Also, why are people using MIPS to compare performance between two different CPU architectures?
Because games/systems in the 16bit era were not CPU intensive in the way it would be on a PC or MAC or even PS 2. Games in the 16bit era in general performed mostly of non complex instructions - alot of read/compare/add-sub/store. These can easily be converted to MIPS - average cycle of all instuctions divided by the number of cycles per second. It's not the end all, but it's a very good point of reference for speed between the two architectures since it applies more true to these games systems.
But your right, they are two different architectures - each with there own strengths and weaknesses. Ofcourse
anyway you look at it, the PCE and MD CPUs still faster than the NES and SNES.
For still screens, definitely. But what people seem to forget often on this board is that the Genesis could display an extra background whereas the Turbo had to use sprites to accomplish the same effects.
Yeah, that's the PCE's achilles heel. That's why I love the SGX
Another thing the Gen had was priority setting on the BG tiles. The PCE has to do a detection routine and use a sprite mask when the main sprite gets with in a few pixels of it - i.e. Ys I&II when Adol goes behind the BG parts - pillars, trees, etc.
Because of this I think flicker was more prevelant in Turbo games that did this (***waits for someone to bring up Lords of Thunder***) and the Genesis didn't need to spend unnecessary sprites. But if all you look at are colors and resolution, of course the Turbo can match and exceed the Genesis by quite a noticeable amount.
Gen also ran standard in 340/320 x 224 mode which really helped it out. Both has the same sprite to scanline limit, but the Gen can have 8x8 sprite size. This seems like a dis-advantage, but it's not. The PCE can have 16 16x16(min) sprites and the Gen 20 8x8(min) sprites. On the PCe if you have a bullet the size of 4x4, it takes the whole 16x16 space. So on a shooter with 8x8 or smaller bullets, the Gen could have more smaller sprites on a scanline before flicker starts to happen. GOT and LOT are good examples of designing around limitation, instead of just running a scripted game without concern for limitations.
There are some plus' on the PCE side video side - you can write to the video memory at any time, the video processor has it's own DMA independent of the CPU, the tile map can address a tile anywhere in video memory, sprites size up to 32x64, sprites have there own palette (256colors) that is seperate than the back ground palette entry(256), background tile map up to 128x64(1024x512 pixels), block transfer (DMA) instruction to and from video memory.
Joe: Besides the vectorman pics, the others look good.
Because a priest came out eventually and got the baby, then FF a few years to the baby as a young boy, and the game started. Maybe your copy is messed up?
Hehe, maybe I didn't wait long enough.
