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Why did Mega Drive/Genesis games not have special chips in them? Á la Snes
- Thread starter Spunky Monkey
- Start date
And how about the T. rex chases in The Lost World: Jurassic Park?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPzKP8zubs0&feature=youtu.be&t=6815
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPzKP8zubs0&feature=youtu.be&t=6815
Hero_of_the_Day
Member
Wasn't the SNES designed with the enhancement chips in mind? I just assumed Sega didn't do the same and it's more complicated than simply throwing chips onto a game cartridge.
EDIT: Yeah, reading online it seems the SNES was designed for these extra chips. Standard games only use so many pins on the cartridge slot, while games with special chips use them all.
Standard game on top, game with an enhancement chip on the bottom.
EDIT 2: The Shadow knows.
EDIT: Yeah, reading online it seems the SNES was designed for these extra chips. Standard games only use so many pins on the cartridge slot, while games with special chips use them all.
Standard game on top, game with an enhancement chip on the bottom.
EDIT 2: The Shadow knows.
I'm sorry but you're the one being ignorant here. It is widely known the the SNES CPU was weaker than the Genesis, and Nintendo did that on purpose in order to sell the console more profitable and use cheaps in the carts in select games instead. The system was designed ground up for such technology.
Interesting, what do you have to say about the GPUs of both systems?
Those are the exact two games I was thinking of. Sonic 3D looks both smooth and colourful even on non SD displays, to this day I have no idea how they did it.
I really like the part in the two face boss fight where everything starts tilting back and forth and he starts throwing 5 dynamites at you, each one throwing out 8-10 explosion sprites.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWKHpptxBhk&t=310
And the animated smoke and fire in the first level.
Can't find any gifs of them though.
forknknife
Banned
Wait, so how do the zooms in art of fighting work then?
I think ultimately, the prospect of co-processors came down to developers needing them to help realize their vision for game design, rather than any extra graphical features and such. Processing power was very much intertwined with what you could do game design wise, and the Genesis' faster CPU making it a much more flexible machine out of the box meant putting less roadblocks for the creative vision of developers. Putting in expensive co-processors just for the sake of making a game look prettier would be a much more superficial reason.
Was it? I was under the impression that Mickey Mania was a pretty good example of pushing the vanilla SNES in features, all things considered.
Easy. When zoomed in the sprites are displayed at their native size.
Was it? I was under the impression that Mickey Mania was a pretty good example of pushing the vanilla SNES in features, all things considered.
Easy. When zoomed in the sprites are displayed at their native size.
captainraincoat
Banned
Snes hardware was better from a technical point of view although some would argue this its probrably more an art direction rather than a physical limitation or a combination.
The extra chips added were more to accommodate 3d into game's as the original hardware was not designed with that in mind
Nintendo and sega had about the same amoumt of ganes with the added chips from memory but nintendo are probably remembered more because of starfox
The extra chips added were more to accommodate 3d into game's as the original hardware was not designed with that in mind
Nintendo and sega had about the same amoumt of ganes with the added chips from memory but nintendo are probably remembered more because of starfox
Playmaster
Banned
One thing I have always wondered. What limits are there to adding chips to carts? Can someone add some custom, powerful chips today and have the snes do some crazy shit?
The Shadow
Member
https://www.destructoid.com/super-road-blaster-the-impossible-laserdisc-to-snes-port-228189.phtml
There are limits, but more importantly, the possibilities were never fully realized due to cost.
I try not to think about things like that. Time is passing by way too fast for my comfort.
Because they can already do all this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2yQNzPgPxU
https://youtu.be/gWVmPtr9O0g
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2yQNzPgPxU
https://youtu.be/gWVmPtr9O0g
Playmaster
Banned
Whoa that's amazing.
A Black Falcon
Member
I know some of this has been said, but:
The reason is that Sega decided to sell hardware addons instead of put more addon chips into the carts. This wasn't only about the Genesis, but it was a longstanding practice that both companies had done the previous generation as well -- think of how most NES games have addon chips in the carts, while instead of doing something similar to make their first console, the SG-1000, more competitive compared to the Famicom (which was crushing the SG-1000 in sales and has better graphics too), Sega chose to release an upgraded version of the system instead, the one we know of as the Master System.
The next generation, both companies continued similarly. So, like the NES before it many SNES games use addon chips, from the DSP to the Super FX, and the system was designed around having addon chips in carts to improve on the hardware in the box. Sega could have put addon chips in Genesis games, but did not; as the OP said, only one game, Virtua Racing, uses an addon chip, and instead of releasing more, Sega released addons. Unlike the previous generation this time the addons, the Sega CD and 32X, do work with the original system, though Sega of Japan's original idea that led to the 32X was a new, slightly better Genesis revision (with a larger color palette, if I remember right), an idea Sega of America disliked, arguing for an addon instead.
Now, Nintendo did release addons for their systems too, but unlike Sega it was not done to add to the hardware power, but instead to change the delivery medium -- the Famicom Disk System (which does have slightly better audio hardware than the NES, but otherwise is unchanged from the base model), the Satellaview (again audio is the only gameplay change, as streaming audio is added, otherwise it's a SNES), and 64DD (which is just N64 with writeable disks). Of course, the Sega CD also changed the delivery medium, and Nintendo was also working on a CD addon for their system, but the Sega CD has enhanced graphical hardware, with added hardware sprite scaling and rotation support, that the SNES CD would not have had, since we now know that it was pretty much just a disc drive for the SNES... and Nintendo cancelled the SNES CD, partially because of disagreements with Sony sure, but ultimately because they decided to stick with carts.
So, the answer to the OP's question is simple, it reflects the different design philosophies of Nintendo and Sega about how to go beyond their systems' base hardware limitations, towards addon chips in carts, or hardware revisions and addons. There are good arguments that can be made either way, as having addon chips in carts makes game prices higher and only allows the games with those chips to benefit from the added power, while all Sega CD or 32X (or Master System) games can benefit from the added power those systems offer, but in practice Nintendo's approach proved to be the more popular one with most consumers, as we all know. Top-end addon-chips like the Super FX added a lot to SNES game prices, and the same was true for the SVP chip in Virtua Racing for the Genesis, but people have far higher expectations in terms of game support and such for a full addon like the 32X than they do an addon chip like the Super FX, and that came back to hurt Sega badly in the mid '90s as they started abandoning systems after only a couple of years. Releasing fewer platforms but supporting each one for longer, and enhancing a current platform's visuals with addon chips instead of hardware expansions, was the commercially better move at that time.
(If you look at the third major console maker then, NEC/Hudson, they released a mountain of addons and revisions for the PC Engine/TurboGrafx-16, and even in Japan where the system did a lot better than it did here, that probably did eventually hurt them. You can only divide your userbase so many times before it gets too small. NEC made lots of other mistakes too, including getting crushed by the SNES in Japan, completely messing up their Western strategy, not hitting on the right followup to the PCE, and completely missing that gaming was going to go towards polygonal graphics and not FMV, but having so many addons/revisions didn't help either.)
The reason is that Sega decided to sell hardware addons instead of put more addon chips into the carts. This wasn't only about the Genesis, but it was a longstanding practice that both companies had done the previous generation as well -- think of how most NES games have addon chips in the carts, while instead of doing something similar to make their first console, the SG-1000, more competitive compared to the Famicom (which was crushing the SG-1000 in sales and has better graphics too), Sega chose to release an upgraded version of the system instead, the one we know of as the Master System.
The next generation, both companies continued similarly. So, like the NES before it many SNES games use addon chips, from the DSP to the Super FX, and the system was designed around having addon chips in carts to improve on the hardware in the box. Sega could have put addon chips in Genesis games, but did not; as the OP said, only one game, Virtua Racing, uses an addon chip, and instead of releasing more, Sega released addons. Unlike the previous generation this time the addons, the Sega CD and 32X, do work with the original system, though Sega of Japan's original idea that led to the 32X was a new, slightly better Genesis revision (with a larger color palette, if I remember right), an idea Sega of America disliked, arguing for an addon instead.
Now, Nintendo did release addons for their systems too, but unlike Sega it was not done to add to the hardware power, but instead to change the delivery medium -- the Famicom Disk System (which does have slightly better audio hardware than the NES, but otherwise is unchanged from the base model), the Satellaview (again audio is the only gameplay change, as streaming audio is added, otherwise it's a SNES), and 64DD (which is just N64 with writeable disks). Of course, the Sega CD also changed the delivery medium, and Nintendo was also working on a CD addon for their system, but the Sega CD has enhanced graphical hardware, with added hardware sprite scaling and rotation support, that the SNES CD would not have had, since we now know that it was pretty much just a disc drive for the SNES... and Nintendo cancelled the SNES CD, partially because of disagreements with Sony sure, but ultimately because they decided to stick with carts.
So, the answer to the OP's question is simple, it reflects the different design philosophies of Nintendo and Sega about how to go beyond their systems' base hardware limitations, towards addon chips in carts, or hardware revisions and addons. There are good arguments that can be made either way, as having addon chips in carts makes game prices higher and only allows the games with those chips to benefit from the added power, while all Sega CD or 32X (or Master System) games can benefit from the added power those systems offer, but in practice Nintendo's approach proved to be the more popular one with most consumers, as we all know. Top-end addon-chips like the Super FX added a lot to SNES game prices, and the same was true for the SVP chip in Virtua Racing for the Genesis, but people have far higher expectations in terms of game support and such for a full addon like the 32X than they do an addon chip like the Super FX, and that came back to hurt Sega badly in the mid '90s as they started abandoning systems after only a couple of years. Releasing fewer platforms but supporting each one for longer, and enhancing a current platform's visuals with addon chips instead of hardware expansions, was the commercially better move at that time.
(If you look at the third major console maker then, NEC/Hudson, they released a mountain of addons and revisions for the PC Engine/TurboGrafx-16, and even in Japan where the system did a lot better than it did here, that probably did eventually hurt them. You can only divide your userbase so many times before it gets too small. NEC made lots of other mistakes too, including getting crushed by the SNES in Japan, completely messing up their Western strategy, not hitting on the right followup to the PCE, and completely missing that gaming was going to go towards polygonal graphics and not FMV, but having so many addons/revisions didn't help either.)
Here I just made one.
The perspective is so fucked lol, effects are really cool though.
Yeah, but the building (and the sidewalk) has per line parallax scrolling, so it looks awesome.
woah i've been keeping an eye on this for years. pre ordered
It worked as a framebuffer based rendering chip that allowed multiple parallax layers and large sprites that can be transformationed
For all intents and purposes, yes.
cireza
Member
I was talking about colors here. DKC has gradients that you could never dream of on Genesis, because the palette has a lot more available colors.
Nothing because I am not a technical person anyway. I simply talk about how I feel when playing the games, and you can pretty much witness the CPU advantage of the Genesis after playing most of the games on both systems. Also the console outputted most of its games at a higher resolution (that's only one example).
The SNES however displays much better gradients, combine this with its ability to make transparency, you get some extremely pretty and refined graphics in many games. But that's pure pixel-art, it does not involve "moving stuff on the screen". They both have very different strengths.
Otherwise, Sonic 3D and Toy Story are some of the games that make the best use of the Genesis color palette. Also, Jurassic Park Lost World has some pretty impressive green gradients (as well as some crazy special scenes). If you don't know about this game, definitely check it out.
MrCunningham
Member
Super Mario Kart used an additional chip called the DSP-1 to produce two mode 7 playing fields in split screen. But otherwise, Mode 7 was an effect that was built into the VPU.
There are polygon elements used in the game, but the Super FX2 chip was mostly used for sprite manipulation. If you pay attention to the game, there are rotating sprites, scaling sprites, and sprite deformation (like stretch and squash) everywhere. It was used to enhance the 2D abilities of the SNES.
stan423321
Member
It's basically another CPU and another RAM chunk and a bunch of memory shuffling wires that compensate for the fact SNES pixel format is a little crazy and unsuitable for software rendering of most stuff. This CPU typically runs something that manipulates bitmaps, similarly to DOS and early Windows games, and SNES CPU can then use these as if these were on the cart.
cireza
Member
I believe that the chip allowed for wider mode 7 areas (bigger circuits), as well as displayed some 2D elements on the circuit (pipes etc...).
Street Racer, which does not use a chip, as much smaller circuits, and nothing is displayed in 2D except for the racers themselves.
ResidentDante
Member
It's definitely the most strange choice for the MD's hardware setup. It was fine for the first years, but when the games started to copycat the Donkey Kong Country CGI look it murdered multiplats on the MD, they looks terrible because of the lack of colours and how they blend compared to the SNES. Not that CGI looking sprite games were very good in general except DKC.
IrishNinja
Member
kinda already been said but
a) they did sometimes
b) they had console add-ons, as in plural, lessening the need here
c) they bailed on the 16-bit gen earlier than nintendo did, also lessening the need to use such chips to elongate said gen (not saying this is a bad thing, mind)
a) they did sometimes
b) they had console add-ons, as in plural, lessening the need here
c) they bailed on the 16-bit gen earlier than nintendo did, also lessening the need to use such chips to elongate said gen (not saying this is a bad thing, mind)
d) it's the GOAT console and they got it right the first time
cireza
Member
Only once : Virtua Racing.
stan423321
Member
Gameplay-wise, you can put a, say, 360 game into a SNES cart, and you can pipe the audio into the system, but regarding enhancing video output, there is a limit and SuperFX2 is apparently close to hitting it. You can only transfer so much data into PPU's RAM without turning off the screen, manipulating data while screen is on is heavily limited, and hilariously, while PPU chips themselves apparently allow a limited 128-color passthrough mode (a'la audio piping) the motherboard doesn't wire them in a way that allows the cart to use it for, well, video passthrough. And obviously you can't get something like 24-bit color from PPU out of nowhere. The same is true on Genny, that's why 32X features the video-to-video cable.
It's because the databus of the SNES is extremely narrow. Many games had loading screens without you noticing. Everybody attacks Megaman X2 for those "empty chambers", but nobody really realizes why that is. The time it takes you to get through that was to allow the rest of the level to be loaded in the background. By the time you started passing through the first part of the door, it would start writing in the second part of the level. Then during the time you take to traverse the path and going through the other door, it would have the necessary seconds to load the rest of the stage.
Yes, the SNES was THAT bandwidth constrained! The reason SuperFX games can look so flashy (but still have low Framerates compared to Megadrive games) is that they use the full DMA to just stream the framebuffer from the cart to SNES memory. Basically your entire console is on the cart, safe for some things like sound. The CPU is completely bypassed.
On top of this, people that say the Megadrive couldn't do this are wrong. The Megadive had similar expansion capabilities, and infact would have been able to store more pallettes had SEGA released the proper mappers. It would have been easier had SEGA connected the lines from the VDP to the cart that allowed for it to be done directly, but since it is possible to switch pallettes in between lineinterupts, one could just make a mapper that stored a bank of pallettes in memory and loaded the ones you needed per scanline. Still limited but it is what some games already do in software.).
Sound wise the megadrive also was a BEAST, the problem was more US developers got very shitty drivers, and were not used to writing their own. The one released to them was a crappy windows wave form editor that simply sounded like crap. I mean check out what renovation did with that chip! Or Technosoft. And that is without SEGA even connecting all the interrupt lines to either CPU or even the cartridge port. A big mistake as had they connected all of the interupts? That YM2612 would have been able to sample multiple channels with little to no CPU overhead, now you needed to poll to get the state of the playback rather than listen for an interrupt request
.I mean even if they hadn't connected it to the CPU, but just to a few pins extra on the cart pinout. They could have released a "SEGA Audio controller mapper" then, that would allow for mixing of PCM channels to compliment that awesome FM sound. (Yes FM is awesome, if you know how it works. Which many US developers didn't. Japanese and European developers however....
..eargasms! ).gonna be twice soon
What The shadow said.
Oh? someone building something in Homebrew? Neat, but still would rather have someone making a nice mapperIC for homebrew with a small framebuffer. One that can rotate and scale sprites
. Imagine an Afterburner clone with fully scalable sprites .stan423321
Member
In my humble opinion the palette entry width was responsible for that, while "colors on screen at once" sounds like palette entry count which, while weaker on Genny than on competing systems, is not nearly such a boon (and can be enhanced by switching the palette entries during h-blanks which is apparently bad on SNES?).
Please don't compare the image of a emulated Meg to an Emulated SNES. Much like FM in emulation: It doesn't do it justice.
A lot of the developers wanting to use photo realistic sprites, used techniques that used scanlines and the way televisions at the time drew their image to their advantage. It is why translucency effects are no big issue on a Saturn either. A CRT television will show that blocky image as a translucent one. But if you run it in emulation on our current day LCD screens? Yeah it look sworse.
Try playing Metal Slug on the NeoGeo, the first stage, just before the endboss.
With the parrots flying through the pixilated waterfall? On a CRT screen that looks beautiful, with the waterfall seemingly translucent and even misty, and the parrots flying through that. On your modern day computer screen? It's a raster mesh mess!
.Also keep in mind that another technique to handle translucency and more than the illusion of more colors is "flickering". CRT screens use a phosphor layer to glow. And thus flickering can be used to generate a different color or translucent effect. Now on your modern day CRT this looks ugly, but that flickering shadow of your PSOne, Saturn, NeoGeo, SNES or Megadrive game will look like a translucent shadow on an old CRT
. Developers weren't nuts back then you know, those straight lines downward? On a Megadrive? Like in the Lionking? Those get blended with the rest to create the illusion of more colours on screen on a CRT
.polyh3dron
Banned
It could've used some help in the display of simultaneous colors department... or the sound department, for that matter.
eh its not that impressive, the limiter here is rom space the megadrive is just as capable of it (though with less colours tbf)
it could have done with better tools for sure, but the megadrives sound chip is fine and is capable of great music.
https://youtu.be/Xln0a0HIX5Y
Finally I can dive into the nostalgia sea and take out my SEGA flag again.
Megadrive >>>>> SNES, fight me GAF.
Joke, I love both.
Maybe the Megadrive hardware was a bit more future proof than SNES, at the beginning...? It didn't need additional hardware, aside from Virtua Racing. I don't know honestly.
It even beats the SNES at its own game in some key regards to PCM samples. Due to the way the SPC chip is built, the sounds you have loaded in its RAM during gameplay is essentially locked and cannot be refreshed without very noticeable freezes. Whereas the Genesis can simply load and unload samples as they are needed, which is a pretty huge advantage.
Games by Treasure which made quite extensive use of PCM for both music and ingame sound effects/voices (and with pretty clear sound quality I might add) flat out could not be done on the SNES with nearly the same scope and/or quality. And you can notice this kind of creative limitation in action in games on both systems by Tommy Tallarico like Earthworm Jim where they had to cut back on the variety of SFX and voice clips quite a bit.
On the SNES you had to worry about memory limitations for both the cart space and sound chip, while on the Genesis you pretty much just had to worry about cart space. This limitation also led to indirectly compromising the sound quality on SNES games that had to fit in a lot of PCM effects and voices alongside the music samples, since you had to cut sample rate fidelity across the board to fit it all in at once, leading to that "muffled" sound (which really has little if anything to do with the 32khz output which some seem to blame it on)
Man the Genesis was just a beast with parallax stuff wasn't it? Saw someone play Sonic 2 yesterday and I never really took a moment to notice all the layers in the first level until now, it's kinda insane. Lovely piece of hardware it was.
stan423321
Member
The SNES CPU was basically a revised version of NES CPU while Genny's 68k was an industry standard, in the times when coding most or all of the game in assembly was normal and expected, so it was almost by definition friendlier to programmers. At the same time some elements of whole MD are weaker, which is not really surprising since it launched in Japan two years or so earlier. You'll also notice that games which arrived on Genny generally didn't use extra chips on SNES either.
Both systems could have been cheaply improved, from the perspective of time, but hindsight is useless. Sega has really dropped the ball with tech design of add-ons though.