Ben Heck's Nintendo-Playstation Prototype Pt 1 Teardown

[Mad Moham]

I'd love to know what Sony/Nintendo think of this teardown. There's got to be someone out there watching the video thinking: "oh shit that's the old unit I was supposed to destroy!"

[tomaitheous]

The 8-bit bus would of held it back.

How so?

[LordGeo]

How so?

Pat & Ian on the CUPodcast actually helped explain this shortly. Essentially, even with a 2x speed CD-Rom drive, the 8-bit bus wouldn't be enough to really take advantage of the extra speed. Load times wouldn't be any better, for example, since the system wouldn't be able to process the data at the speed that the drive would be taking data from.

In short, imagine that the data is water & the bus is the drain that the water can flow through to get processed by the game itself. Even though water is being piled onto that drain at twice the speed as what the Turbo-CD & Sega CD were capable of, the drain is still small, so the end result is that the water is draining just as slow as before. In comparison, the Sega CD's bus was 16-bit, meaning that it was "draining the water" faster than either of the other two CD add-ons, yet was getting data at only half the speed as that of the "SNES-CD/Play Station".

[tomaitheous]

Pat & Ian on the CUPodcast actually helped explain this shortly. Essentially, even with a 2x speed CD-Rom drive, the 8-bit bus wouldn't be enough to really take advantage of the extra speed. Load times wouldn't be any better, for example, since the system wouldn't be able to process the data at the speed that the drive would be taking data from.

In short, imagine that the data is water & the bus is the drain that the water can flow through to get processed by the game itself. Even though water is being piled onto that drain at twice the speed as what the Turbo-CD & Sega CD were capable of, the drain is still small, so the end result is that the water is draining just as slow as before. In comparison, the Sega CD's bus was 16-bit, meaning that it was "draining the water" faster than either of the other two CD add-ons, yet was getting data at only half the speed as that of the "SNES-CD/Play Station".

And yet none of that addresses any real specs. 8bit and 16bit data buses mean nothing without context of what the transfer bandwidth is (separate buses, their speeds, dma or block move instructions, etc). For example, the SNES bus B is actually operating at 2.6megabytes to 3.57megabytes per second. Faster than the Genesis 1.9megabytes per second (one word every 4 cycles).

If you ignored the DMA controller (which handles these moves at a much faster rate), a double speed CD drive is only 300k per second - and the cpu in slow mode could fill the cart ram by itself at 335k per second (simple read/write). Fastmode would be 440k a second. But the actual 8bit buses (two of them) on the snes are capable of 2.6megabytes/sec on the low end and 3.57megabytes/sec on the high end. The buses speed is waayyy faster than a double speed cd transfer rate; a dma controller would have no problem supporting it, and a slow brute force cpu method also exceeds it as well.

Did you really just cite Pat the nes punk for technical references???

[Da_Shocker]

LOL @tomaitheous

So this thing contains NO extra chips though? Given how the SNES really needed them in alot of games how on earth would they compensate?

[tomaitheous]

LOL @tomaitheous

So this thing contains NO extra chips though? Given how the SNES really needed them in alot of games how on earth would they compensate?

Knowing Nintendo's history with the SNES from day one (Pilotwings), there was bound to be a capable DSP on the cart for the final product. Genesis could have went that route as well. As well as "bios" upgrades for later games (if they went the PCE CD route).