a few more pages on the SNES CD-ROM

LOL, the 8-bit console on top of a 16-bit podium? I'd call a steward's enquiry on that one!!! ;-)

Oh wait, the SNES is there, too! Technically that's not all 16-bit, either!! :lol:

Looks like the third place MegaDrive might win by default!! ;-)

 

How is the SNES not all 16-bit? The PCE may technically have an 8-bit cpu but it's still a nice machine worthy of being in the 16-bit generation. It's a shame their Super Grafx upgrade was such a waste. But atleast it will always have the only truely successful CD add-on of any console.

 

You can't really say a console with an 8-bit CPU is 16-bit, even if it has a 16-bit GPU.

The Mega Drive uses the 68000, technically 32-bit but using a 16-bit data bus. The SNES uses the 5A22. Yes, that's based on the 16-bit 65c816, but has an 8-bit data bus.

Bit like the Jaguar. Two 32-bit CPUs with a 64-bit data bus.

 

The SNES uses the 65C816 CPU which is an upgraded 8Bit 6502 CPU.
With the Upgrade its 16Bit. The CPU is technically compatible to the NES and there was a Prototype Unit which was full NES-Compatible. When the SNES was released, the "aged" CPU was the biggest negative Point.

 

Oh believe me I know what kind of CPU the SNES has, but I don't see how people class it into which "bit" category. The SNES has a 24bit address range since you have the typical 0000 to FFFF, plus a bank register for 00 to FF giving you 000000 to FFFFFF. Sure it's arranged a bit strange but you have 16 bit registers and operations. Really it's all how you want to claim what "bit" the system is by either CPU, GPU, etc.

The SNES despite it's relatively slow CPU still did a pretty good job. And if you paired it with the SA-1 what could have you to complain about then? Resolution maybe?

 

to point of that podium is, that the PC Engine played clearly in the 16-Bit liga and not the 8-Bit, regardless of it's technical specs.
but not enough, it's output capability as a result also outruned the Mega Drive and Super Famicom in many issues which made it the winner of the 16-bit console era (NeoGeo AES unconsidered). may be some people won't agree with that, but it's the fact which a every connoisseur will confirm you :nod:

 

What are you on about? Graphically the Megadrive and the SNES beat the the PCE, no question.

 

I'm confused too. Other than Clock Speed and a very successful CD-ROM add-on I don't see how the PC-Engine outdid the SNES. Though the PC-Engine certainly seemed capable of better color depth than the Megadrive which was a serious issue I think with alot of MD titles. Games like Sonic you don't notice but other games like MK1 were terrible color wise.

 

did you guys ever played the reference titles on the systems?

as mott spotted out, the MD had strong color issues and about the weakness of the SFC, i think we do not have to loose further discusses. nice colors and effex for that time as well some nice chip tune capabilities, but action and dynamic wise a sleeping pill (with some very few exceptions). and a lot of games looked like put through a soft focus lens.

the PCE, in a wise, was a great mix of both systems, even it hitted the market years before and is considered to be a 8-bit system. does it matter? -> a decent color palette very sharp and clean displayed, paired with real arcade action on screen, which leaves nothing to be desired.

games like sapphire showed the real muscles of the system and set a clear landmark in 16-bit era in terms of action on screen with nice color palette and paired with a great dynamic, al ot of surprising effex e.g. huge animated prerender bosses, rotations, zooming, metamorphosis, polygons, folding etc. and this held all in a very clean way (rare flickers, no slowdowns..). so you still think, this all could have been handled by a laughable and simple designed 8-bit system?

even a game like Gradius II, which was an almost 1:1 port of the arcade pendant could proof the real capability of the system. a game that wouldn't have been possible to bring on a SFC in that way for sure.

briefly said, the PCE was the system where everything just seemed to look the right way, while both the MD and SFC had to struggle with some real basics like color palette or technical issues.

of course deep shit was scattered all over those systems, but regarded to the really great stuff made, amazingly the PCE was extraordinarily superior in quite few things.

but i won't sound like a fanboy and as i mentioned before, all three systems are a must own and all three systems had their very unique and value gems! :icon_bigg

 

One of the most stupid problems with the PC Engine series was the lack of RGB out. Yeah, you can mod but not everyone is capable of doing that. in the Mega Drive's case it was the lack of Stereo Audio via the Multi AV out at the back. You had to use the headphone jack at the front until the Mega Drive II came out. Real shame when you consider some of the ass kicking tunes you could get out of the MD. Most PC Engine stuff on Hu-card sounded weak however there are some very good examples of great PC Engine Audio from Hudson soft shooters!! As for the SFC, yeah, it had fantastic audio but I never did find anything on it that was as clean sounding as Streets of rage 2 or Thunder Force 4. A lot of SFC techno / dance music relied on samples which were always low bit rate. The PC Engine and Mega Drive mostly used hardware driven sounds.
Yakumo

 

yeah..that whole interface issues where one other case. saddly the PCE never was really further developed on that matter, when the DUO series came out. just a simple s-video output would have brought a lot satisfaction to the users.

anyway, this is some analog issue related and not really affects the digital part of the system, which is in charge of the technical power. but i agree, it's a technical issue thought.

i also agree, that a lot of SFC tunes sounded very cheap due to the use of cheap instruments and crackle samples. but in the other hand, some prestigious companies also made some very very good work on it (konami etc.).

the MD had a very decent arcade sound also due to the FM, and i agree that some of the PCE chip tunes didn't sound that strong as on the MD, but there were some exceptions of course. but anyway, a lot of the greatest BGMs ever released on a video game systems in history, were some red book audios on the CD-ROM.

in retrospect i feel that a lot of SFC games aged baddly. they were brilliant and shiny back in the time due to high amount of colors, but lost kinda charme and character over the years.

 

I have to disagree on some aspects about the Super Famicom.

Yes, the sound was bad in many games, but also was not really dreams to my ears on the Mega Drive nor PC Engine.

Sadly, the SNES is a slow console, but with SA-1 and Super FX2, it's a wondermashine, Yoshi's Island, Super Metroid, Super Mario Kart, I just can't imagine them on a PCE or MD.

But mostly, it's all about the games.
SFC, MD and PCE all have their gems, and shovel-ware, PCE and SFC more so than the MD.

Sadly, the TurboGrafX16 never really caught on in the USA, let alone in Europe, where it's mostly unknown.

The same could be said about lot's of PCE and MD titles, on the Mega Drive, anything with pre-rendered graphics and lot's of greys (Altered Beast, Vectorman, Mortal Kombat).
And in the PCE, Bonk aged badly, it looks more like a generic NES platformer with more colour depth, and some ear shattering chiptunes. Call me Bold but, it's just the best PCE platformer.

 

Super Metroid didn't have any special chip. It's all base hardware. So are many other wonderful games. Also, I've heard the issue with poor sound/music quality in early SNES games was due to the lack of ROM memory causing them to use lower quality samples. And being early on they may have decided to load nearly everything for the whole game at once into sound RAM opposed to what later games do where they load only what is needed at the time.

I really think it's a shame that the SNES had that awfully slow 2.68mhz speed 99% of the time. Just imagine the improvement if the SNES CPU had been as fast as the competition, say around 7mhz.

Or if Nintendo had made the SA-1 or similar Co-processor into a Booster Pak, Game Genie style so that many more games could have used it. But even with it's rather slow CPU, the SNES was excellent.

I agee with Tatsujin though, all three systems were excellent and all have some real gems to offer.

 

I think it was more due to inexperience with the SPC700 itself.

Unlikely. The sound board has such a tiny amount of RAM that it'd need updating regularly.

3.6Mhz, wasn't it? Either way, agreed.

This kind of thing is horrible for all concerned. It leads to low sales and low development for the updated standard.

 

The reason for the slow speed is because Nintendo cheaped out with slow DRAM; if they had paid out for SRAM (<$25 vs <$10 in '89), it could have ran at 7.16 MHz+ with similar ROM wait states, but then still execute plenty code in the large 1M of WRAM.

 

Alchy, actually this is true, even though the SPC has 64K of space there are games that load everything at once. BS-Zelda does this. It's possible Super Mario World and other early games do too.

I did said that the lack of experience (from being early games) probably was a factor in low sound quality.

The SNES was not 3.6mhz. Normally it ran at 2.68mhz. It ran at 3.58mhz only when accessing FastROM mapped to banks $80 - $FF. Accessing RAM or I/O ports was at 2.68mhz or possibly the 1.7mhz speed for those cycles.

Calpis, I remember hearing about that idea. Someone suggested that the SNES could have used some of it's large amount of RAM (twice what Genesis had for WRAM I believe) to copy program code into and use for faster execution, which would have been sweet at 7.16mhz. But it does not surprise me that they cheaped out.

 

I was an SNES fan growing up, but I certainly respect the PCE. Most people dismiss it because it does have a lot of weak 8-bit-esque games. I think the Hucard, while being the most badass storage medium for a console EVER, was also its weak point. Its really hard for devs to create awesome effects and such when your limited to 1 megabyte. I think when considering the PCE, you really need to count in the CD library. It adds no additional graphical hardware, so I think its fair to compare these games to the normal SNES/Genesis library (if your comparing just from a graphical standpoint).

 

Well if you compare the PC-Engine DUO to the SNES or Genesis the DUO fairs very well. It's a shame the cost of the system was so high that it couldn't have been more competitive in the US.

But I'm not sure your point about HuCards holding it back is right. Just look at Street Fighter 2' on PC-Engine which was quite large. Or the Arcade Card that had 2MB of RAM in it. Sure they had that bump thing going on but they were still sexy HuCards. I'm not sure what the reason was for most HuCard games being smaller than the average SNES or MD game.

 

Damn PC Engine fanboys! Take it outside!

...the thread that is! This is for the SNES CD ;-)

 

On topic:

Let me get this straight there are/is some kind of snes CD boxes, shells... or whatever you want to call them kicking arround somewhere?? I take it these are sony from when they were still maiking the snes CD.

If so what happened between Phillips and nintendeo anmd did they get far with the snes CD