Advantages of SNES hardware vs. Genesis hardware

About the Jaguar sucking because its graphics werent "real next gen", well, when the Jaguar launched, next gen was stuff like Doom, and for basically been a first generation title (given how the software developing situation was, with the Jaguar), the Jag ran it pretty well, while the industry leaders, SNES and Genesis, couldnt even dream of running anything resembling a playable version of Doom on their stock hardware.

Other next gen stuff from the era, such as Comanche with its voxel graphics, were doable with the Jaguar.

With enough cart size, the Jag could probably run any 2d game on the high end market when it launched too. It could do superscaler type games like no system before it.

On the right hands, it could probably have had great Virtual Fighter and Virtua Racing clones too.

It gets tiresome to listen to people hate on the Jaguar because its textured mapped 3d wasnt as good as it was on consoles released years after it, by companies with much more money. The Jag and 3do are kinda like the Colecovision and the 5200, they were the next gen when they came out, but the NES/SMS quickly outclased them overall, but more specifically at scrolling, much like the Sat/PS1 ouclass the Jaguar overall, but more specifically at textured mapped polygons, and in both cases, scrolling and textured mapped polygons, they turned out to be the hot stuff on their respective generations.

What's all this about Jag and 3DO being years earlier than Saturn and PS1? They were one year apart in terms of release date, not three. Maybe a point can be made with regards to development time of the hardware, but even there it still wouldn't be correct to state they were all that far apart in age. From my understanding the 3DO and Jaguar projects proper were started in late '90/early '91, the Saturn and PS1 projects in late '92/early '93, and N64, iirc, late '93/early '94.

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Originally Posted by spiffyone

What's all this about Jag and 3DO being years earlier than Saturn and PS1? They were one year apart in terms of release date, not three.

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Two years, not one. Both the Jaguar and the 3DO came out in NA in late 93 (Nov and Oct, respectively), with the PS1 coming in Sep 95. The Japanese releases of the Jaguar and 3DO were late 94, the same as the PS1 in Japan, so that may throw off some people. But here in the US, we only consider the US releases as all the rest can be ignored. :p :D

So I've finally taken a look at the 9-bit RGB palettes in the Genesis and PCE:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...e_RGB_9bit.png

Really? theres no shades of gray? I must be misunderstanding something here

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Originally Posted by azonicrider

So I've finally taken a look at the 9-bit RGB palettes in the Genesis and PCE:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...e_RGB_9bit.png

Really? theres no shades of gray? I must be misunderstanding something here

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Not counting pure black and pure white, there are 6 shades of even gray. Each shade has equal RGB values.

For example, this is the darkest shade of gray:

R: 36
G: 36
B: 36


Looking at a pic like that won't really tell you much.

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Originally Posted by Chilly Willy

Two years, not one. Both the Jaguar and the 3DO came out in NA in late 93 (Nov and Oct, respectively), with the PS1 coming in Sep 95. The Japanese releases of the Jaguar and 3DO were late 94, the same as the PS1 in Japan, so that may throw off some people. But here in the US, we only consider the US releases as all the rest can be ignored. :p :D

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3DO was released in mid '94 in Japan, actually. Now, I know you're pulling a funny, but they were only a year apart in all seriousness.

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Originally Posted by kool kitty89

What's kind of ironic is looking at both Commodore and Atari Corp in '93/94. Both were in trouble in different ways, both tried to push out next-gen consoles, and both ended up failing, yet not in quite the same way.

The Amiga CD-32 was horribly weak for the time and not very cost effective either (poor performance relative to price point). However, CBM was still together enough to manage fairly decent advertising and distribution, and had better PR and cashflow than Atari at the time....

Though, as it was for Atari, they made a big mistake in ignoring Europe to a large extent. (even cutting out the London and Paris test market plans in '93)
They might have have had massive success, but given their reputation and the general consumer and software development situation in Europe at the time, putting an emphasis on that market (with what limited funds they had) very well might have worked out a lot better than it did. ...Heh, they at least might have outsold the CD32 . . . which would also imply more than double the Jaguar sales they saw in reality.

Atari Corp's bigger problem in general, that fed into the whole 1993 situation was lack of a full range of viable products from ~1990-1993. The Lynx never got that far along (hit and miss with both management and marketing), their computers were stagnating and falling out of favor, and they had no follow-up console to the 7800 for ~1990. (the Panther wasn't great, but they had nothing and it still had some interesting potential . . .

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Yeah, you and I have discussed this before over at AtariAge, iirc. Atari not having product to follow-up the effective (if not on paper actual) discontinuation of 2600, 7800, and the XE computer line (including XEGS), and augment their ST computer market. They absolutely should've just released Panther in '91 as planned, targeting Europe for the most part. Was Jaguar far along and more promising? Maybe. But Panther was, iirc, damn near finished and would've at least given Atari some product to put on the shelves. Would it have "beaten" Genesis/MD or SNES/SFC? No, most likely not. But it would've sold some, probably enough to be quite profitable.

As for Commodore...*sighs...they shouldn't have released CD32. They shouldn't have gotten rid of the original Los Gatos team. They shouldn't have done a lot of things. But key among them is that they shouldn't have fallen for the "convergence" idea which has NEVER taken hold, and simply should've focused on the Amiga as a computer platform. We'd all likely have a viable fourth option in terms of OS/computer platform had Commodore been a bit more conservative.

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Heh, on the note of Sega, with all the money they ended up pouring into the 32x, combined with the Atari patent settlements in 1994, I wonder if it would have been a better investment to negotiate a merger/buy-out of Atari's assets back in '93 or '94. :p ( . . . still probably not a GOOD investment at that point though -had Atari been looking for partners back around '91 or so, that might have been more compelling -then again, Sega turned doen the 3DO hardware development thing too, so hey)

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I still say Sega should've just followed Nintendo's example during the close of the 16-bit gen: focus on their own 16-bitter, no more add-ons (so no 32X), and release their successor console later than they did at the true tail end of the 16-bit gen. Could 32X been viable with Saturn pushed back? Maybe. But, honestly, Sega didn't need such an add-on, especially one that in Nakayama's mind was going to help sales in the West.

Fact is, Sega didn't need such help at that point, quite frankly, as they were outselling Nintendo's SNES by a good margin in the US/NA and EU markets (not to mention SA). Heck, iirc, even the release of the vaunted Donkey Kong Country, often cited as the "turnaround" for SNES in the console war sales race didn't actually change things as Genesis still outsold SNES that holiday season (and therefore took the win for the year).

IMHO Sega probably should've just killed off SMS and maybe Sega CD to some extent (the latter of which, IMO, shouldn't have been released outside of Japan quite frankly). And they probably would've been better served scrapping the Saturn altogether once they learned of Sony's plans, or revising it more heavily than they did (consolidating the hardware, simplifying it, etc.). Then release the hardware world-wide in late '95. Would they have given Sony a year lead in Japan? Sure. But Japan was not the big prize, nor where the bulk of the Sega fanbase resided. A stealth FUD campaign against PS1 (and N64), hype building the new console in the classic Sega marketing way in the West might've been enough to turn kids off of PS1 and have them wait for the "next big thing" (which is actually what Nintendo did, iirc). Japan could've been won over eventually, maybe. But by focusing so much on Japan, they lost site of the bigger picture.

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Originally Posted by azonicrider

So I've finally taken a look at the 9-bit RGB palettes in the Genesis and PCE:

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...e_RGB_9bit.png

Really? theres no shades of gray? I must be misunderstanding something here

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You're not looking close enough ;)

http://i.imgur.com/pD2V0UJ.png

Yea I'm finding alot of grayish colours now

what the problem is, is the right side of my monitor is faded as hell. So now I always gotta bring the palette to the left side of my screen, to truly see the colours.

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Originally Posted by azonicrider

Yea I'm finding alot of grayish colours now

what the problem is, is the right side of my monitor is faded as hell. So now I always gotta bring the palette to the left side of my screen, to truly see the colours.

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There actually a lot of "grayish" colors with a good number of shades between pure black and pure white within the 9-bit palette.


http://superpcenginegrafx.net/misc/grayish3a.png



It may be hard to visualize their grayish-ness when looking at them lined up in equal proportions like that, but they are very noticeable when used effectively and you can get a lot of mileage out of them. It's all about how you stagger them and the shading.


http://superpcenginegrafx.net/misc/grayish1.png



They can be blended together by veering off along a shading sequence to create a seemingly infinite number of perceptual types of gray coloring.

http://superpcenginegrafx.net/misc/grayish2b.png http://superpcenginegrafx.net/misc/grayish2a.png

Why do you put "grayish" between quotes? according to Firefox spell check, its a real word


I just gotta learn the ways of RGB, to realize where all the colours are.

When writing CSS, I always used hex syntax instead of RGB syntax (#FFFFFF, rgb(255,255,255) ). I see this could help in that discipline too.

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Originally Posted by spiffyone

Fact is, Sega didn't need such help at that point, quite frankly, as they were outselling Nintendo's SNES by a good margin in the US/NA and EU markets (not to mention SA). Heck, iirc, even the release of the vaunted Donkey Kong Country, often cited as the "turnaround" for SNES in the console war sales race didn't actually change things as Genesis still outsold SNES that holiday season (and therefore took the win for the year).

IMHO Sega probably should've just killed off SMS and maybe Sega CD to some extent (the latter of which, IMO, shouldn't have been released outside of Japan quite frankly). And they probably would've been better served scrapping the Saturn altogether once they learned of Sony's plans, or revising it more heavily than they did (consolidating the hardware, simplifying it, etc.). Then release the hardware world-wide in late '95. Would they have given Sony a year lead in Japan? Sure. But Japan was not the big prize, nor where the bulk of the Sega fanbase resided. A stealth FUD campaign against PS1 (and N64), hype building the new console in the classic Sega marketing way in the West might've been enough to turn kids off of PS1 and have them wait for the "next big thing" (which is actually what Nintendo did, iirc). Japan could've been won over eventually, maybe. But by focusing so much on Japan, they lost site of the bigger picture.

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It would have been interesting to see Sega find a way to get the SVP chip into more than one cartridge. Maybe some sort of lock-on cart with Virtua Racing.

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Originally Posted by gamevet

It would have been interesting to see Sega find a way to get the SVP chip into more than one cartridge. Maybe some sort of lock-on cart with Virtua Racing.

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Isn't that kinda how the 32x was created?

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Originally Posted by azonicrider

Isn't that kinda how the 32x was created?

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I don't know about that. Melf wrote an article a while back suggesting that the SVP would have been a better alternative.

It seems like it would have been a pretty good idea to sell Virtua Racing with a lock-on cart, that could be used for future titles. You're not segregating your user-base, like what happened with the Sega CD and 32X.

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Originally Posted by gamevet

I don't know about that. Melf wrote an article a while back suggesting that the SVP would have been a better alternative.

It seems like it would have been a pretty good idea to sell Virtua Racing with a lock-on cart, that could be used for future titles. You're not segregating your user-base, like what happened with the Sega CD and 32X.

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I think it would've been wisest to take the Nintendo approach, rig the cartridges with chips.

A lock-on cart wouldn't have bombed as hard as the 32X, but I don't think requiring add-ons has ever worked for games.