SMS VS NES

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Originally Posted by StarMist

Being so enamoured of hardware power why do you play anything other than the 360

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I'm not enamoured with hardware power at all, I made a straight statement that SMS graphics are much better, thats it, I already stated quite clearly that I favoured the NES in my first post on this thread, and that it was one of the best console's ever made, being one of the best consoles doesn't automatically make it free from all criticism.

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Originally Posted by StarMist

That's not very factual is it? In accordance with your debating habits this is where I should upbraid you for nostalgia, bias, ignorance, and fanboyism. Or can you 'prove' that pain? Did you hook up Dragon Warrior 3 and 4 to an odynometre?

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Its a subjective opinion which I feel I can back up with logical argument, whereas your argument about graphics is tied to actual hardware specifications.

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Originally Posted by Thenewguy

3 colours (+1 shared) per 16x16 squares for backgrounds is horribly inferior to having complete freedom to use 16 colours wherever you want.

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It's actually two sets of 16 colors; bg tiles can optionally use the palette reserved for sprites. (edit: sorry, misread.) They can also use all ~488 tiles. And they can be flipped and mirrored. I don't think any SMS game has really explored the full potential of this.

Some later NES games exploit bank switching to allow for background animation. It's dead easy to implement, you just store multiple similar graphic pages in order and change banks every x frames. It's usually reserved for running water and fire, but some games use it to make foliage blow in the wind. One of the crazier uses is in the final level of Batman Return of the Joker. I have a GIF but am not sure how to inline it, the attachment system seems to turn it into a jpeg.

Isn't there some huge bottleneck with the SMS when you load graphics from ROM, or something along those lines? I seem to remember reading that it had to happen at a VERY specific time, and takes a lot of flexibility away from the programmer so that you can't do the tricks that made other consoles capable of being pushed beyond their ostensible limits (see: most of the Atari consoles).

I can't speak firsthand to any of this, beyond a sense that the SMS is "stiff" and tied to its architecture in the same way that, say, the Intellivision is: it's (far) more capable than the VCS out of the box, but the VCS can be made to do things that would never be possible on the Inty, because its basic design is more flexible and forces the programmers to operate closer to the hardware.

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Originally Posted by blobolonia

I have a GIF but am not sure how to inline it, the attachment system seems to turn it into a jpeg.

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Don't use the attachment system, put it on an image host like http://www.imgur.com

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Originally Posted by goldenband

Isn't there some huge bottleneck with the SMS when you load graphics from ROM, or something along those lines? I seem to remember reading that it had to happen at a VERY specific time, and takes a lot of flexibility away from the programmer so that you can't do the tricks that made other consoles capable of being pushed beyond their ostensible limits (see: most of the Atari consoles).

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Had a discussion about it with tiido a while back, yup it's pretty limited at doing VRAM updates. You can put DMA hardware on cart to fix the problem though. It's not really fair to compare the extra chips on the NES with the bare SMS. Put the DMA chip on the cart and the FM module and the SMS wins easily in every area.

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Originally Posted by goldenband

I can't speak firsthand to any of this, beyond a sense that the SMS is "stiff" and tied to its architecture in the same way that, say, the Intellivision is: it's (far) more capable than the VCS out of the box, but the VCS can be made to do things that would never be possible on the Inty, because its basic design is more flexible and forces the programmers to operate closer to the hardware.

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You can actually do stuff on the SMS you can't on the NES without extra chips, like line scrolling (aka, fake parallax). But yes, it's pretty limited, you can't even do dynamic tiles because there's just too little time for updating VRAM and you need all of it to update as many sprites as possible.

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Originally Posted by blobolonia

One of the crazier uses is in the final level of Batman Return of the Joker. I have a GIF but am not sure how to inline it, the attachment system seems to turn it into a jpeg.

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Return of the Joker is the craziest NES game graphically. What the hell happened to the Genesis version? Oh yeah, it's called "a half-arsed port by a western developer".

Thank you :)
http://i.imgur.com/4qNQv.gif
Why did you have to fill this game with obnoxious ambushes, Sunsoft? Why?

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Originally Posted by Kamahl

Had a discussion about it with tiido a while back, yup it's pretty limited at doing VRAM updates. You can put DMA hardware on cart to fix the problem though. It's not really fair to compare the extra chips on the NES with the bare SMS. Put the DMA chip on the cart and the FM module and the SMS wins easily in every area.

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Interesting, so they could have easily beefed up the SMS (further). Are there any games that use DMA?

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Originally Posted by blobolonia

TInteresting, so they could have easily beefed up the SMS (further). Are there any games that use DMA?

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No SMS game uses an addon chip AFAIK. Tiido has been making some experiments with it and it's totally possible to do.
Also that batman game is beautiful, probably the greatest looking NES game.

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Originally Posted by Kamahl

You can actually do stuff on the SMS you can't on the NES without extra chips, like line scrolling (aka, fake parallax).

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Like the background effects at 1:30 and 5:30 in this video-

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Originally Posted by blobolonia

Some later NES games exploit bank switching to allow for background animation. It's dead easy to implement, you just store multiple similar graphic pages in order and change banks every x frames. It's usually reserved for running water and fire, but some games use it to make foliage blow in the wind. One of the crazier uses is in the final level of Batman Return of the Joker. I have a GIF but am not sure how to inline it, the attachment system seems to turn it into a jpeg.

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Yeah the background animations of some NES games are pretty cool, Jurassic Park on the SMS actually does a lot of that sort of thing during its levels, though its not as complex as it is in Return of the Joker.

I really wish just one of two other Japanese companies had supported SMS, I would've loved to have seen what kind of games Sunsoft would've made for the system.

http://i40.tinypic.com/3525c3q.gif

Would have been interesting if Natsume made more SMS games. Their late NES sidescrollers are among the best on the system, and their SMS port of Renegade has good graphics and music.

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Originally Posted by Thenewguy

Your argument has no basis in logic, its essentially "I like limited colour sprites and backgrounds, therefore NES has better graphics than SMS because it forces the programmer to use low quality graphics"

Its interesting, as I thought this sort of argument was limited to ZX Spectrum forums.

NES has lower colour sprites. FACT
NES has lower colour tiles. FACT
NES limits colour placement more. FACT
Any of those NES games could be recreated on SMS looking virtually the same. FACT

What exactly are the NES' concrete advantages? if there aren't any real advantages then its all just a load of nostalgic nonsense, ask any kid not involved with either console which has the better graphics, nobody is going to pick the NES, because its sprites and tiles clearly have something wrong with them colour wise 4 times out of 5.

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Actually, there are concrete (technical) advantages for the NES's graphics, and I addressed some of them a few pages back:

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Originally Posted by kool kitty89

Actually, the SMS is better than that, since you have 2 sets of 15 colors to choose from on an 8x8 tile basis, though sprites are limited to 15 colors.

However, the master palette of the NES is generally better than the 6-bit RGB of the SMS . . . a bit of a saving grace for the color limits. (and you have 8 3 color palettes to work with too, so more flexibility there)

Also note that, since only 2-bit graphics are used, you can fit double the animation/graphics in the same amount of ROM (uncompressed) as you would the SMS's 4-bit graphics, and the NES has sprite mirroring, further cutting space for animation (without software flipping/decompression). Albeit the NES lacks tile mirroring (which the SMS supports), but sprite flipping is generally more important than tiles.


Still, there's no doubt that the SMS's graphics are technically superior over the NES by a significant margin (at least in the same respects that the PCE or MD graphics hardware is superior -albeit not by as wide a margin)

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On top of that, there's the bottleneck for VRAM updates compared to the NES's dedicated VROM bus . . . albeit there's advantages to the SMS's set-up too: carts are significantly cheaper to make since there's only 1 bus rather than 2 (many fewer pins and fewer ROM chips -potentially just 1 chip vs at least 2 in the NES). It could also potentially use compressed graphics and decompress them into VRAM in-between scenes/stages (or on the fly), but there's so little RAM to work with (since all graphics are 4-bit -unlike the 1-bit graphics of the SG-1000/etc) and such limited CPU resource, that option is pretty limited too. (though padding 1/2/3-bit graphics to 4-bit would probably be pretty fast -since bitplanes are used, or even faster would be to specifically reserve certain chunks of VRAM for tiles/sprites of specific bit depths, thus avoiding padding altogether -and just copying over 1/2/3/4 bitplanes -and thus also making 1/2/3-bit graphics faster to copy than 4-bit)

The cost savings on the carts (from the single bus/lower pin count) could partially offset use of more ROM, but that's a bit hard to compare.


Then there's the issue of NES add-on chips skewing the comparison further. (and is also hard to compare with larger non-enhanced SMS games -if we knew the exact manufacturing cost, we could compare things on more even grounds, but we don't have that information)

In my experience the Master System equivalent to "16-bitness" of Return of the Joker is Shadow Dancer.

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Originally Posted by sheath

In my experience the Master System equivalent to "16-bitness" of Return of the Joker is Shadow Dancer.

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Yup, and no addon chips on that one ;).

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Originally Posted by cowboyscowboys

Most games on the SMS are unbearable to listen to. It's hard to enjoy games when the music is horrendous. The Nes for me wins easy I mean if this were a race it would be a morbidly obese man vs. Usain Bolt. I am disappointed the SMS has one vote.

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I agree, why does the music on the SMS sound sooo terrible and almost exactly the same? At least the NES could mix it up a bit. What sound hardware was used on the SMS that resulted in it's annoyingly unique sound?

Texas Instruments SN76489 or equivalent. As mentioned above, the FM module (pretty similar to early Sound Blaster cards) was never released in western markets.