Your analysis appears correct, as several sources write that Gunstar Heroes uses multi-sprite bosses [1][2].
F1 on the Mega Drive owes its existence to an earlier game for the Atari ST, Vroom [5]. The brainchild behind that game, "Dan McRae", talks in a video interview [3] about how he arrived at that particular version of the game from his earlier revisions on older platforms -- where techniques shown in Lou's Pseudo 3d Page [4] apply, to more advanced techniques [6] similar to the ones presented in this submission.
F1 on the Mega Drive was done by the same dev studio that collaborated with McRae on Vroom, and at least one of the same programmers, but presumably had to do some advanced tilemap trickery specific to the console. Unfortunately, compared to other games in this series, there is very little information on the technical aspects of the Mega Drive version.
F1 on the Mega Drive owes its existence to an earlier game for the Atari ST, Vroom [5]. The brainchild behind that game, "Dan McRae", talks in a video interview [3] about how he arrived at that particular version of the game from his earlier revisions on older platforms -- where techniques shown in Lou's Pseudo 3d Page [4] apply, to more advanced techniques [6] similar to the ones presented in this submission.
F1 on the Mega Drive was done by the same dev studio that collaborated with McRae on Vroom, and at least one of the same programmers, but presumably had to do some advanced tilemap trickery specific to the console. Unfortunately, compared to other games in this series, there is very little information on the technical aspects of the Mega Drive version.
[1] http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/gunstarheroes/gunstarheroes... [2] http://www.racketboy.com/retro/sega/genesis/best-sega-genesi... [3] https://youtu.be/ZTd-fFScLGA [4] http://www.extentofthejam.com/pseudo/ [5] https://youtu.be/ZTd-fFScLGA?t=7m33s [6] https://youtu.be/ZTd-fFScLGA?t=10m28s