The polygons of Another World: Sega Genesis
Summary
Developers in Japan and USA did not follow best practices and assumed the VBLANK signal used to measure time triggered every 16 ms. The task to port to Segas machine landed on Michael Burton while Rebecca Heineman took care of the three other platforms. Michael did not immediately respond to email inquiries so the rest of this article is based on observations done with GenS and Exodus emulators as well as disassembly outputs. With no way to build the engine around the VDP rendering into its VRAM, Another World went for a 68000 heavy approach similar to what we saw with the Atari ST. Three framebuffers, the two BKGD and a "working" buffer are kept in RAM. This lower resolution made copy, fill, and draw polygon op code faster to execute but also reduced the cost of transferring from RAM to VRAM.