Saturn graphics question

[digitallogic]

I'm curious about something. Saturn is well-known for having awesome 2D sprite power. That said, I've seen several games in which there is an ugly checker board effect on some sprites. In Mortal Kombat Trilogy, the characters' shadows are checkered. Cyber Speedway also has checkered textures. I've seen checkering in many other games as well, but I don't remember their names off the top of my head.

My question is, was that just style choice, or was there a technical reason for it?

 

[Ponut]

Have you ever played a Saturn on a CRT?
If you did, you would likely use S-Video or composite video. These video signals mask the checkerboard pattern and turn it into transparency.
That is what you are looking at; it is an antiquated but very cheap and effective way to achieve 50% transparency.

Make no mistake; this method is preferable in many situations since it always works, provided the video is being output via composite\s-video to a CRT. The other methods of hardware transparency are more complicated and computationally expensive.