SNES vs Genesis

[Bregalad]

I just looked through a Sega-16 thread about StarFox, and Zebbe quoted you, spewing out his "I've spoken with 2 programmers and they both said..." bullshit again.

Does Zebbe honestly thinks he's fooling anyone? Even if he actually does know them, it still doesn't matter what they say, because none of the programmers he named have ever programmed a single game for the SNES in the first place.

Not only I've never written any SNES games, but not even a tech demo !
The best I did was modify an existing demo and write some SPC700 code (that I lost stupidly by the way).

Also I'm totally biased against Sega and I fully assume my position. They, their consoles and their fanboys sucks so hard !! And why did they have to release so many different console, it's like they released one every year. They released 2 consoles between the NES and the SNES, and another 2 or 3 between the SNES and the Playstation/N64. Seriously. Why hadn't they focused more on quality than quantity ?

[3gengames]

Wikipedia isn't an accurate source, but still...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instructio ... per_second

[tokumaru]

Why hadn't they focused more on quality than quantity ?

I believe SEGA was always trying to get into the next generation before everyone else. It worked for the Mega Drive, their first worldwide success. Nintendo was pretty comfortable with the NES and everyone making games for it, until SEGA released the Mega Drive. That worked for SEGA that time, but unfortunately for them this trick never worked again.

The Mega Drive/Genesis add-ons were just plain stupid though. People had to basically buy 2 SEGA consoles in order to play SEGA CD or 32X games, and few people did that. I remember I did kinda want a SEGA CD when I was a kid, but SEGA never showed me anything that made me REALLY want to own one, so I never did.

[Bregalad]

People had to basically buy 2 SEGA consoles in order to play SEGA CD or 32X games, and few people did that.

Yeah, but this formula worked in Japan for the Famicom Disk System. It only worked for a short period of time (1986-1988), much shorter than the console's lifespan (1983-1994) but nevertheless it worked.
So there is other reason behind the failure of the Megadrive's add-ons, every likely the fact they were released too closely with the Saturn, and the PlayStation. Also the SNES was very expensive just when it came out and many people would take the decision to buy one only several years after, and they'd rather buy a SNES than a Megadrive add on to complete their collection. The idea to release 2 add-ons at almost the same time is terrible - if at least they released only the Sega CD, and deleayed the Staturn, it would probably have worked.
This is just hypothesis, what I say might be plain wrong (especially considering I don't know much about Sega consoles, because - of course - I am completely biased against them ).

[TmEE]

PCE Engine had a really successful addon, and that is most probably the main reason for the MegaCD idea. Only difference is that NEC was pushing the CD instead of cards, while Sega did both CD and cart.
There is a very recent review at Sega-16 with one main figure at Sega during the 32X times and there is a lot of good info about why it made sense etc. In the end it still turned into a blunder... but it sold hundreds of thousands, unlike some other flops from others.
I do personally think there was no need for either, or the MegaCD should have had its own video out so the DMA to MD VDP VRAM for display bottleneck gets eliminated, and in the process you can introduce fair bit of extra stuff as far as graphics go.

You can do 512 color flat bitmaps with MegaCD though, using the CRAM DMA method I described earlier in this thread. MegaCD side is not halted for the duration of the DMA, so while MD side shows the bitmap, the MegaCD side can render next frame. Chilly Willy is cooking up something around it last time I spoke to him.

[tomaitheous]

Hey, people actually have links to my old pastebin posts?

[strat]

This could have accounted for the TCD being a lot more expensive at launch, but it shows more care in the engineering that the base unit + add-on only needed one power supply between the two, while the Megadrive + Mega CD had their own power cables.

[TmEE]

MegaCD could be powered from the MD side, but only on models that do not have carbon covered contacts on the expansion connector... all japanese units have carbon coated connections. Those few ohms of resistance the carbon causes is enough to cause instability when the MCD is powered from MD during seeking operations when power draw is greatest.
Scraping off the carbon would fix the problem and that is what I do on my machines to make them behave good on my "single AC brick modded" MegaCD.

[Zelex]

This thread has been thoroughly entertaining thanks!

[CareerOfEvil]

I don't know about you guys, but my sega genesis runs at 10MHZ!

[mikejmoffitt]

I don't know about you guys, but my sega genesis runs at 10MHZ!

What is all that mess??? 10MHz overclock involves an oscillator, a switch, and at most four wires... please tell me all that does something else as well!

[TmEE]

I got one that ran reliably at 17MHz with select games, Flashback being one of them. That one had so super smooth cutscenes then. That game is an atrocity on SNES...

[CareerOfEvil]

I don't know about you guys, but my sega genesis runs at 10MHZ!

What is all that mess??? 10MHz overclock involves an oscillator, a switch, and at most four wires... please tell me all that does something else as well!

Hahaha! Yes it is a mess. Before I had a digital camera, so I'll see if I can get some new pictures. On top of having an oscillator, there's also a circuit to output s-video.

[psycopathicteen]

I was able to get the SNES to software rotate a sprite, while running an unfinished version of Gunstar Heroes on stock hardware. The rotating sprite is placed at the end of the "level" using the dynamic-loading-corridor trick shown as described here. http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/M ... micLoading

[Bregalad]

Congratulations, it looks neat ! And without any slowdown