cable will reroute stuff so the sound mixing is done on the Mega CD side, not the Mega Drive side (early Mega Drive revisions are somewhat infamous for showing that Sega hadn’t quite mastered the dark arts of analogue sound circuitry).
(I would double check some of this, but my Mega Drive / Mega CD setup isn't to hand, and the CD drive is broken anyway, although I understand the JP/PAL piano tune on the logo screen is all from the Mega CD side?).
Just thought I'd chime in! Started on the IIgs, loved the graphics, music and artwork from the manual. I even use the hand drawn sketch of the 'dogfighter' as my twitter pic.
18 comments
[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 37.8 ms ] threadAs the article points out, while it is an FMV game, it tries to fool you into thinking it’s a polygon based game. The Sega CD had no 3D capabilities at all (just 2D rotation and scale). But GameArts pulls off the FMV so convincingly, down to the aliasing, that it’s hard to understand (at least to my 12-year old self) how it could be anything other than 3D rendering.
It’s often panned as not the best shooter, but the gameplay was secondary to the experience. I don’t know how it would play for someone who didn’t experience it at the time, but it will always be one of my favorites on the system.
If the author is around, super curious how they got to enjoy their workflow here in a side project, working with AI. This kind of situation, to me, is often where the joy is gone.
It is fun in a totally different way than programming is. The "fun" or "joy" isn't coming from the sense of accomplishment of writing code or building software per se. Now it feels like it is just the joy of being able to prototype or debug or reverse engineer literally anything at a pace way beyond what you could've ever hoped to before. Have you ever dreamed of developing some software, but realized it was simply too big of a scope for one person? It might not be, anymore, even if you don't go full vibecoder.
The only real problem I ever had with this was the quality of the code. Sometimes it doesn't matter, like for pure prototypes or even reverse engineering, but sometimes it does. My heart sank a bit when I tried Fable to find that it was much better at long tasks and more ambitious in general, but I still didn't like the code much more than Opus 4.7 or 4.8. However, I'm pretty pleased with the code quality of GPT 5.6 Sol. This is a silly thing to care about but I love that by default it doesn't print code comments like a CVS receipt printer adding all kinds of pointless crap that is either apparent from context or irrelevant outside of the conversation you were having. Generally I've also found it to be super good at debugging, usually able to zero in on the actual problem with surprisingly little effort, even with not much context; I wish my debugging foo was that good. I gave Codex a spare machine to test something with real hardware and it has done a fantastic job making use of it.
Then of course there's the problem that I really don't like OpenAI or Anthropic very much. But it seems the news is good there too: even if we assume open weight Chinese models are at least less than 12 months behind on coding performance, then by next year we should have quite a lot of options for how to go about things. Evidence suggests 12 months is probably an over-estimation, and even now I use GLM 5.2 quite a lot at work since it is simply good enough. So... we're getting there too.
Obviously it's a little scary to think the world may need fewer programmers when you are one, and this is maybe not the way that I wanted programming to become accessible and democratized, but beggars can't be choosers. If the future is me being able to run an army of virtual programmers on a GPU cluster, I am interested in seeing what cool shit can be done with it. And when the hype and doom cycle finally ends, I hope everyone else will realize how fucking cool it is, too.
I was going to say the patch cable setup was just a passive aid to take the Mega Drive I's minijack stereo output (the big DIN AV connector on the rear only does mono) to a more serious two RCA jack setup. But looking at a schematic to check, it does do more stuff, and apparently connecting the patch cable will reroute stuff so the sound mixing is done on the Mega CD side, not the Mega Drive side (early Mega Drive revisions are somewhat infamous for showing that Sega hadn’t quite mastered the dark arts of analogue sound circuitry).
(I would double check some of this, but my Mega Drive / Mega CD setup isn't to hand, and the CD drive is broken anyway, although I understand the JP/PAL piano tune on the logo screen is all from the Mega CD side?).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWVmPtr9O0g
I'm reasonably familiar with the hardware, I've written some games from scratch and I still have absolutely no idea how they did most of it.
How they fit the Sonic 3D intro onto a sega mega drive _cartridge_!
Fixed link: https://youtu.be/GBS332N6wig?t=1749
Anyway, another great article from Fabien.