The art and engineering of Sega CD Silpheed

Sega's Mega-CD add-on for the Genesis suffered from CD-ROM's severe speed limitations (800ms access time, 150 KiB/s bandwidth), leading to many poorly-received Full Motion Video (FMV) games. However, Silpheed stood out by using exceptionally efficient video compression techniques that delivered impressive full-screen cutscenes on just a 12.5MHz CPU with minimal bandwidth (8 KiB per frame), earning critical acclaim that persists today. The article details the author's reverse-engineering of Silpheed's FMV format to understand how it achieved such remarkable results within the hardware's constraints.