Oh, and just for fun, more colors simultaneously doesn't always equal spooge-fest graphics. It is probably more important to have better colors to choose from in the first place. Here are some pics of a couple of Genesis games that put more than 64 colors onscreen simultaneously:
It really depends on the comparison.
Like say, if you gave the NES a 16 million color pallete. The games would still be limited by per sprite color restrictions, number of colors onscreen overall etc.
Finally, the Genesis is so far off from the PC Engine color display-wise, that even if you gave it a 16 million color pallete, the PC Engine would still have the potential for better screen shot graphics overall.
But if well reproduced beutiful art isn't what someone judges "good graphics" by, say someone like Dave Halverson from Gamefan/Play magazines...
-and instead your brain is mainly stimulated by moving slates(no matter how bland), or some kind of simple warping effect that you've been told once was hard(or impossible) to do(or in the current gen, feet that slant on hills)...
-then it doesn't really matter and taking an bland NES game and super-charging it with 50 layers of parallax and 15 independant scrolling bg's and scaling/rotating sprites and throwing in a 'special' sound(
ing) chip... all with under 18 unique colors onscreen and some crude art...
-would impress them more than any Capcom or Neo Geo arcade game with any bg layers turned static.
And I'm not going to say matter-of-factly that well-reproduced art = good graphics(even though I can argue that everyone agrees so outside of systems wars scenarios, like say judging an arcade game standing on it's own).
Because there are a lot of people out there(especially on internet rant pages) who really have no taste(good or bad) in art and really do judge all game graphics by self-percieved technicalities or single particulars, like:
"all 16-bit games must use parallax or they look like NES!"
"all 32-bit games must be 3D and use (what I deem to be)
true light sourcing or the they look like 32X( tehy sux)!"
"all '128-bit' games must use any kind of 'mapping' that I happen to think up of while playing a particular game, particularly if one or two other consoles don't render it in hardware(and therefore by my definition not at all), or it loos like PSX graffix!"
....now, back to the whole pallete thing.
The SNES is supposed to always have the bestest graphics, no matter what(!), 'cuz its got a bigger pallete and can display 256 onscreen. But when you look at so many of those OMG games that you remember looking so hot back in the day on an emulator (or S-Video) today... you can now see that a lot are kinda drab color-wise and often don't use too many colors in their fantastic bg's.
I used to beleive that the PC Engine had a crappy pallete like the Genesis and that SNES had to ALWAYS be better(!). But now I see how vibrant the colors are in most decent PCE games, even the lower color ones.
Finally, the Genesis doesn't seem to be bottle necked by the 64 colors onscreen thing so much as other 'per colors limits. I amateurly say this because there so many(all?)
quality ports to Genesis, where the same game also appears on SNES or TG/PCE... and in both/all versions, there are less than 64 colors(thats a lot of colors!) onscreen in all versions... but the Genesis version still noticibly recycles colors and winds up showing slightly less shading than the other(s).
