GTA 3 for the NES!

and either way, there are many better games for the NES.

Hell, Xbox is the most powerful of today's 3 systems, still PS2 has many and much better games. The PSX and PS2 outlived the Dreamcast that was quite more powerful.
The Saturn is more powerful than the PSX in many ways (not 3D, though)
Hell, the PCEngine could do polygons and stuff by the end of its life.

So in fewer words, maybe SMS is a better machine. Unfortunately, NES was better used, as inferior as it was, and had much more progress in terms of hardware and software improvement.

So it became the better machine.
Just like today's shite PS2 is the best machine in the market, when even Dreamcast is superior to it.


(not hoping to start a flamewar)

 

The PS2 is superior, in terms of technical capibilities, to the Dreamcast. However, I see the comparison between PS2/DC as something akin to SNES/Genesis (Megadrive). While the Genny was quite less powerful, it could do certain things that the SNES simply couldn't do.

Yes, I'm looking at the jagariffic PS2 games. :smt042 The N64 could anti-alias!

 

Actually, the SNES is much less powerful but it can do a hundred things the Genesis can't do w/o a Sega CD.

 

Sure!
Snes is a 300mhz Pentium 3 CPU and 64moRAM with a Ati4800
Genesis is a 900 mhz Pentium Itanium and 64moDDR with a RivaTnT

Anyway, i'm not sure that the 6502 is faster as the z80 at same clock.
Is there any datasheet brenchmarking both cpu's?

Even the Snes Cpu isn't really better (still 8bit technology), 68k is a 32bit cpu.

 

The SMS was in fact powerful than the NES in terms of graphics. I remember seeing a comparison between NES games and SMS games.

 

68K comes in both 16 and 32bit flavors. The Genesis uses a 16bit 68K.

Of course the SMS is technically "better" but it is NOWHERE near as flexible in the graphics department. I'll repeat myself, sure it supports more colors and sprites onscreen but the palette is dark and the SMS's cartridge design prevents it from getting the cool effects enabled by external hardware. Someone please tell me what SMS game has the best "graphics" because I'll show you guys a side by side comparison of the NES besting SMS, whatever game you throw at me.

You guys've played Kirby right? No way in hell SMS could do that. If the arguement is that "mappers" are cheating, go play a 32k SMS game, they suck 100x more than 40k NES games.

 

You have a point there Kuyusaku.

 

Character sprites always seemed to have less colours in NES games compared to SMS, regardless of how vibrant the colours were. Sonic 1 for SMS, for instance, has 2 tones of brown, two tones of blue, black and white for Sonic's sprite. SMB3 has pink, red and black for Mario, and Kirby has pink, purple and black for the character sprite.

Actually, it's the other way around. Snes has scaling and rotation effects in hardware that Megadrive couldn't do. Also SNES had a bigger colour palette (4096 vs 32k iirc). The SNES CPU was slow and crappy though. I never understood why Nintendo went for the 6502-compliant CPU without ever using it for NES compatibility...

 

Nintendo uses 2bpp tiles so sprites are generally 3 colors including an outline because the 4th color has to be "clear." There are exceptions to this though. NES was never short of talented programmers.

SMS/Genesis/SNES uses 4bpp so they can have 16 color sprites.

 

YEs, but this calculations generaly require a SuperFX chip because SnesCPU cant handle real time perspective calculation (to control the VDP, reload display registers and sprites/planes).
80% of great Snes games uses SuperFX while sega only required a superFX-style chip for one game, Virtuaracing and this game is enormous.

Technicaly, the basic 68000 is a 32bit CPU (32bit internals registers & co) but with a 16bit data gate (i have some technical docs about the first military 68000, so correct me if the public one was only 16). So there is only a 16bit bus to cart, ram, VDP.
Snes has a 6502 upgraded but still have 8bit bus so cart is 8bit. I'm not sure of that but it seems that the SNes CPu only have 8bit data registers and thats enormously crap.

In fact, Nintendo always thinked to make low speed system but with an powerfull VDP (video Display processor).
Same for NES, same for SNES, same for GBA....
We should ask them why :smt082

 

SNES couldn't do such things as Sonic or Gunstar Heroes, due in large part to precessor speed. But if you look at the MK series, the SNES ones kick the Genny ones to the curb, due to the vibrant color palette. Sega CD FMV games looked grainy as hell because of that. I remember a quote from some FMV maker who says the SNES FMV ones looked really nice, as opposed to the SCD crap.

 

80% of great SNES games? There are about 10 games for SNES that even use a Super FX. Sega's SVP is very very different. I've got Virtua Racing and I say it sucks monkey balls even though yes, it's very 3D. Stunt Race FX is just as 3D as Virtua Racing and it even sucks slightly less.

Exactly, but starting at the 68020 revision, the bus jumps up to 32bit.

Whats so crappy about a 8bit bus? The console can still address 64 megabits, twice that of a Genesis. N64 uses a 8-bit ROMs.

They understand that quality is acheived through efficient and well thought out programming and a very predictible clock. I find nothing wrong with slow consoles. If you'd like to see what SNES looks like with a faster processor play a SA-1 game, they have a whole seperate 65816 at a much higher frequency and guess what it has? A 16bit bus. I don't know what the Genesis can do that the SNES can't, besides Sonic. 90% of the time, the SNES releases of a multiplatform game are better.

 

Don't forget that SNES had hardware transparency effect which made a lot games look cool and had not slow down. The Genny tried to mimmick that effect by a fast series of blinking colors "on" and "off", like Sonic2's blue protection bubble.

 

If the SNES couldn't, it would be entirely down to CPU speed, in terms of on-paper graphical capability there's nothing the Megadrive can do that SNES can't (disregarding real-time concerns for now). However, personally I think it could handle both those games with the right team coding it: take a game like Pop 'n Twinbee Rainbow Bell Adventure - it moves just as a fast as Sonic. If you compare the best scrolling shooters on the Megadrive (Musha Aleste or Thunder force 4, for example), graphically I don't think they compare to the best the SNES offered (Macross Scrambled Valkyrie, Axelay, Super Aleste etc).

R-Type 4 and Axelay both make fairly extensive use of the graphical modes the SNES offers in hardware, without the use of an additional chip (AFAIK). Admittedly the SNES wasn't powerful enough to cope with polygons at a decent rate without additional hardware, but neither was the Megadrive.

Anyway, as a general rule I don't like most of the SuperFX games, the framerate was too low. 3D games on the 16-bit generation of consoles was a hit and miss affair. I do love Virtua Racing though ^_^

 

8bits is cool, 16 bit is better.
Because the snes need to do 2 time more acces to move a 16bit word.

Because programmers are gods.

I think that snes is good for rpgs & qte, genesis was made for action games.

Thats because snes has a 256 color mode in its vdp (divided or not i in 16*16 colors pal).

Ummm, i agree that snes can do 256 color fmv but its MUST be at low framerate.
Segagenesis can handle 20fps full 64colors screen FMV from segaCD (and believe me, the genesis was never designed to communicate with segacd, all is displayed using the genesis power), and i'm sure that snes can only make a gorky 5fps 256colors with the same hardware limitations.

I don't say "snes is bad" i just say "snes is cool but slow".

 

Thats why they came out with the Super FX2 and SA-1 chips. SNES gaming with far more power than Sega CD.

 

I don't remember but i think that super fx is a bit like a standalone processor with some rom and a ram to communicate with Snes VDP.
Basicaly the SVP is similar but faster (ie: barbarian calculator).

Yes, the SVP and FX2 are faster than the segaCD cpu but arent able to make faster zoom/rotation on 2D than the segacd arithmetic chip (even the 32x had some problem to imitate it with his 2 sh2's running at +20mips each).

To bad that sega never added a standalone additional VDP in the segacd (it was possible since there is a video mixing pin passing throught the segacd connector) .
:smt009

 

Nah-unh. It runs in cooperation with the 65816. It's only 10mhz but the SFX2 is 21mhz and has many other abilities.

Are you sure? Have you played Yoshi's Island?

 

Its simple, i edited some BCRACER race file to put 30-50 of big lamp on screen and it slowdowned a bit...
Considering how the game works, it seems that the segacd arthmetic chip can draw a "print" in the *frambuffer* loads of zoomed elements at once.

In yoshies, does the FX draws the sprites?
I'm not sure but i rather think (because the game seems smooth) that the fx *only* calculate sprites coordinates/zoomfactor... and then the snes cpu use this informations to fill its video display processor.

 

Does the SCD have a framebuffer then? I am quite sure that is not the case...