There's a FMV player for the 8-bit Sega Master System ( https://github.com/bravesoftdz/tiler ,) which compresses to a fixed number of dynamically updated tiles. The codec in TFA and Tiler seem very similar, with Tiler also taking advantage of the SMS's ability to flip tiles horizontally or vertically.
A higher spec version of Tiler is available as TileMotion, which has a JavaScript demo decoding 1080p video in software here: https://gligli.github.io/tilemotion/demo/
If you want to see what it's supposed to look like, copy the screenshot into GIMP, go into "Color, Levels" and in the "Input Levels" section, there should be a textbox+spinner with a "1.00". Set that to 0.45.
Apparently Voodoo cards defaulted to 1.3 gamma instead of the standard 2.2. I wonder why that is, since it theory using a non-standard gamma would just reduce your color range with no real benefit.
This is definitely fixable in the design though by looking at the DAC gamma register. I'll do so once I get to the scan-out implementation on the DE-10 Nano.
I recall Quake orignally being super dark, Like you were supposed to be playing this in some basement tomb. But we were 'testing' Pentium Pro workstations in a brightly lit windowed office, so we had to adjust the game's brightness. So I wonder if this was a "make Quake look good for demos" thing.
"And because Sega is working with Swatch, we wanted to encourage the use of the BEAT system."
This was also marketing driven, it seems.
Kinda telling, that they had timezone troubles, even when using Beat :)
"The BEAT system that shows up on the game screen isn't just based on the Dreamcast settings -- it's sent over from the server. And because there are so many different servers in different time zones, it was a bit of a pain to get all of that unified."
As a kid, I remember the Windows version from being included on the disk that came with the book, "Windows Magic Tricks," published by Sybex.
Years later, I was surprised to see the exact same cat on a "port" to the Sega Dreamcast VMU (a memory card that can function as a stand-alone device, with a 48x32 pixel screen,) where pressing a button would play one of the animations. It makes a little more sense now, finding out that the cat images were released into the public domain.
