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Did the Super Nintendo actually win the 16-Bit war?
- Thread starter German Hops
- Start date
Thaedolus
Gold Member
Sure, which is why I came around on it in recent years when I've seen more examples of it being utilized well. But the fact of the matter is, most Genesis games sounded like wet farts and by and large the SNES sounded great in comparison. The cream of the crop for both systems have their own strengths and weaknesses, but I'd still give the SNES the edge.
I think that's selling it pretty short. Super Metroid isn't thought of as a Mode 7 game but utilized it for cool effects.
I think you missed my point about the 32X + CD being fully utilized together. Yes, the SEGA CD definitely enhanced the capabilities of the system beyond what the SNES could do, but not much beyond what it could do with enhancement chips (unless you're talking redbook audio or FMV games).
cireza
Member
Why would Redbook audio, FMV and almost infinite storage capacity (for the time) not count ?
You can put all the enhancement chips you want, you are never going to run Snatcher or Lunar Eternal Blue on SNES. These are not FMV games, but they use a ton of storage, have fantastic ambient audio (very clear voices) for Snatcher, beautiful and super clean cut-scenes that don't age for Lunar etc... Actually, SEGA-CD even has some advantages over 32 bits consoles for videos and audio, since everything eventually became compressed and full of artifacts in later consoles, as space available for videos and musics kept shrinking.
Another example : in games like Fatal Fury Special or Samurai Shodown, because of the gain in ROM space, the SEGA-CD could retain the full sprites of the Neo Geo games as well. These games look like they are in HD when compared to the SNES fighters.
Enhancement chips are nice and all, but in the end, they don't remove the low resolution, low number of sprites at once or poor sound quality (not talking about composition quality) restrictions of the SNES. All of this has to be generated by the console in the end.
That's because the SEGA-CD alone makes a world's difference. The 32X was utterly pointless in the end.
Romulus
Member
cireza
Member
I actually know of all of them... Races and worldmaps most of the time. Personally, I prefer when they are used sparingly like in Castlevania IV or Contra for example.
Mode 7 "term" is used in a wrong way a lot of time as well.
Axelay is not Mode 7 for example.
Metroid escape is not Mode 7, the MegaDrive can do this without any issue. It simply consists in shifting lines/columns (note how much smoother it is...). Example :
Yoshi's Island is using a chip to do all of this stuff, not sure that Mode 7 is used.
Take a look at this video. You will see that the lack of Mode 7 actually brought much more variety in the effects done on MegaDrive :
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Thaedolus
Gold Member
I was thinking more of what you see on the screen during actual gameplay than redbook audio or FMV...FMV games are lame, but definitely jaw dropping stuff at the time. I mean, a fully decked out Genesis with addons definitely has more potential than a SNES with enhancement chips, and your examples show where those strengths were actually utilized. But at the end of the day, anyone with a base model SNES could buy Star Fox or Yoshi's Island or DOOM without the need of investing in extra hardware. To me, that was a better strategy, overall, than having expensive addons.
But also money for games was a little tight in my house growing up and now that I'm an adult with my own money, I can appreciate splurging on stuff that gets you the best experience. There's a reason I still have a CRT with all my original hardware and games vs. going the cheap route with a Raspberry Pi or whatever.
How? The Super FX chip allowed for full sprite scaling and rotation by rendering to a buffer and passing the information to the ppu, as seen in Yoshi's Island, and the snes ppu can do matrix operations allowing for full zoom, rotation and perspective effects. The Neo Geo could only do very limited sprite zoom outs.Nah, Neo Geo zooms >>> any feature from the SNES or its enhanced chips.
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cireza
Member
Well certainly, but these were still a bit more expensive I think. And in the end, the number of SNES games using chips is largely exaggerated. I am a big SEGA fan (I think this is pretty obvious lol), but the argument "SNES was using chips" tend to annoy me, because the vast majority of fantastic looking games don't use any chip at all on SNES.
I am simply not a fan of the concept of added chips, CPUs or whatever in cartridges. I find it wasteful (hey look, I own 3 times the same processor, one in each cartridge !) and I like a well crafted console, well balanced from the go. I think SEGA were excellent at this. Master System, Game Gear, MegaDrive and Mega-CD are superbly designed in my opinion. They have everything they need and there is no reason to need any kind of enhancements to them. When day-one you need to put chips to have proper scaling in Pilotwings, it means that your console is not built correctly as far as I am concerned.
NES and SNES have obvious weaknesses meant to be mitigated by additional chips (and in the NES it was hilarious how much hardware you could push with these), and I find that this was mainly done because Nintendo were super greedy (and still are...).
I have exactly the same setup
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Romulus
Member
I think Vectorman and Raider X impressed me the most at the time. I do remember that stage with the forest and jumping out and the lighting changed.
cireza
Member
The forest effect is simply a real-time palette update I think.
I find Vectorman super impressive, as close to a 32 bits game as you can get on the console. I know how most of the effects were achieved, but I still have to take a look at how they did the waterfall effect for example. The thing covers the vast majority of the screen.
This game also uses the light/shadow effects of the console (which actually had some capabilities in that regard) and is pretty convincing. Ranger X uses it as well. Otherwise it is used very sparingly in some games, to do the shadows for the characters for example.
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DonkeyPunchJr
World’s Biggest Weeb
As a JRPG fan + general gaming music fan, it was such a treat to hear some gaming music with early 90s sensibilities but recorded with CD quality audio. Sonic CD, Lunar 1 & 2, Final Fight, etc just sounded so damn good.
“Next gen” games like Lunar Remake + FF7 felt like a downgrade in comparison.
Romulus
Member
To be fair, Pilotwings wasn't something you saw every day in a time of 16-bit 2d platformers and fighters.
Sega clearly wanted their own add on chips. From what I read Virtua Racing was a direct response to the FX chip because gamers were seeing the SNES had 3d capabilities that weren't on their system at that time. They just couldn't produce it cheaply
It was all mindset, the big gaming mags almost always showed SNES winning comparisons of major titles and it was getting these 3d games you didn't see on genesis like Doom and Star Fox. That just made people believe it was more capable. And it was. Most Nintendo developers didn't need 20hz CPU to do the kind of 2D games of that time. Having more sprites on screen just came off like a wash because it didn't translate onscreen outside of a few rare examples where you need to be shown by a hardcore fan. But when you saw a 3d game, that made impact because it was where gaming was going. It had the wow factor.
And I remember seeing comparison after comparison where they pointed out these examples
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Futaleufu
Member
None of the Yoshi Island's effects look particularly impressive, not even back in the day.
Most of those examples are line parallax effects.. something that could be achieved on the nes. Others are simply baffling (Super Fantasy Zone). Not seeing a lot of variety.
dacuk
Member
I love Shining Force series, but in no universe it is in the same league of the JRPG's Square and Enix were launching out for SNES.
cireza
Member
I don't think so. It was simply an answer as "see, we can do it to". But otherwise, not a single game uses chips and it is very easy to see why : you simply had everything you needed in the MegaDrive. You could achieve through software a ton of effects because of how much room you had with the powerful CPU and its numerous registers. It was never in their design philosophy to use chips.
Well you certainly didn't see Zero Tolerance on SNES either. The MegaDrive was simply much more capable at brute-forcing special effects.
That's your opinion. I find these games largely better and much more fun. To each his own. And only a very few of their JRPG actually launched in Europe anyway. The SEGA line-up in terms of Adventure/RPG was simply much better here.
Yet you have much more varied usage of this effect. A game like Batman & Robin is a good demonstration of it. Then you have games like Vectorman or Gunstar Heroes, that also uses various techniques, like huge articulated enemies made of a many sprites. This requires CPU power to animate at high speed etc...
And you could achieve this on the NES if you embedded additional hardware in the cartridge if I am not mistaken, as the console doesn't even have a scanline counter to begin with...
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Thaedolus
Gold Member
Let’s not get silly here
Futaleufu
Member
Let's not resort to name calling here.
If you thought that Yoshi's Island looked impressive then you never went to arcades nor played PC games.
Thaedolus
Gold Member
Oh geez, you think that’s name calling?
I’ve always had a PC and what Yoshi’s Island did on the SNES is still impressive to me, even when at the time I was playing TIE Fighter and such.
Futaleufu
Member
Thaedolus
Gold Member
That looks dope, arcade games always had more horsepower to outpace home hardware back then.
Alexios
Cores, shaders and BIOS oh my!
Also that arcade game only rotates and zooms everything, background, sprites, whatever, clearly it doesn't do the 3D effect of Pilotwings and other games that change the angle of the ground layer for seemingly actual 3D play (hence the low res pixels, if rotating in orthogonal view it looks better).
Shining Force II is neat. Also more of an SRPG though it's cool you wander the towns/world and what not unlike say, FE. But yeah, Phantasy Star IV is juvenile shite and more like a mobile knock off of Square greats by kemco than a real classic. I was shocked by how damn stupid it is given its rep.
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Alexios
Cores, shaders and BIOS oh my!
Yes, on hardware you could never own at home. People can be impressed by games on the systems they can actually have at home even if nothing ever came close to touching the best of arcades until SEGA and a couple other companies at best stopped going for bleeding edge over the top tech and instead went for more affordable stuff like Naomi (though Naomi 2 still impressed for a while), System 246 and other console based hardware then finally settled on modest PC specs for their arcades. If nothing at home impressed you until the Xbox and contemporary PCs you do you. It's silly and you aren't saying anything new at all here, after all the quality of ports and how much they were cut down to fit on the home systems has already been discussed, at their time and in this thread as well, so yes people know arcades were better, that's part of why they were a (popular) thing.
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Futaleufu
Member
The point of my post is that when Nintendo does a worse version of something seen in arcades 6 years prior its nothing but revolutionary, just because it is Nintendo.
If you only played Doom on SNES you never really played Doom.
Thaedolus
Gold Member
Pilotwings wasn't 6 years later…I mean come on man you’re comparing a home console to arcade hardware. Nobody was doing what arcades were doing at home back then. Not until like Dreamcast did you have parity with Model 3 games
Romulus
Member
They didn't have decent 3d games though. None of the other genesis games look 3d like Star Fox, or if they do they're terrible even by 90s 16bit standards. The truth is, Sega wanted to do 3d or they wouldn't have been spending tons of cash on chips and pushing 32x hard when they were already struggling against SNES. It wasn't experimental time for them, it was do or die.
Zero Tolerance absolutely needed a chip. It runs in a laughably small window and even then its far less complex than Doom SNES. Of course we're talking 16bit fps standards, but entire walls pop in just 8 meters away here.
I remember entire sections would disappear and you were walking on a floor that leads into space:
Doom even had actual complex geometry like stairs and lighting that flickered through into other rooms. Again, 16bit standards. But the window size alone the Genesis is rendering what, 30% as much?
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Well then neither are Neo Geo sprite zooms impressive. The point is that the snes could do a lot more than that. And you're wrong about Yoshi's Island. Not only does it look amazing to this day, I got the game back when it launched and was amazed by all the visual effects on display. I loved the squash and stretch of certain enemies. The boss fights were particularly impressive. I mean sprite rotation and scaling wasn't something you saw often in 2D arcade games. The Neo Geo and CPS boards couldn't do it for example. It's like saying you couldn't be impressed by Metal Slug after seeing polygonal graphics back then. Just not true.
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Alexios
Cores, shaders and BIOS oh my!
I posted a nice somewhat 3D game on Genesis a couple pages ago. Not disagreeing with the gist of it (or have a clue about it really), just saying. It was a nice engine and impressive for sure with 3 games at least. Hard to find good quality footage for some reason, even harder of non PAL copies.
And again some of the games had a turbo mode that made sprites or whatever smaller (Idk if it's wholly lower resolution as the window view was the same, not even more cut off by the map etc., things just look smaller) to achieve quite a smooth frame rate.
Funnily I prefer the look of the first F1 game, the next tried to go for more realism perhaps and it doesn't quite cut it with that amount of colors for the sprites. The motorcycle game was the last (I think) and didn't try that it seems. But yeah it's clearly different to (just) sprite scaling/mode 7, it's 3D.
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Futaleufu
Member
Pilotwings only has a very pixelated zoom/rotating BG layer.
I don't remember any arcade nor console game before Art of Fighting that had that level of full screen sprite zooming. Maybe you do?
Thaedolus
Gold Member
You also said "a worse version of," I'm not pretending the SNES could do what arcades could do at the time or slagging it or the Genesis for not being able to compete with hardware that was many times the price.
Dragon's Lair came out in 1983, am I gonna sit here and scoff at any system that didn't have an optical disc drive after that?
Futaleufu
Member
Sega CD had a port, granted it was the worst looking port of the game available at the time but somehow it doesnt count when comparing 16 bit systems
I don't know what you're even trying to argue. I only asserted the snes was a lot more capable than that.
Here's art Art of Fighting on the snes replicating that effect anyway without enhancement chips, which the genesis simply couldn't btw (with much smaller sprites to boot).
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Romulus
Member
There is definitely some 3d going on there with a combination of sprites, which in reality was probably a really smart move. I played that top F1 game and it ran well from what I remember. Genesis had some developers willing to try some interesting things. There was even a fighter jet full 3d game I played. It ran at like 10fps and was just a flat texture but it was fully 3d.
Thaedolus
Gold Member
I don’t even know what we’re talking about anymore
Daniel Thomas MacInnes
GAF's Resident Saturn Omnibus
The Super NES stayed around for two full years with essentially no competition, so Nintendo was able to pump up those sales numbers. It was probably the smart move for them as Sega floundered and struggled.
That said, when it counted, Sega stripped half the market share away from Nintendo and put that company into a downward spiral that wouldn’t reverse until the arrival of the DS and Wii.
In the end, Nintendo’s greatest asset is its diehard fan base, kids who will stick through anything for the next Mario and Zelda. Sega never had that loyalty for anything apart from Sonic. Never made sense to me personally, but I’ve always loved Sega’s style and felt they really defined 1990s videogames.
That said, when it counted, Sega stripped half the market share away from Nintendo and put that company into a downward spiral that wouldn’t reverse until the arrival of the DS and Wii.
In the end, Nintendo’s greatest asset is its diehard fan base, kids who will stick through anything for the next Mario and Zelda. Sega never had that loyalty for anything apart from Sonic. Never made sense to me personally, but I’ve always loved Sega’s style and felt they really defined 1990s videogames.
cartman414
Member
True, but little did they realize what Sony, who was just transitioning into a multimedia company, was really up to, as I posted earlier. Or rather, Ken Kutaragi mainly. They told Nintendo in late 88 that it would be for everything but videogames, so Nintendo said sure, go ahead. Just a few months later they formed Sony Interactive, not long after acquiring Columbia Pictures and CBS Records. The contract Nintendo signed, unfortunately, had no clauses on what Sony could produce and profit for the system. By the time Nintendo realized just what Sony was up to, it was too late.
I also wish Nintendo could have been more wise to Sony and Ken, but to do so would have necessitated being wise to their overall operations, especially given the transition Sony was undergoing. They were more adept on the smaller scope, like getting the rights to Tetris.
cartman414
Member
Wasn't the Genesis a bottleneck on the Sega CD (and 32X) with its more limited color palette?
It is too bad that Mode 7 was just a background that could be manipulated, rather than an honest-to-goodness sprite scaling and rotating feature. (That required the Super FX.)
IIRC they planned on a faster CPU but earlier attempted to make the system backward compatible with the NES.
Drell
Member
Actaully, there's some examples of sprites scaling without SFX or any other chip. For example, Chrono Trigger does this on the bike chase scene. The Background is full mode 7 and the 2 racers are scaled according to the "camera". I'm not an expert so maybe it's not what I say but the way the 2 sprites change at 60 FPS doesn't look like some classic sprite size being swapped at some distance just like Mario Kart or F-Zero.
Team Andromeda
Member
Nintendo went to SONY and so, should have been really more Zavvi with the contract. Its almost makes me laugh at those who belive the utter bull that comes from Tom Kalinske and how he could have worked with SONY. Even if you belive bullsh8t Tom, SONY would have looked to screw SEGA up too, maybe that's why SEGA looked to JVC to help with their CD Add-On in the development phase.
cartman414
Member
Don't you mean savvy by Zavvi?
nkarafo
Member
Don't worry i wasn't talking about you and i love dogs anyway.
Top down action shooter from the Snes era(from a big publisher):
Top down action shooter from modern SS3 Megadrive (from a little developper):
As you can see, indies on the genesis will blast process most of the library of that era in a few years.
Reason is simple, during the 16bits era many developers were just employees doing their job.
Indie games on modern megadrive is passion.
Yuzo Koshiro upcoming title will be absolute dope
You can't compare the available tools and knowledge of today VS the early 90's. Xeno Crysis would not be able to exist back then by a small dev with no resources.
cireza
Member
I think that it was fine for the SEGA-CD, it was never the intention to boost the color palette. 32X override the video output so it had a much larger palette, but when you start doing this, you might as well make a full fledged console and move on with your life (which in the end means skipping the 32X and going directly to Saturn).
cireza
Member
I am not too sure what you are getting at. Starfox uses a chip to push 3D and it is still very basic. Virtua Racing uses a chip and pushes a real 3D engine with full backgrounds, great speed at a good framerate. It is much more impressive than Starfox.
Alexios
shared some good examples of racing games looking 3D and being very smooth, without any chip added. These consoles were not meant to push 3D anyway, as they are tile-based. It makes everything very difficult.Well okay, but Doom is also using a 20 MHz chip lol... Zero Tolerance is base MD hardware. What equivalent do we have on SNES with textured walls and super smooth gameplay without any chip ? Wolfenstein ? Game looks super poor and MD has a much better port available from the homebrew scene. There is also Bloodshot on MegaDrive for example.
If it runs on base hardware with a standard cartridge I don't see any issue. Modern days don't make consoles magically more powerful than they are.
Sprites are not smaller, it is simply that the resolution of the SNES is largely inferior to the MD, making sprites look bigger. But it actually isn't pushing more sprites at all.
Yu Yu Hakusho on MegaDrive has real time zooming of the characters, and supports 4 fighters at once on 2 planes. This is something you won't see on SNES.
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No, they actually are bigger. You can do direct screenshot comparisons to prove this. Sprites are taller and wider on the snes. The Genesis only has a horizontal resolution (+sprite per scanline) advantage on some video modes, both systems use the same vertical resolution.
This game? I don't see any zooming there. And obviously the Genesis couldn't do background scaling like in AoF, which is what I was referring to.
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It's more that Smash TV launched on 512KB roms, leaving little room for graphics vs whatever Xeno Crysis used (MB), which I guess is what he's criticizing. It also has a lot more objects on screen than Xeno. But apparently, the beloved all time classic game that directly inspired Xeno Crysis was simply unpassionate in fanboy land.
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cireza
Member
Ok, I will take a look.
cireza
Member
Only for the characters (and I remember it being smooth). If you have some time try playing it.
I don't see why the MD could not do the zooming effect seen on the SNES. But I will look in more detail later. My guess is that it is purely software, so some kind of trick more than using the dedicated chip in the SNES.
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Maybe it does, I just can't find any example of it from videos. Are you sure it has sprite zooming?
Unlikely. Some homebrew devs would have done it by now. And even if Sega themselves couldn't do it.. it's not something you can replicate purely in software.
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cireza
Member
Yes when moving between the two gameplay lines.
I will take a look but it was maybe never of interest to anyone.
Oh, I missed that. So it's drawing different sprites for each plane as in Fatal Fury 2.
It should have been of interest to Sega who handled the AoF port... and certainly to any programmer/coder from the demo scene.
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