Harmony of Dissonance - 32X ?

This might be disappointing to some, but I am not sure if I will continue doing the MD version of HoD. The more I implement, the more I feel there are lots of compromises. Moving through rooms and do normal combat ( using standard whip attack ) works fine, as long as there are not too many enemies on screen, but even then it can slow down. But using sub-weapons like a holy water bottle, or using the spell infusions against 2 or 3 active enemies will slow down noticably. HoD is using alpha blend effects surprisingly often, which can't be done in a practial way on MD too. Rotations or scaling effects needs to be pre-renderd in ROM too in most cases because CPU would be too slow for normal gameplay scenes ( which pushes rom size to go up quickly ). The one thing that is of highest importance to me personally, is performance. It was bothering me that I encountered slow downs quite a lot lately. I spent hours and hours with optimizations but finally came to a point where further optimizations were not possible anymore, or so small that it doesn't make any difference. So I played around with thoughts of increasing hardware power. I checked the possibilites and compared Sega CD and Sega 32X. This video is show casing the Prologue scene with Talos and one of the more crowded rooms of the castle entrance area. It is using 32X for both background layers so they are using high colors. Also most of the sprites ( and of course the alpha blend effects ) are done by 32X too. Mega Drive is only doing sound, music playback and rendering the HUD and enemy name tags. My first test on real hardware was extremly disappointing, as it went down to 40-45fps ( whereas on emulators it worked flawlessly ). Using optimized code and techniques like a rollin framebuffer, I managed to get it run with almost constant 60fps on real hardware, which makes me extremly happy, as it just feels great to see it in all it's glory, running with smooth 60fps on a CRT. Seeing how beatiful it looks and performs on the 32X, I am not sure if I want to go back to MD only, to be very honest.