(posting Vectorman is probably cheating and besides the point because of how extensively the look of the game is created through shadow and highlight trickery but also this is an argument, fuck you)
22 Likes
my favorite “actually those extra pixels are good” example is Zombies Ate My Neighbors, where both versions have the same viewable amount of level on screen but the extra horizontal space means the Gen/MD version can have the radar displayed at all times instead of having to overlay it and toggle it
2 Likes
5 Likes
funnel all processing power into creating more impressive spread shots imo
3 Likes
Man my friends with Genesis never had these great looking games.
The best time I ever had on a Genesis was Spiderman and Venom, separation anxiety. And its probably actually shit. But, I love Spiderman and I loved beat-em ups in those days and of course I had Maximum Carnage at home on SNES.
The pics I posted were from a SNES game
I played a little sneaky on ya
3 Likes
the genesis was amazing in the right hands but most of the time it was not in the right hands
this is kind of true of all of sega’s hardware I guess
2 Likes
It’s funny how the Genesis hardware design is what we value today – general-purpose, simple, flexible.
But the restricted custom-purpose silicon on the SNES made it more usable for a lot of what developers wanted to do on it. Same as the NES, Nintendo’s custom work matched what was needed.
But I think that template broke down immediately after that generation. Saturn is when the arcade engineers take charge of the console design and they absolutely swing towards a restricted view of what the hardware does, next to the PSX’s general-purpose machine. And it carries forward: 360 next to PS3, and since 2010 nobody would even think of doing to much custom work.
3 Likes
the SNES architecture is also just …
they made a lot of strange decisions as a result of wanting it to be backwards compatible with the NES, which it ultimately never was (compared to the PS3 or the GBA where they just threw in the previous generation’s chipset). the NES was a technical work of genius, it absolutely was that perfect generic 8-bit hardware as a direct result of having the custom graphics mapping work it did, and I think they were trying to just carry that forward with the SNES, I don’t think they saw themselves as specializing. it’s really the first obvious example of a very Nintendo style of decision making, and one of the only times it didn’t hurt them.
they even got that assembler port of the Apple IIGS Another World out of it!
4 Likes
there is the fixed function DMA stuff like mode 7 graphics and the transparency layers but I see those as “how do we give this memory mapper more features since we’re committed to using it after that was the whole trick last time around”
one of my favourite Nintendo platforms from a hardware perspective is the GBA, because it actually had both a fairly fast and flexible CPU and a bunch of regular hardware mapping stuff
Poor Sega would’ve had such an easier time if they’d shelled out for an 020 for the Sega CD and kept on the 68k architecture for the Saturn but they had to go down the SH2 R&D rabbit hole
1 Like
The SNES was also saved from its weak CPU by the fact that cartridge hardware wasn’t ever really expected to be cheap, and both Nintendo and their consumers could afford to throw additional chips into any given game the same way they could afford FF6 having what was then a super luxe cartridge size
This is also why it was easier for the Dreamcast and the PSP and other comparable hardware to emulate Mario RPG with its vastly faster CPU add on than to run Super Metroid with the stock transparency layers enabled; the CPU interpreter was never nearly as big of a hit as trying to get all that fixed function graphics stuff working in software.
1 Like
Ah, you’d characterize the NES as fairly generic, then? My high-view understanding was that the PPU and the over-expensive sound chip were key reasons it excelled next to similar systems of the time.
1 Like
yeah, but the PPU was absolutely the best way to do what all of the other 8-bit Arcade and Microcomputer platforms were doing at that time in a single piece of hardware, and it didn’t make the NES abnormally complex, it made it more flexible. you just weren’t going to get more generically powerful from any other hardware solution at that time.
that was what made Nintendo such a huge success, their idea of “custom” actually aligned exactly with the 8-bit era in that way. it’s no less generic than Sony deciding that what you needed to do to ship cheap 3D hardware in the mid 90s was an FPU, an mpeg decoder, and a framebuffer.
2 Likes
the thing was already costing too much, I guess you wanted it dead and buried instead of just limping along huh
more to the point, even with just an extra 68000, it’s capable of impressive scaling and rotation effects, you just needed to be a 68k wizard
the Saturn is a result of a bad guess more than any kind of actual bad design and then trying to bandaid that guess just fucked all the shit up (which, ironically, was kind of the same thing that happened to the System 32 the Saturn was aimed at emulating, where it was more or less killed off because the Model 1 came along and Virtua Fighter and Racing blew up)
but hey, they managed to guess right with the Dreamcast considering how far PowerVR chips have gone since
2 Likes
put another way – “generic” doesn’t always just mean a powerful CPU. only most of the time.
I mean, two main CPUs back when everyone was still writing assembler was asking too much, even if they didn’t also have two VDPs
1 Like
and the Dreamcast’s problem was really that it shipped too late to have a GPU that couldn’t do real hardware T&L, it was only ever like a super-PS1
could’ve had many happy years of that though
it sounds like you want the 32X
I’ve got bad news for you
2 Likes
I’m sure I’ve gone on about this hobby horse in the past but really, the Sega CD should’ve had an 020 (that way it runs Doom and all the other 3DO stuff), the 32X should’ve actually been the VDP1 (packed in with the VF2 port), and the CDX should’ve thusly been the equivalent of the Saturn
I’m pretty convinced at this point you’re trying to kill Sega even harder than they managed themselves
1 Like