Also the NeoGeo AES.
Weren't Taito and Konami were both also prototyping 16bit consoles?
-
Ever wanted an RSS feed of all your favorite gaming news sites? Go check out our new Gaming Headlines feed! Read more about it here.
What hardware advantages did the SNES have over the Genesis other than colors and mode 7?
- Thread starter Oscarzx n
- Start date
Weren't Taito and Konami were both also prototyping 16bit consoles?
The Genesis can do some really cool things with the highlight/shadows feature:
(see 8:16)
However, the Genesis isn't actually mixing / blending two pixels together, and therefore it's not technically transparency. It's still a cool feature, though; I'm not really familiar with the Genesis's capabilities, but I think the Chrono Trigger and DKC examples could both probably be done on the Genesis because those games simply use the SNES color blending to basically lighten or darken some pixels.
But yeah, there are plenty of other examples that really show off the power of the SNES's color blending, like this
:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/52682845/Screen_Shot_2017_01_10_at_12.49.31_PM.0.png)
or this
which simply can't be done on most other platforms at the time.
The transparency of the SNES and the shadow/highlight of the Genesis each have their specific scopes that limit the way those effects can be used in practice in different way. People usually bring up transparency in a really reductive way like developers could apply it in any way they wanted, but that's not really the case. This is somewhat outside my knowledge, but IIRC the SNES transprency needed to have an entire background layer dedicated to it. So it's seldom ever used for non background objects, since it has to be a background masquerading as a sprite just like for scaling and rotation effects.
The shadow/highlight on the other hand while being more simple offset of palette values, also had the advantage of being applied more flexibly. I think you actually saw more use of it for "transparent" spot shadows on characters in fighting games whereas SNES fighters still stuck with flickering shadows cause dedicating actual transparency to that wouldn't be worth all the trouble. Light shaft effects in the foreground were also fairly common. There's a particularly clever use of the effect in EA's The Haunting where the player sprite's black jacket and shoes use the shadow effect to give the impression of a transparent sprite.
Fuck, I forgot about Neo Geo when I was thinking of all the announced and rumored systems. Actually no, I was going by what was known in by mid 1989.
We didn't hear about the Neo Geo arcade/home until March/April 1990. Probably in Japanese magazines in February 1990.
I think we only heard about the Konami console within the last ten years, not back in the 90s.
I didn't know about the Taito /JSB WOWOW 16-bit CD-ROM + satellite linked console until the early 2000s.
Last edited:
This is true, and I think a lot of people miss something equally important from an audio standpoint: SNES was the first one with built-in effects (echo). So instead of just raw crunchy digital sound, you could put your samples into an acoustic space for the first time. (if you had the ram for it)
Ooh, I knew shadows were used in Ranger X but didn't realise there were other titles with such obvious demonstrations of it. Wonder how many more there are.The transparency of the SNES and the shadow/highlight of the Genesis each have their specific scopes that limit the way those effects can be used in practice in different way. People usually bring up transparency in a really reductive way like developers could apply it in any way they wanted, but that's not really the case. This is somewhat outside my knowledge, but IIRC the SNES transprency needed to have an entire background layer dedicated to it. So it's seldom ever used for non background objects, since it has to be a background masquerading as a sprite just like for scaling and rotation effects.
The shadow/highlight on the other hand while being more simple offset of palette values, also had the advantage of being applied more flexibly. I think you actually saw more use of it for "transparent" spot shadows on characters in fighting games whereas SNES fighters still stuck with flickering shadows cause dedicating actual transparency to that wouldn't be worth all the trouble. Light shaft effects in the foreground were also fairly common. There's a particularly clever use of the effect in EA's The Haunting where the player sprite's black jacket and shoes use the shadow effect to give the impression of a transparent sprite.
You do realise that with PCM samples, you could sample sounds with effects already applied, such as echo and reverb, so you still get the end result? Besides, Amiga could still apply effects to samples without needing a DSP, so the SNES isn't the first time:
While that's a fat track, the echo is programmed in, and you can do that on NES, C64, and other systems as well. And of course you could sample any sound with any amount of reverb, but I'm talking about real time effects, not pre-baked stuff. These let you have an actual ambient reverb. It was used to good (and not-so-good) effect not just in music, but also on sound fx ie when transitioning to interior areas.
These effects are everywhere in games today, and the SNES was the first system to really have them.
Last edited:
I get what you are saying, but you gave the effects "equal importance" to the ability to do PCM samples. Sorry, I don't give it that much weighting. It's a nice to have feature, no doubt. You could do effects in software with the Amiga, and I gave a link above (MP3). Now there may be dynamic effects as well in Amiga games, but they would be harder to differentiate from pre-baked ones. Now your example of transitioning to different areas, you could have another set of samples for those as well, memory permitting.
Obviously, dedicated hardware is better. But you were claiming the SNES did effects first with PCM samples. I think what you mean is the SNES was the first with dedicated hardware for sound effects. Which maybe true.
I can only really think of transparency. Transparency is something I think Sega struggled with for a long time, and why they made such a big deal out of it with the Dreamcast. Sonic Adventure 1 was a big testing ground of transparency even going as far to create a character (Chaos) that was transparent.
The transparency of the SNES and the shadow/highlight of the Genesis each have their specific scopes that limit the way those effects can be used in practice in different way. People usually bring up transparency in a really reductive way like developers could apply it in any way they wanted, but that's not really the case. This is somewhat outside my knowledge, but IIRC the SNES transprency needed to have an entire background layer dedicated to it. So it's seldom ever used for non background objects, since it has to be a background masquerading as a sprite just like for scaling and rotation effects.
The shadow/highlight on the other hand while being more simple offset of palette values, also had the advantage of being applied more flexibly. I think you actually saw more use of it for "transparent" spot shadows on characters in fighting games whereas SNES fighters still stuck with flickering shadows cause dedicating actual transparency to that wouldn't be worth all the trouble. Light shaft effects in the foreground were also fairly common. There's a particularly clever use of the effect in EA's The Haunting where the player sprite's black jacket and shoes use the shadow effect to give the impression of a transparent sprite.
This isn't up for debate really. Genesis can do transparencies with hardware tricks, but the hardware itself doesn't support it. SNES supports it because it can do colour addition, averaging and subtraction and it's applied on everything from menu transparencies to pretty much every aspect of most games. Even crappy licensed games with low effort used transperencies somewhere.
Here's a TT's Jon Burton talking about how the transparency effect (not dithering) is achieved in Sonic for example.
It's a hardware trick on the Genesis. SNES did not have to deal with this.
The Coding Secrets hidden in "Sonic the Hedgehog"
I tear apart the original Sonic the Hedgehog game to expose the secrets of how it was coded.Color Palette glitch video - https://youtu.be/_euM-nL6g1sIs That ...
youtu.be
Last edited:
You should check out the Genesis versions of Disney games, they were just as smoothly animated, if not better (though in some cases, like Aladdin, the games were entirely different, by different developers). But yes, the number of colors made a HUGE difference, as well as the fact that Genesis had a limited number of color palettes to choose from, while SNES the developer could choose which exact colors to use. SNES also could do more smaller sprites on the screen at once than Genesis, though the Genesis CPU speed allowed them to do more with the sprites they had. Larger sprites the two systems are about equal, though Genesis had more sprite memory, so fighting games with huge characters sometimes had things cut out on the SNES that were in the Genesis version, such as elephants in the background of Street Fighter 2.
Yeah, but those games were more expensive than other games. It was kind-of like an add-on that you had to pay for with each game that used it. Star Fox for example was $60, which would be $107 in 2020 dollars. Later games would get up to $75 ($133 in 2020!)
Last edited:
I see what you mean, I didn't mean to single out your post. While dsp effects were maybe not quite as important as actual PCM sound, they were still a pretty cool and important feature. SNES games would sound (and feel) a lot different without it.
During the 16 bit generation game prices ranged around $50-$60 in US with the more niche (RPG)/more in the demand (fighting vs) that could reach $70-$75.
Star Fox's $60 price tag therefore wasn't perceived as something out of ordinary.
The reason why Star Fox fell in the standard price bracket, despite the SuperFX chip included, was that it used a ROM of only 4Mbit and was a first-party game (thus no royalty fee to pay to others).
The additional chips added to the cost of the cart but the consumer price was never outrageously higher (with the notable exception of the SVP chip in Virtua Racing for Mega Drive), usually in the range of $5 (Super Mario Kart, DSP-1) -$10 (Star Fox, SuperFX) higher than the base $50 price tag for first-party games.
What had a notable impact to the final consumer price was the size of ROM utilized, for example with Street Fighter 2 on SNES, which was a 16Mbit game in a time most games were between 4Mbit and 8Mbit, retailing for $75-$78.
Similarly Strider for Mega Drive, that was the first 8Mbit MD game, had a retail price closer to $70.
For context:
Electronic Boutique Christmas 1993 catalog
Electronics Boutique Christmas 1993 Catalog
In this catalog Mortal Kombat was of course a hot item but the really interesting part was seeing the Genesis vs Super Nintendo console war in full swing.
During the 16 bit generation game prices ranged around $50-$60 in US with the more niche (RPG)/more in the demand (fighting vs) that could reach $70-$75.
Star Fox's $60 price tag therefore wasn't perceived as something out of ordinary.
The reason why Star Fox fell in the standard price bracket, despite the SuperFX chip included, was that it used a ROM of only 4Mbit and was a first-party game (thus no royalty fee to pay to others).
The additional chips added to the cost of the cart but the consumer price was never outrageously higher (with the notable exception of the SVP chip in Virtua Racing for Mega Drive), usually in the range of $5 (Super Mario Kart, DSP-1) -$10 (Star Fox, SuperFX) higher than the base $50 price tag for first-party games.
What had a notable impact to the final consumer price was the size of ROM utilized, for example with Street Fighter 2 on SNES, which was a 16Mbit game in a time most games were between 4Mbit and 8Mbit, retailing for $75-$78.
Similarly Strider for Mega Drive, that was the first 8Mbit MD game, had a retail price closer to $70.
For context:
Electronic Boutique Christmas 1993 catalog
Electronics Boutique Christmas 1993 Catalog
In this catalog Mortal Kombat was of course a hot item but the really interesting part was seeing the Genesis vs Super Nintendo console war in full swing.huguesjohnson.com
Yeah cartridge prices were more varied back then. But I do remember SNES games being up to $10 more expensive for comparable games, and Sega even made ads about it. Here's an ad from 1993 , note MK is $10 more on SNES and the most expensive Genesis games topped out at $64 while some SNES games topped out at $69.
That said, one of those $69 games was SNES Mortal Kombat and it did not use any chips, so I don't think its really a 1-1 correlation. MK's higher price I think was because it was on a 16-mbit cart while the Genesis version was smaller I think it was on a 12-Mbit cart.
source: https://www.retrojunk.com/article/show/4546/1993-toys-r-us-catalog
I guess I was extra lucky to find a Japanese version new for $60 CAD back then. I did buy the NA version of Gaiares new (another early 8 megabit game) and I don't remember there being a jacked up price on it.
Saying the snes library is vastly superior to the genesis is pretty hilarious. Absolutely not. I will say that more games on snes withstood the test of time more than a lot of genesis games but that is no different than the n64 vs ps1 to be honest. When the games were new the library was incredible on both sides. Audio wise the snes had a better sound chip when it came to voices and that's where it ends. Other than that they were both very capable but also completely different. Bass and percussion usually sounded better on genesis while atmospheric sounds sounded better on snes due to its better use of sampling. Regarding the specs they traded plus and minuses. The genesis cpu was over 2x as fast as the snes but the snes could display far more colors at the time. Also even though the snes could technically display higher resolutions than the genesis it only did so doing static screens usually and genesis games on average were actually displayed at a higher resolution which made the lack of colors even more noticeable
Yeah I'd say they were pretty even, but this was an era where both consoles had a deep bench of exclusives. So your tastes mattered.
For RPGs, SNES was the superior platform. That said, this was an era where multiplats were the annualzied sports games and licensed games of various quality. I kind of miss this era of gaming where exclusives accounted for a larger part of the total library, compared to current gen, Where even the hardware itself is just a PC in a box. This meant each platform offered something truly unique.
Last edited:
Ignoring the vastly superior library of games for the most noticeable was the audio. Retrospectively it was the next gen factor compared to genesis audio. Sure some would say that genesis audio was technically better because of this or that. But for my ears, genesis audio always sounded like crap.
Yeah cartridge prices were more varied back then. But I do remember SNES games being up to $10 more expensive for comparable games, and Sega even made ads about it. Here's an ad from 1993 , note MK is $10 more on SNES and the most expensive Genesis games topped out at $64 while some SNES games topped out at $69.
That said, one of those $69 games was SNES Mortal Kombat and it did not use any chips, so I don't think its really a 1-1 correlation. MK's higher price I think was because it was on a 16-mbit cart while the Genesis version was smaller I think it was on a 12-Mbit cart.
source: https://www.retrojunk.com/article/show/4546/1993-toys-r-us-catalog
The price thing is so bizarre to me... Over the years I have seen people saying they remember paying $80 for Street Fighter II on SNES, but I really don't remember ever seeing those kinds of prices. Granted, I was a kid, but my family only had so much money and I was always conscious of that when I asked for things. I've always thought the vast majority of my SNES carts cost $50 with maybe the ocassional $55 or $60 game. And most of them I was getting at or near release.
A bit more on topic, I think it's really as simple as they were two vastly different systems and it all depended what developers focused on and got out of them. I've always preferred the SNES... mostly due to enjoying the library more and due to its advantages when it comes to the color palette (higher number of available colors, higher number of colors on-screen).
Even though the Genesis had good sound in the right hands...the SNES sound chip was significantly better.
3D was better as well.
Didn't SNES have bigger sprites as well?
3D was better as well.
Didn't SNES have bigger sprites as well?
I think it's at least fair to say that the pinnacle of the SNES library has stood the test of time very well compared to the pinnacle of the Genesis library. Super Mario World, Link to the Past, Final Fantasy VI, Super Metroid, Chrono Trigger, Donkey Kong Country 2, and Yoshi's Island are regularly discussed as candidates for the best game of all time in general, even today. Outside of the Sonic series, very few Genesis games occupy the same levels of modern reverence.
I don't think that lesser reverence on Genesis today has anything to do with the quality of the games being lesser. I think the Shinobi games, Thunder Force III/IV, Phantasy Star IV, Monster World games, Contra: Hard Corps, Gunstar Heroes, Ristar, Rocket Knight Adventures, MUSHA, Streets of Rage series, etc. can easily hang with the SNES' best.
There's more people attached to Nintendo/Nintendo-related franchises just by sheer numbers alone from other highly successful Nintendo consoles. And stuff like Square's SNES games gained greater popularity than they had in the 16-bit era because of legions of PS1/PS2 Square fans. And 2d shooters (a major strength of the Genesis and TG16) have become increasingly niche since then. The Genesis just isn't being discussed on an even playing field outside of the most hardcore sectors that are very familiar with both sides.
Last edited:
Not like it but better sounding IMO.
- YouTube
Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.
m.youtube.com
Your solo sortie video is missing sound channels for some reasonNot like it but better sounding IMO.
- YouTube
Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.
Super R Type - Solo Sortie
SNES Game - Super R-Type - HD SoundtrackInteresting tip.... play the game with a turbo controller that has slow mo ( pause and un-pause super fast ) the game...
www.youtube.com
When it comes to shmups though, the Genesis definitely has the SNES beat for me in the music department.
Last edited:
I personally wish more hip-hop heads were composing for Genesis games back in the day. It would have been the perfect pairing during the Golden Age:
That's basically what I was saying. It seems that's true. No evidence to suggest otherwise.
The 1988 Super Famicom hardware that was demo'd near the end of the year probably had that DSP-1 hardware on board.
The Genesis couldn't even properly pull off the NES Mega Man games, though ;P
This, I'm always very surprised when people say snes had better music, I always loved the genesis sound so much more and thought of most of snes music as "midi trash" (no offense lol)
All I remember was the sports games like NHL sucked on SNES. They were much smoother on Genesis but for some reason i think SNES had larger games such as RPG's?
Watch carefully the video that i posted, just being ironic.
I know Im just teasing, the tone of your posts seemed a bit vindictive
Have some Sangokushi Retsuden:
yeah, the Genesis had better arcade games than the SNES.
on topic:
some things were obviously better on the SNES like Zombies ate my Neighbors because of the better SNES hardware
Genesis:
SNES:
SNES version has a bigger playfield and the graphics are smoother
The Genesis version is actually running the game at a higher resolution, so instead of the developers redrawing the art to fit the higher resolution, they left it the lower snes resolution and left the remaining space with the HUD.