it would’ve worked great! the 32X proves they wouldn’t have been hamstrung by the megadrive’s video ouput if they’d done it that way, the mega CD would’ve been maybe $15 more expensive to manufacture and would’ve sold vastly better, they would’ve technically gotten a full decade out of the megadrive hardware (making that controller pinout emulate an analog stick for nights would’ve been tricky maybe), and the dreamcast would come to market right as they have to acknowledge that, yeah, the PS1 can do more than we can, but we’ve had the Mega CD around for two years longer and with our VDP1 add-on you can still run all these ports
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this is just
are you trying to build Amigas or
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also the Nomad gets supported in the market longer because all Sega hardware through the late 90s continues to be able to run megadrive cartridges
I’m sure they could’ve justified spending on bank-switching rom to get some Neo Geo ports by then, and hey, maybe the Mega CD looks attractive enough that there’s no Neo Geo CD
there is no parallel universe wherein any contemporaneous commodity console is ever “good enough” to abandon the idea of “Neo Geo but not hilariously expensive in some manner”
actually I take back my dumb edit because even the PSX and Saturn needed to pull bullshit to run NG games
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that metal slug X port was great and you know it
sure
how about we play a game where we hack off one of your fingers for every cut frame of animation
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see that kind of attitude makes me wish someone would kidnap us and force us to build amigas
has anyone told you that you type well for someone with bloody palm stubs
anyway, you can come over later and check out my new Super AGA 3000 card, it runs well with my G6 overclocked in Workbench 10
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**Wacky Workbench 10
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demanding the other mods perform a coup d’etat for that last post
Regarding pushing sprites onscreen: IIRC for the Genny, programmers could treat the x and y position of sprites as simple 16-bit integers. OTOH for the SNES the y coordinate was 8 bits (okay whatever), while the x coordinate was 9 bits, with that 9th bit being in a separate table or bitfield or something.
Also, the SNES was limited to using only two different sprite-sizes at once, whereas the Genesis could use any sprite size at any time.
So yeah, those are the technical reasons why the Megadrive had an easier time pushing sprites compared to the SNES, despite technically having a lower sprite limit.
My favorite piece of SNES sprite-related technical trivia is that Super GnG writes the bitfields for sprite attributes (palette, flipping, tile number, ect) in the wrong order, and then at runtime twiddles the bits into the format the SNES’s PPU actually supports, which is why the game lags so much. The best guess anybody has as to why this is the case is that the game originally targeted a very early revision of the hardware.
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the mega cd didn’t need better hardware, it needed people at sega to throw digital pictures and the other fmv snake oil salesmen out the door like uncle phil throwing out jazz.
the pc engine cd was a huge success (in japan), and it was way less powerful than the mega cd. but it had a much bigger library of actual games. with the kind of international reach sega had in the early 90s, the mega cd could have been a hit if it had actual games in the place of kriss kross make my video
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counterpoint – what if it had been able to run an earlier version of barbie fashion designer for windows 95
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world peace
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I refuse to believe the quality of the games had much to do with the PCE CD’s survival. The games themselves were all pretty much identical to anything found on other storage mediums. It’s all the superficial stuff that set it apart.
Like it’s a console released during a bubble economy that found an audience that was older, more tech-crazed, and way more affluent than any Sega ever had in the West. Those people weren’t buying this shit for a slightly more accurate port of Golden Axe. They wanted to oogle anime girls and hear anime girls coo and squeal and listen to CD quality buttrock while making numbers go up so they could save anime girls from a dungeon.
There was no equivalent audience in the West at the time. The economy wasn’t as strong. Most users were reliant on their parents to buy games and hardware for them. The closest thing to that otaku-level devotion I can think of would be shit like Star Trek fandom, and those folks were not going to buy consoles. If they were going to drop big bucks to hear Captain Picard speak via digital they were going do so on PC.
So without more powerful hardware you just have a bunch of Mega Drive games with CD audio and cutscenes and no one wanted to pay an extra $300 for that. There’s just no saving that thing.
*Or play strip mahjong with anime girls. There are so many fucking mahjong games on that thing.
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Certainly when I scroll through the list of PC-Engine CD games, I get a certain impression…
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y’all are nerds
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This was a great stream of posts A+
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Anybody know a good guide for setting up a virtual machine for old windows versions? I keep running into graphics driver issues.
I’m looking for something good for playing low-spec multimedia software from the early to late 90s, specifically.
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