Game Pilgrimage

[Da_Shocker]

http://www.gamepilgrimage.com/

THis is a great site check it out.

[OldSchool]

Wow, I didn't know the Master System had 'that' much more power of the NES... interesting

[Psy]

Wow, I didn't know the Master System had 'that' much more power of the NES... interesting

The Master System was still watered down compared to Sega System E arcade boards that had 8MHz Z-80 instead of 4Mhz Z-80, 16K RAM instead of 8K or RAM, 64K VRAM vs 16K VRAM and had two VDPs instead of one.

Yet I think the System E arcade boards were beefed up SMS boards that were designed after the SMS.

[roundwars]

Wow, I didn't know the Master System had 'that' much more power of the NES... interesting

It looks like those specs aren't completely accurate; the NES had 25 total palette entries, not 16. And I'm not sure I believe that the SMS had 4 times the main RAM and 8 times the video RAM of the NES either.

My understanding is that the big difference between SMS and NES is 15-color sprites versus 3-color sprites. SMS graphics were capable of a surprising level of detail while NES graphics would always look somewhat primitive. But other than that, the systems weren't that different (similar color palettes, similar onscreen color counts, similar sprite capabilities, similar CPU resources, and similar sound generators -- with the NES being a cut above in this aspect).

[Psy]

It looks like those specs aren't completely accurate; the NES had 25 total palette entries, not 16. And I'm not sure I believe that the SMS had 4 times the main RAM and 8 times the video RAM of the NES either.

My understanding is that the big difference between SMS and NES is 15-color sprites versus 3-color sprites. SMS graphics were capable of a surprising level of detail while NES graphics would always look somewhat primitive. But other than that, the systems weren't that different (similar color palettes, similar onscreen color counts, similar sprite capabilities, similar CPU resources, and similar sound generators -- with the NES being a cut above in this aspect).

The SMS had a 3.5 Mhz Z80 (I rounded the clock in my last post) while the NES had a 6502 based CPU @ 1.7 Mhz, the only advantage of the 6502 family was they were very cheap so the SMS dominated the NES in terms of raw processing power that is why arcade boards upgraded from 6502 based CPUs to Z80 based CPUs.