A deep technical reverse-engineering of Silpheed's FMV video format on the Sega Mega-CD. The author explains how Game Arts engineered upward from hardware constraints rather than downward from a desired output. Key optimizations include: exploiting the tile-based rendering system to deduplicate solid-color tiles (50% bandwidth reduction), using the Mega-CD ASIC's 'font registers' to encode two-color tiles with 3 bytes instead of 8 (37% further savings), and compressing the tilemap using a linear auto-increment bitmap scheme (30% reduction). The piece also covers the dual-CPU architecture of the Genesis+Mega-CD combo, audio routing quirks, palette color-cycling tricks for laser effects, and why complex 'fractal' texture stages required dropping to 7.5fps.
