IGN: Sega ahead of it's time.

[Hobie-wan]

Professor Hobie sez...

I knew TG-Express slips but the Gameline, dude, you could teach gaming history in college.

Haha. A bunch of useless information sticks in my head, but I went to look up the dates. Apparently the author of that article just went off fanboy lore or is woefully underinformed about older game systems. They could have done some simple research, but then I guess that would have destroyed their entire article.

[o.pwuaioc]

I'm surprised no one mentioned the Intellivision PlayCable.

[Hobie-wan]

I'm surprised no one mentioned the Intellivision PlayCable.

Heh, didn't know about that one.

[marurun]

As to CPU power, if you use the MIPS rating, for example, the 8-bit Hu6280 in TG-16 and the 16-bit 68k in the Genesis are about even, and the SNES's 5A22 lags a bit. Then again, each CPU did have different specialties. The 68k was great at multiplication and was well known by any company producing software for the arcades. The 68k's inherent design advantages were part of why Treasure stuck largely to developing on the Genesis. The Hu6280 was a major step up from the 2A03 in the NES while still being very similar due to being based on the 6502. The SNES's 5A22 was also based on the 6502, but it was hamstrung in a number of ways, not the least by the system bus and clock speed.

CPU speed can actually be pretty important in-game. Collision detection and enemy AI are all CPU-based. Many early games on the SNES had massive slowdown because developers didn't know how to optimize collision detection routines for the 5A22. Heck, the TG-16 does quite well for itself, considering the audio is built into the CPU and can easily take a 5-10% toll on the CPU, more when playing back digitized audio.

the Genesis seemed to handle more sprites easier than the SNES could

The SNES could handle more, actually (128 total, versus 80 max for the Genesis), but again this is part of the graphics chip capabilities, not the core CPU.[/quote]

The SNES could push more sprites on screen, but not any more on a line. The SNES and TG-16 were both limited to 256 sprite pixels per line. The Genesis could display 320 sprite pixels per line in 320x240 resolution mode. That's just enough sprite pixels to cross the screen horizontally.

As for audio, the SNES had a really nice DSP, actually something of a precursor to the audio engine in the Playstation. Unlike the Genesis, TG-16, and almost every console system before them, the SNES used sampled audio exclusively. The Genny and TG could play back digitized samples and incorporate them in music, but they also generated synthesized audio from waveforms, whereas the SNES's sample-driven engine was more like the way the Amiga did audio via MOD files. The problem was that the SNES had some pretty strict limitations on sample size and length. The SNES also didn't have any more system memory than the Genesis, so where the Genesis could get a lot of audio out of relatively small-footprint waveform data, the SNES had to throw a decent bit of memory at storing sampled audio. To make up for this, the SNES DSP does lots of filtering on the output to mask the really crappy quality of the samples it uses. That's why so many SNES games have perpetual reverb and/or sound muffled or muddy. The sound hardware is powerful and flexible, but it's working with samples that are of really poor quality.

[DietSoap]

I suppose the analog stick, the DS, and the fully motion control Wii weren't innovative. HD isn't even a new technology. It's just a higher resolution.

Vectrex and Atari 5200 created the analog thumbstick much earlier before, and just as well the Saturn 3D pad w/analog came out the same time as the N64 anyways. Touch/mic and motion controls weren't exactly new to gaming with those respective systems, either. I suppose Nintendo could claim orgin to dual screen with the game and watch, but that's more a cute thing they do for some reason rather than a significant, creative feature.