Advantages of SNES hardware vs. Genesis hardware

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Originally Posted by tomaitheous

Better is subjective ;) I like the z80 (it was my first processor for ASM after coming from x86) and it has a decent/comfortable ISA. 65x series might very well have a more simplistic ISA and even convoluted at times, but overall it's more powerful. Whatever short comings or dislikes about the ISA can easily be fixed with pseudo instructions (macros). I have 16bit instruction macros for my huc6280 coding that tend to look a lot like 68k instructions. I use them quite a bit. 65x can be fixed with macros, z80 weaknesses cannot. Plus, who doesn't like 128 16bit address/vector registers? And free indexing at that? That's one thing I never got about the z80; the speed comes from register operations - yet it has so few of them (especially paired registers for vector addressing). I always hated pushing and popping registers from the stack (regardless of the cpu. This dislike started with x86) and I rarely ever do this on the 6280; there's no real need to.

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Indeed it is subjective. With Z80 I have love with the hate, 65x is just hate :P
It has some nice things like you mentioned but it is far from user friendly to me. It takes mre code to do simple things, it may very well do it faster than Z80 but that is not a whole lot of concern to me, I'm lazy like that :P
Regarding stack - I only use it with CALL, almost never with PUSH and POP. I am going as far as just making SP as an additional index register... I dont need stack, when you do you do something wrong :lol:

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Originally Posted by Kamahl

The neo geo can actually easily beat the SNES in color, but there's a very simple reason why it rarely does. It has to do with how the backgrounds are generated. Since the Neo uses sprites to make the background, developers typically used maximum size sprites to draw it (it's the most efficient way). Sprites are however limited to 16 colors, this means that for every 16x512 column of background you can only have 16 colors. That's why they used dithering.

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Check out the Big Brain on Kamahl!!


In response to the Mega Drive it just needed more colors to display, IDK why they made it only 61 + what ever BS not including highlighting and shading but a 1987 PCE could display 2wice as many colors as a SNES so IDk why they didn't.

2nd would have been speech samples, the Genesis had what 1 channel? The SNES had 8 so the SNES was able to pull speech samples out of it's ass while teh Mega Drive suffered. The MK3 game had MONO sound and half speech samples playing on one channel just to keep up with the SNES.

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Originally Posted by TmEE

Indeed it is subjective. With Z80 I have love with the hate, 65x is just hate :P
It has some nice things like you mentioned but it is far from user friendly to me. It takes mre code to do simple things, it may very well do it faster than Z80 but that is not a whole lot of concern to me, I'm lazy like that :P
Regarding stack - I only use it with CALL, almost never with PUSH and POP. I am going as far as just making SP as an additional index register... I dont need stack, when you do you do something wrong :lol:

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I love both processors. I've done a LOT of assembly on both. They each have their pros and cons. As to extra registers on the Z80, people forget about the alternate registers all the time. If you aren't using them for interrupts (and on the MD you aren't), you've got twice as many registers now free to use! I do that on my real-time decompressor player code. It saves a lot of pushing and popping - just exchange the registers at the proper places.

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I wasn't talking about the sample quality, I was simply pointing out that they are games that play 2 PCM samples at a time. The bad sounding voices have more to do with a poor sound engine, not the Systems capabilities, as many of Tiidos demos have shown. And I find the drums in Genesis games to be far better than whats in SNES games.

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Signs . What next all the poor sounding Snes games are down to poor sound engines ? . When it came to simultaneous sound samples the MD game out a true 2nd best to that of the Snes or even the Amiga not down to poor sound engines but the Mega Drive suffering from having one channel for sampled sound

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The SNES had 8 so the SNES was able to pull speech samples out of it's ass while teh Mega Drive suffered. The MK3 game had MONO sound and half speech samples playing on one channel just to keep up with the SNES.

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Spot on . Just play MK III and SF II on both systems and hear the difference when it came to samples , even SEGA own internal teams couldn't do it

Eternal Champions has fine sample quality and playback. So does Toejam & Earl for that matter. It was all about properly timed code, not the system's capabilities. The SNES could never, ever, produce a great sounding tune like this though.

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Originally Posted by sheath

a great sounding tune like this

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The SNES can't do funky tunes like that no sir.

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Originally Posted by Team Andromeda

Signs . What next all the poor sounding Snes games are down to poor sound engines ? . When it came to simultaneous sound samples the MD game out a true 2nd best to that of the Snes or even the Amiga not down to poor sound engines but the Mega Drive suffering from having one channel for sampled sound

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Then explain Tiidos sound engine that gets 2 PCM channels working perfectly? It's been pretty well established that the Sound Engine used in Street Fighter 2 isn't a very good one even though it does allow 2 PCM channels.

In fact I'm pretty sure there's a demo floating around somewhere that can do 4 8-bit PCM channels on the Genesis.

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Originally Posted by Kamahl

The SNES can't do funky tunes like that no sir.

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More specifically it can't do the clarity of the instruments, not even the drums.

-edit-

Also, let's actually compare the audio quality of Street Fighter II and Mortal Kombat II on both systems.

SFIISCE-Genesis 2

SFIITurbo-SNES

SF2SCE-Genesis1HDG

SuperSF2-Genesis2

SuperSF2-SNES

SuperSF2-Genesis1HDG

MKII-Genesis

MKII-SNES

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Originally Posted by TrekkiesUnite118

In fact I'm pretty sure there's a demo floating around somewhere that can do 4 8-bit PCM channels on the Genesis.

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It's on the Sega Genesis Dev Kit by Stef.

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Originally Posted by evilevoix

The SNES had 8 so the SNES was able to pull speech samples out of it's ass while teh Mega Drive suffered. The MK3 game had MONO sound and half speech samples playing on one channel just to keep up with the SNES.

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Several SNES games show "problems" to play several samples at once and/or quick sequence.
WWF Wrestlemania: The Arcade Game's samples playback on the Genesis put the SNES version to shame.
No, it's not only about the Genesis version having more samples due to its larger ROM, it's about the SNES version playing them like ass and nothing like on the Arcade.

Flashback is another interesting comparison... The SNES version sounds like crap compared to the Genesis one.
Demolition Man also sounds better on the Genesis, both music and sfx.

Uhhh, do snes games use a "sound engine"?

Thanks for boring me to death. Is anyone else still following this? I'm not.

And you felt the need to post that because...?

Drakon, yes, SNES games use sound engines, usually force fed by Nintendo, which is why most SNES games sound so echo-y and muddled.

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Originally Posted by sheath

And you felt the need to post that because...?

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Because he's the OP?

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Originally Posted by tomaitheous

Charles Macdonald's old VDP doc mentions "You can divide control port data into two categories; 16-bit register sets and 32-bit command words". But it's misleading to say VDP works with 32bit instructions.

First off, only VRAM access (read/write) has long command words. And this is because the vram address is embedded into the command. And it's quite convoluted (and a pain in the ass) how they took the existing SMS 16bit command and tacked on the extra address bits and vram areas into a second command word (the extended address bits are in the second 16bit word write and aren't aligned in normal binary order). Thus you write two 16bit commands in order to access vram (a single LONG/32bit move is the same as two 16bit moves because the VDP ports are mirrored and since the data bus is only 16bit, the 68k is only writing a 16bit WORD at a time). There a bunch of other registers (doc says 23 but I forget off hand) in the VDP that are simply accessed via single 16bit word commands. These aren't instructions like you would have with a CPU ISA or a DSP or such. It's a simple select a register to turn on/off features or select a vram address to access.

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Yeah, I still can't figure how the VDP uses 32-bit instructions/commands/words, but the 68000 is very clearly defined as a 16/32-bit processor. I suppose that is reason enough to update that spec, it isn't like I'm going to set IGN forums on fire or anything.

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Originally Posted by tomaitheous

Err, that's 6.3k. Sorry. 3 and an 8 look the same in my memory. It's 8 master cycles per byte. That's 166 bytes per scanline. There are 8 DMA channels, but they don't all write to the same destination at once. Anyway, 262-224=38 * 166 = ~6.3k (it's also mentioned in the official SNES SFX dev manual). I don't know if you gain additional bandwidth by clipping the active display (turning it off earlier). Anomie’s Register Doc is the one you want to look at. The clipping WINDOW really is advanced. Way overkill IMO, but it handles color math options as well as mixing a single color against different BG and OBJ configurations (you use HDMA to change the color per scanline).

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I had a document on this that doesn't seem to be available anymore. It said 2.68MB divided by 8 (channels) divided by / 60 (frames per second), DMA occurs during VBLANK, according to the Super NES Programming/SNES Specs, Direct memory access unit. I will take some more time and look at Anomie's Register Doc to see how the 166 byte per scanline works out.