Lamenting the SuperGrafx

[turboxray]

A little context would probably be help full.

 Here's Super Metroid ship on the SNES as how it's laid out with its sprite setup (it has 8x8 and 16x16 as the sizes chosen for this game): 52 sprites out of 128 = 41% usage



And here's how it would be laid out on the PCE: 13 sprites out of 64 = 20% usage.

[pokun]

I see, yeah those things are of course very similar to the Famicom's PPU, except maybe the VRAM part. All of Nintendo's consoles typically shares a lot of similarities like this.

[spenoza]

Nintendo’s designs are infamous for throwing money and tech at 1 or 2 features and then cutting everything else to the bone in an effort to make the resulting product as cheap as possible. The results are typically pretty convoluted or oddly restrictive and yet ahead of the game in some key ways.

[crisgenjin]

Jul 25, 2022 3:02:28 GMT spenoza said:

Nintendo’s designs are infamous for throwing money and tech at 1 or 2 features and then cutting everything else to the bone in an effort to make the resulting product as cheap as possible. The results are typically pretty convoluted or oddly restrictive and yet ahead of the game in some key ways.

Yeah, just like the Switch. It has shit hardware but you can play it both portably and on a TV! 

[SignOfZeta]

I think the Switch, like the WiiU, Wii, and GC have hardware that perfectly matches exactly what they were trying to do. When I’m playing Mario Odyssey there is nothing in the game that would be even %1 better no matter how powerful the system is. It runs the game they wanted to run on it.

The NES, SNES, and N64 for sure had some majorly obvious shortcomings like “everything flickers”, “can’t move stuff” or “everything is fog”.

[crisgenjin]

Jul 25, 2022 18:45:38 GMT SignOfZeta said:

I think the Switch, like the WiiU, Wii, and GC have hardware that perfectly matches exactly what they were trying to do. When I’m playing Mario Odyssey there is nothing in the game that would be even %1 better no matter how powerful the system is. It runs the game they wanted to run on it.

The NES, SNES, and N64 for sure had some majorly obvious shortcomings like “everything flickers”, “can’t move stuff” or “everything is fog”.

You forgot the Nintendo 64's RDRAM and low bandwidth? Not to mention, the CPU and RDP are constantly fighting one another. It could've been a mini SGI workstation at home, but alas. I'm not ready to talk about the hardware of 3D consoles yet lol

[spenoza]

No, he clearly indicated the N64 had issues.

[turboxray]

I mean it's not like the PCE is perfect either. The most incredible expansion bus ever, even better than what PCs had, and basically all for nothing.

[elmer]

Jul 26, 2022 3:19:09 GMT turboxray said:

I mean it's not like the PCE is perfect either. The most incredible expansion bus ever, even better than what PCs had, and basically all for nothing.

Both the IFU and the SuperCD-ROM2 are looking at you and asking "What am I, chopped liver?".

[dshadoff]

And the Backup Booster, Tennokoe 2, AV Booster, Print Booster are all in the corner muttering to themselves.
Tsuushin Booster issued a statement of “no comment”…

[turboxray]

Jul 26, 2022 13:42:49 GMT elmer said:

Jul 26, 2022 3:19:09 GMT turboxray said:

I mean it's not like the PCE is perfect either. The most incredible expansion bus ever, even better than what PCs had, and basically all for nothing.

Both the IFU and the SuperCD-ROM2 are looking at you and asking "What am I, chopped liver?".

Pffft! Pretty much! There's nothing special about them that a small interface windowed bus couldn't give you. I'm talking about full digital video bus, associated clock, etc. You even have an indicator of if the pixel is sprite or bg, allowing inserting priority levels. The SGX, with some slight changes, could have been addon with a completely new VCE and palette range.

[gilbot]

It seemed that NEC/Hudson wasn't expecting the eventual success of the CD-ROM peripheral and became the primary media format of the games on the system.
In case of CD-ROM failing in the market or that it was popular but not enough to become the primary format, they would continue to support the expansion port to release more stuff (such as the Family Basic Communication Booster/modem or the Power Console).
When they designed the Duo to permenantly attach to the CD-ROM and axed the expansion port it was officially confirmed that the port was abandoned and thus the end of the Core concept.
I'm not sure whether this is possible, but the developers might at some point wanted the system to have different add-ons daisy chained to the port, so you may say, attach a modem to the base system first, and then attach the CD-ROM to the back of the modem (this is not unlike how the interface unit (which was more or less a Tenokoe II add-on) worked in the original CD-ROM unit, but that was mainly for tax reasons).

Losing the expansion port meant every new add-on had to be connected to the controller port(or the Hucard slot), and it's very clumsy to have your system connected to a MB128, and then a Joytap V and then to five controllers.
Worst of all, it made programming to accomodate the peripherals very complex and there are games(first-party games even) that are not compatible with some of the combinations.

[pokun]

Yeah they should have designed the CD-ROM² IFU with an expansion port in the rear from the start, so that other peripherals could be daisy-chained from there. Then the Duo models would probably also have the expansion port.

But I guess there could be hardware conflict problems or confusion among users what combinations of expansion-port peripheral works.

Regarding 3D consoles, hardware limitations as we used to know them basically disappeared with the 128-bit era, and games could suddenly look and sound like however you wanted.

Gamecube and PS2 games no longer has those sharp polygons from Virtua Fighter, the jitter-fest of the PS1 or the muddy anti-aliased look of N64 games, no real limitations on sound and, with the exception of realism, could easily be made to look about exactly as the concept art. Limitations were mostly about how large games can be, and now it seems to just be about things like frame-rate and polygon count as the games can already be larger than what the developers are able to come up with within the span of a normal development period. Since a game can look almost exactly like an anime using cel-shading there is not much use for a higher polygon count for regular games like Odyssey (although it also does push realism were polygon count matters). I mean, other than the realistic worlds in Odyssey, the game doesn't look dramatically different from Super Mario Sunshine which could already portray Mario and the other characters convincingly similar to their artwork (something that can't be said about Super Mario 64).

This also means there are no longer any clear characteristics of a certain system, they all look and sound the same. Any 8-bit system using the TMS9918 video chip (ColecoVision, Sega SG-1000, MSX etc) are very easy to spot with their characteristic palette and single-colored sprites, anything using a certain off-the-shell PSG or FM chip like the AY-3-8910 or the YM3526 will have the characteristic sound associated with said audio chip and the Famicom, Super Famicom, Game Boy and PC-Engine which all has custom VDPs and PSGs also all stands out very clearly. This trend basically stopped around the time of the Gamecube when graphics are full-color and with adequate polygon count and the audio chip is simply just a high quality DAC (actually the N64 also just used a high quality DAC but the ROM cartridge format meant severe size limitations on the sound data compared to modern systems).

[turboxray]

Jul 28, 2022 15:31:18 GMT pokun said:

Yeah they should have designed the CD-ROM² IFU with an expansion port in the rear from the start, so that other peripherals could be daisy-chained from there. Then the Duo models would probably also have the expansion port.

But I guess there could be hardware conflict problems or confusion among users what combinations of expansion-port peripheral works.

A "graphic/sound enhancement" device could sit between the PCE and the IFU. 

 Speculation/opinion/whatever, but given dates and timelines - the Duo design (IMO) signaled that Hudson/NEC thought the PCE was coming to an end of its life (finalizing an all in one design, and discontinuing the other models). I think they expected the Tetsujin to be launched in 1992, which pretty much puts that into perspective. According to whatever online sources, the PCFX was just a slightly modified Tetsujin (cpu replacement). If the original HuC62320 in the Tetsujin had a huc6280 core in it (which is possible - that core is pretty tiny), it would have made the system backwards compatible (at least for CD games). Everything is pretty much there for it to work, except for late gen games like Gulliver Boy/Seiya Monogatari/etc that used new libs that directly accessed the CD hardware, bypassing the CD System card BIOS routines. 

 Yeah yeah, all speculation.. but suspicious hahah.

[goldenpp72]

It's interesting to observe this timeframe because there wasn't really a truly established formula for this stuff. Atari just released one system and sat on that forever with no regulation, Nintendo attempted to add structure to that formula, but also rested a bit too long before making their successor to the NES, meanwhile a lot of companies kept pumping out systems, revisions and add ons. These days all of that seems silly because we know it's not viable, but I guess at the time it must have seemed like a good idea. Living in the US, most seemed pretty uninterested in what Sega was doing in this space, not really caring for the Sega CD or the 32x, and I think other examples have made it pretty clear that add-ons and major revisions typically either don't work at all, or won't work for long. The only real benefit of developing for them is having closer to a monopoly on buying options to the consumer, similar to releasing launch software, people will simply be more likely to pick your products when little else is available.

While I don't think the add on and system revision market is quite ripe even today, at least consumers are more conditioned to do tech upgrades and to care about this stuff, that plus having disposable incomes versus your allowance money I suppose. I don't really feel like the Supergrafx made a ton of sense personally, it just didn't seem to line up with any viable business model, even if it's an interesting device for enthusiast.