Which system had the most unusual/bizarre hardware architecture? My vote based on what I have seen goes to the Nintendo 64 and its weird graphics setup.
The Intellivision/Channel F is my bet at the moment, since i am currently trying to emulate it on DS. I have written a working core, but it uses secondary circuitry for just about everything like video and sound, even I/O it seems... Now that is a lot of chips to emulate and time right From old work experience i would say i personally hate logic controllers for automated machinery, but thats another story...
Well the Atari VCS being one of the very early systems, had lots of unusual architectural decisions made under the hood. The fact that you needed to build each raster line on the display with the CPU, and chase the "beam" is very different from having a frame buffer and some sort of DMA/logic engine to feed the graphics chip. The Saturn had a boat-load of chips inside of it, a sprite engine, a background engine, an SH2, an SH1, etc. They used to kid me at the office, as I was the head of Saturn development for the company, that the Saturn console was a Frankenstein of hardware, while the PS1 was such a clean design. The Sega 32X was an interesting design too, interfacing with the Genesis base... --Selgus
I m amazed no one mentioned the Genesis add-ons and the Saturn. Coding for 32X+SegaCD games must have been a nightmare, especially when considering the lack of high level tools at the time!
Oddly enough you should mention it, as i recall writing a never finished "multimedia experience" for some company that was supposed to be installed in the lobby of a hospital, to guide visitors to the different locations there. It ran on Megadrive+CD hardware, strange as it may seem, with this being aroung -96 or something, when a PC with CD-ROM would have been a more obvious choice. However, i think some part of their deal fell apart and nothing came of it. The point i am trying to make here however is that i was given and used a C compiler tailored for the system, by the company ordering the job. It actually generated some pretty fast code. A lot of memory handling was still low-level, but just saying there was quality tools, at least as of -96... If it was their own or some official tool i don't know. Might have it on disk still, however...
32X is not much of an headache until you try to do really high performance requiring stuff on it... the setup is too slow for its CPUs, everything you do makes the CPUs wait :/ MCD is a piece of work though, nightmare and very prone to crashing if it does not get what it wants...
Any reason why the Jaguar was an odd machine, lots of programmers nodding and going I agree doesn't tell us much. TmEE had the right idea with telling us a little more.
