I'm not even going to
try to comment on the original topic of this thread, since there're already
way too many personal opinions being put forward which won't be swayed and a lot of stuff thats
definately bogus.
All I'll say is no system will ever reach it's potential limit and the common denominator for any performance is the programmer. Potential 'power' doesn't mean anything if someone doesn't know how to work with it.
And its all about art anyway. You can render the most visually amazing graphics without taxing a system or grind it a halt with an ugly mess depending on your skills.
According to the "common knowledge" thats out there, like most of the crap printed in classic game mags(
I'm not going to list any of the hilarious samples I've come accross lately reading old mags), everything Chris Covell (
an 'amateur' programmer with no proffessional tools/official dev kit) has done on the PC Engine is not only "impossible", but several times over so and therefore doesn't really exist(
he's fooled us all!).The bottom line is, the Genesis can display very colorful looking graphics, the SNES can push a ton of sprites with no flicker or slowdown and the PC Engine can move any number of independant scrolling bg's and parallax.
And they all sound cool.
In the grand scheme of things, when you look at Odyssey up through XBox 360, the 16-bitters are all pretty much identical.
But if the Sega CD could do a really good job of Dracula X, then why did the Lords of Thunder port not come out as good as the Duo version?
This is just a myth, The Sega CD version is an awesome port, which loses very little considering it's a port of a top quality PCE CD title.
The main difference is the loss of color(more dramatic than most people think if you run them both on emulator) on a technical level, but the result is still a beutiful game.
Its got 95% of the original scrolling bg's and adds in some new ones. Show both versions to any non-gamer and they'll think they're looking at the same game.
The music and sfx may be a little 'less-good' overall, but are still great.
If a quality port of Drac X was made for Mega CD, it'd probably wind up around the same deal, losing a little and adding a little.
Off-Topic: I have heard a HELL of alot of "This system flopped" or "That failed" but truly in my humble opinion, very few consoles in history failed. Systems like the CDi, The Virtual Boy, and the 32X are indeed failures. Even the PCFX should be considered a failure.
Don't forget the SuperGrafx! ...unless you coun't the entire PC Engine catalog as part of it's library.
For a PCE to Mega CD port success story, look at Popful Mail, Cosmic Fantasy, and Snatcher.
Popful Mail is actually a completely original game on Sega-CD. Some other PCE CD to Mega-CD success stories though: Space Adventure Cobra, Lords Of Thunder and Burai. And of course there are all the cross format success stories (CD-cart, Cart <-> Hu, Cart - CD).
Oh, almost forgot...someone had mentioned the SNES' "scaling without scaling" thing that was used a lot in SMB...that effect is called a mosaic pattern. It was a popular, albeit cheesy, effect used in the 90s as a transition. Of course, the SNES was limited even in this effect...it could only affect the background layer, it couldn't affect sprites. However, here's an interesting tidbit for ya...Final Fantasy VI used the mosaic pattern effect for various parts of the game, such as when Tina (Terra) was trying to escape the guards in the beginning and fell down the hole. On the SNES version, you see the background go mosaic, but her sprite remains static. On the Playstation port of the game, the whole screen goes mosaic.
New Adventure Island does a simple version of that effect at the beginning of each level and it's also only the background. I don't hate it(the SNES effect), but it did get overused.
I remember noticing in later SNES games how it would cycle transparencies, since
in theory, it can only do one layer. Like when you use a special move/spell in Chrono Trigger and all the shadows and other effects on screen would dissappear right before the spell and then quickly fade back in right after.
