Nintendo Continues To Blame Wii U For Its Financial Woes

CreepyUncleGoogle said:
Actually that was "Genesis does what Nintendon't"... I think... :p

I don't mean to be a grump or anything about how technology is boring and the incremental changes are meaningless (because they aren't and even I don't think that). I guess I just can't get that excited about a console and yeah, that has something to do with me being a non-gamer.

Though on a totally off topic note, my copy of the first STALKER showed up today and I'm gonna be underwhelmed by it on a GMA x3100 next week when I have time. :p
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Yea, it was that. But, it didn't fit the sentence. :) Sega was good at poking fun at Nintendo.

A lot of gamers can still pick up a SNES and play those games and have an awesome time. Even if it's over 20 years old. Some games they will play for hours. Some non-gamers can pick up the newest CoD and put it down after a few minutes. The audience has to be there.

Was Mozart or Bach or Tchaikovsky revolutionary or innovative? To those that appreciate them, yes. To someone who thinks Lady Gaga is awesome, maybe not. Pink Floyd, Queen, David Bowie, etc. all brought something new and big to the table. But, someone who enjoys rap may think they sound like garbage.... Same with games. :/ Just sucks when someone that likes rap starts dissing your Floyd, man. My SNES is my Pink Floyd. ;)
 
CreepyUncleGoogle said:
I'm completely willing to accept that what was new then was really something that would have impressed people. I think it's just as important to put it into perspective though with relationship to the expected progression of technology. That shouldn't rob it of value for people that had fun with these things when they were new. Also, I admit I'm influenced by a huge dislike of games that rely on jumping from one platform to the next as their basic premise and, in spite of the argument, you can see there's a lot of subconscious agreement on that. The games people remember as good or mind blowing are generally not platformers, they're racing games and RPGs with the rare exception of Super Metroid and it's ilk. Unfortunately, a lot of the games that don't get mentioned or remembered as amazing were just more of the same old stuff like the Gradius rehash from the NES to SNES that people don't even think about anymore.
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Yeah, some of it is absolutely nostalgia. Of course it is.

But, to me, the SNES is more like the iPad. I mean, sure, the idea of tablets is way old and the iPad is by no means the first tablet. But it's still the first tablet to get so many things right and that's what made it so groundbreaking. The SNES is the console version of that.

And, 20 years from now, you will see many younger people wondering what was so special about the iPad. Tablets will be a commodity to them so that, for the same reason, they won't be able to see how it broke new ground.
 
I'm also sure I'll tell people how magical of a time it was when the Xbox One came out with Kinect 2 and how it revolutionized...wait no...nevermind.

Yeah, lets stick to saying the SNES was meaningful to a lot of people and thats fine with me. However, going all the way back to what started this thing, I don't think Nintendo would survive by going back to that kind of operating model. It needs to try new things and this last time around with the Wii U was generally a mistake. They'll either try again and get it right, exit the industry, change how they operate, or whatever, but they really shouldn't go back even with newer hardware. They've gotta incorporate stuff that's happened between the 1990's and now into whatever they do next.
 
CreepyUncleGoogle said:
Yeah, lets stick to saying the SNES was meaningful to a lot of people and thats fine with me. However, going all the way back to what started this thing, I don't think Nintendo would survive by going back to that kind of operating model. It needs to try new things and this last time around with the Wii U was generally a mistake. They'll either try again and get it right, exit the industry, change how they operate, or whatever, but they really shouldn't go back even with newer hardware. They've gotta incorporate stuff that's happened between the 1990's and now into whatever they do next.
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Back then, it was industry domination that was their goal. One up the other guy, in that time it was Sega. Sega stole their market share, and Nintendo didn't like it. Nintendo owned the console market after 1986. They had 90+% of the market. The Genesis came out before the NES and brought some killer games that kicked the NES's ass. Some good history there (new book comes out next week about this - Console Wars). I think living and being a big part of the gaming scene back then did make it a lot more than it probably was, but to some people, it really was that awesome. Reading about it and seeing pictures from before release (when it was just rumors and artist renditions) to seeing the Japanese release screenshots, then waiting for the release day. Those were some great times.
 
CreepyUncleGoogle said:
I'm also sure I'll tell people how magical of a time it was when the Xbox One came out with Kinect 2 and how it revolutionized...wait no...nevermind.
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That's exactly the thing. To you, computing *is* a commodity. Computing in 1990 wasn't anywhere remotely near a commodity.

In 1990, the difference in going from PC to SNES was like going from silent black-and-white movies to colored talkies. You can't call it 'merely evolutionary' if you don't have that frame of reference. When Star Fox came out, for example, PC flight sims didn't even have textures. The entire wing of a plane would just be one single shaded polygon.
 
Not surprising. Why would a console gamer, who only is interested in spending $400-500 every 5 or so years for a major upgrade spend $400 for a minor upgrade (over PS3/360)? If they were interested in spending lots for little improvement they would be PC gamers.

Combine that with the undeveloped online community and much more powerful consoles right around the corner and it is really no surprise that the Wii U did poorly. The 3DS is another story and that is doing very well.
 
hordaktheman said:
That's exactly the thing. To you, computing *is* a commodity. Computing in 1990 wasn't anywhere remotely near a commodity.

In 1990, the difference in going from PC to SNES was like going from silent black-and-white movies to colored talkies. You can't call it 'merely evolutionary' if you don't have that frame of reference. When Star Fox came out, for example, PC flight sims didn't even have textures. The entire wing of a plane would just be one single shaded polygon.
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Um, Star Fox came out in 1993 and didn't have anything close to a realistic flight model for its fighters (understandable given the premise of the game) or textures. Also released in 1993 was Microsoft Flight Simulator 5.0 which was the first of the MS Flight Sim series to use textures on aircraft.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Fox_(video_game)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Flight_Simulator_5.0#Flight_Simulator_5.0

Admittedly, FS5 hit the market later in the year, but even version 4.0 was far more complex and computationally intesive than Star Fox despite the fact that it used the PC speaker for sound. In fact, in FS 4.0, if you looked closely at the Cesena, you could even see the various flight surfaces move in response to control input. Flaps would go down and elevators would go up.
 
So about the original topic...

I am mostly a PC Gamer now although I do have a Wii I play from time to time. My son is in the same boat, but also has a DS and a few other vintage systems. Between my brother and I, we pretty much had every major system since Atari at one point in time so it's not like I just picked up a controller/mouse yesterday.

I went into the local game stores and checked out the 3 new systems with my son. First looked at the available games for the PS 4. They were cool, but most I could play on computer (or would be able to in the semi-near future). We then looked at the Xbox One, and found a lot of the same. We then went over to the Wii U... now yes there were some cross platform games, but the ones that interested me where the Nintendo Franchise games Mario/Zelda/ect. These are the games that will not come out for PS, Xbox, or PC... so 'if' I were to get one of the three, it would be a Wii U (keep in mind that would only be 2nd to PC).

Really the issue of the Wii U is the price. I almost liken it to what recently happened with the original 3DS. The 3DS was almost a failure, being at $250. It just wasn't worth the price of admission and people were not seeing the value at that price. Nintendo brought the price down to $170... and it almost instantly did better. It became more of an impulse buy and the 3DS series then took off (turning around an almost broken launch). If the price of the Wii U is adjusted in a similar fashion, I bet it will do well... heck I might even bite then.



Now being that the off topic was fun to read... just want to put in my 2 cents. SNES was great when it was in it's prime and it brought a lot to the table. And although it's still good enough my son loves it, I feel you really need the time-context to appreciate what it offered. Else, you are looking at it with a skewed time perspective (simplified it would be like saying Doom is just a crappy low budget FPS clone compared to today's standards, because you experienced todays FPS's before the originals they were modeled after).

Also just to straighten out the timeline... IMO Genesis was competing w/ TurboGraphx16 (or vice versa), and although it was still around during the SNES days and had good games, hardware wise it was behind the time (yes there was the SegaCD and 32x but those where practically one-off's that came out significantly after to try to keep up). The SNES actually came out shortly after the NeoGeo (which beat the snot out of it)... but those were for 2 totally different crowds (I believe I paid less for one of my first cars than what the NeoGeo went for new... and come to think about it, I even sold it for less than what 1 of the cartridges went for new). The cost/value of a SNES v.s. a NeoGeo made the NeoGeo short lived outside of the arcades. I could go on from there... but felt that was enough to cover the OT discussion.
 
CreepyUncleGoogle said:
Um, Star Fox came out in 1993 and didn't have anything close to a realistic flight model for its fighters (understandable given the premise of the game) or textures. Also released in 1993 was Microsoft Flight Simulator 5.0 which was the first of the MS Flight Sim series to use textures on aircraft.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Fox_(video_game)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Flight_Simulator_5.0#Flight_Simulator_5.0

Admittedly, FS5 hit the market later in the year, but even version 4.0 was far more complex and computationally intesive than Star Fox despite the fact that it used the PC speaker for sound. In fact, in FS 4.0, if you looked closely at the Cesena, you could even see the various flight surfaces move in response to control input. Flaps would go down and elevators would go up.
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Ya, that's kind of what I'm getting at. I mean, sure, my memory is a bit hazy but I still have PC mags from 1994 where gourad shading on untextured planes was very much a big thing.

But this textured Andross cube was a huge deal back in 1993. This was when technology leapt bounds every few months but on a 4 year old console at the time. You just don't have the same perspective.

7H0dFSm.gif
 
I'm not sure who brought it up, but the early 90s were a time of revolution and evolution. The earlier half of the decade seemed claimed by the consoles, and the latter the PC.

I remember most of the games from my youth. Baldurs gate the first time, Wizardy, pool of radiance, act raiser (already mentioned) metal gear etc.

The super nintendo and the 16 bit gen was a revolution in graphics, sound and gameplay. The NES too. The playstation and saturn, along with the n64 were also revolutionary, to a point.

Previously, graphics of those quality required a voodoo and a high end PC at the time.

For someone to say "What, platformers were around for 10 years!" "Rpgs were around for 10 years!"

It's the same as comparing a sketch in the dirt to the mona lisa and calling them the same. Regardless, the golden age of the pc was in the latter 90s and early 2000s, and the golden age of consoles came before.

Although, with the recent resurgence of indie gaming and BBB level pc games, there's a lot of new things coming along. In a few years I think we might realize we're in the second golden age.
 
To whoever asked if they should buy a Wii U I would wait another 6 months or a full year. It's going to go down in price at some point and by then Kart, Brawl and X should be out with Zelda following soon there after.

The problem is future game development is in the shitter and when you buy it you are buying it with that understanding.

It's life cycle support, the Xbox One and PS4 have hundreds of games in development right now and will have huge libraries by the time they are EOL. The Wii U might see another 60 games released by the time it's EOL.
 
hordaktheman said:
Ya, that's kind of what I'm getting at. I mean, sure, my memory is a bit hazy but I still have PC mags from 1994 where gourad shading on untextured planes was very much a big thing.

But this textured Andross cube was a huge deal back in 1993. This was when technology leapt bounds every few months but on a 4 year old console at the time. You just don't have the same perspective.

7H0dFSm.gif
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Of course I don't and the number of polygons on that screenshot is really low compared to what a flight simulator did in the same era. That goes back to the same yawnfest arguments people have been having about computers versus consoles as long as they thought it was worth aruging about. Consoles were cost effective computing devices made for playing games and had to reach to a lower price point to have mass market appeal. PCs weren't as limited and could do more (for a lot more cost) even in gaming despite their general purpose nature. A console at the time impressed people, but arcade cabinets and computers were far more powerful and demonstrated that just as they do today and as people who frequent this forum are quick to point out as an advantage of PC gaming. That balance of power hasn't really changed even though consoles had and still have lotsa advantages over PCs in doing what they're designed to do cheaply and without the PC-like fuss.
 
hordaktheman said:
Ya, that's kind of what I'm getting at. I mean, sure, my memory is a bit hazy but I still have PC mags from 1994 where gourad shading on untextured planes was very much a big thing.

But this textured Andross cube was a huge deal back in 1993. This was when technology leapt bounds every few months but on a 4 year old console at the time. You just don't have the same perspective.

7H0dFSm.gif
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In addition to that, yes, you had games like Doom come out in 1993. But to run those at decent framerates you needed a floating-point enabled CPU like the 486DX that ran at 3000$ per system. You could run them on non-FPU enabled systems like the 486SX but you'd get half the framerate. And those were needed just to run the graphics. If you wanted the same quality of music then you'd need to fork out for a Roland Sound Canvas at 400$ in addition to the 200$ you'd need for a Soundblaster to process the wave samples outside of MIDI soundbanks.

And that's in contrast to the 200-300$ you'd need for an SNES.
 
Back then a SNES cost $200 and a PC capable of running Microsoft Flight Simulator would cost at least $2,000. Not only that, the framerate was terrible, the control was practically unusable and the graphics consisted of flat single-color polygons. SNES games were capable of competing by using a bunch of fixed-function hardware but the CPU was laughably underpowered (22Mhz FTW) and that makes the games even more impressive.

As an aside I actually played and beat Star Fox last weekend, Gameplay held up, frame rate was annoyingly low and of course the graphics were terrible, the sound was passable and the music was ok, if entirely synthetic.
 
Who didn't see this coming a mile away? It was obvious before it was released it was going to be a major dud. The Wii U is a stupid concept.
 
Dekoth-E- said:
Things like this make me want to dig up the boatload of posts from those who couldn't see the obvious when it wan't released just to rub the fact that many of us called this.

But i figure, they are probably miserable enough with their no game system and constantly battling that stupid ass controller.


Hopefully the next version has normal controllers and is BC so I can pick up the few games that are good. Much like Ms needs to abandon the forced kinect, nintendo needs to abandon the tablet. Both end up reducing the price point of the device where it can actually be competitive and doesn't force consumers to buy additional shit just to use it day 1.
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Agreed, although I like the Kinect and am interested in trying the upgraded one.


Stoly said:
It has several succesful franchises. They could go multiplatform. The games don't really need powerfull hardware. I bet they can make them run even on mobile devices.
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People said that before the Wii. ..and that was a blockbuster. Nintendo just needed to stick with a working product and modernize it like everyone was clamoring for them to do. Their management was stupid.
 
The biggest thing SNES brought to the table was it was the first console that offered hardware accelerated rotation and scaling.
That was HUGE back then, and to be able to do it at $200 was nothing short of a miracle that allowed developers to let hardware do some work instead of doing it all with software tricks.
Was it pretty?
Not really by today's standards.
But boy oh boy, it was SOMETHING, and that something did something not even Big Bad Neo Geo was capable of doing.

I was still honestly hooked on my Turbo Duo just a tad bit more because of Ys and the downright amazing music found in games like Gate of Thunder and Lords or Thunder. But hey, to each his own. SNES had some amazing soundtracks that almost rivaled CD quality like Hook and Super Castlevania.
The music is what I remember the most...
 
Kongar said:
I'm gonna jump in and defend the SNES Genesis era. Anyone younger than 35 can't possibly understand how awesome those games were by using emulators today. I am now 40, and was in 7th grade when people were able to get their hands on a NES. So I'll give 2nd graders and up a pass ;)
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Shit, I'm 28 and I fondly remember getting my first japanese Mega Drive (Genesis name in anywhere but the USA). Couldn't understand shit because it was all in japanese, but damn did I have lots of fun. It came with Quack Shot, played the hell out of it. Some years later I managed to bother my father enough to get an SNES also. The sound was noticeably better, but both consoles were just plain awesome. These games were fun in a way that I still miss in newer games.
 
Nintendo should team up with Valve and release a Wii-Box. Bring the Nintendo library to PC.

Give up on home consoles before all of your financial gains from the first Wii are lost.
 
cdr_74_premium said:
Shit, I'm 28 and I fondly remember getting my first japanese Mega Drive (Genesis name in anywhere but the USA). Couldn't understand shit because it was all in japanese, but damn did I have lots of fun. It came with Quack Shot, played the hell out of it. Some years later I managed to bother my father enough to get an SNES also. The sound was noticeably better, but both consoles were just plain awesome. These games were fun in a way that I still miss in newer games.
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They way I remember it, Mega Drive / Mega Drive II had noticeably better graphics, though some games sounded better on the SNES. SEGA's console was much better imo.
 
The Wii U has quite a few good games at the moment: Wind Waker HD, Super Mario 3D World, Pikmin 3 and Donkey King Tropical Freeze.

I believe sales will pick-up once Smash and Mario Kart are released. The Wii U is not a bad system, I'd actually pick it over a PS4/XB1. The amount of good games for either of those consoles is also pretty poor after being out 6+ months.

Nintendo has been pushing most of their new games to 60 FPS. Wind Waker HD, Donkey Kong, Pikmin 3, A Link Between Worlds and the upcoming Smash and Mario Kart releases are all running at 60 FPS. I would rather take a game like those with good graphics, unique and interesting art styles and 60 FPS over games struggling to make 1080P and pushing 30 FPS on the PS4/XB1.

The frame rate on the 360/PS3 sometimes made games almost unplayable/unejoyable. The Last of Us and GTA5 both showed signs of this on PS3.

TL;DR, I'd rather have Nintendo games with unique art direction and a fluid/responsive 60 FPS than "better" looking games on PS4/XB1 with 30 FPS.
 
Nintendo has had the same attitude as apple ... Full control of hardware/software. I'd like to see them stick around but damn, nintendo needs to either get with the times on a hardware level or start porting to other platforms to stay relevant . Each generation is going to place Nintendo on Atari/Commodore status shortly.
 
hordaktheman said:
Nah. It's fine that you disagree if you're of a generation that didn't experience it first hand. What was evolutionary to you was groundbreaking to those of us coming from integrated PC speakers and floppy disks.

Still, just contrast then high-end PC audio (AdLib and Roland MT-32) to the SNES audio chip in these two clips below.

The Secret of Monkey Island

Actraiser
Opening
First level

Similarly, the difference between 3 channel mono in the Atari ST and 4 channel stereo in Commodore Amiga was a pretty big thing back then. If you grew up comparing 64-channel audio to 128-channel audio then it's obviously far less meaningful to you.
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Ahh the Amiga!! When I first saw Shadow of the Beast and its 13 layers of scrolling, giant sprites, beautiful music... :eek:
 
sfsuphysics said:
Calling it the Wii U was a mistake since you don't give it any real identity as a separate console, to this date I see "Released on the WIi U" and I instantly think "Oh I can get that, I have a Wii" then a second later recall wait that's their next one.
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yea a lot of people think the wii u is just the gamepad and a peripheral to the wii. horrible branding.
 
dgz said:
They way I remember it, Mega Drive / Mega Drive II had noticeably better graphics, though some games sounded better on the SNES. SEGA's console was much better imo.
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The SNES could display a lot more colors on the screen simultaneously. I don't remember all of the specific modes off the top of my head, but in at least some modes, it could do 2048 onscreen colors I believe from either a 15 or 16 bit palette.

The Megadrive could display 64 out of a 512 color palette at once.

Both systems had 16 bit processors. The Megadrive's was a Motorola 68000 which was clocked at 7.16MHz, but some of its instructions took more than one clock cycle. The 65816 in the SNES was half that at 3.58MHz (I think) but had a much more efficient instruction set. Both decent.

The SNES had a lot more hardware assisted graphical features, (Mode 7 scaling and rotation) I believe hardware sprites as well. Where the MD was all done through software.

I'm a fan of FM synthesis, so I actually like "most" of the MD music/audio better, but there are some undeniably good sounds on some SNES games.

I'd say overall the SNES was much more powerful, and and had nicer graphics. (especially real transparency modes as opposed to the "checkerboard" effects seen on a lot of MD games.)

It's of course down to taste for the most part, and the sum of the parts on one or the other could go either way for someone. I feel like there was a lot more unique content on the SNES though whereas the MD had a lot of arcade ports and ports from other computers/machines. It had some unique as well of course though.
 
Quix said:
Back then a SNES cost $200 and a PC capable of running Microsoft Flight Simulator would cost at least $2,000. Not only that, the framerate was terrible, the control was practically unusable and the graphics consisted of flat single-color polygons. SNES games were capable of competing by using a bunch of fixed-function hardware but the CPU was laughably underpowered (22Mhz FTW) and that makes the games even more impressive.

As an aside I actually played and beat Star Fox last weekend, Gameplay held up, frame rate was annoyingly low and of course the graphics were terrible, the sound was passable and the music was ok, if entirely synthetic.
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Your estimates of compute power available at the time are a bit inaccurate.

Flight Sim 4.0 ran just fine on a 386SX at 16 MHz with 2 MB of RAM. In fact, it even ran okay on a 286 processor. The system requirements are listed here:

http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-0789-07300-Flight-Simulator/dp/B000FDB2A4

Notably, the 386 went to market around 1985, a long time before the SNES began selling. In fact, MS Flight Sim 5.0 which came out in 1993 when Star Fox was also for sale worked okay on a 486. In 1993, Pentium processors were all the rage with the first of them going on sale in March of 1993.
 
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CreepyUncleGoogle said:
Your estimates of compute power available at the time are a bit inaccurate.

Flight Sim 4.0 ran just fine on a 386SX at 16 MHz with 2 MB of RAM. In fact, it even ran okay on a 286 processor. The system requirements are listed here:

http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-0789-07300-Flight-Simulator/dp/B000FDB2A4

Notably, the 386 went to market around 1985, a long time before the SNES began selling. In fact, MS Flight Sim 5.0 which came out in 1993 when Star Fox was also for sale worked okay on a 486. In 1993, Pentium processors were all the rage with the first of them going on sale in March of 1993.
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At what cost? At launch, they were thousands of dollars. This isn't a PC Master Race vs. Console comparison.
 
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Ur_Mom said:
At what cost? At launch, they were thousands of dollars. This isn't a PC Master Race vs. Console comparison.
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I'm just pointing out that the things the SNES was capable of doing weren't unique to the SNES when it was available for sale. There's no implied this versus that competition, but merely an observation that there was very little about what was happening on the SNES that wasn't also being done elsewhere making the console nothing particularly revolutionary or groundbreaking in its day.
 
CreepyUncleGoogle said:
I'm just pointing out that the things the SNES was capable of doing weren't unique to the SNES when it was available for sale. There's no implied this versus that competition, but merely an observation that there was very little about what was happening on the SNES that wasn't also being done elsewhere making the console nothing particularly revolutionary or groundbreaking in its day.
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Man, I'd hate to see you at CES or anywhere. You seem to be underwhelmed by everything.

Apollo missions? Meh. Soviets already went to space. Nothing groundbreaking there....
 
That's somewhat true. The Amiga could scale objects, had "unlimited" vertical resolution sprites, blitter objects, etc. However, other consoles were not doing that. On PCs at the time, any such thing was all done in software, and then sent to a dumb VGA frame buffer. The SNES hardware WAS actually doing some things that not much else was capable of at the time. At least not in hardware. They tended to use this to their advantage with games like Pilotwings. Sure there were flight games on other systems, some looked good, some didn't. Some were accurate models, some weren't. However, the SNES was tailored to do these things, and for quite a while, it was one of the best pieces of hardware to do it on.

Strike Commander on the PC looked pretty incredible, but it required some serious (for the time) hardware. For a fraction of that cost, you could get something that looked in the ballpark (though not quite as good) with the SNES. Some of the features of the SNES, and some of the software for it were iterative, but there were a lot of things that if you paid attention to, were interested in, or could otherwise be excited by at the time, that were pretty revolutionary in the context of a gaming system.

Looking back from now, many of those subtle nuances are missed, and what was revolutionary may look silly now. Devs used to hack hardware, extract every last cycle out of it, do undocumented tricks, etc. to create new effects, get more sprites on the screen, etc. etc. Any new hardware that gave them more power, could produce amazing results, and things that some people might have thought weren't possible. (maybe even the original hardware designers)

Now things have gotten so powerful that nobody optimizes anything, and just relies on more threads, more RAM, more texturing units, etc. Why painstakingly write assembly code to get more performance when your crappy object oriented language will look just fine. Throw more RAM at it, require a bigger GPU.

I find this to be much LESS revolutionary than the hardware and methods used in the past.
 
Ur_Mom said:
Man, I'd hate to see you at CES or anywhere. You seem to be underwhelmed by everything.

Apollo missions? Meh. Soviets already went to space. Nothing groundbreaking there....
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I guess that's true when it comes to tech stuff. I don't get very excited about it. You could probably say that I'm...

31063764.jpg


...most of the time.
 
No edit:

John Carmack was (until recently) one of the few devs that still dug into things, found new tricks to produce interesting results. You don't see a lot of that anymore. Anyone familiar with the Demo Scene will know something about what I'm talking about. Game devs used to be a lot more like that too. Old hardware was the perfect canvas for them to work this magic too.

Now everything is abstracted from the programmer. Direct hardware access could cause problems, but it could also produce some CRAZY things. I remember some demos in the DOS days that could produce more colors or do some crazy effects that weren't typically possible. Anyone remember ModeX? It was some oddball resolution with some oddball refresh rate that would allow coders to do some interesting graphical tricks. Can't remember how it worked exactly. Anyway, I'm way off topic, but I haven't thought about these things for a long time. I'm way off the nerdometer now... :D
 
dgz said:
They way I remember it, Mega Drive / Mega Drive II had noticeably better graphics, though some games sounded better on the SNES. SEGA's console was much better imo.
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Actually SNES almost always had better graphics than Genesis games whenever a game came out on both platforms. SNES music was more realistic but that being said both systems have their own very unique soundchips that are so different it's not an apples to apples comparison.
 
CreepyUncleGoogle said:
I'm just pointing out that the things the SNES was capable of doing weren't unique to the SNES when it was available for sale.
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That's because you're seeing it through the eyes of someone used to hardware acceleration. Those PCs didn't have the kind of custom graphics logic that you're thinking because video cards were just dummy outputs for graphics rendered on the CPU. System requirements were quite literal back then and included running games at 5fps.

The SNES (and to much lesser extents, Amiga and ST) had custom graphics chips to enable, for example, scrolling backgrounds at a full 60fps. Where you would play an arcade perfect conversion of Street Fighter 2 on the SNES you'd be getting 15-20fps in that same game on a 486. And with worse graphics to boot.

No, the reason that PCs were naturally suited to crunching polygons was due to higher clockspeeds and FPU co-processors. Those were great for 3d processing but did absolutely nothing to help sprite-based graphics. There's a reason that PC games of the time were mostly animated sprites running around static backgrounds.
 
hordaktheman said:
That's because you're seeing it through the eyes of someone used to hardware acceleration. Those PCs didn't have the kind of custom graphics logic that you're thinking because video cards were just dummy outputs for graphics rendered on the CPU. System requirements were quite literal back then and included running games at 5fps.

The SNES (and to much lesser extents, Amiga and ST) had custom graphics chips to enable, for example, scrolling backgrounds at a full 60fps. Where you would play an arcade perfect conversion of Street Fighter 2 on the SNES you'd be getting 15-20fps in that same game on a 486. And with worse graphics to boot.

No, the reason that PCs were naturally suited to crunching polygons was due to higher clockspeeds and FPU co-processors. Those were great for 3d processing but did absolutely nothing to help sprite-based graphics. There's a reason that PC games of the time were mostly animated sprites running around static backgrounds.
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Coprocessors were pretty common by the time the SNES came out. The 486 mostly overcame the need to have even a dedicated coprocessor like the 80387 FPU and as the Pentium was already selling at that time, every new CPU had a floting point processor embedded.

Besdies that, in order to handle 3D graphics smoothy, the SNES needed a cartridge to contain the SuperFX coprocessor which drove up the cost of the game's hardware and made it unappealing to companies which is why there were so few SuperFX equipped games.
 
Oh and games were not perfect conversions from the arcade cabinet to the SNES. Mortal Combat looked a lot better in the arcade than it did at home as did mostly everything else too. :p
 
Yes, but if I remember correctly Mortal Combat in the arcade used dual (or maybe more) TMS 40MHz CPUs, and then several other chips as well. That would not exactly have been cost effective in the home back then.
 
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