[rant about Genesis color]
it sickens me that Genesis could only display 64 colors on screen at once, in hardware. nevermind the software tricks. this is only a modest improvement over the amount of colors that the Master System can display on-screen, 32 colors. (more on that later)
Genesis has a pallete of 512 colors, well THAT should have been, at minimum, the amount displayable on-screen, in hardware. the pallete should have been 4096, at the very least. smaller than SNES color pallete (32,768) but reasonable given the time Genesis hardware was done (1988, released in Japan as the MegaDrive)
back to on-screen displayable colors: it's just mind-boggling to me why Genesis was limited to 64 colors in hardware. the 1-year older 8-bit NEC-Hudson PC-Engine (TurboGrafx) can display at least 4 times as many colors on-screen as Genesis. 256 at least, and possibly all 512 colors, or maybe it is somewhere over 400 colors. whatever the PC-Engine's exact amount of displayable colors is, it is 4 to 8 times as much as Genesis. and the PC-Engine/TurboGrafx does it IN HARDWARE, without tricks.
WHY is Genesis limited to 64 colors on-screen in hardware? I don't know, but I have a guess.
the main graphic-video chips in both the Genesis and the previous-generation Master System are called VDP - video display processor. you will remember that the Saturn also has VDP, actually VDP1 and VDP2. I am just *guessing* (wondering if) the VDP in Genesis is only a modest improvement over the VDP in the Master System - at least as far as the amount of colors displayable on-screen is concerned.
Master System: 32 - Genesis: 64 ....hmmm.... I feel that my theory is helped by the fact that Genesis can only display 80 *sprites* on screen at once. not that much for a 16-bit console. the Master System could do 64 sprites. and even though the Genesis could do more and *larger* sprites than Master System, the Genesis max sprite-size (32x32) was smaller than what the PC-Engine could do (32x64). dispite the fact that Genesis could do more individual sprites (80) than PC-Engine (64). The various color and sprite capabilities would all be determined by what the Genesis VDP can do, no?
the 68000 CPU probably helped Genesis move things around very FAST, and was of great use for all kinds of programming tricks. but, the VDP and its hard-wired, fixed capabilities would determine how many colors on-screen and how many sprites Genesis could display, right? I am not hardware tech expert by any means.
back to my actual ranting....
why is it that the PC-Engine ~ TurboGrafx, ((a console that came out in Japan: Oct 1987 one year before the Sega console came out in Japan: Nov 1988 .... same year launch in the U.S.)), can display so many more colors on-screen in hardware, than the 1-year newer Sega console? I mean what the fuck.
*IF* Sega had done things RIGHT (haha, as in so many other things) the Genesis would have been displaying closer to 4096 colors on screen, and been closer to 8 ~ 16 times *ahead* of the PC-Engine ~ TurboGrafx (256-512 colors) *instead* of being 4 ~ 8 times BEHIND the NEC console as Genesis was (64 colors)
Now you might ask: why *should* Genesis have had the ability to display an astonishing 4096 colors on-screen, or close to it? because that is what the hardware that Genesis was derived from can do. the System16 board of 1986 (two years *older* than Genesis hardware going by MegaDrive launch in 1988). The System16 can do 4096 colors on-screen from a pallete of 32,768.
as I said near the beginning of my rant, the Genesis should've had, at the very least, a 512 color on-screen out of 4096 total capability. still much less than that of its parent, the System16 board (4096 out of 32,768) but still respectible. instead of the *laughable* 64 out of 512 capability that Sega saw fit to give Genesis.
the SNK NEO-GEO btw, has a 4096 out of 65,536 color capability - a good balance of total colors in its pallete and on-screen displayable colors.
the SNES, although nowhere near as HORRIBLE has the Genesis, could have had a better color capability. SNES color pallete: 32,768, is very large, half the size of the NEO-GEO, which is good for a machine that cost half as much. ($200 vs $400) but SNES could have used more colors on screen also. while 256 is not bad, it isnt great either, for a console that came out later than the other 3 (PC-Engine, Genesis, NEO-GEO), and especially compared to an 8-bit console (PC-Engine) that came out 3 year earlier (PC-Engine: 1987 ..... SNES: 1990 Japan) and that can display at least as many colors as SNES (256) if not more (PC-Engine can do at least 256, if not 400+ and possibly upto 512 colors). so best case for SNES: the SNES equals the PC-Engine in displayable colors on screen at once (256) or worse case: PC-Engine beats SNES by 2x in displayable colors, depending on what the actual real amount was for PC-Engine.
something that is for certain though: not counting the expensive NEO-GEO, the PC-Engine is the best as far as the amount of displayable, on-screen simultaneous colors, in hardware. especially given that PC-Engine is older than the other 2 consoles that I am counting (Genesis and SNES)
one more time in case the color amounts got lost to your eyes in those paragraphs ....
PC-Engine~TurboGrafx: 256+ (256-512) - first released: 1987
MegaDrive-Genesis: 64 - first released: 1988
SNES: 256 - first released: 1990
I'm so going to check this out. 