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Post by spenoza on Aug 13, 2020 21:34:59 GMT
Sega Retro has this detailed table comparing the Genesis to the SNES. The technical data is presented in a way that suggests extrapolation in some areas and selective presentation in others, but I find it interesting nonetheless, because if even some of it is accurate, it provides a detailed picture that people ordinarily don't get. So why am I posting this in the PCE/TG discussion area? I want to know what some of that data would look like for the PC Engine. What if our little Turbo had a column? What would be in those little boxes? I realize that ain't nobody got time to figure that out these days (and very little incentive to boot), but hey, I'm putting it out there nonetheless.
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Post by turboxray on Aug 14, 2020 5:13:09 GMT
Sega Retro has this detailed table comparing the Genesis to the SNES. The technical data is presented in a way that suggests extrapolation in some areas and selective presentation in others, but I find it interesting nonetheless, because if even some of it is accurate, it provides a detailed picture that people ordinarily don't get. So why am I posting this in the PCE/TG discussion area? I want to know what some of that data would look like for the PC Engine. What if our little Turbo had a column? What would be in those little boxes? I realize that ain't nobody got time to figure that out these days (and very little incentive to boot), but hey, I'm putting it out there nonetheless.
Ohh god.. not sega-retro haha. That document gets a LOT of stuff wrong (and numbers wrong). It's not as bad as the SMS vs NES page, but it's still laughable. At the expense of offending anyone, whoever wrote these comparison pages at segaretro is half retarded. Not even joking. I like the part where they say the 68000 has an "internal 32bit" bus. They just make shit up out of the air haha. The 68k, for all intents and purposes from a software development point of view is totally a 32bit cpu, but the ALU and the bus are still 16bit, but it's a slow 32bit cpu. Code written for the 68k tends to use 32bit operations only for the fact that it's faster to do on the 68k than chaining operations - and not because 32bits are needed. And the fact that 16bit and 8bit operations take the same amount of cycles to process, memory alignment issues, and if you needed to do 8bits with 16bits operation, you would simply do a 16bit with 16bit operation because it's actually faster on the 68k - even though there wasn't a need for that to begin with. I find that legacy 68k veterans have a really hard time wrapping their head around this fact, as opposed to developers that have worked with many different types of processors and aren't locked into one kind of thinking. "This means that, in a single cycle, the 68000 can process a 32-bit instruction" <- not even close! lol. 32bit instructions take on average 16+ cycles (12-20 cycles). And my favorite line: "It was the most powerful console at the time of its release in 1988, surpassing the PC Engine (TurboGrafx-16), and it was not surpassed in power until the Neo Geo in 1990". Anyway, assuming that page was more accurate, what would you like to see? How the PCE squares up the SNES? I've been meaning to do something like this. But more so as a three way comparison. For two reasons: the ridiculous only an "8bit" cpu comments, and general 8bit "architecture" of the PCE. To show that the PCE is not an 'in between' console, but rather its design aligns with the Genesis and SNES - it just happens to be the first console of the group. Literally, if the PCE had a custom 16bit processor, but nothing about the games, or processing power, or anything changed - would people still refer to it as an "in between" console?
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gilbot
Punkic Cyborg
Posts: 137
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Post by gilbot on Aug 14, 2020 7:45:57 GMT
Well, fanboys... Anyway, they must be correct. The Mega Drive clearly surpassed the PCE by miles. The MD was much larger, so it's obviously much more powerful. ... On the other hand I think the TG16 is similar in size to the MD, so they must be equally powerful. Also, both TG16 and MD has "16" on them!
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Post by elmer on Aug 14, 2020 17:21:38 GMT
Ohh god.. not sega-retro haha. That document gets a LOT of stuff wrong (and numbers wrong). It's not as bad as the SMS vs NES page, but it's still laughable. At the expense of offending anyone, whoever wrote these comparison pages at segaretro is half retarded. Not even joking. Yep, it's absolute fan-boy rubbish and pure number-comparison with no real technical knowledge of what the numbers really mean, or the factors that effect them when it actually comes to real development. It's the same kind of marketing idiocy that caused Sega to panic and double up the number of Hitachi SH-2 processors on the Saturn when they heard the specs of the Playstation, even though doing so caused horrendous memory bus contention and the 2nd CPU usually had little to acutally do in practice. I'm also very tired of the whole 8-bit vs 16-bit misinformation, especially when people seem to think that the 65C816 is somehow a 16-bit CPU that is magically superior to the HuC6280. It was well-know at the time (to developers and hardware folks), that the transition from the 8-bit generation to the 16-bit generation actually referred to the GPU memory bus, and not whatever the CPU capabilities were. It was the expansion of the GPU memory bus from 8-bit to 16-bit that caused the ability for hardware manufacturers to move from the 4 color-per-tile graphics of the NES, or the 16 color-per-chunky-pixel graphics of the mid-1980s 8-bit home computers, into the 16 color-per-tile graphics of the SNES/Genesis/PCE, and the crisp 16-color-per-pixel graphics of the Amiga and Atari ST. It had absolutely nothing to do with the capabilities of the CPU that was used.
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Post by spenoza on Aug 14, 2020 17:34:40 GMT
That doesn't mean some of us don't want to ogle the specs, anyway. Numbers porn can still be fun, even if it is of limited value.
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Post by turboxray on Aug 14, 2020 19:07:10 GMT
That doesn't mean some of us don't want to ogle the specs, anyway. Numbers porn can still be fun, even if it is of limited value. I mean we can definitely throw something up like that. Though I think it might be better with some context; some custom demos to show off things (nothing extensive). Maybe some diagrams too so you can visualize things. While it's definitely spec porn, and that's interesting, what I find the most interesting aspect of the PCE.. are the developers. How did they view the hardware and how did that influence their designs? What was their approach? Where was the bar set? These kinds of things. This "mindset" when it comes to developing on the PCE. I've been pouring over the PCE library for over a decade.. peeking in with a debugger.. looking at their graphics in vram, what tricks they use (if any), etc. From what I've found, PCE software doesn't really follow the trends of the NES, SNES, and Genesis where the bar keeps getting pushed higher and developers try to eke out more from the hardware. Some of the early hucard titles are actually more advanced, or try to do more with the hardware right out of the gate, than a lot of the later ones. Rather than a nice ramp, it tends to be more of a wide splatter plot than a line - and the trend of the plot is less aggressive than on other systems. And from reading the interviews from Hudson (for PCE development), I get the impression they weren't really a top tier team of developers like that of Sega or some other companies. I don't mean in the context nowadays, knowing what we know and the tools we have today to do retro dev, but specifically in the context of back then. The games we consider (well.. what I consider haha) top tier or AAA on the PCE, really should have been more of the norm not just the exception. I've been really meaning to do an in-depth look and analysis of PCE games in relation to all of this (hardware, life of the system, design patterns, mindset, etc) - from an "in the weeds perspective" to a "cloud view" of PCE game design.
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Post by SignOfZeta on Aug 15, 2020 3:48:18 GMT
I wouldn't mind seeing a (better) comparison of the Neo Geo and the Genesis. They have a lot in common in theory...but in practice, especially with period software, clearly they are the difference between chocolate and shit. I sometimes have to wonder, for example, could you do KOF '95 on the Mega Drive if you could afford to sell a gigabit cart? Or lets say just a $250 cart, be it because of ROM size or DSPs or both? What issues would be insurmountable?
The one cliche I didn't like in this article was where he says (and I'm paraphrasing here bigtime) that the SNES's special features could be replicated in the code because the 68k is so powerful. I hear this...a lot. I mean a LOT from those dudes who still haven't heard that the system wars are over. When they say this the thing that always comes to mind is, "Well then why didn't they?" Its such a high school dropout level excuse. "I could do it if I wanted to..." I mean, if Akklaim could have done a Super Mario Kart ripoff and sold it to the Genesis market they would have. So where is all the scaling and the filter sweeps on the explosions and stuff? There were plenty of bad producers of Genesis games that would have jacked all that cheesy brrp brrrp sound and alpha blends and Mode 7 just for the skrill. Since they didn't, we can assume it wasn't that easy. I'd wager that much of it is possible to achieve in software but that that it would consume the entire CPU, look/sound bad and have even more bottlenecks than the SNES does. Also, the color poverty of the Genesis is severely evident in the actual library of software that was produced by dozens of devs over 100s of titles...but not really seen as a technical problem for this author.
One more note, regarding PCE titles being often extremely primitive and the state of the art being more of a patchwork quilt than an ongoing upward evolution...I think we can attribute this to it being (lets face it) a Japan only system. There never would have been a Comic Zone or a Vectorman or even a Virtua Racing on Megadrive if not for the American influence. Especially nowadays...all the popular games are American and $$$. Japan is only so concerned with cutting edge. Tokimeki Memorial was a revolution in gaming...that you could make in HTML if you wanted to. Kabuki-den has cutscenes to die for but overhead map graphics relatively Famicom grade. Budgets are higher in the US but that's not it. The will to "advance" just isn't as overbearing in that culture, it seems to me. I mean, look how slow and crappy everyone's car is in Japan, if they even have one. Americans would never tolerate that. Here even the brokest dude on the block can have a V8. I think its some cultural thing like that. (and the budgets)
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Post by spenoza on Aug 15, 2020 11:58:29 GMT
Wow, that is horribly offensive and definitely incorrect. Are you aware of just how racist that reads?
Look at what Japan was doing with arcade hardware and the insane stuff they were doing with the NES. When it comes to console games it was the Americans who were typically doing the least impressive work. The PCE’s best coding work was on CD, frankly. I think the Hucard simply became an outdated medium almost from the outset. Treasure and Konami made the Mega Drive really punchy. But Konami’s A teams weren’t making Hucards. Nintendo’s careful design sensitivities, and those of their partners, like Intelligent Systems and HAL, were also unique, and there wasn’t really an analogue on another system. Hudson themselves were the closest thing, but they stretched themselves super thin trying to provide such broad library support for the PCE. They were overseeing and producing so many contract development efforts they put out very little in-house software.
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Post by SignOfZeta on Aug 15, 2020 17:22:32 GMT
I think you're an idiot if you think I'm being racist towards Japanese here. I drive the same 1.5L Fit that is Honda's biggest selling car over there and frankly I'd sell it and Densha de Go! if I could because at 47 I too lack the overbearing will to advance. I guess I must hate myself too, right? No, to me this is a compliment. Progress isn't progress if it drives you crazy so why employ 100 coders on a mahjong game? Its inhearntly shinto, really. Only doing what you can be mindful of. Its how you build a temple that will last 1000 years longer than a Pontiac Silverdome. Currently playing: www.pcengine.co.uk/HTML_Games/Jantei_Monogatari_2_Kanketsu.htm
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Post by spenoza on Aug 15, 2020 17:52:56 GMT
I didn’t say you were racist. I said what you wrote reads really racist. And also it’s incorrect. Japan made some Turbo-charged, highly tuned V6 cars that give American V8s a run for their money. And the reason their cars are smaller and more efficient has nothing to do with lacking the drive to advance or any BS like that.
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Post by SignOfZeta on Aug 15, 2020 20:26:15 GMT
The problem is that you simply aren't understanding what I'm saying. The broke guy on the corner with the V8 I mentioned is a moron. He's broke because his tires are $1800 a set and he can't afford gas. People SHOULD be driving around in mild white boxes. Then maybe they'd have Japan's vastly preferably automotive casualty rate. Mustangs and Vipers are STOOPID. They aren't progress if you only use it to destroy the planet before you wrap it around tree and kill yourself. PCE devs that couldn't level up DIED when things "advanced" and the Playstation came out. To me, that's bad. Comic Zone and Vector Man and Virtua Racing were made possible by the American market but those games suck! I mean, who wants to actually play Virtua Racing? They pushed the envelope and made a new DSP and charged $99.99...for clunky unplayable crap. Give me Mystic Defender or PSIV any day.
This is the angle I'm coming from. Now read my "Wow, racist" comment again.
Also, I'm an automotive dyno/development technician who reads car history books all day for fun. I know all about cars, Japanese and otherwise. Most of the high output stuff from Japan honestly just proves my point even more. Its generally made for the American market and less reliable than the I4s that overall define the JDM market. Thrilling for punters at first but "Japan's small block V8" is for sure an I4 of some kind and nothing that's actually huge or powerful. If you want meatheaded muscle you buy GM. If you want to drive the same car 475,000 miles you buy a poverty spec Yaris. That's EA vs Falcom right there. Never play an ace if a two will do.
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Post by spenoza on Aug 15, 2020 20:57:25 GMT
You’re still off the mark, and your phrasing in the original comment still looks really bad. What you claim to have meant does not come through to me from your words as originally written at all. But I can accept that you meant something different than what you wrote. I still don’t agree with your revised assessment, however.
I suspect the PC Engine’s lack of consistent programming one-ups-manship probably stemmed from not having a clear rival in the market. They were initially out to beat the Famicom, but that was easy. And when the Suoer Famicom came out it was no contest for Nintendo. Their lack of success in the US market may indeed have been a part of that, but I’m not sure how much of a difference that would have made. They were top dog and then the SFC hit and it was then about competing for a rapidly shrinking minority market. Add to that that Hudson was perpetually developing for their “competitors” (Nintendo especially) and you have a recipe for stagnancy. I do think the CD format really allowed some devs to play around. RAM was the bugaboo they PC Engine really struggled to escape.
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Post by dshadoff on Aug 15, 2020 21:20:15 GMT
I really don't understand what you guys are talking about... I don't feel that games from either region fell into categories, or were "progressive" or "stagnant". Different publishers might be considered this way though (*ahem* Pack-in-Video *ahem*).
The backdrop of this era was that consumption was growing, so the number of titles needed to be increased; new programmers were recruited and they needed to learn the basics; this might be some measure of what is being considered "stagnancy", but supported a multiple-fold output. Artists were also stretched thin.
And then there were the goals of each publisher - some were looking to extract money from uneducated buyers (*ahem* Pack-in-Video *ahem*), some were interested in getting a game out according to a schedule with a relatively fixed level of quality in order to get a return on investment and remain a going concern, and some were interested in advancing the state of the art at any cost. If you are referring to the last category, it may be arguable that more American firms were doing this because the industry was less developed and had a more "indy" feel to it in the 1990-1995 era. And possibly getting investor money was easier the USA.
But to be honest, I'm not clear on what is even being discussed above: - programming aptitude ? Not sure that anybody has ever done a study, as you would need to look deeper than any user could. - variety of genres ? Certainly Japan led in this regard in the 2D era, although the forces were from many sources - little embellishments and niceties/frills ? I certainly saw these evolve during the lifetime of the PC Engine...
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Post by SignOfZeta on Aug 16, 2020 0:52:08 GMT
You’re still off the mark, and your phrasing in the original comment still looks really bad. What you claim to have meant does not come through to me from your words as originally written at all. But I can accept that you meant something different than what you wrote. I still don’t agree with your revised assessment, however. I suspect the PC Engine’s lack of consistent programming one-ups-manship probably stemmed from not having a clear rival in the market. They were initially out to beat the Famicom, but that was easy. And when the Suoer Famicom came out it was no contest for Nintendo. Their lack of success in the US market may indeed have been a part of that, but I’m not sure how much of a difference that would have made. They were top dog and then the SFC hit and it was then about competing for a rapidly shrinking minority market. Add to that that Hudson was perpetually developing for their “competitors” (Nintendo especially) and you have a recipe for stagnancy. I do think the CD format really allowed some devs to play around. RAM was the bugaboo they PC Engine really struggled to escape. “What I claimed to have meant?” What you’re saying there is not only am I racist but I’m also a liar making up an insane excuse? You can go screw yourself, frankly. Anything else you want to say about me? Maybe I’m pedophile? Stop wasting our time being offended for other people due to...my inscrutable idiom, presumably. I have an immense respect for Japanese culture that goes back to my earliest years and way beyond PC Engine. Everyone I know seems to understand this except some moderator who is attacking me from across the Internet. This whole scenario is ridiculous. Tone policing indeed! You’re tone deaf!
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Post by elmer on Aug 16, 2020 2:20:05 GMT
Well, this topic went a bit off track, didn't it?
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