It was for me in terms of audio. It was really the last generation where every machine had its own unique sound. After that everything homogenised into PCM audio and that was that.
It's all subjective, but I'd say the golden era was probably 1986-1996. Although the NES (in the form of the Famicom) had been around since 1983, 1986 is about the time where the really good stuff started coming out. Not only were games starting to become much longer and more complex rather then (usually) single screen affairs, but battery backed cartridges became a thing. Games finally reached the point where they were more like adventures with so much more to see and do. The 16-bit era then basically gave us a lot more power. Games became only slightly more complex over late NES era games (which is actually a good thing IMO), but they got even longer and had much better balance in difficulty. No longer was the difficulty in games so brutal, and now we usually had checkpoints! After 1996 things got really exciting for awhile with 3D gaming being the next big thing, but even back then I felt that we had lost something that we'd probably never get back. To this day I can't put my finger on what it is, but things just seemed different, and it was more then just the change from 2D to 3D. Still, I really loved the 3D era up until the mid 00's with the Wii, PS3, and 360. I'm not ripping on those consoles and I actually own them all, but IMO things really went downhill starting in that era. There were still some great games, but we started getting *way* too damn many FPS games, focus on online multiplayer over single player mode (which is just so backwards), walking simulators or interactive movies (and these are somehow still considered to be games), damn near unplayable games being released and later being patched (rage inducing crap that we never had to deal with before the mid 00's), and controllers now being so high tech that they're just as expensive as the games (physical versions) if not even more expensive in some cases. Controllers used to be half the price of a game, and I really miss that.
I bought my SNES specifically to play SF2, and it delivered a damned satisfying experience. My roommates and I had endless drunken tournaments huddled around my little 13 inch TV, beating the crap out of each other for hours in end. Despite my display being fairly small, I did take advantage of the stereo-out audio on the SNES and had the sound running through my 100+ watt component stereo system and its two big, 80s-style tower speakers. Having grown up with the simple beeps and boops of the Pong sound effects (as well as games that had no sound whatsoever), I’d never really taken much notice of video game console sound…until I got my SNES. I remember plugging in Super Star Wars for the first time and being totally blown away by the rich, symphonic soundtrack, it seemed so realistic for the time and I was sure it represented the final and definitive achievement of video-game technology. I mean, where could you go from there, right? ;)
To be fair, today's digital audio technology is not very different from what's used inside the SNES. It's just that sample size and rate are much, much higher, and the DSP capabilities are far superior (due to more computations performed each second) , along with DACs being more accurate. Even the SNES can play near CD quality audio with a bit of help (MSU-1), which tend to show that the limiting factor with the sound quality on SNES wasn't so much the Sony chipset itself, but moreso the 64KB of audio RAM and cartridges storage space.
@@honestguy7764I'm not so sure about that. The PC Engine version lacked the speed options SNES and Genesis versions had. That and the sound honestly isn't as good.
One of the best soundtracks us batman returns for the snes. I believe if the people from that game did the soundtrack for snes star wars it would be alot better. Just listen to that games music and you'll understand
@Mega Mario 77 .... Educate yourself. I live that era. While the TurboGrafx-16 predated the Genesis/Mega Drive release, it's not truly a 16-bit system; the graphics card itself was 16-bit, but the CPU was still 8-bit. The Sega Genesis, known as the Mega Drive outside North America, is a 16-bit fourth generation home video game console developed and sold by Sega. The Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES), commonly shortened to Super NES or Super Nintendo, is a 16-bit home video game console developed by Nintendo that was released in 1990 in Japan and South Korea, 1991 in North America, 1992 in Europe and Oceania, and 1993 in South America.
Looking back on that time, the SNES was the better console for me, but I'm happy to have experienced the Genesis. So many good memories of Sonic the Hedgehog... I still hum tunes from the various games to this day. Shining Force was another one I adored. Gunstar Heroes was a balls to the wall blast. Rocket Knight Adventures was packed. But again, looking back, the library on the SNES had more favorites for me. Donkey Kong Country, Chrono Trigger, Earthbound, Secret of Mana, Yoshi's Island, Starfox, UN Squadron. One of Sega's strengths in the US was the sports games, but I was never a fan of that genre. In any case, it was an interesting time, full of fun and arguments about one's console of choice. But... I'm old now. And one thing I realize as I get ever older, is that I was fortunate to simply have all these choices to experience. The SNES, the Genesis, and yeah even the Turbo Grafx 16 (PC Engine), all provided unique games, strengths, weaknesses, and ultimately a unique experience. I look back at it all now, fondly.
I was mainly a PC gamer in the 16-bit era. I only ended up with a SNES, because my next door neighbor REALLY wanted a my old sound card for his PC. He wanted to trade me the system for the card. We both got something nice out of the deal. His computer games no longer sounded like digital nails across a chalk board, and I had something I could play a GOOD port of Street Fighter II on.
The Genesis did lack in color and sound capabilities compared to the SNES on top of Mode 7 and Super FX capabilities, but thanks to the highlight/shadow mode and the Z80 and 68000 working in tandem, the Genesis can brute force something like Toy Story or Star Cruiser or the OST of Streets of Rage in the right hands, without enhancement chips no less.
Actually the sound chip in the Sega Genesis/Megadrive was well known to be superior... the YM2612 chip was made by Yamaha and was used In Some of their popular hardware 💯
First console I ever owned was a megadrive, having previously just had a zx spectrum, seemed like a quantum leap. Eventually swapped it for something with my brother and bought a snes. The snese always seemed like the best choice, partially due to capabilities but mainly because the cream of the world's top developers were releasing classic after classic that were not appearing on the megadrive. This was a time when a Nintendo console could be your only console, not a bonus console you bought for Nintendo titles alone
You'd be lucky to have either console back in the 90's. I was able to enjoy mega drive and my friend lent me his SNES and it blew me away how much better the experience of those consoles were when compared to my older amstrad CPC 464 with the slow tape loading. I remember being a sega fanboy but in my heart I always wished my parents had bought me a SNES too!
5:42 Most people don't know this, but the SNES' Direct Colour mode actually allows for 255-2040 visible colours on BG1 alone, plus the other 120 visible colours for BG2 and another 120 visible colour for sprites again. This means that in normal use in some of SNES' regular background modes it can display more total on-screen colours than the PC Engine during full gameplay. In total, SNES can display anywhere from 496-2288 colours on-screen in Direct Colour mode as standard, even before any also standard colour math and HDMA backdrop colour gradients are applied. So, if it's just about max colours, the SNES can have way more on-screen. It wasn't really used, but it's not a cheat or anything, just an almost entirely ignored feature of the SNES, largely because the normal modes with less colours can actually look nicer due to the way the palettes work. The SNES also has a standard 8bpp mode, which allows for 256 colours per tile (64 visible per tile), whereas the PC Engine only has a 4bpp mode that allows for 16 colours per tile. The SNES also has a master palette 0f 32,768 colours, which is a whopping 64x larger than the PC Engine's 512 colour master palette. And that actually makes far more of a difference here between the two consoles in terms of the colours you see on-screen. Point being, when it comes to colours, the PC Engines higher number on-screen on paper is pretty much only that. In every meaningful way, the SNES beats the PC Engine when it comes to colours. And the Genesis isn't even in the running in that regard. The SNES' Colour Blasting capabilities really can work wonders when it comes to anything related to the colours.
😂 snes had more color capability but turbo has 512 on screen at once and snes could not thats why turbo games are infact more colorful tunbo had higher resolution capability and a faster cpu😂
@@SwedishMeattball The SNES can display anywhere from 496-2288 colours on-screen in Direct Colour mode as standard, even before any also standard colour math and HDMA backdrop colour gradients are applied, which as orders of magnitude more colours. So, if it's just about max colours, the SNES can have way more on-screen. The SNES also has a standard 8bpp mode, which allows for 256 colours per 8x8 tile (64 visible per tile), whereas the PC Engine only has a 4bpp mode that allows for 16 colours per 8x8 tile. The SNES also has a master palette of 32,768 colours, which is a whopping 64x larger than the PC Engine's 512 colour master palette. And that actually makes far more of a difference here between the two consoles in terms of the colours you see on-screen. There are no PC Engine games as or more colourful that most SNES games, and I don't think a single example of a game that's on both systems where it even matches never mind has more colours than the SNES equivalent. When it comes to colours the PC Engine cannot match the SNES. The SNES also has a standard 512x448i resolution mode as well, and it can use this basically without taxing the system at all--it's just one of the standard eight background modes for the system--unlike the PC Engine's equivalent higher resolution modes, which I think technically goes up to 512x224 and maybe 512x448i but that not all TVs accept. There are no PC Engine games running in 512x448i resolution that I know of, but SNES has RPM Racing and the upcoming Rex Nobilis that both run perfectly in that resolution during full-colour full 60fps gameplay, etc. So, when it comes to practical max resolution, the SNES has the edge there too. Yes, the PC Engine has a faster CPU than the SNES as standard. Although, put a SA1 chip (10.74 MHz) or FX chip (10.5-21 MHz) in the cart and the SNES can have a much higher CPU speed there, as was the case with a bunch of games back in the day like Kirby Super Star, Kirby's Dream Land 3, Star Fox, Vortex, Super Mario RPG, Stunt Race FX, Doom, Yoshi's Island, etc. And now there's the just announced SNES Doom Definitive Edition that even uses an "FX3" chip in the physical cart, which presumably runs even faster too. When it comes to speed in real games on these systems, there are no PC Engine games that run close to 10.5 MHz, never mind 21 MHz or even above.
Awesome vid as usual. The color limitation actually kind of fits for Comix Zone, since comic books were colored using combinations of halftone dots which historically gave the colorist only 64 colors to work with (although by the 1990s I think this had been increased to 128).
I will say that the SNES was two years newer than the Mega Drive/Genesis. With that said, SNES was a slow machine with a low resolution and needed assistant chips to run decently. What this video doesn't mention is that games which included enhancement chips cost as much as $74.95! No, those chips weren't free. SNES might seem better when you're comparing a 4 meg Ghouls N Ghosts to a two years newer Super Ghouls N Ghosts that's 8 megs. When it comes to multi-platform games like Street Fighter II, the Genesis and PC-Engine were held back by the SNES as the assets from Super Nintendo were recycled for for Genesis and PC-Engine. There's lots of arguments that can be made. The Genesis was simply more capable than some of the software (released at the time) suggests and without enhancement chips.
Spot on especially about the enhancements chips not free. the main reason very few 3rd party developers use the super fx chip was cost. The super fx chip cost $10 dollars and would’ve driven up the cost.
The SNES does not Trump the others especially the mega drive. It was pretty even yes the super Nintendo has more advanced graphics and sound. It’s new technology to be expected, but the mega drive could more than hold its own and the MD advantage is the Motorola 68,000 which trumps the slow processor in the SNES.
18:47 - Minor correction, Sega Genesis could do sound samples as well. See Toy Story on the Sega Genesis, which does 4 channel multiplexing of samples in addition to the sound hardware that was with the Sega console. See GameHut's video on how they implemented this back in the 90s.
It could, it's just that most titles didn't really utilize this feature, and SNES was just more efficient at it with its sound chip. Genesis strength was in its arcade quality sounds, more-so than samples, and vice versa for SNES. Each had its strengths and weaknesses.
Toy Story uses all the processing resources of the mega drives CPU to do 4 channels. Basically the mega drive had the 32x and mega cd. These addons basically made the mega drive more powerful than the SNES in every way but were really just wasted potential. The limits at the time was console cartridge size. This stopped really good games and ports for both the snes and mega drive. For example mega drive games could have had CD music if you had a mega CD or added features. This was ignored and made the mega CD its own console, with its own games. Only the 32x had a few games that used both the mega drive and the mega CD but then too little to late.
@@GodKitty677 32x was more powerful than the SNES, but I don't think it was as powerful as 5th gen consoles like PS1 and N64. That being said, SNES did still have the cartridge chips, which added strength to SNES's processing abilities. If you look at SNES games made in 1991 compared to say... games made in '98, like Rockman and Forte, the differences are staggering. That game practically looked like a 2D PS1 title. The sprites, backgrounds, animation, etc. are all far superior than Megaman 7 or other contemporary titles. Obviously SNES wasn't 32-bit with the newer chips, but it enabled the system to at least compete with other 5th gen consoles for a short time.
@@AltairEgo1 The mega cd was more powerful than the super fx chip and the snes. The mega cd had a faster 68000 cpu if memory serves. So the system had two 68000 cpus. The 32x I believe added two more risc cpus. There is a demo of starfox on base mega drive hardware. The mega drive had its pluses over the snes, the addons all together were very powerful for the time.
@@GodKitty677 I mean, it was a disc based on add-on, so it should be more powerful than something that just uses carts. If it didn't, that would be embarrassing. I wouldn't go as far as saying Genesis was stronger than SNES. Its add-ons certainly were. I'm sure the Nintendo Playstation would be comparable to it as well, had it ever come into existence.
Imagine if you could go back in time, and give yourself a $100 handheld console that has every game from both systems, and a rechargeable battery that lasts for days. The future is not-so-bad, sometimes.
Yeah, but being there and getting EGM every month with previews, having to get the games, hype, etc. discovery, etc. Sometimes the journey is the reward.
@@rustymixer2886 The powkiddy V90 is literal trash that I would not give to a child that I hate. Spending $20 more improves your experience so much. V90 is just trash that hasn't made it to the landfill yet.
The CPU comparisons actually depend on the genre of the game. The 6502 is have a bigger instruction throughput, but the 68000 have more complex instructions that would require several 6502 instructions to emulate, and then there's the multiply and divide can of worms, where the 68000 has it, the snes can offer multiply with the video chip and you have to deal with it yourself on the PC Engine. In games where you perform a buttload of simple instructions like filling a sprite table with many, many, many sprites like space shooters, the PC Engine will win. But if you have something like an heavy AI or data management, or the game is doing 3D or heavy physics math, the mega drive will come on top.
I think the accessibility of the 68000 is a big advantage. And the lack of requiring bank switching on the Sega Genesis is also very nice. Both the SNES and PC-Engine suffer due to their smaller address space requiring more care to deal with that. In general I think that the main advantage the Genesis has is it's more straight forward to develop for. The SNES and PC-Engine have some more intricacies to deal with. Not that it's some mountain to overcome but if you were to decide today to develop a fairly standard 16-bit era game I think the Genesis would be the easiest to develop for. You could definitely program your game in C without much trouble. You can do so now on the SNES and PC-Engine but I imagine you can run into issues there, possibly related to memory banking. I've written code for both the SNES and Genesis and I do think if I was going to make a whole new game today and wanted the easier route I'd go with the Genesis. That being said, I enjoy all 3 platforms and would develop for any of them.
@@mottzilla4858 And what is the best CPU among the 65C816 VS 68000? What we know (we don't program anything for these hardwares) is that the SNES accesses the RAM in 1 cycle while the Mega Drive in 4, but on the other hand the Mega Drive has a higher clock rate and a 16-bit bus, so a technical draw. An opinion from someone like you would be nice. I think you are the most likely to talk about the topic. Another interesting thing you mentioned was the difficulty in programming something on the SNES, what we see today are some games optimized (and passed to Fast-ROM) running without slowdowns most of the time (Axelay for example). On the Mega Drive we see some interesting demos and games as well. Congratulations to you old programmers, who coded at low level and had precarious tools to use, today everything is done within an engine, with several tools included and much easier to use.
68000 or even Z80 will come on top when doing bulk memory manipulations outside zero page of 65XX CPUs. 68k, because you transfer twice as much with 16 bits bus and can write 32 bits at a time with 1 instruction, Z80 because it has lots of regs vs 6502, can keep 16-bit pointers in regs instead of repeatedly reloading from 0-page, can load/store sequential data very fast via PUSH/POP 16-bit stack ops.. Though 7MHz clock speed is still a lot of raw power for primitive 6502 :)
@@noop9k The Z80 also have the actual block copy instructions like otir, ldir etc.. they're pretty darn useful. Now the thing i think help the most on 68000 on complex memory operations is the fact it has dedicated address registers, and 8 of em on top of that, and that you can pull many very complex addressing modes on ANY instruction.
@@noop9k in 95% of cases 6502 less cycles = 2x+ of z80 speed also we had 65816 running over 20mhz back then it was made by WDC and still is today that cpu was used in super cpu for c64/c128 I would say it would have been nice to have a faster 68516 but a moot point in the end as i rather have faster cpus dsps etc etc with more ram in cart it puts the upgrades into the devs hands and in that regards they will know the system better and have tools needed instead of something like a 32x which you need to rely on sega for all info dev units etc etc I do understand why Nintendo kept tha 6502 compatible 65816 for backwards compatibility with nes that we never got
I grew up with both the Sega Mega Drive, the NES and Game Boy with the Mega Drive being the first console followed by the GB and the NES & SNES was what friends had, and we enjoyed all gaming systems! Still loved the Nintendo vs. Sega ;-D. Made things a lot more interesting back then. "Genesis Does' What Nintendon't" Well, in sales numbers the SNES was the winner on paper in total. It won the North American market and the Asian market. However, when it comes down to Europe Australia and South America, the Sega MEGA DRIVE (Genesis in the N.A) was more or less the winner. Some wider and some smaller. Smaller would be Europe where the Mega Drive first like in North America had the lead but in the end the SNES caught up and won several European country markets, but some would still remain a "Mega Drive country". That was not for the lack of great games as we all know the SNES had arguably more of them BUT more down to economics and local support.
The MD was cheaper ($50 less) and so was the games ($5 less) for it then SNES and its games and that had a big impact in many countries game cultures. Heck, Nintendo distributors in Europe like Scandinavian Bergsala AB for example where caught with fixing prices and had to pay some great fines for there illegal monopoly practices, but that did not help the customers getting better prices.
best console generation of all time!!! Three completely different architectures , each one with its pros and cons...each version showing differences in colors, paralaxx, sounds... a golden age ! I bought a PC Engine Duo R just in 2015... wonderful console as MD and Snes. Since PS4 XOne gen, the games has the same " identity" because architecture X86 became the new standart. Very helpful to developers, but i felt the games lost identity, maninly on XboX Series and PS5. Sorry for my poor english level. Greetings from Brazil.
I had both the Genesis and Snes. Snes was better by miles, the library of classics is simply unbeatable. There's nothing on Genesis that can touch a hair of Chrono Trigger, Donkey Kong Country trilogy, Super Metroid, for example. But it doesn't mean that the Genesis was totally useless, lots of great games there too, Streets of Rage is by far my favorite series on Genesis. We have one or other game on Genesis that runs faster than the Snes version of the same game, but people always ignore that, while it's a little faster, it lacks colors, details, paralax, and usually, has much worse sounds too. The screen size become something that matter today, but back in the day, with the 480p televisions, with both Genesis and Snes stretching the image to fill the screen, no one noticed a few lines more on Genesis. Anyways, I believe it's totally acceptable to prefer the Genesis, since Sega itself made great games for the system too, specially if you were an arcade lover.
The major limitation with the SNES’s sampled sounds is that they could only be sampled at one pitch and then played back at varying speeds to get multiple pitches. Without “multi-sampling” (such as you’d find on professional keyboards of the era, and ever after) the further you get away from the original sampling pitch, the more artificial the sound. This is why the best SNES soundtracks tend to have instruments playing tunes within a very short musical range.
I see all this console rilvary thing as a purely American phenomenom, most likely due to the Sega commercials. When I was a kid, we didn't argue which console was superior in school, we just thought videogames were awesome Got a Super Nintendo? Awesome! Got a Mega Drive? Lemme play it, please!
In the US, I got punched for not having a SNES. It wasn't like I didn't want one, just couldn't afford it until I started working, after the SNES left the market and I was hitting up flea markets for cheap games.
@@stevesteve0521 When I was around 10-17, I had a PS1 and whenever I met someone who had a N64, instead of laughing at their "inferior" console, I'd be like: YES!!! Let's play Mario 64, Mario Kart, GoldenEye 007, Pokemon Stadium!!!
There’s something I’m not clear about. The Genesis has varying sprite sizes (up to 32x32) but also rectangles like 8x16. Is an 8x16 sprite using up twice the resources of an 8x8 sprite or not? Also, of the 16 available sprite sizes (8x24, 32x8 etc), you can use all 16 at once. Whereas the SNES only offers four sizes - 8x8, 16x16, 32x32 or 64x64 of which you can have only 2 on screen at once. I looked at the sprite tables on Sega Retro and the SNES can do 128 8x8 or 16x16 sprites but only 69 sprites at 32x32. Whereas Genesis handles 80 sprites up to 32x32. Then per scanline SNES does 32 8x8 sprites but only 17 16x16 sprites. Genesis does 20 16x16 sprites per scanline. So it seems the SNES can handle a greater number of smaller sprites but less larger sprites. Then of course, dies adding more sprites slow the game down? I suppose that is a matter if game logic having to plot the paths of all the moving sprites rather than the PPU not being able to move then smoothly at the same time. Then you have unique sprites. SNES can have 128 8x8 or 16x16 but only 32, 32x32. The Genesis can do 80 up to 32x32 unique sprites. So if you consider how often games are using 8x8 or 16x16 sprites in a number greater than 80, it might be the case that the SNES is actually *less* good with sprites. Especially if you use sprites which are larger than 16x16. It’s kind of confusing. But I think 80 sprites of 32x32 pixels = 100 sprites of 16x32. But 80 is the hard limit regardless of size. But you could have 80, 8x32 sprites whereas the SNES would need four times the 8x8 sprites (lined up, 4 in a row) which would be 320 sprites, way above the 128 limit.
Each system lent itself to certain art styles, both graphically, and audially. The SNES overuses very short sound samples which sound very warbly and grating to my ears, however poorly coded MD/SG FM music is even worse with its high pitched, ear-piercing screeches. PC Engine is a scrappy little system that, as you said, with its CD add-on, opens up a buffet of really amazing, larger, much better sounding games.
Of course the SNES would win. It had newer hardware. The MD/Genesis was 2 years older when the SNES came out. I have both but I played more on my Genesis. I still play on my Genesis until now. My SNES has been collecting dust for almost 20 years.
The SNES really had a hard time moving around stuff, and games are riddled with slowdowns, despite its lower resolution. The maximum sprite number is most probably never reached. Any BTA has less enemies at once than what we see in SoR2 for example. Same applies to shmups. This also applies to the possible number of colors or resolution. You have hypothetical maximum values that can never be reached all at once. The MegaDrive was a much more balanced system meant to maximize its capabilities, just like the Master System. The MegaDrive processor is simply way ahead the other two, and you can see it in games with how capable the console is to move around and animate huge sprites all at once. All great consoles of course, but raw numbers are not exactly the same as what was actually achievable in real life. But they looked good as marketing arguments on the boxes, without a doubt.
There was still plenty of slowdown and flicker in M.D games just a bit less than on the SNES. SNES games had more flair and cool effects than the M.D and generally speaking much better sound quality, colour and in particular transparencies - a very advanced effect for the time which even the Saturn struggled with. .
@@MySamurai77 Going to disagree with most of this. MD did not have "a bit less slowdown". The console is simply much more capable of moving around a ton of sprites, and if slowdown occurs, it is in a situation where the console is doing much more than the SNES. Seiken 3 is riddled with slowdown, yet it really isn't moving around very impressive sprites... And this is just an example, there are plenty of it. Transparency is not something "advanced". Either your hardware is built to support it, either it isn't. Saturn handles graphics with two separate VDPs, the first one not seeing what the second one is doing. This means that any sprite or 3D model rendered by VDP1 cannot apply transparency on backgrounds and things rendered by VDP2. It was a design choice to do this, to offer a console that natively supported both 2D and 3D (which wasn't the case of PS1 neither N64). It was never meant to do this type of transparency, and by hardware design, it cannot do it. This has nothing to do with a "struggle".
Strider has a lot of slowdown. Midnight Resistance, Viewpoint, Thunder Force 4, Steel Empire, Demolition Man, Chakan, Sonic 2 (when getting hit), also have their fair share. Granted, I don't think the SNES could handle Gunstar Heroes. But Space Megaforce and Macross Scrambled Valkyrie are as hectic as anything on the Genesis.
@@cireza_ I am sure ideally Sega would have put h.w transparencies in the Saturn but it would have added to the cost so they decided to sacrifice it. A feature the SNES had years before the Saturn even came out. Not aware of any other home system that had h./w transparencies until the PSX . It was rare even in the arcades.
The trouble with super Nintendo sound is that all those samples ate up cartridge space and often required huge cuts to game content except on the highest end games that could command $70 price tags and 32 MB cartridges
Even a game like Killer Instinct with a 32 Mb cartridge suffered a lot of cuts. You can find videos of the early version where it has nearly all the animation frames from the arcade game, but the iconic "ULTRA COMBOOOOO" announcer was missing. The version they ended up releasing had more than half of the animation cut to fit the voice clips, and it looks and feels very choppy as a result.
It's a tradeoff for sure, but most consoles of that era had to make cuts and sacrifices. It made console wars more interesting though, because not every machine was almost exactly the same thing, like modern consoles. So your experience could be very different depending on the platform you chose. Now all versions of multiplats are nearly identical experiences, with very little if any unique features, and we have almost no exclusives.
I spent a lot of money supporting all 3 back in the 90’s. Glad it was back then and not now because I’d have a fraction of my collection. Genesis first console bought with my own money followed by TG-16 then SNES. There was something to love about all 3. Genesis had great games early and again late in its lifespan when developers did all sorts of graphical trickery & special effects in software that the Genesis lacked in hardware. TG-16 was the little “engine” that could produce fantastic games released at a trickle as it just didn’t have the support from Japan which had a ton of games but they just couldn’t figure out what to bring to the US. SNES took a while and although it’s the only console that I personally noticed a good amount of games with slowdown (with my collection of games) it had best colors, sound FX and it pretty much shined throughout its lifespan. Loved all three so ultimately we were all winners to be able to play them
I worked at Radio Shack at the time and we sold both the Genesis and Turbo Grafx. The TG16 always had a sweet spot in my heart, but the Genesis ran several Amiga titles, for I was an Amiga user back then.
The SNES was by far the most future proofed. The high color pallate and different background modes made it very easy to use expansion chips and to push the hardware in creative ways. The 8 bit color of the Genesis was consistently a hard wall Sega couldn't overcome leading to them releasing the ill fated 32X.
The Amiga was my first 16 bit system, but I bought a TG-16 shortly after, then added a Genesis and SNES a little later. I funded much of my games, but my parents helped me get the systems. The PS1 was the first console that I bought with money from my own job. We were a C64 and PC house up to that point.
@@Illeea nah, it started with the nes. By the time the 64 rolled around, 3rd party developers had basically written off Nintendo. Aka no final fantasy, no streetfighter, etc..
If Nintendo hadn't been, "underhanded" as you say, we would have been stuck with lazy ports instead of games built from the ground up to take full advantage of each systems strengths.
@@marcellachine5718 nintendo had pretty much all the 3rd party support on the nes. They lost a little bit on the snes but not enough that they didnt have the big third party games like megaman x, street fighter, mortal kombat, final fantasy, castlevania, dragon quest and chronk trigger. On the n64 though, they had rough ports of megaman legends and resident evil 2, both of which didnt sell much. Rare was their biggest 3rd party developer and supplied about a 3rd of the best games on the system. They had some 3rd party support but it wasnt the peak of what the developers could do unlike on the playstation.
The 68000 is absolutely the best processor in these. It's not even close. The slowdown in the snes is due to its extremely underpowered cpu. The snes won due to its very advanced graphics hardware... but in any game that required cpu crunch like Another World and Flashback the SNES gets housed.
@Jon Bad ports are bad ports no matter the system. And the SNES suffered from this as well at times, look at Super Ghouls n Ghosts, by all rights it should run better than it did on OG hardware. But that doesn't mean the CPU of the SNES wasn't its weak point, not at all. The SNES CPU wasn't bad in theory, but it was too damned slow. It's why the most impressive games on the system often had to use add on chips, like the SA-1, which was basically the SNES CPU but running at 3x the speed. Why this matters again, is that AW and Flashback are HEAVILY CPU dependant. They are generating polygons for the creatures and characters in the game, and that can't easily be pawned off onto the superior graphics hardware of the SNES.
@@Vinicius-hs2rf If only they used that time to improve it, in just 1 month of its release Nintendo required additional hardware in Pilotwings, the DSP-1. If the SNES came with the DSP-1 built in, all future SNES games could have benefited from the additional performance.
What i remember to this day from the first time i saw a snes in a shop is the sound. when maro entered the cave area and the soundtrack got the underground echo
25:40 I've long wondered what if the consoles stayed 8-bit and just got faster and faster. What if there was some fantastical 200MHz version of the 6502? What would the consoles have been built like, and what would the games be like?
from what i understand thats kinda what happened with computers, with all modern computers using x86 architecture, so nothing really would've changed graphics wise for consoles
@@lednails That's pretty damn false man. Megadrive was better for shoot em ups, run n gun, and action platformers. It was better for beat em ups too. Also Megadrive had groundbreaking titles like Herzog Zwei and Star Cruiser.
Given that the megadrive was basically last in almost every technical category (colours, levels on screen, ability to do transparency, etc) it's arguably more impressive that the mega drive managed to hold its own.
@@medes5597 Actually I don't think thats true though, I'm no expert but I think in ways it was more powerful than the Snes. Like theres things it could do that the Snes couldnt, Starcruiser for example I heard couldnt exist on the Snes but again no expert on the technicals. Also tbf it was two years older than the snes lol.
31:56 "Blast Processing" is mostly just used as a way for Genesis to display static images with more colours than it normally can by "blasting" extra colours to the screen as the image is being drawn, and it wasn't really used in any commercial Genesis games back in the day, being only recently properly figured out to actually work as originally evangelised. Those "Blast Processed" images on Genesis also take up all of the CPU resources and even stall the sound chip too, which is why it's really only good for static images. The SNES' Colour Blasting has that beat regardless, as its standard 8bpp images can still look noticeably superior both in terms of colours and resolution, as Genesis has to have double wide pixels horizontally in order to display "Blast Processed" images like this. And, not only that, but the SNES can display a gorgeous 8bpp image on one of the backgrounds even during full standard gameplay if desired. SNES also has the Direct Colour mode that technically allows it to show from around 500 to more than 2200 total colours on-screen during actual gameplay too. It doesn't end up looking as good as the 8bpp examples just because of the more limited 11-bit colour range there on the Direct Colour background layer, but it's a higher number on paper if that's important to some people. So, really, the Genesis' "Blast Processing" is absolutely trounced by the SNES' Colour Blasting in that regard.
In the Genesis/Mega Drive fan community, they're many amazing projects; Such as Star Fox, or F-zero all done in software. On the other hand, SNES fan projects look super ordinary to me. I've not seen anything that gave me pause. My opinions are based on my own programming experience. I have plenty of demo's on my channel that act as examples.
@@mdromtest3991 True, but that's not "Blast Processing" doing any of that, because "Blast Processing" is made up marketing gibberish, and its recent actual application of increasing colours in static images on Genesis pales in comparison to what SNES can do in its standard 8bpp modes with far nicer images and in higher resolution. And, unlike with Genesis where these "Blast Processed" images take up all the CPU resources and even stall the audio chip, the SNES can do that during full gameplay too. Also, while the stock Genesis Star Fox demo is stunning--no sane person could deny that in all fairness--the 30+ years later Genesis' low-res, low-frame rate, cropped F-Zero demos pale in comparison to not only the original '90s full-screen 60fps F-Zero on a stock SNES that's even running in SlowROM at a paltry 2.68 MHz and a bonkers only 30% of the Genesis 7.68 MHz CPU speed, but also another actual '90s stock SNES game like Street Racer pushing up to four Mode 7 views at once with all the racers and full gameplay and stuff too. And, maybe you haven't seen everything new on SNES, because the 512x448i resolution shmup on SNES that Kulor is making for the system is pretty dang impressive, Rex Nobilis, and technically impossible on Genesis at that 512x448i resolution. As just one example. Now, I'm not saying the Genesis can't do some stuff better than SNES, because it absolutely can--just as SNES can do some stuff better than Genesis. I'm just saying Colour Blasting > "Blast Processing". Also, none of your own demos are doing anything special. They're just pretty standard uses of the Genesis from what I can see, with just one or two typical backgrounds and pretty typical sprite affair for the system. I'm confident anyone who knows how to use the Genesis SGDK could create most of these tests in an afternoon or so each. No offense. But you're the one who wanted to make a point of your own examples there, like they are presumably meant to be all technically impressive and blow away what is possible on SNES or something, so I just wanted to do a bit of a reality check on that. Just don't want anyone to get confused about what they're seeing there.
The SNES sound chip would evolve into the PS1 SPU and the PS2 SPU2. Ken Kutaragi the father of the PlayStation created the SNES sounchip. The PS1 has 24 sound channels with 512KB of RAM, PS2 has 48 channels with 2MB of RAM. With the PS3 and PS4 Sony stopped using dedicated hardware for sound. Luckily with the PS5 Sony has the Tempest Engine for sound.
You (most people for that matter) are not taking the timeline into account. In a time when graphics performance was close to doubling every 2-3 years, that is an important factor that needs to be talked about. PC Engine = 1987 Mega Drive = 1988 SNES = 1990 So even though these consoles are considered the same generation, there's a three year gap between them. When comparing the MD to the SNES with its two year gap, it's like comparing a RTX2060 to a RTX3060 and saying the 3060 is faster. In my opinion, the PCE and MD actually do surprisingly well considering their age. The gap between the PCE and NES (4 years) is not that different to the gap between it and the SNES (3 years).
Note: In your Street Fighter II comparison 1:36 you've actually shown the games incorrectly relative to the other versions. As far as I'm aware, all versions of this game specifically use art that was drawn pre-squished to look proportionally correct when stretched to a 4:3 display, and they're all based on the SNES assets. It's rare that this is the case on SNES especially, where a game actually takes the 4:3 stretch into account, and similarly where the Genesis version is based on SNES resolution and such, but it is the case here. So, really, the only correct way to view all three versions is in 4:3, where the overall screen should be displayed at the exact same size and proportions for each, not in some version of a modern pixel perfect view specific to each console. Just a small but important thing there.
With the hardware specs so close to each other the choice can only be down to what system specific games you must have. Sonic and Streets of Rage made the decision for me.
They really were not though. The Genesis had a faster CPU, yet was beaten on everything else. I don't know why people want to say their in the same boat when it comes to hardware specs. The snes had a better soundchip, could display more colors, bigger sprites, produce a higher resolution. Both systems are good, they are not even close hardware wise.
F-Zero and Uniracers on SNES made even Sonic 2 and 3 seem a bit slow by comparison. I had both as a kid (even though I was born in 1994) and was a bit better at the Sonic games because (ironically) they were slower 😆
@@queercommunist it is not an acceptable answer. State you're case or go sit at the kids table. It's the way it is, I guess you're just gonna have to cope with a juice box and a nap.
@@yeahyeahwowman8099The SNES only has higher resolution in theory. The hi resolution mode was only ever used for menus, not gameplay. In practice, the Genesis was outputting gameplay. As far as sound goes, the Genesis sound chip was quite capable, and a lot of great music came out on it. Hardly "trounced".
I know you're trying to do your best and part of that is reading the comments to get feedback and making adjustments. BUT... You can't let us trolls get to you so much man. You're doing a fine job producing a free product and nothing we say can change it or you in any significant way. It's all just the opinions of assholes. Take what's useful and chalk the rest up to us being idiots. Thanks, man and call the systems whatever you want... You mentioned it like 15 times seriously we don't matter that much, we're all wrong about everything all the time. Even now as I type this...
I think the TG16's larger number of simultaneous colors onscreen gave its games a distinct look and really set the visuals apart from the Genesis or even the SNES. I could even identify which version of Street Fighter II shown in this video was running on TG16, based on the colors alone... well, the colors and the fact that the onscreen prompt mentions the "run button" I guess. Anyway, I always thought that TG16 games tended to look more vibrant and colorful than either of the other 16 bit consoles, which is odd when you consider that the SNES had a pallette 32,768. A lot of the time though, I think the extended color palette of the SNES just resulted in developers choosing a lot of weird hideous pastels and other offbeat shades for the colors, whereas the TG16's palette was expanded just enough to provide a noticeably wider range of colors and could show nearly twice as many onscreen at once as the SNES.
I grew up with the SNES and the Turbo Grafx 16. A friend of mine even imported SF2 Champion Edition. I've never seen any game on Turbo Grafx 16 that actually pushes more colors than the most impressive SNES games. SF2 is no exception as their are literally side by side comparison videos showing how many colors their are on every stage and character for the SNES, Turbo Grafx 16, and Sega Genesis. The SNES displays significantly more colors than the Turbo Grafx 16 version by quite a bit.
@@davidaitken8503 Oh yeah? I hadn't realized that the SNES version displays more colors onscreen, but there's just something about the color choices in the TG16 version that allowed me to guess that version from the side by side comparison. I guess it might be the types of colors used, like I was saying in my original comment - whereas SNES games often had lots of exotic pastel shades and stuff, the TG16 had a more basic but nicely expanded set of colors compared to the Genesis.
I think you were a bit off the mark with this one, sorry. You didn't give enough weight to the SNES's awkward sprite arrangement and the fact the graphics were planar (like the Amiga) and not chunky like the MD. Harder to manipulate, harder to decompress (carts like SFA2 had chips just to convert stored chunky into planar). And having written assembly for all of M68K, 6502 and 65816, I can tell you it's not as close as you've implied. If you're writing assembly, two of the biggest factors that make your life easier (and grander ideas feasible) are big and plentiful registers, and a good memory map layout. The MD has both of those things (many 32-bit registers, all work RAM and ROM available at optimum speed without banking), and the SNES has neither (fewer smaller registers, heavily reliant on banking for RAM and ROM, ROM access usually a bottleneck). SNES games get around it's underpowered CPU setup by surreptitiously doing less than comparable MD games - simpler logic, fewer active entities. 25% less screen area (in pixels) means you can do 25% less of everything and achieve the same density of 'life' in a game. The fact is a lot of SNES software isn't that ambitious in terms of processing complexity - not that much more going on than in top-end NES games. The graphics chip does all the heavy lifting in making it look 'next gen'. Sonic's game engine has been thoroughly dissected and it's a proper generational leap in ambition above something like Super Mario World, which only really has a mild 16-bit audio/graphics facade to elevate it above what the NES could do.
Shareopolis is a donut and doesn’t understand half the stuff he says. This video is just to make Nintendo fans happy because he thinks it will make him more popular. But if his viewership are British then they probably preferred the Mega Drive. Unless... there were secret SNES fans across the country, too scared to proclaim their love of a console that was largely shunned from public discourse for being for sissy’s. Yes. The SNES has more colours but it has less of everything else. I don’t like the sound and I don’t think it’s superior. But this is a touchy subject. The SNES modes and their features got removed from the wiki page, strangely. There is very little information about the SNES hardware to be found anywhere on the internet. It’s routinely given technical comparisons with the Mega Drive and it never loses apart from the cpu clock speed, which then gets refuted on account of the 6502 is more efficient. The bias is outragouse. What irks me most though is when Brits, who have no business liking the SNES pretend it was their system of choice to score browny points with a US audience they assume are mostly SNES fans. Despite the two consoles selling almost identical numbers. Although the software tie ratio favours the Mega Drive 2:1. So there were around double the number of Mega Drive / Genesis games sold to SNES / Super Famicom games.
Here's the honest truth I've learned over the last couple of years diving deeply into the capabilities of each console: 1. The stock PC Engine only really competes on a technical level [with the SNES mostly] if a game is stuck with one background layer, which is not as many games as you think with games not made for it specifically, because then its sprites are roughly on par with SNES. It can't match the Genesis in terms of sprites. And it simply cannot compete if a game is properly using more than one full background layer, as then it has to sacrifice sprites to fake the extra background layers, which puts it at a big disadvantage compared to the two other systems, and especially next to the SNES. 2. The stock Genesis has superior sprites capabilities to both the PC Engine and SNES, despite what some of the common on-paper specs might suggest, to the point that it can often use sprites to make up for the lack of background capabilities when compared to SNES and even do some things simply better there than the SNES, like put more larger sprites on-screen and per scanline before flicker and animate more sprites before requiring forced-blank black bars at the top and bottom of the screen, etc. The sprites on Genesis are easily the most versatile and the best of the three consoles when taken full advantage of. SNES can still have nicer colours on the sprites and use proper multi-coloured transparency with them though, so they can always look prettier. 3. The stock SNES has vastly superior background capabilities to the PC Engine and handily beats the Genesis across the board there too other than how much of the horizontal view you can see. It can can actually show both nicer and more colours than PC Engine [despite what some people might believe based on an unawareness of the full facts there] and way more and nicer colours than Genesis too, up to four times as many backgrounds as PC Engine and up to twice as many as Genesis, can have proper multi-coloured transparency effects on them, can have full-screen 60fps background scaling and rotation during full gameplay, can do superior column scrolling to the Genesis, can mix and match background modes down the screen, can show more beautiful static images, can use 8bpp and Direct Colour background visuals during actual gameplay, has a higher max resolution, etc. I just want to be clear that those are not just my opinions but all facts of the respective technical capabilities and limitations of each system. Stock audio is a bit more debatable, but I'd personally say it goes SNES > Genesis > PC Engine. Again personally, when all systems are being used properly there, I actually don't think the PC Engine and Genesis can really compete with the SNES' more realistic sampled sounds and its ability to even support Dolby Surround sound. But I'm sure many PC Engine and Genesis fans would debate me on that. Overall, depending on what you're after, I'd say it goes like this in terms of technical capabilities: SNES ≈ Genesis > PC Engine. In terms of stock controllers, we can pretend counting the Genesis 6-button controller isn't a cheat (and you could just as easily cheat and buy some vastly superior arcade stick on SNES and probably PC engine too if that's the case), or just admit that it clearly goes SNES > Genesis > PC Engine. In terms of games, that's for each person to decide on a personal level (at least in terms of which you prefer and think are better, as SNES wipes the floor with the other two systems when it comes down to the size of the library). They each have some truly brilliant titles and are stronger than the others in certain categories, so take your pick. I personally put them like this though: SNES > Genesis > PC engine.
It's not the reverb that makes it sound muffled, its mostly because samples take more space on the cartridge than some FM synth settings. Many snes games actually have the entire soundtrack of the game stuffed in the SPC700 64KB memory at once, which means all the instruments the game will use (and sound effects) are packed densely in it, with very low sample rates that at least get stretched with some filtering. But then there are late games that use the bigger cartridges that can offer unique set of instruments per song, or even a few games like earthworm jim 2 and tales of phantasia that swap the instruments in the sound chip memory while the song is playing to blow past the limit. Now the mega drive generate all it's sounds (other than voices) on the fly, no samples stored, just settings, and settings that can be changed while the instrument is being played so you can have instruments with a lot of variation on the fly, which is for example why the MG/Genesis is just better at doing guitars (when done right, ie. not rock and roll racing)
Same here(though the muffled sound had to do with sample sizes, NOT reverb), plus it sounded very otherworldly to me, & well kid me loved space & aliens.
@Benjamin Jagun The fact that their are so few games that Sega fanboys can point to when claiming sound superiority pretty much proves why the SNES was vastly superior in sound.
@Benjamin Jagun Dude, you're a TROLLBOT I've already encountered before, so cut the generic, Sega fanboy, BS talking points, will ya. The SNES had literally twice as many sound channels to the Amiga's insufficient 4 and the SNES audio system was a massive leap forward from the FM synth used in the Genesis. It wasn't even close. That doesn't mean their weren't some excellent compositions on the Genesis, just as their are on the NES and Turbo Grafx 16. Those could be on the SNES. Not true with the other way around.
One thing about the audio I've heard, though I don't know how much of it is true, is that supposedly the Megadrive was harder to work with than the SNES in that aspect. I could definitely believe that, another saying about Megadrive soundtracks is that they fall into one of two categories: Absolute classic or absolute trash.
Yes, FM Synthesis can in theory produce almost any instrument sound authentically…, but it’s up there with rocket science in difficulty. A lot of developers therefore used the limited instrument sounds that came with audio development tools like GEMS. It’s a shame this video didn’t show off the amazing music of games by Treasure and Konami, that showed how orchestral the Mega Drive could sound (beyond the more common EDM and twangy guitar sounds). Additionally, if you plugged your Mega Drive into a stereo system (via the headphone jack) you could clearly hear the huge difference in frequency range; the Mega Drive could pump out some incredible bass frequencies.
Having made graphics for homebrew games for both the PCE and MD, I must say, all of those extra palettes on the PCE *Reeeeeally* come in handy... And I also personally find the PCE's wavetable synth MUCH easier to work with than the MD's FM synth, it's really not that hard to get the PCE to sound awesome despite the fewer sound channels! (Also the PCE's stereo is way better than the MD's) I do love all three systems though, but I having said all that, the SNES is my favourite, and by a reasonably wide margin... Never worked on anything for it though, but without the kind of tools the MD and PCE have for homebrew it must be a pain... Oh well, I can't code anyway, I just do the graphics, and occasionally sound and music...
Looking back I find it remarkable SNES ended up with the DSP it did. It had full wavetable mixing, obviously limited by memory size per sample (which they got around to some effect in Earthbound music, and plenty more), but wavetable mixing didnt come to pc for literally 10 years (sans the little-used niche Amiga add in for the nerds that wanna argue), which is why the pc version of FF7 and 8 had midi instead of mp3. PC was reliant on CD audio for HQ music generally until this era, which was 1998! Snes could do it the whole time.
In the US it was SNES, Genesis, Turbo Grafx-16 but in Japan it was a different story with Super Famicom, PC Engine, and Mega Drive. Either way, my top is PCE/Turbo. Loved my SNES, had fun with the Genesis, but the PCE library of games was unique, the quality of crossover titles was for the most part very solid, and the hardware did amazing things considering it’s limitations.
Well...that's really how it ended but not how it played out during the majority of the 16-bit generation. The Sega Genesis took a commanding lead of the 4th generation and held it for almost its entirety. So the field actually looked like this... 1989- 1. Genesis 2. TG-16 1990- 1. Genesis 2. TG-16 1991- 1. Genesis 2. Snes 3. TG-16 1992- 1. Genesis 2. Snes 3. Turbo Duo 1993- 1. Genesis 2. Snes 3. Turbo Duo 1994- 1. Genesis 2. Snes 1995- 1. Snes 2. No one Addendum- Sega of Japan in their infinite wisdom decided to discontinue the wildly successful Sega Genesis in 1995. This gave Nintendo free reign as the only budget console available on the market. Nintendo won a battle it fought all by itself and had they still been contending with Sega I don't think they would have won anything...I left out the Neo Geo AES, CDi, Sega CD, 3DO, 32X,, Atari Jaguar, and Neo Geo CDZ so as not to muddy the waters.
@@Sinn0100 That simply isn't true. The SNES was ahead of the Genesis for a considerable portion of its' lifespan. The Japanese market in particular was as if the competition from the Turbo Grafx 16 and especially the Genesis didn't even exist. That is the main reason why the SNES got so many exceptional exclusives from 3rd parties.
@@davidaitken8503 Yeah....we're not talking about the Japanese market. We are talking about world wide sales. The Japanese market is a drop in the bucket compared to the US which still stands today as the largest in the industry. Sega owned the 4th generation until the beginning of 1995 when SOJ dropped support of the Genesis. Leaving the Snes as the only budget console in the entirety of North America. That doesn't even bring the European or UK markets into the equation because their support of Sega's 16-bit machine was huge. Addendum- If you want to get twchnically the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive did actually win the 4th and do you know why? It was the leading console in Brazil and was still being produced/sold all the way up to 2007 (I think it was 2007). It was in the 2000's, that I know.
Very enjoyable video. Imo 1 thing should have been mentioned in this line up, and that is how these systems fare in their afterlife. Homebrew and even still nowadays how the support in this is per system.
honestly if your including the enhancement chips id argue the includements of both the turbo cd and the geneis's addons since they're also adding tech to the system.
@@charlesgreenberg6956 Sega of America thought the same, that is why they released the 32X (And I really like Virtua Fighter and Racing 32X). but yea, I understand your point. It just that at Sega, they have a different way to do things.
I actually had to stop your video to make this comment. The snes has more abilities then you know with sound. The snes can actually play pcm unimpressed audio. The problem is the no game cart at the time could hold 700mb to 4gigs of audio back in the 1990s without it being way to expensive for each game. If you was to patch a msu1 mod to a game and put that patched rom on an everdrive the snes will be able to play all the pcm files no problem. The snes is also able to play fmv video files. Both the pcm and fmv abilities were built in the snes because of the cd add on that was in development with Sony. But because the cd add on wasn't used both features just sat dormant unit some random person found out the snes could do both those things. Ppl have made some msu1 mods for some games that have both the pcm audio and fmv video files for said game. One of those games is zelda a link to the past. The great thing about it being able to read pcm files means it can read any type of music that you stream now say on Spotify just so long as you put it in the pcm format. And for those that might not pcm file have zero compression it's one of the reasons why some msu1 mods hit 4 gigs because that said game has so much different songs in it and each one is in its purist form it can be in. This is just a little secret about the snes that most don't know about. And thanks to the modding community that has started this project they are trying to make msu1 mods for every snes game.
Great video, even as a Mega Drive fan I still think your points are very fair. You missed a beneficial hardware feature of the Mega-Drive, backwards compatibility. Okay, useless nowadays but at release in the US Super Nintendo faced severe criticisms for not having backwards compatibility with the NES, while the Mega Drive required a cartridge adapter to allow it to play the Master System cartridges and cards. I think the SNES, technologically speaking, was amazing and a better way to approach things at the time, such clever engineering. Something I wonder is: if a Mega-Drive game ran at the lower 256 x 224 like the SNES, would it have additional processing power overhead available to do more impressive things, like scaling, than compared to when running at the normal 25% higher pixel count of 320 x 224?
@Jôn I knew some games ran at 256 x 224 but not which ones, so thank you for the list. Do you know if by reducing the resolution by 25% if the MD gained any noticeable performance increase? I mean it makes sense to me if it does, but the architecture might mean it is negligible. I ask because the SNES renders 25% less pixels / tiles than the MD, so that might help it keep up on the performance side of things.
I think the Mega Drive using backwards compatibility with the Master System hurt its audio capabilities and they should’ve just used the FM chip that was in the MS in Japan.
Spot on! Great video man! I never owned a TG16 but I have emulated it for years and can appreciate it as a decent "3rd place console." However I grew up a Sega fan and have always been aware of the snes. The battle between the two was extremely close. Racing, shmups, and sports games usually play better on the Genesis, but more games look and sound better on the snes. I own both now and can see the advantages of each. Some publishers really chose a side. EA for example chose Sega. There are more EA games on the genesis/megadrive, and games like Madden play better on sega also. If someone is really into RPGs, then the snes is an easy choice. There are high quality choices and more of them on snes. Overall it just varies what you want to play.
My view is that Sega were the clear winner early on, but its architecture simply could not keep up when the overall trends in gaming shifted. Action-heavy arcade style games were popular in the first half of this particular console generation, and in this genre the Genesis/MD clearly dominated. When RPG and exploration focused games (such as Chrono Trigger and Super Metroid, for example) became more popular, the Sega console seemed to lack the nuance of the SNES. While I am a fan of both consoles, it's obvious that the SNES ended its life with a bang while the Genesis/MD ended with a whimper.
A lot of that was due to Japan abandoning the console, plus a bitter Sega having failed to teach their western partners anything about game design...can you imagine DKC and StarFox without Miyamoto's influence?
You can say that "only" a few games used enhancement chips on the SNES, but the tech was there if developers wanted it and common enough. It included ARM chips that were 4-5x the clock speed of the main CPU on the Megadrive/PCEngine, so it's really hard to have those systems come out on top. Like with the NES before it, developers were comfortable adding in additional on that hardware, and it was done more often enough that the chips were a little cheaper. The Sega chip just cost too much and it never got the widespread use of the SNES's offerings, so it was never going to be a good option. The SNES also used a lot of custom hardware in the console itself. Sega mostly used off the shelf parts from a few years earlier, so it ends up being able to do less and cost more to assemble. And addon after addon did not do Sega any favors either.
Neither Sega or Nintendo are capable of manufacturing microchips. The Mega Drive is based on the Sega 16 arcade machine but limited in memory and no scaling chip. The big VDP chip is co-designed with Yamaha and contains a Master System mode and it’s PSG sound generator as well as the DMA unit which is part of an integrated circuit connecting it with the cartridge and memory. The design of the vdp is taken from a Texas Instruments video chip which redesigned for use in the SG1000 and Master System and Mega Drive and possibly even the Saturn VDP1 shares it’s heritage. The SNES cpu is designed by Ricoh (based on a WDC design used in the Apple 2GS) and includes the DMA unit within the chip (die) as well as IO for the controllers. The video system was also co-developed with a hardware company although I don’t know who. Possibly Toshiba or Ricoh. Neither company has facilities to manufacture microchips or pcb’s.
@Jôn fair points about the SNES graphics capabilities…. However Genesis is NOT 4 bits per pixel, it is 6 bits per pixel, which equals 64 colors at once… technically Genesis is limited to 61 colors out of that, due to color zero being transparent and having 1 backdrop color. Keep in mind Genesis had shadow and highlight mode which could triple that number of colors on screen in a limited way… so it wasn’t that big of a difference for on screen colors. Overall color pallet the SNES wins with 32,768 vs 512 for Genesis. Before declaring SNES superior hardware than Genesis, consider the Genesis had a processor that was twice as fast as the SNES. Again, Neo Geo laughs at all of this.
Genesis had a better processor and resolution than SNES, but SNES's much larger color palette meant that most games looked better on it. Though some Genesis developers did very well within its limitations.
Actually, the only plus on SNES is the color palette, I still have both consoles. SEGA kept the promise of delivering arcades at home. Shooters that had almost no slow-downs. Beat em ups that had more than 4 sprites on screen. Arcade resolution that you could port arcade titles. At the end is personal taste though, great video as always.
"If we're going to allow enhancement chips, the advantage of the genesis disappear", kinda a biased statement to make, considering the Genesis had even more powerful enhancement chips available... Even if not widely used (I'll never forget paying $90 for Virtua Racing... and people complain about $70 games today).
I have been looking at oscilloscope views of the systems various sound chips. I'm a massive nerd and I accept that. I may be wrong but it looks like the Snes can kind of do 10 channels in hardware as it has 2 echo channels that play independently. They are echo's or wave distortions of another sound effect or sample but I think they can kind of be used as extra channels albeit less versatile ones. The megadrive can make one of the FM channels ( i think channel 3 ) split into 3 Fm channels. The caveat being you must use any of 8 pre-programed waveforms that were built into the YM 2612. So I think technically the Sega can do 12 channels of sound but many of them are quite limited. I may be wrong and I apologize if I am. Otherwise I think its quite interesting :)
Yeah, it's gets a bit messy. Where do you draw the line? For instances, when it comes to PCM.. you can have a sample that's three different octaves (or notes) as that sample (think of a chord).. so now you more 'channels' than hardware channels. The SNES echo buffer can be exploited, but it doesn't have pitch(frequency) or volume control. It's convoluted and not easy to abuse it - but it's been proven. Yeah, the 2612 can split the channel into single carriers. It can also soft-mix multiple PCM channels into a single 8bit PCM stream. On PCE, you can pair two channels for 10bit output, and soft-mix multiple PCM streams as well. So it's like.. where does one draw the line? Starting with number of hardware channels is a good starting point, but it's not the end point.
Genesis channel 3 has a mode which allows the individual operators to be tuned out of scale where they are otherwise x2 or x3 of an octave in order to be making the same note. Channel 6 in pcm mode can actually be split up to four channels (interleaving) but limiting the sample frequency. 32Khz is the maximum. So you can have two at 16Khz or four at 8Khz. Useful for drum samples or overlapping sound effects.
@@iwanttocomplain Thank you for explaining that. I have to admit, I still do not understand the channel 3. Once it gets into the mathematics of octaves, im beat :) Many thanks though. I will go research , so I understand better. Is the division of 32khz into 4x 8 done through software, similar to how the Amiga can run 7 channels if the Cpu has the time to do so?
@@leighbyford635 yes you need to write a software driver and load it into the 8KB sram. In fact no sound will happen unless you write a driver/sequencer program and write it into the sram. The Z80 can then handle the rest. Actually I think you can probably put your driver into the main ram if you want to not use the Z80 if you feel it’s not fast enough. But then you can’t use the PSG channels. The technique is called multiplexing. Which mean it plays a sample for each of the divided channel in sequence, one at a time. So by lowering the sample frequency of each channel, your still using the maximum 32Khz but splitting it into different channels. I think the Amiga’s 4 channel sound can be split into 8 using this same technique but only in a standalone application like Octamed as it uses a lot of cpu.
The best console generation in my opinion, each system have an impressive catalogue of great games. My choice goes to the Sega Genesis for all those wonderful action games...contra hard corps, gunstar heroes, Shinobi 3, adventures of Batman and Robin, rocket knight adventure, streets of rage, thunder force IV, musha aleste, battle mania 2 and so many more. Not to mention the latest releases like xeno crisis.
But the SNES had an even better library when it comes to action games: Star Fox, Castlevania 4, Super Ghouls 'n' Ghosts, ActRaiser, Smash TV, Hagane, Contra 3, Mega Man X+2, Super Star Wars 123, Super Turrican 2, Sunset Riders, Cybernator, Metal Warriors, Rendering Ranger, Super Turrican (released a year earlier than Sega version), Space Megaforce, R-Type 3, Macross Scrambles Valkyrie, UN Squadron, Axelay, Gradius 3, Turtles in Time, Batman Returns, King of Dragons, Ninja Warriors, Knights of the Round... Granted, the Genesis is now getting better games : P
@@madspunky well i have the two original here and i prefer Mega Drive over the Snes. Even with less colours i prefer the sharper picture with RGB on a crt,soundtracks like Streets of Rage,Sonic & Knuckles, Thunderforce iv etc... Generally more fast paced games. Lots of reasons and that's enough for my preference... But i also play Super Nintendo a lot.
@@AdrianoSnake Yeah, the Genesis has a sharper fidelity which I also enjoy, including the sounds. However, what do you think of the SNES's great rocking soundtracks like MMX1, Killer Instinct, Top Gear, F-Zero, Plok, Super Adventure Island, and Star Fox? I mean, the Genesis has its fair share of great soundtracks, and I think the Megadrive has a sharpness that goes well with rock/techno music (MUSHA is my favorite!), but when I do a tally, I can't help but think that the SNES has just as many great rocking OSTs, but also symphonic OSTs (like Chrono Trigger, ActRaiser, Castlevania 4, DKC FF6, Secret of Mana, etc.), something very rare on Sega's console. As for fast paced games, again, I thought the SNES had just as many. There's Sonic of course and the titles you mentioned (and of course Gunstar Heroes!), but on the SNES there's F-Zero, Run Saber, Smash TV, Pocky & Rocky, Hagane, MMX1+2, Super Star Wars, Super Turrican 2, Contra 3, Joe & Mac1+2, Space Megaforce, R-Type 3, UN Squadron, Axelay, Super EDF, Turtles in Time, TMNT Tournament Fighters, Top Gear, Super Bomberman... I just don't really see how the Megadrive having "more" fast paced games would be a reason when the Super Nintendo has so many. Am I neglecting something?
My personal opinion on what should call the consoles: either Super Famicom or Super Nintendo are fine, good enough names; TurboGrafx 16 and PC Engine are both bad names for a console, but I prefer TGX16 desspite it being harder to pronounce, because the console isn't a "PC" nor an "Engine"; Between Mega Drive and Genesis, I definitely chose the first, becausse MD sounds like the name of an actual console, and "Genesis" to me is the name of a 70s prog rock band.
Your failure is to analyze hardware capabilities SEPARATELY. Remember that everything needs to go through the processor bottleneck. Snes ricoh would have great difficulty processing many of its technical capabilities at the same time. Many snes games have absurd slowdowns due to this. So programmers are forced to make sacrifices in colors or sprites or resolution, etc. The Genesis' much faster motorola processor allowed usability of many of its technical capabilities while in play; allowing more cool effects to appear on screen simultaneously; but still very colorful, with many sprites, with great resolution, clear sound, running several parallaxes at the same time, without slowdowns. That's what makes Genesis beat Snes.
Gonna have to hard disagree with you on this one. Especially considering that people who currently make software for these machines seem to almost universally prefur the megadrive/genesis due to the more powerful raw performance on the base machine. Leading to the MD/G having a massive homebrew scene with new full games still coming out on a regular basis Honestly comparisons like this always seem to be stacked in favour on the snes do to the snes being built like a box of tricks being able to out do other machines at any specific task once at a time. But when you're actually making software for these machines (which I've been learning to do recently), on the snes you constantly have to pick and choose what tools you want to use and you're limited on how many you can use compaired to the MD/G you usually have access to the full power of the machine at any given time That being said there are still some advantages to making games for the snes. Due to having more on screen colors you have the option for more realistic color gradiants compaired to the more stylistic gradiants of the MD/G. Then there's the very different sound hardware which is completly subjective but important for kind of atmosphere you would want for your game and then there's the specific tricks the snes can do such mode 7 which the MD/G can do in software (search "mega drive mode 7" on youtube ) but just not as well as the snes's hardware Also not sure why you didnt include the neogeo as it could easily wipe the floor with any of these machines. It's biggest problem being it's price
Also NEOGEO was mostly limited to fighting games as far as I know, many of which were arcade ports. With the price it feels more like a specialty system or something for enthusiast.
I think one of the main reasons why there's more homebrew for the genesis is that you can program in C to it. The large number of 32bit registers and absurd orthogonality of the 68000 makes it quite a good target for C compilers, which means not having to deal with assembler (specially snes assembler that is kinda a pain in the rear at times) And then there's that SGDK kit that is just awesome and can pull absurd things such as playing three PCM audio samples at the same time without distortion.
I'm going to have to agree with Dan. The reason Genesis homebrew is so prevalent is because SGDK is really, really good and convenient and uses C instead of assembler. You can make a game much more quickly that way as you can see by the numerous homebrews. As soon as someone makes a similar development environment for the SNES I will jump ship immediately. The only thing I will miss is the YM2612, which I have grown to love.
It's clear that favoring the SNES like they did, trying to be concise, but always falling back to his personal preferences in each segment. They also seem to be all Nintendo as you can see from the gameplay footages, not only on this video but previous ones too, where he could barely move Lara Croft around in Tomb Raider II. So yes, a 90's SNES fan kid making a video to show his love for the machine. I was lucky to have an older brother who played and brought a lot of video games back then, so we had the chance to play NES/SMS, MD/SNES and Sat/PS1, which one do you prefer? I prefer each and every one of them, specially from that era where each game, even if most shared exact same names, they were different experiences, from the hardware and developer sides.
Complaint: when talking about sound you don't _play_ any of it until the Secret of Mana part. Like, would do well for you to be quiet for a few seconds and let us hear what the machine sounds like, yanno?
people say that movies are 60% audio. star wars would end up feeling like a B movie if it didn't have its epic score for example. SNES focusing on the sampling, which would essentially be how most music is made till this day, is honestly probably the biggest deciding factor for many. likewise, people that love how FM synthsesis sounds is probably why they choose Genesis over SNES.
The PC engine was out in Japan 3 years before the the super famicom at which point it was competing against the famicom or NES, and did quite well so you can't really say it's the distant third
Parasol Stars and Rainbow Islands are two of the best games on the TG16. It always seemed to me that the TG16 was similar in many ways to the NES, just with more colors. Frankly, cartridge size held back all 3 of these systems far more than their hardware. Sega's DSP was far too expensive to put into cartridges. Virtua Racing ( a ONE HUNDRED Dollar cartridge) got away with it because it was a 1 Dollar arcade machine. Virtua Racing could really munch money. I remember I was with a couple of friends in a mall when Virtua Racing was brand new in the arcade and we each blew like 20 bucks in a few minutes on this machine. MAYBE they could have got the price down by continuing to use it and ramp up production numbers. But we will never know.
Svp dsp was was paid and licensed by Samsung. That's why the chip is so expensive. Had sega created a risc based dsp or coprocessor, virtua racing will be less than $100
@@maroon9273 That's like saying if pigs had wings, they could fly. The same was true with Nintendo. They didn't create their own DSPs either. I know one of them was made by Argonaut Games. Frankly, I think the SVP was built around the requirements of an advanced 3d arcade system and so this limited budget considerations in a way that the SFX and other enhancement chips did not. Virtua Racing for the Genesis is absolutely amazing for being on a Genesis.
@@tarstarkusz even sega could've asked Hitachi to create a risc dsp core chip since they partnered with Sega for the saturn. Nintendo had 3rd party developers (ie araugnaut, capcom: hitachi, hudson: epson, and nintendo like zicoh/working design via snes manufacturing parts sa1, sharp (super game boy via gameboy hardware), ninetendo with sdd1, and nec with the dsp chips, seta's st010, st011. Last, arm from seta for its st018 using the armv3 cpu.
@@maroon9273 Do you know if the SVP is custom? If so, to what degree (meaning an all new entirely custom chip or modification to an existing chip)? There is really nothing on the SNES that I know of that approaches the complexity of Virtua Racing. It's full screen fully 3d without any mode 7 or the high color count helping to make it look great. Though I don't actually know, I'm guessing the SVP chip is way advanced of what Nintendo was putting in SNES cartridges at the time. It's a shame they didn't continue to use it. The price comes down. By late in the Genesis' life, they probably could have got them much cheaper and that's besides being able to place much larger orders by using it in multiple games. I don't know who fabbed chips for either one of them. They seem to have multiple sources and not single sourced. If Sega had flat out owned or licensed with manufacturing allowed, they could have also produced it much cheaper if they had their own fab capable of whatever process was used for the chip. I just looked it up, it was published in August of 92. It's hard to fathom that it's been 30 years!!!
@@tarstarkusz not custom, it is Samsung dsp. It is called the SSP1601 chip and Sega bought its license from Samsung. Even with the svp high cost. Sega would've never lose money like they did with the 32x add-on. Which Sega sold it at a loss everytime someone purchase the add-on and its free games from the coupons.
I think of the Madden football games as the Rosetta Stone to understanding the differences in practice. The SNES versions had brighter colors, and each player had his correct skin tone, but in most cases they ran like they were trying (poorly) to imitate the Genesis versions, which ran more smoothly, but all players had the same skin tone (the Genesis' color count), and behind the end zone was mostly a sad abyss with sub-8-bit-looking fans unnaturally far away from the field, as opposed to the SNES where the fans behind the end zone looked great in the stands, properly placed and human-looking, even displaying fan-made signs personalized for each team (like "team of the 90s" at San Francisco's Candlestick Park, etc.).
The interesting thing here is that I think the Genesis' visuals could certainly be tweaked slightly and the SNES versions could have been much better optimized for that system too. So, it would be interesting to see what both systems would be capable if actually pushed to their full limits. I mean, what could Sega do to polish those games on Genesis further, and what could Nintendo or Rare do to polish those games on SNES further to make sure we really were getting the best of the best in both cases. . . .
As far as I'm concerned, you can say that everything was better with the SNES than with the MegaDrive. But when it comes to the sound: no, nobody convinces me. That usually just sounded awful with the original SNES. Nintendo already knew why they didn't install a headphone output like Sega. Sadly i never tested a real PcEngine so i can't say anything about the soundsystem there. But SEGA, as sayed in the video, have bin the most clevered of the area. Using two very well known cpu's at the time, using a common resolution of other M68K based Systems, using a very well known Soundchip of the time. This made it very easy vor developers to port there games to and from the megadrive to other systems.
Since the SNES uses sound samples a developer can theoretically sample the Megadrive or TG sounds and come out with something close it them, although at a lower bit rate.
Oh yes, this divvy said the SNES can replicate any sound, with it's 4bit adpcm samples in 64K of memory. You realise the Genesis is a synthesizer which outputs 9bit sound at 54Khz frequncy. A synthesizer instrument can change, whereas a sample is simple playback of a recording. In music engineering, the adsm envelope controls four stages of a note. The sustain portion loops the middle of the sample. A sampler on it's own it limited in terms of the potential to control the sound. It can only alter the pitch and volume. So if you made a note on the Genesis that was 10 seconds long and changing the whole time, it would be completely impossible to replicate on the SNES 4bit sound chip. The only way to reproduce clear sound on the SNES is to take that loop point and shrink it as much as possible. If you have too many samples loaded in at once, they must reduce the quality of the sample.
I've said this before and I'll say it again - the Super Nintendo was overrated. Now don't get it twisted, the console definitely smoked its competition in terms of raw numbers/capability, but we didn't really start to see what it could do until mid way to near the end of the console's life. In my opinion, Sega's inhouse development pushed every drop of juice out of the Mega Drive as early as it could and gave us some truly original and innovate pieces of software. Sega's IP's and launch line up, especially in the first 3 years, was much stronger than Nintendo's in my opinion. Sega actually dared to double down on 16-BIT before everyone else, whereas you felt the PC Engine didn't really do that (it technically wasn't 16-BIT) and Nintendo only came out with the SNES because they were forced to. If Sega hadn't have pushed anything, Nintendo would probably have rinsed the 8-BIT NES for another few years. You could just tell because they released Super Mario Bros 3 on the system and charged £54.99 UK for it, when the game was never supposed to be produced on the system in the first place, it was meant for the next console. Super Mario World looked rushed to me, all you have to do is look at that crappy intro sequence. It just looks like a weak tech demo to me, made into a full game. Sonic absolutely smoked it in terms of showcasing the leap from 8-BIT to 16-BIT, Super Mario World just looked like a really gimmicky slight upgrade on super Mario Bros 3 with prettier colours. Depending on who you ask, especially staunch Mario fans, many have suggested Super Mario Bros 3 was actually the better game. AM2, Team Shinobi and Sonic Team absolutely smoked all the early SNES stuff in my opinion. The Mega Drive was worth more than the sum of its parts, there's just so much that goes into producing great games than just raw on paper numbers. That's just me anyway.
Super Mario Bros 3 was a far better game than Super Mario World. SMB3 is probably my favorite game ever while I just dont find SMW very fun. Also Japan only but StarCruiser was a great example of the Megadrive pushing the technical boundaries far beyond what the SNES did.
@@stevesteve0521 The SNES wasn't even close to being the best home console, in any era. The console was full of gimmicks and much of its load was carried by third party developers, which deserves no kudos in my opinion. Sega's inhouse development teams were far superior to Nintendo's in my opinion. Yeah sure, the SNES produced some really good games near the end of its life, but the quality that came was expected of it by that point, they weren't really pushing the mantle in moving 16-BIT gaming on to the next generation with any significance the way Sega did. Sega laid all the foundations for 16-BIT and Nintendo came and added their little bells and whistles on at the end. Considering how much longer they had to work on their machine, their challenge was pretty anaemic but for the third party devs propping them up and some shady ports on the Mega Drive, which indies have shown recently could have been done much better at the time. Nintendo were happy to get trounced for those first few years of the Mega Drive's launch because they were so greedy charging £50+ for 8-BIT games and knew their die hard followers (or rather their parents) would go ahead and pay the mark up no matter what. The best home console ever rests between the Saturn and the Dreamcast for me. My personal favourite was the Saturn (geared for Jap imports), the Dreamcast is a close second. Both consoles were producing things the mainstream simply had no clue about nor were ready for. The libraries are going for as much as $2,000 per title now in some cases - that is telling you something....
@@Longlostpuss I’m a huge fan of the Saturn as well, the game library with the imports is just unbelievably great, I’m hoping games like princess crown and suikioden would get English translations like how the entire shining force 3 and grandia did so I can play them fully. Saturn is definitely up there for me, the 8 button Japanese/model 2 North America controller is probably my favorite controller of all time, the the sheer amount of fantastic fighting games and shoot ‘em ups on the Saturn make it a must have for anyone into retro games in my opinion. Surprisingly I don’t love the Dreamcast as much as the Saturn despite it arguably having more heavy hitters in the fighting game and shoot ‘em up department but I think that has to do with the Dreamcast controller just being mediocre to me. The d pad just was too stiff and I didn’t understand the point of downgrading from 8 buttons in the Saturn to 6 buttons on the Dreamcast. The vmus although they were a great concept and very innovative, they really didn’t store all that much memory on it and it sucked that there were some games that I just had to buy the regular memory card for just to save them. I guess the bigger thing the Dreamcast had for me at the time that was so much better than the Saturn was the sports game which I absolutely loved but those aren’t games I’m going to go back and play like I did when I was playing at the time of their release. I remember getting the total control 3 back in like 2005 and I was finally able to really enjoy the Dreamcast more since I was able to play games with a Saturn controller. To sum it up I still like the Dreamcast library of games and the fact that atomiswave arcade ports from 2006 are able to run on the Dreamcast 1998 hardware tells us just how way ahead of its time the hardware on that console had but I just like the Saturn and what it offers as a whole better
In the end it only comes down to the games you can only really compare based on the games, and the fact is it was far more common to find fast, smooth playing shoot'em up games on the PC engine and the Genesis, so no the SNES is not the clear cut winner in all regards, if anything Nintendo went with underpowered hardware considering the rapid advancement of computer technology and the console was released a few years after the other two
Developers using cheaper SlowROM cartridges is largely the cause of that rather the underlying SNES console. For example, almost every SNES shmup that suffers from slowdown is artificially crippled by these cheaper cartridges and running in SlowROM at 70% of the console's full CPU speed. Even then, look at a game like Rendering Ranger R2 running at a paltry 2.68 MHz on SNES, which is a whopping 70% slower CPU speed than the Genesis and PC Engine, and 30% slower than even the Master System, and I think you can see what the stock SNES is capable of in the right hands (especially in the shmup sections). Same with other SlowROM games like Super Smash TV, Parodius Da!, and Super Aleste as another few examples. I think the SNES' CPU is a lot more capable than many people have led many other people to believe in recent times.
68000 is a much better, more advanced and faster CPU. Fake performance advantage of 6502-derived CPUs disappears after you understand that all code and data they process moves 8 bits at a time, instead of 16 on 68000 and in addition to that 68000 has many 32-bit registers so data doesn’t even need to be moved to/from CPU as often as with 6502/65816. Z80 is more powerful than 6502 for these reasons too, except that it has 8-bit bus, obviously. More regs less memory accesses, more powerful instructions requiring smaller volume of code for many tasks..
@@Vinicius-hs2rf then you don’t understand what I wrote. 68k requires more cycles but also does more with less instructions and normally has higher clock speeds. Any code to execute, any data to process moves through 8-bit bus on 65816. And it doesn’t have many registers, so the variables that could live in CPU registers on 68k, often need to be repeatedly read or written, byte at a time, on 65816. You need more instructions to express the same algorithm on 65816. These extra instructions will also be read byte at a time, wasting clock cycles. Sure, you can add one register to another repeatedly faster on 65816 to get higher bogus MIPS. But *useful* code often works faster on 68k.
I found your channel recently and have enjoyed it immensely. May I ask about the meaning of your channel’s name? On the face of it, the name simply means “Shar’s city.” Is there more to it?
In the background comparison, it should said that the Megadrive was able to simulate the mode 7 with software programming. There were actually various things it can do this way. About the sound capabilities comparaison, well if you wanted to be fair, you would have give each console the same amount of time for displaying what it can offer. For example you could have played a bit of Street of Rage themes, that has some of the best soundtrack of the Megadrive.
Great video, I've owned/own all three of the devices over the decades, recently reduced myself to the PCE Mini though to streamline my focus though. I think calling them comparable is a little misleading, yet not, it's odd, because realistically raw clock speed of the Gen/MD aside, the SNES slammed them largely otherwise. What really got me was saying the PCE struggled, in its home market it throttled the Famicom out of first for a few years and Sega was laughable there, they never stood a chance against the other two. The PCE is a wonderbox hybrid, sure it's partly 8bit yet the system could do better visuals, better color(and more color), better audio, just overall performance OVER the Genesis, and it was a good year older hardware. The fact it could keep up better in lush visuals with the SNES than the Genesis speaks volumes. I really enjoyed your technical breakdown, it's why I continue to watch your stuff, you're fair, don't spit out sad reruns for clicks, and contribute some value in a sea of attention seekers. I do enjoy the care on audio, it is subjective, so much it almost deserves exceptions, but you can't go there either really. SNES had this near technically CD quality 33khz sampled audio output, it would utterly blow you away when someone put the right effort into the work, it was a generation ahead almost in that respect. The other two, chip tune generators basically, traditional audio with arcade style roots, but strangely again, once more the Sega unit was so watered down compared to their own comparable arcade hardware it went into this oddly usually tinny, buzzing, muffled mess in most the titles...yet then you have the PCE audio which largely just smeared Sega into the mud, amazing clean audio that didn't get into those defects. PCE was peak chiptune for that generation of home consoles, just amazing work.
Your assessment was on point. Both the SNES and Turbo Grafx 16 generally had better looking and sounding games and they completely creamed the Genesis in Japan which resulted in far more support from the best developers in the world.
@Benjamin Jagun I've heard all of those Genesis games. Have you heard Air Zonk, Soldier Blade, Super Star Soldier, Aero Blasters, Jackie Chan's Action Kung Fu, Ninja Spirit, etc.? As for graphics, that shadow/highlight mode gets brought up all the time by Sega fanboys that don't understand how limited it truly is. Prove me wrong. Show me these mysterious games that supposedly sound and look better than the best Turbo Grafx 16 and SNES games.
PC engine having better sound than the mega drive don’t make me laugh. The PC engine has great sound but only when it’s games are exclusive like bomber man 94 but lay off the drugs if you’re gonna be telling me that the PC engine has better audio done a dedicated 16-bit console the PC engine is 8 bit not 16 bit.
@@davidaitken8503 I’ve already mentioned the games that look and sound better than the SNES and PC engine games. There is no way the SNES could do a game like streets of rage and revenge Shinobi golden ax and Gauntlet your ignorance is showing you just expose yourself as an ignorant fanboy 😂😂
Back in the '90s an argument could be made for either one, but today I'd say that the Genesis/Mega Drive is clearly superior. The games that the SNES excelled at, such as the pseudo-3D stuff using Mode 7 or large, graphics-heavy RPGs were done better by later systems, but for the kind of fast, arcade-style 2D arcade-style games the Genesis is still often your best option unless you're going to spend crazy amounts of money on a Neo Geo or even crazier amounts on arcade JAMMA boards. The example I like to use is that the SNES had Super Mario Kart, which was a great game in its time, sure, but has had a lot of sequels and derivatives that outclassed it in the years since, while the best Genesis games like Streets of Rage II are often still at the top of their genres to this day. The Genesis represented the absolute peak of a particular era in gaming, while the SNES provide a glimpse into a future that has already come and gone.
EXACTLY. The SNES did not have an answer to many Mega Drive IP's whereas I think Sega for the most part had an answer to everything Nintendo put out. Only in the multiplat war did Sega lose, that's the only reason Nintendo won out in the end, just by sheer brute force in the numbers game.
I'm team Megadrive but Streets of rage ii is one title i dont get the hype for, especially now since it's easier to emulate arcade beat em up titles which I think were often far better. In terms of action platformers though Megadrive is still king especially with Treasures output.
My preference is the mega drive. I prefer it sound while I do like this Nintendo it’s audio hasn’t aged nearly as well as the mega drives in my opinion and I’m talking about Japanese developed games pacifically that aged very well for the mega drive.
The S-SMP is really only an evolutionary improvement over the wavetable sampling of the PC-Engine's HuC6280, and the Sega peripheral units had it beat in only a few years. The Sega CD had (besides Redbook CD audio) the Ricoh RF5C164 which had the same PCM capabilities as the S-SMP, that could be combined with the MD's FM synth; and the 32X had the QSound Virtual Audio chip, which was technically and conceptually far more sophisticated than the SNES' audio chip.
@Jon all of Neo Geo's RAM chips are fast SRAM. It was a really expensive console for that very reason. The Atari ST and Amiga had 512K DRAM, and they were so much cheaper despite the vastly superior data space. Most of SNES RAM is DRAM I think, and the mega drive had 64K DRAM only.
@@aboriginalmang The Amiga sounded like garbage in practice precisely because of it's lack of sound channels. Plenty of games didn't even have music and sound effects playing at once. You had to choose one or the other.
@@ostiariusalpha Prove it with some examples of better sounding games than the best available on the SNES. Oh wait! You can't... because they don't exist!
Sound certainly is a personal preference. At the time, reviewers almost always choose the SNES audio. But a decade or three later, SNES games almost all sound like they've been recorded over an analogue phone line, and can't match the clarity of the top Mega Drive soundtracks. Although somehow the SNES game Plok seems to sound amazing. Apart from that though, I'd choose Amiga sound over both of them, and that's a machine from 1985! The decision to be a cheapskate over the Mega Drive's graphics memory is so frustrating though, considering how so many other aspects weren't compromised, like the backwards compatibility, high resolution and volume control. And then it bit the Mega CD in the butt as well, because you can't just add colours from the data storage side of things. I heard the the Mega Drive was mainly one person's design, rather than the product of a team. So even with all that arcade hardware expertise, it seems likely that no-one pointed out that games might soon benefit from pastel colours, smooth gradients, digitisation and CG.
@@genesislives1131 You can move the goal posts all you want, but at the end of the day, Sega lost the console war. 49 million units sold vs 29 million sold. I guess Sega should have spent less time trying to be edge lords, and fighting with their own corporate branches.
16-Bit was such a magical era. Thank you for this video.
Definitely. N64/ps1 were awesome at the time, but they just did not age well.
@@pauls4522 yea early 3D don’t age well. 16 bit consoles were almost mastering 2d graphics
The older I get the more I believe 16bit was the "golden age."
It created MegamanX so id have to agree
It was for me in terms of audio. It was really the last generation where every machine had its own unique sound. After that everything homogenised into PCM audio and that was that.
It's all subjective, but I'd say the golden era was probably 1986-1996. Although the NES (in the form of the Famicom) had been around since 1983, 1986 is about the time where the really good stuff started coming out. Not only were games starting to become much longer and more complex rather then (usually) single screen affairs, but battery backed cartridges became a thing. Games finally reached the point where they were more like adventures with so much more to see and do. The 16-bit era then basically gave us a lot more power. Games became only slightly more complex over late NES era games (which is actually a good thing IMO), but they got even longer and had much better balance in difficulty. No longer was the difficulty in games so brutal, and now we usually had checkpoints!
After 1996 things got really exciting for awhile with 3D gaming being the next big thing, but even back then I felt that we had lost something that we'd probably never get back. To this day I can't put my finger on what it is, but things just seemed different, and it was more then just the change from 2D to 3D. Still, I really loved the 3D era up until the mid 00's with the Wii, PS3, and 360. I'm not ripping on those consoles and I actually own them all, but IMO things really went downhill starting in that era. There were still some great games, but we started getting *way* too damn many FPS games, focus on online multiplayer over single player mode (which is just so backwards), walking simulators or interactive movies (and these are somehow still considered to be games), damn near unplayable games being released and later being patched (rage inducing crap that we never had to deal with before the mid 00's), and controllers now being so high tech that they're just as expensive as the games (physical versions) if not even more expensive in some cases. Controllers used to be half the price of a game, and I really miss that.
This and dc Xbox ps2 GameCube generation are best imo
This is the time where games actually looked arcade quality and in some cases better.
I bought my SNES specifically to play SF2, and it delivered a damned satisfying experience. My roommates and I had endless drunken tournaments huddled around my little 13 inch TV, beating the crap out of each other for hours in end. Despite my display being fairly small, I did take advantage of the stereo-out audio on the SNES and had the sound running through my 100+ watt component stereo system and its two big, 80s-style tower speakers. Having grown up with the simple beeps and boops of the Pong sound effects (as well as games that had no sound whatsoever), I’d never really taken much notice of video game console sound…until I got my SNES. I remember plugging in Super Star Wars for the first time and being totally blown away by the rich, symphonic soundtrack, it seemed so realistic for the time and I was sure it represented the final and definitive achievement of video-game technology. I mean, where could you go from there, right? ;)
Should it happened you owned a Pc engine with the SF, I can guaranteed the experience would ve been better.
Same sentiments as you on that last part. Back then I thought Doom was all we really needed and there's nothing else we couldever want.
To be fair, today's digital audio technology is not very different from what's used inside the SNES. It's just that sample size and rate are much, much higher, and the DSP capabilities are far superior (due to more computations performed each second) , along with DACs being more accurate. Even the SNES can play near CD quality audio with a bit of help (MSU-1), which tend to show that the limiting factor with the sound quality on SNES wasn't so much the Sony chipset itself, but moreso the 64KB of audio RAM and cartridges storage space.
@@honestguy7764I'm not so sure about that. The PC Engine version lacked the speed options SNES and Genesis versions had. That and the sound honestly isn't as good.
One of the best soundtracks us batman returns for the snes. I believe if the people from that game did the soundtrack for snes star wars it would be alot better. Just listen to that games music and you'll understand
Ooh...this is the 16 bit wars! I'm reliving my childhood
No its not, snes and pc engine are 8bit CPUs
@@megamario77 😆👍
@Mega Mario 77 .... Educate yourself. I live that era.
While the TurboGrafx-16 predated the Genesis/Mega Drive release, it's not truly a 16-bit system; the graphics card itself was 16-bit, but the CPU was still 8-bit.
The Sega Genesis, known as the Mega Drive outside North America, is a 16-bit fourth generation home video game console developed and sold by Sega.
The Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES), commonly shortened to Super NES or Super Nintendo, is a 16-bit home video game console developed by Nintendo that was released in 1990 in Japan and South Korea, 1991 in North America, 1992 in Europe and Oceania, and 1993 in South America.
The PC Engine was simply amazing considering that it was meant to compete with the NES and not true 16 bit systems.
If the PC Engine had the 3rd party support the NES had…
@@freddyvidz The PC-Engine had tremendous support in Japan, far more than the Mega Drive.
@@freddyvidz NES, similar to Sony today, had the talent of locking things down.
pc engine beat nes in japan@@freddyvidz
Looking back on that time, the SNES was the better console for me, but I'm happy to have experienced the Genesis. So many good memories of Sonic the Hedgehog... I still hum tunes from the various games to this day. Shining Force was another one I adored. Gunstar Heroes was a balls to the wall blast. Rocket Knight Adventures was packed. But again, looking back, the library on the SNES had more favorites for me. Donkey Kong Country, Chrono Trigger, Earthbound, Secret of Mana, Yoshi's Island, Starfox, UN Squadron. One of Sega's strengths in the US was the sports games, but I was never a fan of that genre.
In any case, it was an interesting time, full of fun and arguments about one's console of choice. But... I'm old now. And one thing I realize as I get ever older, is that I was fortunate to simply have all these choices to experience. The SNES, the Genesis, and yeah even the Turbo Grafx 16 (PC Engine), all provided unique games, strengths, weaknesses, and ultimately a unique experience. I look back at it all now, fondly.
I was mainly a PC gamer in the 16-bit era. I only ended up with a SNES, because my next door neighbor REALLY wanted a my old sound card for his PC. He wanted to trade me the system for the card. We both got something nice out of the deal. His computer games no longer sounded like digital nails across a chalk board, and I had something I could play a GOOD port of Street Fighter II on.
The Genesis did lack in color and sound capabilities compared to the SNES on top of Mode 7 and Super FX capabilities, but thanks to the highlight/shadow mode and the Z80 and 68000 working in tandem, the Genesis can brute force something like Toy Story or Star Cruiser or the OST of Streets of Rage in the right hands, without enhancement chips no less.
Take away those enhancement chips and the Snes just has Mario.
Not gonna lie reading this got me hot and bothered.
@yearight5303 SNES had Zelda, Metroid, Mega Man X, DKC, and Squaresoft. Genesis just had Sonic and a bunch of overrated arcade ports.
Actually the sound chip in the Sega Genesis/Megadrive was well known to be superior... the YM2612 chip was made by Yamaha and was used In Some of their popular hardware 💯
As a producer I'd say both the SNES and the Genesis were equal on sound as they would both have areas they excel which the other doesn't 💯
This one is a no brainer, they both win. Two amazing consoles, both with amazing games.
First console I ever owned was a megadrive, having previously just had a zx spectrum, seemed like a quantum leap. Eventually swapped it for something with my brother and bought a snes. The snese always seemed like the best choice, partially due to capabilities but mainly because the cream of the world's top developers were releasing classic after classic that were not appearing on the megadrive. This was a time when a Nintendo console could be your only console, not a bonus console you bought for Nintendo titles alone
You'd be lucky to have either console back in the 90's. I was able to enjoy mega drive and my friend lent me his SNES and it blew me away how much better the experience of those consoles were when compared to my older amstrad CPC 464 with the slow tape loading. I remember being a sega fanboy but in my heart I always wished my parents had bought me a SNES too!
We must have been rich then, because we had Amiga, SNES and MEga Drive at home.
@@turrican4d599 so cool! 10 year old me is so jealous 😂🥺
5:42 Most people don't know this, but the SNES' Direct Colour mode actually allows for 255-2040 visible colours on BG1 alone, plus the other 120 visible colours for BG2 and another 120 visible colour for sprites again. This means that in normal use in some of SNES' regular background modes it can display more total on-screen colours than the PC Engine during full gameplay. In total, SNES can display anywhere from 496-2288 colours on-screen in Direct Colour mode as standard, even before any also standard colour math and HDMA backdrop colour gradients are applied. So, if it's just about max colours, the SNES can have way more on-screen. It wasn't really used, but it's not a cheat or anything, just an almost entirely ignored feature of the SNES, largely because the normal modes with less colours can actually look nicer due to the way the palettes work.
The SNES also has a standard 8bpp mode, which allows for 256 colours per tile (64 visible per tile), whereas the PC Engine only has a 4bpp mode that allows for 16 colours per tile.
The SNES also has a master palette 0f 32,768 colours, which is a whopping 64x larger than the PC Engine's 512 colour master palette. And that actually makes far more of a difference here between the two consoles in terms of the colours you see on-screen.
Point being, when it comes to colours, the PC Engines higher number on-screen on paper is pretty much only that. In every meaningful way, the SNES beats the PC Engine when it comes to colours. And the Genesis isn't even in the running in that regard.
The SNES' Colour Blasting capabilities really can work wonders when it comes to anything related to the colours.
😂 snes had more color capability but turbo has 512 on screen at once and snes could not thats why turbo games are infact more colorful tunbo had higher resolution capability and a faster cpu😂
youre right only you have this amazing info😂
@@SwedishMeattball The SNES can display anywhere from 496-2288 colours on-screen in Direct Colour mode as standard, even before any also standard colour math and HDMA backdrop colour gradients are applied, which as orders of magnitude more colours. So, if it's just about max colours, the SNES can have way more on-screen.
The SNES also has a standard 8bpp mode, which allows for 256 colours per 8x8 tile (64 visible per tile), whereas the PC Engine only has a 4bpp mode that allows for 16 colours per 8x8 tile.
The SNES also has a master palette of 32,768 colours, which is a whopping 64x larger than the PC Engine's 512 colour master palette. And that actually makes far more of a difference here between the two consoles in terms of the colours you see on-screen.
There are no PC Engine games as or more colourful that most SNES games, and I don't think a single example of a game that's on both systems where it even matches never mind has more colours than the SNES equivalent.
When it comes to colours the PC Engine cannot match the SNES.
The SNES also has a standard 512x448i resolution mode as well, and it can use this basically without taxing the system at all--it's just one of the standard eight background modes for the system--unlike the PC Engine's equivalent higher resolution modes, which I think technically goes up to 512x224 and maybe 512x448i but that not all TVs accept.
There are no PC Engine games running in 512x448i resolution that I know of, but SNES has RPM Racing and the upcoming Rex Nobilis that both run perfectly in that resolution during full-colour full 60fps gameplay, etc.
So, when it comes to practical max resolution, the SNES has the edge there too.
Yes, the PC Engine has a faster CPU than the SNES as standard.
Although, put a SA1 chip (10.74 MHz) or FX chip (10.5-21 MHz) in the cart and the SNES can have a much higher CPU speed there, as was the case with a bunch of games back in the day like Kirby Super Star, Kirby's Dream Land 3, Star Fox, Vortex, Super Mario RPG, Stunt Race FX, Doom, Yoshi's Island, etc. And now there's the just announced SNES Doom Definitive Edition that even uses an "FX3" chip in the physical cart, which presumably runs even faster too.
When it comes to speed in real games on these systems, there are no PC Engine games that run close to 10.5 MHz, never mind 21 MHz or even above.
Awesome vid as usual. The color limitation actually kind of fits for Comix Zone, since comic books were colored using combinations of halftone dots which historically gave the colorist only 64 colors to work with (although by the 1990s I think this had been increased to 128).
I will say that the SNES was two years newer than the Mega Drive/Genesis. With that said, SNES was a slow machine with a low resolution and needed assistant chips to run decently. What this video doesn't mention is that games which included enhancement chips cost as much as $74.95! No, those chips weren't free. SNES might seem better when you're comparing a 4 meg Ghouls N Ghosts to a two years newer Super Ghouls N Ghosts that's 8 megs. When it comes to multi-platform games like Street Fighter II, the Genesis and PC-Engine were held back by the SNES as the assets from Super Nintendo were recycled for for Genesis and PC-Engine. There's lots of arguments that can be made. The Genesis was simply more capable than some of the software (released at the time) suggests and without enhancement chips.
Spot on especially about the enhancements chips not free. the main reason very few 3rd party developers use the super fx chip was cost. The super fx chip cost $10 dollars and would’ve driven up the cost.
So, what you're saying here, is the SNES curbstomps the others.
Of course, we all already knew that since we were kids.
The snes was 8-bit 😆
@@genesislives1131 Huuuuuufffff
The SNES does not Trump the others especially the mega drive. It was pretty even yes the super Nintendo has more advanced graphics and sound. It’s new technology to be expected, but the mega drive could more than hold its own and the MD advantage is the Motorola 68,000 which trumps the slow processor in the SNES.
@@Adamtendo_player_1Genesis cpu was not faster. Just had a higher clock.
18:47 - Minor correction, Sega Genesis could do sound samples as well. See Toy Story on the Sega Genesis, which does 4 channel multiplexing of samples in addition to the sound hardware that was with the Sega console. See GameHut's video on how they implemented this back in the 90s.
It could, it's just that most titles didn't really utilize this feature, and SNES was just more efficient at it with its sound chip.
Genesis strength was in its arcade quality sounds, more-so than samples, and vice versa for SNES. Each had its strengths and weaknesses.
Toy Story uses all the processing resources of the mega drives CPU to do 4 channels. Basically the mega drive had the 32x and mega cd. These addons basically made the mega drive more powerful than the SNES in every way but were really just wasted potential. The limits at the time was console cartridge size. This stopped really good games and ports for both the snes and mega drive.
For example mega drive games could have had CD music if you had a mega CD or added features. This was ignored and made the mega CD its own console, with its own games. Only the 32x had a few games that used both the mega drive and the mega CD but then too little to late.
@@GodKitty677 32x was more powerful than the SNES, but I don't think it was as powerful as 5th gen consoles like PS1 and N64.
That being said, SNES did still have the cartridge chips, which added strength to SNES's processing abilities.
If you look at SNES games made in 1991 compared to say... games made in '98, like Rockman and Forte, the differences are staggering. That game practically looked like a 2D PS1 title. The sprites, backgrounds, animation, etc. are all far superior than Megaman 7 or other contemporary titles.
Obviously SNES wasn't 32-bit with the newer chips, but it enabled the system to at least compete with other 5th gen consoles for a short time.
@@AltairEgo1 The mega cd was more powerful than the super fx chip and the snes. The mega cd had a faster 68000 cpu if memory serves. So the system had two 68000 cpus. The 32x I believe added two more risc cpus. There is a demo of starfox on base mega drive hardware. The mega drive had its pluses over the snes, the addons all together were very powerful for the time.
@@GodKitty677 I mean, it was a disc based on add-on, so it should be more powerful than something that just uses carts. If it didn't, that would be embarrassing. I wouldn't go as far as saying Genesis was stronger than SNES. Its add-ons certainly were. I'm sure the Nintendo Playstation would be comparable to it as well, had it ever come into existence.
Imagine if you could go back in time, and give yourself a $100 handheld console that has every game from both systems, and a rechargeable battery that lasts for days.
The future is not-so-bad, sometimes.
Powkitty v90 to myself in 1996
@@rustymixer2886 I've heard of self loathing, but that's just cruel and unusual.
@@FranklySean you don't like $30 v90?
Yeah, but being there and getting EGM every month with previews, having to get the games, hype, etc. discovery, etc. Sometimes the journey is the reward.
@@rustymixer2886 The powkiddy V90 is literal trash that I would not give to a child that I hate.
Spending $20 more improves your experience so much. V90 is just trash that hasn't made it to the landfill yet.
The CPU comparisons actually depend on the genre of the game.
The 6502 is have a bigger instruction throughput, but the 68000 have more complex instructions that would require several 6502 instructions to emulate, and then there's the multiply and divide can of worms, where the 68000 has it, the snes can offer multiply with the video chip and you have to deal with it yourself on the PC Engine.
In games where you perform a buttload of simple instructions like filling a sprite table with many, many, many sprites like space shooters, the PC Engine will win.
But if you have something like an heavy AI or data management, or the game is doing 3D or heavy physics math, the mega drive will come on top.
I think the accessibility of the 68000 is a big advantage. And the lack of requiring bank switching on the Sega Genesis is also very nice. Both the SNES and PC-Engine suffer due to their smaller address space requiring more care to deal with that. In general I think that the main advantage the Genesis has is it's more straight forward to develop for. The SNES and PC-Engine have some more intricacies to deal with. Not that it's some mountain to overcome but if you were to decide today to develop a fairly standard 16-bit era game I think the Genesis would be the easiest to develop for. You could definitely program your game in C without much trouble. You can do so now on the SNES and PC-Engine but I imagine you can run into issues there, possibly related to memory banking.
I've written code for both the SNES and Genesis and I do think if I was going to make a whole new game today and wanted the easier route I'd go with the Genesis. That being said, I enjoy all 3 platforms and would develop for any of them.
@@mottzilla4858 And what is the best CPU among the 65C816 VS 68000? What we know (we don't program anything for these hardwares) is that the SNES accesses the RAM in 1 cycle while the Mega Drive in 4, but on the other hand the Mega Drive has a higher clock rate and a 16-bit bus, so a technical draw. An opinion from someone like you would be nice. I think you are the most likely to talk about the topic.
Another interesting thing you mentioned was the difficulty in programming something on the SNES, what we see today are some games optimized (and passed to Fast-ROM) running without slowdowns most of the time (Axelay for example). On the Mega Drive we see some interesting demos and games as well. Congratulations to you old programmers, who coded at low level and had precarious tools to use, today everything is done within an engine, with several tools included and much easier to use.
68000 or even Z80 will come on top when doing bulk memory manipulations outside zero page of 65XX CPUs. 68k, because you transfer twice as much with 16 bits bus and can write 32 bits at a time with 1 instruction, Z80 because it has lots of regs vs 6502, can keep 16-bit pointers in regs instead of repeatedly reloading from 0-page, can load/store sequential data very fast via PUSH/POP 16-bit stack ops..
Though 7MHz clock speed is still a lot of raw power for primitive 6502 :)
@@noop9k The Z80 also have the actual block copy instructions like otir, ldir etc.. they're pretty darn useful.
Now the thing i think help the most on 68000 on complex memory operations is the fact it has dedicated address registers, and 8 of em on top of that, and that you can pull many very complex addressing modes on ANY instruction.
@@noop9k in 95% of cases 6502 less cycles = 2x+ of z80 speed also we had 65816 running over 20mhz back then it was made by WDC and still is today that cpu was used in super cpu for c64/c128
I would say it would have been nice to have a faster 68516 but a moot point in the end as i rather have faster cpus dsps etc etc with more ram in cart it puts the upgrades into the devs hands and in that regards they will know the system better and have tools needed instead of something like a 32x which you need to rely on sega for all info dev units etc etc
I do understand why Nintendo kept tha 6502 compatible 65816 for backwards compatibility with nes that we never got
I grew up with both the Sega Mega Drive, the NES and Game Boy with the Mega Drive being the first console followed by the GB and the NES & SNES was what friends had, and we enjoyed all gaming systems! Still loved the Nintendo vs. Sega ;-D. Made things a lot more interesting back then. "Genesis Does' What Nintendon't"
Well, in sales numbers the SNES was the winner on paper in total. It won the North American market and the Asian market.
However, when it comes down to Europe Australia and South America, the Sega MEGA DRIVE (Genesis in the N.A) was more or less the winner.
Some wider and some smaller.
Smaller would be Europe where the Mega Drive first like in North America had the lead but in the end the SNES caught up and won several European country markets, but some would still remain a "Mega Drive country". That was not for the lack of great games as we all know the SNES had arguably more of them BUT more down to economics and local support.
The MD was cheaper ($50 less) and so was the games ($5 less) for it then SNES and its games and that had a big impact in many countries game cultures.
Heck, Nintendo distributors in Europe like Scandinavian Bergsala AB for example where caught with fixing prices and had to pay some great fines for there illegal monopoly practices, but that did not help the customers getting better prices.
best console generation of all time!!!
Three completely different architectures , each one with its pros and cons...each version showing differences in colors, paralaxx, sounds... a golden age !
I bought a PC Engine Duo R just in 2015... wonderful console as MD and Snes.
Since PS4 XOne gen, the games has the same " identity" because architecture X86 became the new standart. Very helpful to developers, but i felt the games lost identity, maninly on XboX Series and PS5.
Sorry for my poor english level. Greetings from Brazil.
I had both the Genesis and Snes. Snes was better by miles, the library of classics is simply unbeatable. There's nothing on Genesis that can touch a hair of Chrono Trigger, Donkey Kong Country trilogy, Super Metroid, for example. But it doesn't mean that the Genesis was totally useless, lots of great games there too, Streets of Rage is by far my favorite series on Genesis. We have one or other game on Genesis that runs faster than the Snes version of the same game, but people always ignore that, while it's a little faster, it lacks colors, details, paralax, and usually, has much worse sounds too. The screen size become something that matter today, but back in the day, with the 480p televisions, with both Genesis and Snes stretching the image to fill the screen, no one noticed a few lines more on Genesis. Anyways, I believe it's totally acceptable to prefer the Genesis, since Sega itself made great games for the system too, specially if you were an arcade lover.
The major limitation with the SNES’s sampled sounds is that they could only be sampled at one pitch and then played back at varying speeds to get multiple pitches. Without “multi-sampling” (such as you’d find on professional keyboards of the era, and ever after) the further you get away from the original sampling pitch, the more artificial the sound. This is why the best SNES soundtracks tend to have instruments playing tunes within a very short musical range.
It all depends on the programmer really. Check Donkey Kong Country
I see all this console rilvary thing as a purely American phenomenom, most likely due to the Sega commercials. When I was a kid, we didn't argue which console was superior in school, we just thought videogames were awesome
Got a Super Nintendo? Awesome! Got a Mega Drive? Lemme play it, please!
Your inferiority complex is showing.
Console wars were very much a thing in the UK in the early 90's. As one of the only kids I knew with a SNES I was normally on the losing side though.
In the US, I got punched for not having a SNES. It wasn't like I didn't want one, just couldn't afford it until I started working, after the SNES left the market and I was hitting up flea markets for cheap games.
Depends on your age, if you were around ages 10 to like 17 around 91-94 than yes the rivalry was real and very important in gaming
@@stevesteve0521 When I was around 10-17, I had a PS1 and whenever I met someone who had a N64, instead of laughing at their "inferior" console, I'd be like: YES!!! Let's play Mario 64, Mario Kart, GoldenEye 007, Pokemon Stadium!!!
There’s something I’m not clear about. The Genesis has varying sprite sizes (up to 32x32) but also rectangles like 8x16. Is an 8x16 sprite using up twice the resources of an 8x8 sprite or not?
Also, of the 16 available sprite sizes (8x24, 32x8 etc), you can use all 16 at once. Whereas the SNES only offers four sizes - 8x8, 16x16, 32x32 or 64x64 of which you can have only 2 on screen at once.
I looked at the sprite tables on Sega Retro and the SNES can do 128 8x8 or 16x16 sprites but only 69 sprites at 32x32. Whereas Genesis handles 80 sprites up to 32x32. Then per scanline SNES does 32 8x8 sprites but only 17 16x16 sprites. Genesis does 20 16x16 sprites per scanline. So it seems the SNES can handle a greater number of smaller sprites but less larger sprites.
Then of course, dies adding more sprites slow the game down? I suppose that is a matter if game logic having to plot the paths of all the moving sprites rather than the PPU not being able to move then smoothly at the same time.
Then you have unique sprites. SNES can have 128 8x8 or 16x16 but only 32, 32x32. The Genesis can do 80 up to 32x32 unique sprites.
So if you consider how often games are using 8x8 or 16x16 sprites in a number greater than 80, it might be the case that the SNES is actually *less* good with sprites. Especially if you use sprites which are larger than 16x16.
It’s kind of confusing. But I think 80 sprites of 32x32 pixels = 100 sprites of 16x32. But 80 is the hard limit regardless of size. But you could have 80, 8x32 sprites whereas the SNES would need four times the 8x8 sprites (lined up, 4 in a row) which would be 320 sprites, way above the 128 limit.
@Vinicius oh yeah, I think they are a side effect of the high res mode. You can’t really use them I think.
@Vinicius oh right. I wonder why they weren’t documented.
Each system lent itself to certain art styles, both graphically, and audially. The SNES overuses very short sound samples which sound very warbly and grating to my ears, however poorly coded MD/SG FM music is even worse with its high pitched, ear-piercing screeches. PC Engine is a scrappy little system that, as you said, with its CD add-on, opens up a buffet of really amazing, larger, much better sounding games.
Of course the SNES would win. It had newer hardware. The MD/Genesis was 2 years older when the SNES came out. I have both but I played more on my Genesis. I still play on my Genesis until now. My SNES has been collecting dust for almost 20 years.
Snes sold 49.1 million worldwide. Genesis only sold 35.25 million. 🙂
That means nothing. NeoGeo sold far less. Was it a worse console? Not by any means.
This is basically a win for marketing, not any sign of technical prowess.
The SNES really had a hard time moving around stuff, and games are riddled with slowdowns, despite its lower resolution. The maximum sprite number is most probably never reached. Any BTA has less enemies at once than what we see in SoR2 for example. Same applies to shmups. This also applies to the possible number of colors or resolution. You have hypothetical maximum values that can never be reached all at once.
The MegaDrive was a much more balanced system meant to maximize its capabilities, just like the Master System. The MegaDrive processor is simply way ahead the other two, and you can see it in games with how capable the console is to move around and animate huge sprites all at once.
All great consoles of course, but raw numbers are not exactly the same as what was actually achievable in real life. But they looked good as marketing arguments on the boxes, without a doubt.
There was still plenty of slowdown and flicker in M.D games just a bit less than on the SNES. SNES games had more flair and cool effects than the M.D and generally speaking much better sound quality, colour and in particular transparencies - a very advanced effect for the time which even the Saturn struggled with. .
@@MySamurai77 Going to disagree with most of this. MD did not have "a bit less slowdown". The console is simply much more capable of moving around a ton of sprites, and if slowdown occurs, it is in a situation where the console is doing much more than the SNES. Seiken 3 is riddled with slowdown, yet it really isn't moving around very impressive sprites... And this is just an example, there are plenty of it.
Transparency is not something "advanced". Either your hardware is built to support it, either it isn't. Saturn handles graphics with two separate VDPs, the first one not seeing what the second one is doing. This means that any sprite or 3D model rendered by VDP1 cannot apply transparency on backgrounds and things rendered by VDP2. It was a design choice to do this, to offer a console that natively supported both 2D and 3D (which wasn't the case of PS1 neither N64). It was never meant to do this type of transparency, and by hardware design, it cannot do it. This has nothing to do with a "struggle".
Strider has a lot of slowdown. Midnight Resistance, Viewpoint, Thunder Force 4, Steel Empire, Demolition Man, Chakan, Sonic 2 (when getting hit), also have their fair share.
Granted, I don't think the SNES could handle Gunstar Heroes. But Space Megaforce and Macross Scrambled Valkyrie are as hectic as anything on the Genesis.
@@cireza_ I am sure ideally Sega would have put h.w transparencies in the Saturn but it would have added to the cost so they decided to sacrifice it. A feature the SNES had years before the Saturn even came out.
Not aware of any other home system that had h./w transparencies until the PSX . It was rare even in the arcades.
@@madspunky Space Megaforce and Macross are fine shmups, but there really isn't much on screen at once compared to the more impressive MD shmups.
The trouble with super Nintendo sound is that all those samples ate up cartridge space and often required huge cuts to game content except on the highest end games that could command $70 price tags and 32 MB cartridges
32 mb you mean
Even a game like Killer Instinct with a 32 Mb cartridge suffered a lot of cuts. You can find videos of the early version where it has nearly all the animation frames from the arcade game, but the iconic "ULTRA COMBOOOOO" announcer was missing. The version they ended up releasing had more than half of the animation cut to fit the voice clips, and it looks and feels very choppy as a result.
That is why the came up with the bank switching method.
It's a tradeoff for sure, but most consoles of that era had to make cuts and sacrifices. It made console wars more interesting though, because not every machine was almost exactly the same thing, like modern consoles. So your experience could be very different depending on the platform you chose. Now all versions of multiplats are nearly identical experiences, with very little if any unique features, and we have almost no exclusives.
I spent a lot of money supporting all 3 back in the 90’s. Glad it was back then and not now because I’d have a fraction of my collection. Genesis first console bought with my own money followed by TG-16 then SNES. There was something to love about all 3. Genesis had great games early and again late in its lifespan when developers did all sorts of graphical trickery & special effects in software that the Genesis lacked in hardware. TG-16 was the little “engine” that could produce fantastic games released at a trickle as it just didn’t have the support from Japan which had a ton of games but they just couldn’t figure out what to bring to the US. SNES took a while and although it’s the only console that I personally noticed a good amount of games with slowdown (with my collection of games) it had best colors, sound FX and it pretty much shined throughout its lifespan. Loved all three so ultimately we were all winners to be able to play them
I worked at Radio Shack at the time and we sold both the Genesis and Turbo Grafx. The TG16 always had a sweet spot in my heart, but the Genesis ran several Amiga titles, for I was an Amiga user back then.
The SNES was by far the most future proofed. The high color pallate and different background modes made it very easy to use expansion chips and to push the hardware in creative ways. The 8 bit color of the Genesis was consistently a hard wall Sega couldn't overcome leading to them releasing the ill fated 32X.
The Amiga was my first 16 bit system, but I bought a TG-16 shortly after, then added a Genesis and SNES a little later. I funded much of my games, but my parents helped me get the systems. The PS1 was the first console that I bought with money from my own job. We were a C64 and PC house up to that point.
the old 68k processors were a joy to work with, and I'd say the best. But the snes co processors are something else.
The addressing modes are just wonderful
The debate all comes down to the lack of a precise criteria of what exactly defines "better". They both had strengths & weaknesses over the other.
I will admit I was a flag waver for the snes back in the day. I unfortunately did not know how underhanded Nintendo was with 3rd party developers.
Nintendo really became underhanded in the next generation.
@@Illeea nah, it started with the nes. By the time the 64 rolled around, 3rd party developers had basically written off Nintendo. Aka no final fantasy, no streetfighter, etc..
If Nintendo hadn't been, "underhanded" as you say, we would have been stuck with lazy ports instead of games built from the ground up to take full advantage of each systems strengths.
@@marcellachine5718 nintendo had pretty much all the 3rd party support on the nes. They lost a little bit on the snes but not enough that they didnt have the big third party games like megaman x, street fighter, mortal kombat, final fantasy, castlevania, dragon quest and chronk trigger.
On the n64 though, they had rough ports of megaman legends and resident evil 2, both of which didnt sell much. Rare was their biggest 3rd party developer and supplied about a 3rd of the best games on the system. They had some 3rd party support but it wasnt the peak of what the developers could do unlike on the playstation.
By the 16-bit era that underhandedness had been corrected.
The 68000 is absolutely the best processor in these. It's not even close. The slowdown in the snes is due to its extremely underpowered cpu. The snes won due to its very advanced graphics hardware... but in any game that required cpu crunch like Another World and Flashback the SNES gets housed.
@Jon Bad ports are bad ports no matter the system. And the SNES suffered from this as well at times, look at Super Ghouls n Ghosts, by all rights it should run better than it did on OG hardware.
But that doesn't mean the CPU of the SNES wasn't its weak point, not at all. The SNES CPU wasn't bad in theory, but it was too damned slow. It's why the most impressive games on the system often had to use add on chips, like the SA-1, which was basically the SNES CPU but running at 3x the speed.
Why this matters again, is that AW and Flashback are HEAVILY CPU dependant. They are generating polygons for the creatures and characters in the game, and that can't easily be pawned off onto the superior graphics hardware of the SNES.
The genises was very forward thinking, fought the good long fight despite being released 2 years prior to the SNES.
@@Vinicius-hs2rf If only they used that time to improve it, in just 1 month of its release Nintendo required additional hardware in Pilotwings, the DSP-1. If the SNES came with the DSP-1 built in, all future SNES games could have benefited from the additional performance.
What i remember to this day from the first time i saw a snes in a shop is the sound. when maro entered the cave area and the soundtrack got the underground echo
I never appreciated the megadrive musical capabilities until I was in my 40's and I started using emulators to revisit my 16-bit youth.
25:40 I've long wondered what if the consoles stayed 8-bit and just got faster and faster.
What if there was some fantastical 200MHz version of the 6502? What would the consoles have been built like, and what would the games be like?
from what i understand thats kinda what happened with computers, with all modern computers using x86 architecture, so nothing really would've changed graphics wise for consoles
Dont care who won commercially. These are both top tier consoles. That said overall Megadrive was better unless you're a jrpg nut.
@@lednails and also run n' guns and shoot em' ups, but yeah the library still wasn't enough to take out the SNES ultimately in both regions
@@lednails That's pretty damn false man. Megadrive was better for shoot em ups, run n gun, and action platformers. It was better for beat em ups too. Also Megadrive had groundbreaking titles like Herzog Zwei and Star Cruiser.
@@lednails I dont know what your issue is?
Given that the megadrive was basically last in almost every technical category (colours, levels on screen, ability to do transparency, etc) it's arguably more impressive that the mega drive managed to hold its own.
@@medes5597 Actually I don't think thats true though, I'm no expert but I think in ways it was more powerful than the Snes. Like theres things it could do that the Snes couldnt, Starcruiser for example I heard couldnt exist on the Snes but again no expert on the technicals. Also tbf it was two years older than the snes lol.
31:56 "Blast Processing" is mostly just used as a way for Genesis to display static images with more colours than it normally can by "blasting" extra colours to the screen as the image is being drawn, and it wasn't really used in any commercial Genesis games back in the day, being only recently properly figured out to actually work as originally evangelised. Those "Blast Processed" images on Genesis also take up all of the CPU resources and even stall the sound chip too, which is why it's really only good for static images.
The SNES' Colour Blasting has that beat regardless, as its standard 8bpp images can still look noticeably superior both in terms of colours and resolution, as Genesis has to have double wide pixels horizontally in order to display "Blast Processed" images like this. And, not only that, but the SNES can display a gorgeous 8bpp image on one of the backgrounds even during full standard gameplay if desired. SNES also has the Direct Colour mode that technically allows it to show from around 500 to more than 2200 total colours on-screen during actual gameplay too. It doesn't end up looking as good as the 8bpp examples just because of the more limited 11-bit colour range there on the Direct Colour background layer, but it's a higher number on paper if that's important to some people.
So, really, the Genesis' "Blast Processing" is absolutely trounced by the SNES' Colour Blasting in that regard.
In the Genesis/Mega Drive fan community, they're many amazing projects; Such as Star Fox, or F-zero all done in software. On the other hand, SNES fan projects look super ordinary to me. I've not seen anything that gave me pause. My opinions are based on my own programming experience. I have plenty of demo's on my channel that act as examples.
@@mdromtest3991 True, but that's not "Blast Processing" doing any of that, because "Blast Processing" is made up marketing gibberish, and its recent actual application of increasing colours in static images on Genesis pales in comparison to what SNES can do in its standard 8bpp modes with far nicer images and in higher resolution. And, unlike with Genesis where these "Blast Processed" images take up all the CPU resources and even stall the audio chip, the SNES can do that during full gameplay too.
Also, while the stock Genesis Star Fox demo is stunning--no sane person could deny that in all fairness--the 30+ years later Genesis' low-res, low-frame rate, cropped F-Zero demos pale in comparison to not only the original '90s full-screen 60fps F-Zero on a stock SNES that's even running in SlowROM at a paltry 2.68 MHz and a bonkers only 30% of the Genesis 7.68 MHz CPU speed, but also another actual '90s stock SNES game like Street Racer pushing up to four Mode 7 views at once with all the racers and full gameplay and stuff too.
And, maybe you haven't seen everything new on SNES, because the 512x448i resolution shmup on SNES that Kulor is making for the system is pretty dang impressive, Rex Nobilis, and technically impossible on Genesis at that 512x448i resolution. As just one example.
Now, I'm not saying the Genesis can't do some stuff better than SNES, because it absolutely can--just as SNES can do some stuff better than Genesis. I'm just saying Colour Blasting > "Blast Processing".
Also, none of your own demos are doing anything special. They're just pretty standard uses of the Genesis from what I can see, with just one or two typical backgrounds and pretty typical sprite affair for the system. I'm confident anyone who knows how to use the Genesis SGDK could create most of these tests in an afternoon or so each.
No offense. But you're the one who wanted to make a point of your own examples there, like they are presumably meant to be all technically impressive and blow away what is possible on SNES or something, so I just wanted to do a bit of a reality check on that. Just don't want anyone to get confused about what they're seeing there.
The SNES sound chip would evolve into the PS1 SPU and the PS2 SPU2. Ken Kutaragi the father of the PlayStation created the SNES sounchip.
The PS1 has 24 sound channels with 512KB of RAM, PS2 has 48 channels with 2MB of RAM. With the PS3 and PS4 Sony stopped using dedicated hardware for sound. Luckily with the PS5 Sony has the Tempest Engine for sound.
That's true :) i only learnt this today :)
You (most people for that matter) are not taking the timeline into account. In a time when graphics performance was close to doubling every 2-3 years, that is an important factor that needs to be talked about.
PC Engine = 1987
Mega Drive = 1988
SNES = 1990
So even though these consoles are considered the same generation, there's a three year gap between them.
When comparing the MD to the SNES with its two year gap, it's like comparing a RTX2060 to a RTX3060 and saying the 3060 is faster. In my opinion, the PCE and MD actually do surprisingly well considering their age.
The gap between the PCE and NES (4 years) is not that different to the gap between it and the SNES (3 years).
Note: In your Street Fighter II comparison 1:36 you've actually shown the games incorrectly relative to the other versions. As far as I'm aware, all versions of this game specifically use art that was drawn pre-squished to look proportionally correct when stretched to a 4:3 display, and they're all based on the SNES assets. It's rare that this is the case on SNES especially, where a game actually takes the 4:3 stretch into account, and similarly where the Genesis version is based on SNES resolution and such, but it is the case here. So, really, the only correct way to view all three versions is in 4:3, where the overall screen should be displayed at the exact same size and proportions for each, not in some version of a modern pixel perfect view specific to each console. Just a small but important thing there.
With the hardware specs so close to each other the choice can only be down to what system specific games you must have. Sonic and Streets of Rage made the decision for me.
They really were not though. The Genesis had a faster CPU, yet was beaten on everything else. I don't know why people want to say their in the same boat when it comes to hardware specs. The snes had a better soundchip, could display more colors, bigger sprites, produce a higher resolution. Both systems are good, they are not even close hardware wise.
F-Zero and Uniracers on SNES made even Sonic 2 and 3 seem a bit slow by comparison. I had both as a kid (even though I was born in 1994) and was a bit better at the Sonic games because (ironically) they were slower 😆
@@queercommunist it is not an acceptable answer. State you're case or go sit at the kids table. It's the way it is, I guess you're just gonna have to cope with a juice box and a nap.
@@yeahyeahwowman8099The SNES only has higher resolution in theory. The hi resolution mode was only ever used for menus, not gameplay. In practice, the Genesis was outputting gameplay.
As far as sound goes, the Genesis sound chip was quite capable, and a lot of great music came out on it. Hardly "trounced".
I know you're trying to do your best and part of that is reading the comments to get feedback and making adjustments. BUT... You can't let us trolls get to you so much man. You're doing a fine job producing a free product and nothing we say can change it or you in any significant way. It's all just the opinions of assholes. Take what's useful and chalk the rest up to us being idiots. Thanks, man and call the systems whatever you want... You mentioned it like 15 times seriously we don't matter that much, we're all wrong about everything all the time. Even now as I type this...
I think the TG16's larger number of simultaneous colors onscreen gave its games a distinct look and really set the visuals apart from the Genesis or even the SNES. I could even identify which version of Street Fighter II shown in this video was running on TG16, based on the colors alone... well, the colors and the fact that the onscreen prompt mentions the "run button" I guess. Anyway, I always thought that TG16 games tended to look more vibrant and colorful than either of the other 16 bit consoles, which is odd when you consider that the SNES had a pallette 32,768. A lot of the time though, I think the extended color palette of the SNES just resulted in developers choosing a lot of weird hideous pastels and other offbeat shades for the colors, whereas the TG16's palette was expanded just enough to provide a noticeably wider range of colors and could show nearly twice as many onscreen at once as the SNES.
I grew up with the SNES and the Turbo Grafx 16. A friend of mine even imported SF2 Champion Edition. I've never seen any game on Turbo Grafx 16 that actually pushes more colors than the most impressive SNES games. SF2 is no exception as their are literally side by side comparison videos showing how many colors their are on every stage and character for the SNES, Turbo Grafx 16, and Sega Genesis. The SNES displays significantly more colors than the Turbo Grafx 16 version by quite a bit.
@@davidaitken8503 Oh yeah? I hadn't realized that the SNES version displays more colors onscreen, but there's just something about the color choices in the TG16 version that allowed me to guess that version from the side by side comparison. I guess it might be the types of colors used, like I was saying in my original comment - whereas SNES games often had lots of exotic pastel shades and stuff, the TG16 had a more basic but nicely expanded set of colors compared to the Genesis.
Super NES is…What Genesisn’t
I think you were a bit off the mark with this one, sorry. You didn't give enough weight to the SNES's awkward sprite arrangement and the fact the graphics were planar (like the Amiga) and not chunky like the MD. Harder to manipulate, harder to decompress (carts like SFA2 had chips just to convert stored chunky into planar). And having written assembly for all of M68K, 6502 and 65816, I can tell you it's not as close as you've implied. If you're writing assembly, two of the biggest factors that make your life easier (and grander ideas feasible) are big and plentiful registers, and a good memory map layout. The MD has both of those things (many 32-bit registers, all work RAM and ROM available at optimum speed without banking), and the SNES has neither (fewer smaller registers, heavily reliant on banking for RAM and ROM, ROM access usually a bottleneck). SNES games get around it's underpowered CPU setup by surreptitiously doing less than comparable MD games - simpler logic, fewer active entities. 25% less screen area (in pixels) means you can do 25% less of everything and achieve the same density of 'life' in a game. The fact is a lot of SNES software isn't that ambitious in terms of processing complexity - not that much more going on than in top-end NES games. The graphics chip does all the heavy lifting in making it look 'next gen'. Sonic's game engine has been thoroughly dissected and it's a proper generational leap in ambition above something like Super Mario World, which only really has a mild 16-bit audio/graphics facade to elevate it above what the NES could do.
Shareopolis is a donut and doesn’t understand half the stuff he says.
This video is just to make Nintendo fans happy because he thinks it will make him more popular.
But if his viewership are British then they probably preferred the Mega Drive. Unless... there were secret SNES fans across the country, too scared to proclaim their love of a console that was largely shunned from public discourse for being for sissy’s.
Yes. The SNES has more colours but it has less of everything else. I don’t like the sound and I don’t think it’s superior.
But this is a touchy subject. The SNES modes and their features got removed from the wiki page, strangely.
There is very little information about the SNES hardware to be found anywhere on the internet.
It’s routinely given technical comparisons with the Mega Drive and it never loses apart from the cpu clock speed, which then gets refuted on account of the 6502 is more efficient.
The bias is outragouse.
What irks me most though is when Brits, who have no business liking the SNES pretend it was their system of choice to score browny points with a US audience they assume are mostly SNES fans. Despite the two consoles selling almost identical numbers.
Although the software tie ratio favours the Mega Drive 2:1. So there were around double the number of Mega Drive / Genesis games sold to SNES / Super Famicom games.
If you look at tech demos you can see how amazing both devices are when pushed to the limit and this without special chips.
Great video, is PC Engine CD vs Sega CD next?
Now that is a comparison I'd love to see, especially when it comes to sound quality. Both systems had multiple games with voice acting on them
Here's the honest truth I've learned over the last couple of years diving deeply into the capabilities of each console:
1. The stock PC Engine only really competes on a technical level [with the SNES mostly] if a game is stuck with one background layer, which is not as many games as you think with games not made for it specifically, because then its sprites are roughly on par with SNES. It can't match the Genesis in terms of sprites. And it simply cannot compete if a game is properly using more than one full background layer, as then it has to sacrifice sprites to fake the extra background layers, which puts it at a big disadvantage compared to the two other systems, and especially next to the SNES.
2. The stock Genesis has superior sprites capabilities to both the PC Engine and SNES, despite what some of the common on-paper specs might suggest, to the point that it can often use sprites to make up for the lack of background capabilities when compared to SNES and even do some things simply better there than the SNES, like put more larger sprites on-screen and per scanline before flicker and animate more sprites before requiring forced-blank black bars at the top and bottom of the screen, etc. The sprites on Genesis are easily the most versatile and the best of the three consoles when taken full advantage of. SNES can still have nicer colours on the sprites and use proper multi-coloured transparency with them though, so they can always look prettier.
3. The stock SNES has vastly superior background capabilities to the PC Engine and handily beats the Genesis across the board there too other than how much of the horizontal view you can see. It can can actually show both nicer and more colours than PC Engine [despite what some people might believe based on an unawareness of the full facts there] and way more and nicer colours than Genesis too, up to four times as many backgrounds as PC Engine and up to twice as many as Genesis, can have proper multi-coloured transparency effects on them, can have full-screen 60fps background scaling and rotation during full gameplay, can do superior column scrolling to the Genesis, can mix and match background modes down the screen, can show more beautiful static images, can use 8bpp and Direct Colour background visuals during actual gameplay, has a higher max resolution, etc.
I just want to be clear that those are not just my opinions but all facts of the respective technical capabilities and limitations of each system.
Stock audio is a bit more debatable, but I'd personally say it goes SNES > Genesis > PC Engine. Again personally, when all systems are being used properly there, I actually don't think the PC Engine and Genesis can really compete with the SNES' more realistic sampled sounds and its ability to even support Dolby Surround sound. But I'm sure many PC Engine and Genesis fans would debate me on that.
Overall, depending on what you're after, I'd say it goes like this in terms of technical capabilities: SNES ≈ Genesis > PC Engine.
In terms of stock controllers, we can pretend counting the Genesis 6-button controller isn't a cheat (and you could just as easily cheat and buy some vastly superior arcade stick on SNES and probably PC engine too if that's the case), or just admit that it clearly goes SNES > Genesis > PC Engine.
In terms of games, that's for each person to decide on a personal level (at least in terms of which you prefer and think are better, as SNES wipes the floor with the other two systems when it comes down to the size of the library). They each have some truly brilliant titles and are stronger than the others in certain categories, so take your pick. I personally put them like this though: SNES > Genesis > PC engine.
When it comes to music, I much prefer the Mega Drive. The SNES usually had too much reverb, making it sound muffled in comparison.
Silly TROLLBOT, you repeat tired words you pick up from the internet, but you don't know how to use them correctly or even understand what they mean.
It's not the reverb that makes it sound muffled, its mostly because samples take more space on the cartridge than some FM synth settings.
Many snes games actually have the entire soundtrack of the game stuffed in the SPC700 64KB memory at once, which means all the instruments the game will use (and sound effects) are packed densely in it, with very low sample rates that at least get stretched with some filtering.
But then there are late games that use the bigger cartridges that can offer unique set of instruments per song, or even a few games like earthworm jim 2 and tales of phantasia that swap the instruments in the sound chip memory while the song is playing to blow past the limit.
Now the mega drive generate all it's sounds (other than voices) on the fly, no samples stored, just settings, and settings that can be changed while the instrument is being played so you can have instruments with a lot of variation on the fly, which is for example why the MG/Genesis is just better at doing guitars (when done right, ie. not rock and roll racing)
Same here(though the muffled sound had to do with sample sizes, NOT reverb), plus it sounded very otherworldly to me, & well kid me loved space & aliens.
@Benjamin Jagun The fact that their are so few games that Sega fanboys can point to when claiming sound superiority pretty much proves why the SNES was vastly superior in sound.
@Benjamin Jagun Dude, you're a TROLLBOT I've already encountered before, so cut the generic, Sega fanboy, BS talking points, will ya. The SNES had literally twice as many sound channels to the Amiga's insufficient 4 and the SNES audio system was a massive leap forward from the FM synth used in the Genesis. It wasn't even close. That doesn't mean their weren't some excellent compositions on the Genesis, just as their are on the NES and Turbo Grafx 16. Those could be on the SNES. Not true with the other way around.
One thing about the audio I've heard, though I don't know how much of it is true, is that supposedly the Megadrive was harder to work with than the SNES in that aspect. I could definitely believe that, another saying about Megadrive soundtracks is that they fall into one of two categories: Absolute classic or absolute trash.
Yes, FM Synthesis can in theory produce almost any instrument sound authentically…, but it’s up there with rocket science in difficulty. A lot of developers therefore used the limited instrument sounds that came with audio development tools like GEMS.
It’s a shame this video didn’t show off the amazing music of games by Treasure and Konami, that showed how orchestral the Mega Drive could sound (beyond the more common EDM and twangy guitar sounds).
Additionally, if you plugged your Mega Drive into a stereo system (via the headphone jack) you could clearly hear the huge difference in frequency range; the Mega Drive could pump out some incredible bass frequencies.
Having made graphics for homebrew games for both the PCE and MD, I must say, all of those extra palettes on the PCE *Reeeeeally* come in handy... And I also personally find the PCE's wavetable synth MUCH easier to work with than the MD's FM synth, it's really not that hard to get the PCE to sound awesome despite the fewer sound channels! (Also the PCE's stereo is way better than the MD's)
I do love all three systems though, but I having said all that, the SNES is my favourite, and by a reasonably wide margin... Never worked on anything for it though, but without the kind of tools the MD and PCE have for homebrew it must be a pain... Oh well, I can't code anyway, I just do the graphics, and occasionally sound and music...
Looking back I find it remarkable SNES ended up with the DSP it did. It had full wavetable mixing, obviously limited by memory size per sample (which they got around to some effect in Earthbound music, and plenty more), but wavetable mixing didnt come to pc for literally 10 years (sans the little-used niche Amiga add in for the nerds that wanna argue), which is why the pc version of FF7 and 8 had midi instead of mp3. PC was reliant on CD audio for HQ music generally until this era, which was 1998! Snes could do it the whole time.
In the US it was SNES, Genesis, Turbo Grafx-16 but in Japan it was a different story with Super Famicom, PC Engine, and Mega Drive.
Either way, my top is PCE/Turbo. Loved my SNES, had fun with the Genesis, but the PCE library of games was unique, the quality of crossover titles was for the most part very solid, and the hardware did amazing things considering it’s limitations.
Well...that's really how it ended but not how it played out during the majority of the 16-bit generation. The Sega Genesis took a commanding lead of the 4th generation and held it for almost its entirety. So the field actually looked like this...
1989- 1. Genesis
2. TG-16
1990- 1. Genesis
2. TG-16
1991- 1. Genesis
2. Snes
3. TG-16
1992- 1. Genesis
2. Snes
3. Turbo Duo
1993- 1. Genesis
2. Snes
3. Turbo Duo
1994- 1. Genesis
2. Snes
1995- 1. Snes
2. No one
Addendum- Sega of Japan in their infinite wisdom decided to discontinue the wildly successful Sega Genesis in 1995. This gave Nintendo free reign as the only budget console available on the market. Nintendo won a battle it fought all by itself and had they still been contending with Sega I don't think they would have won anything...I left out the Neo Geo AES, CDi, Sega CD, 3DO, 32X,, Atari Jaguar, and Neo Geo CDZ so as not to muddy the waters.
@@Sinn0100 You are completely delusional. What Q-anon forum did you get that information from?
@@davidaitken8503
How did I come across this information? I lived through it but hey, thanks for playing!
@@Sinn0100 That simply isn't true. The SNES was ahead of the Genesis for a considerable portion of its' lifespan. The Japanese market in particular was as if the competition from the Turbo Grafx 16 and especially the Genesis didn't even exist. That is the main reason why the SNES got so many exceptional exclusives from 3rd parties.
@@davidaitken8503
Yeah....we're not talking about the Japanese market. We are talking about world wide sales. The Japanese market is a drop in the bucket compared to the US which still stands today as the largest in the industry. Sega owned the 4th generation until the beginning of 1995 when SOJ dropped support of the Genesis. Leaving the Snes as the only budget console in the entirety of North America. That doesn't even bring the European or UK markets into the equation because their support of Sega's 16-bit machine was huge.
Addendum- If you want to get twchnically the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive did actually win the 4th and do you know why? It was the leading console in Brazil and was still being produced/sold all the way up to 2007 (I think it was 2007). It was in the 2000's, that I know.
Very enjoyable video. Imo 1 thing should have been mentioned in this line up, and that is how these systems fare in their afterlife. Homebrew and even still nowadays how the support in this is per system.
honestly if your including the enhancement chips id argue the includements of both the turbo cd and the geneis's addons since they're also adding tech to the system.
Anyways, the Sega Virtua Processing Chip is much better that the SFX2.
@@nathleflutiste tru but i wish they used it more then once lol
@@charlesgreenberg6956 Sega of America thought the same, that is why they released the 32X (And I really like Virtua Fighter and Racing 32X). but yea, I understand your point. It just that at Sega, they have a different way to do things.
I actually had to stop your video to make this comment. The snes has more abilities then you know with sound. The snes can actually play pcm unimpressed audio. The problem is the no game cart at the time could hold 700mb to 4gigs of audio back in the 1990s without it being way to expensive for each game. If you was to patch a msu1 mod to a game and put that patched rom on an everdrive the snes will be able to play all the pcm files no problem. The snes is also able to play fmv video files. Both the pcm and fmv abilities were built in the snes because of the cd add on that was in development with Sony. But because the cd add on wasn't used both features just sat dormant unit some random person found out the snes could do both those things. Ppl have made some msu1 mods for some games that have both the pcm audio and fmv video files for said game. One of those games is zelda a link to the past. The great thing about it being able to read pcm files means it can read any type of music that you stream now say on Spotify just so long as you put it in the pcm format. And for those that might not pcm file have zero compression it's one of the reasons why some msu1 mods hit 4 gigs because that said game has so much different songs in it and each one is in its purist form it can be in. This is just a little secret about the snes that most don't know about. And thanks to the modding community that has started this project they are trying to make msu1 mods for every snes game.
I think you'll find it's called the Seg Amiga Drive.
Great video, even as a Mega Drive fan I still think your points are very fair. You missed a beneficial hardware feature of the Mega-Drive, backwards compatibility. Okay, useless nowadays but at release in the US Super Nintendo faced severe criticisms for not having backwards compatibility with the NES, while the Mega Drive required a cartridge adapter to allow it to play the Master System cartridges and cards.
I think the SNES, technologically speaking, was amazing and a better way to approach things at the time, such clever engineering. Something I wonder is: if a Mega-Drive game ran at the lower 256 x 224 like the SNES, would it have additional processing power overhead available to do more impressive things, like scaling, than compared to when running at the normal 25% higher pixel count of 320 x 224?
@Jôn I knew some games ran at 256 x 224 but not which ones, so thank you for the list. Do you know if by reducing the resolution by 25% if the MD gained any noticeable performance increase? I mean it makes sense to me if it does, but the architecture might mean it is negligible.
I ask because the SNES renders 25% less pixels / tiles than the MD, so that might help it keep up on the performance side of things.
I think the Mega Drive using backwards compatibility with the Master System hurt its audio capabilities and they should’ve just used the FM chip that was in the MS in Japan.
Spot on! Great video man! I never owned a TG16 but I have emulated it for years and can appreciate it as a decent "3rd place console." However I grew up a Sega fan and have always been aware of the snes. The battle between the two was extremely close. Racing, shmups, and sports games usually play better on the Genesis, but more games look and sound better on the snes. I own both now and can see the advantages of each. Some publishers really chose a side. EA for example chose Sega. There are more EA games on the genesis/megadrive, and games like Madden play better on sega also. If someone is really into RPGs, then the snes is an easy choice. There are high quality choices and more of them on snes. Overall it just varies what you want to play.
My view is that Sega were the clear winner early on, but its architecture simply could not keep up when the overall trends in gaming shifted. Action-heavy arcade style games were popular in the first half of this particular console generation, and in this genre the Genesis/MD clearly dominated. When RPG and exploration focused games (such as Chrono Trigger and Super Metroid, for example) became more popular, the Sega console seemed to lack the nuance of the SNES. While I am a fan of both consoles, it's obvious that the SNES ended its life with a bang while the Genesis/MD ended with a whimper.
A lot of that was due to Japan abandoning the console, plus a bitter Sega having failed to teach their western partners anything about game design...can you imagine DKC and StarFox without Miyamoto's influence?
You can say that "only" a few games used enhancement chips on the SNES, but the tech was there if developers wanted it and common enough. It included ARM chips that were 4-5x the clock speed of the main CPU on the Megadrive/PCEngine, so it's really hard to have those systems come out on top. Like with the NES before it, developers were comfortable adding in additional on that hardware, and it was done more often enough that the chips were a little cheaper. The Sega chip just cost too much and it never got the widespread use of the SNES's offerings, so it was never going to be a good option.
The SNES also used a lot of custom hardware in the console itself. Sega mostly used off the shelf parts from a few years earlier, so it ends up being able to do less and cost more to assemble. And addon after addon did not do Sega any favors either.
Neither Sega or Nintendo are capable of manufacturing microchips. The Mega Drive is based on the Sega 16 arcade machine but limited in memory and no scaling chip. The big VDP chip is co-designed with Yamaha and contains a Master System mode and it’s PSG sound generator as well as the DMA unit which is part of an integrated circuit connecting it with the cartridge and memory.
The design of the vdp is taken from a Texas Instruments video chip which redesigned for use in the SG1000 and Master System and Mega Drive and possibly even the Saturn VDP1 shares it’s heritage.
The SNES cpu is designed by Ricoh (based on a WDC design used in the Apple 2GS) and includes the DMA unit within the chip (die) as well as IO for the controllers.
The video system was also co-developed with a hardware company although I don’t know who. Possibly Toshiba or Ricoh.
Neither company has facilities to manufacture microchips or pcb’s.
Most technically advanced for 2D gaming back in that era was SNES???? Neo Geo clears its throat. I rest my case.
Yes Neo Geo has a wopping 24mhz 24bit GPU.
@Jôn fair points about the SNES graphics capabilities…. However Genesis is NOT 4 bits per pixel, it is 6 bits per pixel, which equals 64 colors at once… technically Genesis is limited to 61 colors out of that, due to color zero being transparent and having 1 backdrop color. Keep in mind Genesis had shadow and highlight mode which could triple that number of colors on screen in a limited way… so it wasn’t that big of a difference for on screen colors. Overall color pallet the SNES wins with 32,768 vs 512 for Genesis. Before declaring SNES superior hardware than Genesis, consider the Genesis had a processor that was twice as fast as the SNES. Again, Neo Geo laughs at all of this.
@Jôn I believe the transparency you are referring to is actually called color math…. It wasn’t true transparency
@Jôn I already ordered a pair of x-ray vision glasses from the back of Boys Life magazine. In 6 to 8 weeks, I’ll have true transparency!!!
Genesis had a better processor and resolution than SNES, but SNES's much larger color palette meant that most games looked better on it. Though some Genesis developers did very well within its limitations.
Haha... Strip Fighter.
Actually, the only plus on SNES is the color palette, I still have both consoles.
SEGA kept the promise of delivering arcades at home.
Shooters that had almost no slow-downs.
Beat em ups that had more than 4 sprites on screen.
Arcade resolution that you could port arcade titles.
At the end is personal taste though, great video as always.
@@Vinicius-hs2rf I don't think that there is a match with the 68K. In real life (games) 68K is faster.
"If we're going to allow enhancement chips, the advantage of the genesis disappear", kinda a biased statement to make, considering the Genesis had even more powerful enhancement chips available... Even if not widely used (I'll never forget paying $90 for Virtua Racing... and people complain about $70 games today).
It's crazy how gamers perceived prices today. So many cheap and f2p games and they moan.
I have been looking at oscilloscope views of the systems various sound chips. I'm a massive nerd and I accept that.
I may be wrong but it looks like the Snes can kind of do 10 channels in hardware as it has 2 echo channels that play independently. They are echo's or wave distortions of another sound effect or sample but I think they can kind of be used as extra channels albeit less versatile ones.
The megadrive can make one of the FM channels ( i think channel 3 ) split into 3 Fm channels. The caveat being you must use any of 8 pre-programed waveforms that were built into the YM 2612. So I think technically the Sega can do 12 channels of sound but many of them are quite limited.
I may be wrong and I apologize if I am. Otherwise I think its quite interesting :)
Yeah, it's gets a bit messy. Where do you draw the line? For instances, when it comes to PCM.. you can have a sample that's three different octaves (or notes) as that sample (think of a chord).. so now you more 'channels' than hardware channels. The SNES echo buffer can be exploited, but it doesn't have pitch(frequency) or volume control. It's convoluted and not easy to abuse it - but it's been proven. Yeah, the 2612 can split the channel into single carriers. It can also soft-mix multiple PCM channels into a single 8bit PCM stream. On PCE, you can pair two channels for 10bit output, and soft-mix multiple PCM streams as well. So it's like.. where does one draw the line? Starting with number of hardware channels is a good starting point, but it's not the end point.
@@TurboXray Thanks, that was an excellent explanation.
Genesis channel 3 has a mode which allows the individual operators to be tuned out of scale where they are otherwise x2 or x3 of an octave in order to be making the same note.
Channel 6 in pcm mode can actually be split up to four channels (interleaving) but limiting the sample frequency. 32Khz is the maximum. So you can have two at 16Khz or four at 8Khz. Useful for drum samples or overlapping sound effects.
@@iwanttocomplain Thank you for explaining that.
I have to admit, I still do not understand the channel 3. Once it gets into the mathematics of octaves, im beat :)
Many thanks though. I will go research , so I understand better.
Is the division of 32khz into 4x 8 done through software, similar to how the Amiga can run 7 channels if the Cpu has the time to do so?
@@leighbyford635 yes you need to write a software driver and load it into the 8KB sram. In fact no sound will happen unless you write a driver/sequencer program and write it into the sram. The Z80 can then handle the rest. Actually I think you can probably put your driver into the main ram if you want to not use the Z80 if you feel it’s not fast enough. But then you can’t use the PSG channels.
The technique is called multiplexing. Which mean it plays a sample for each of the divided channel in sequence, one at a time. So by lowering the sample frequency of each channel, your still using the maximum 32Khz but splitting it into different channels.
I think the Amiga’s 4 channel sound can be split into 8 using this same technique but only in a standalone application like Octamed as it uses a lot of cpu.
So are we basing this off the PAL region or the NTSC region with the specs? I'm assuming NTSC.
The best console generation in my opinion, each system have an impressive catalogue of great games. My choice goes to the Sega Genesis for all those wonderful action games...contra hard corps, gunstar heroes, Shinobi 3, adventures of Batman and Robin, rocket knight adventure, streets of rage, thunder force IV, musha aleste, battle mania 2 and so many more. Not to mention the latest releases like xeno crisis.
But the SNES had an even better library when it comes to action games:
Star Fox, Castlevania 4, Super Ghouls 'n' Ghosts, ActRaiser, Smash TV, Hagane, Contra 3, Mega Man X+2, Super Star Wars 123, Super Turrican 2, Sunset Riders, Cybernator, Metal Warriors, Rendering Ranger, Super Turrican (released a year earlier than Sega version), Space Megaforce, R-Type 3, Macross Scrambles Valkyrie, UN Squadron, Axelay, Gradius 3, Turtles in Time, Batman Returns, King of Dragons, Ninja Warriors, Knights of the Round...
Granted, the Genesis is now getting better games : P
@@madspunky well,not for me. I prefer Mega Drive
@@AdrianoSnake For which reasons, if I may ask?
@@madspunky well i have the two original here and i prefer Mega Drive over the Snes. Even with less colours i prefer the sharper picture with RGB on a crt,soundtracks like Streets of Rage,Sonic & Knuckles, Thunderforce iv etc... Generally more fast paced games. Lots of reasons and that's enough for my preference... But i also play Super Nintendo a lot.
@@AdrianoSnake Yeah, the Genesis has a sharper fidelity which I also enjoy, including the sounds.
However, what do you think of the SNES's great rocking soundtracks like MMX1, Killer Instinct, Top Gear, F-Zero, Plok, Super Adventure Island, and Star Fox? I mean, the Genesis has its fair share of great soundtracks, and I think the Megadrive has a sharpness that goes well with rock/techno music (MUSHA is my favorite!), but when I do a tally, I can't help but think that the SNES has just as many great rocking OSTs, but also symphonic OSTs (like Chrono Trigger, ActRaiser, Castlevania 4, DKC FF6, Secret of Mana, etc.), something very rare on Sega's console.
As for fast paced games, again, I thought the SNES had just as many. There's Sonic of course and the titles you mentioned (and of course Gunstar Heroes!), but on the SNES there's F-Zero, Run Saber, Smash TV, Pocky & Rocky, Hagane, MMX1+2, Super Star Wars, Super Turrican 2, Contra 3, Joe & Mac1+2, Space Megaforce, R-Type 3, UN Squadron, Axelay, Super EDF, Turtles in Time, TMNT Tournament Fighters, Top Gear, Super Bomberman...
I just don't really see how the Megadrive having "more" fast paced games would be a reason when the Super Nintendo has so many. Am I neglecting something?
My personal opinion on what should call the consoles: either Super Famicom or Super Nintendo are fine, good enough names; TurboGrafx 16 and PC Engine are both bad names for a console, but I prefer TGX16 desspite it being harder to pronounce, because the console isn't a "PC" nor an "Engine"; Between Mega Drive and Genesis, I definitely chose the first, becausse MD sounds like the name of an actual console, and "Genesis" to me is the name of a 70s prog rock band.
I agree with your assessment.
Your failure is to analyze hardware capabilities SEPARATELY. Remember that everything needs to go through the processor bottleneck. Snes ricoh would have great difficulty processing many of its technical capabilities at the same time. Many snes games have absurd slowdowns due to this. So programmers are forced to make sacrifices in colors or sprites or resolution, etc. The Genesis' much faster motorola processor allowed usability of many of its technical capabilities while in play; allowing more cool effects to appear on screen simultaneously; but still very colorful, with many sprites, with great resolution, clear sound, running several parallaxes at the same time, without slowdowns. That's what makes Genesis beat Snes.
Best layperson friendly comparison I’ve come across.
Gonna have to hard disagree with you on this one. Especially considering that people who currently make software for these machines seem to almost universally prefur the megadrive/genesis due to the more powerful raw performance on the base machine. Leading to the MD/G having a massive homebrew scene with new full games still coming out on a regular basis
Honestly comparisons like this always seem to be stacked in favour on the snes do to the snes being built like a box of tricks being able to out do other machines at any specific task once at a time. But when you're actually making software for these machines (which I've been learning to do recently), on the snes you constantly have to pick and choose what tools you want to use and you're limited on how many you can use compaired to the MD/G you usually have access to the full power of the machine at any given time
That being said there are still some advantages to making games for the snes. Due to having more on screen colors you have the option for more realistic color gradiants compaired to the more stylistic gradiants of the MD/G. Then there's the very different sound hardware which is completly subjective but important for kind of atmosphere you would want for your game and then there's the specific tricks the snes can do such mode 7 which the MD/G can do in software (search "mega drive mode 7" on youtube ) but just not as well as the snes's hardware
Also not sure why you didnt include the neogeo as it could easily wipe the floor with any of these machines. It's biggest problem being it's price
Also NEOGEO was mostly limited to fighting games as far as I know, many of which were arcade ports. With the price it feels more like a specialty system or something for enthusiast.
I think one of the main reasons why there's more homebrew for the genesis is that you can program in C to it.
The large number of 32bit registers and absurd orthogonality of the 68000 makes it quite a good target for C compilers, which means not having to deal with assembler (specially snes assembler that is kinda a pain in the rear at times)
And then there's that SGDK kit that is just awesome and can pull absurd things such as playing three PCM audio samples at the same time without distortion.
I'm going to have to agree with Dan. The reason Genesis homebrew is so prevalent is because SGDK is really, really good and convenient and uses C instead of assembler. You can make a game much more quickly that way as you can see by the numerous homebrews. As soon as someone makes a similar development environment for the SNES I will jump ship immediately. The only thing I will miss is the YM2612, which I have grown to love.
@@dan_loup @Brunch Have a looking into PVSnesLib, You may be suprised
It's clear that favoring the SNES like they did, trying to be concise, but always falling back to his personal preferences in each segment. They also seem to be all Nintendo as you can see from the gameplay footages, not only on this video but previous ones too, where he could barely move Lara Croft around in Tomb Raider II. So yes, a 90's SNES fan kid making a video to show his love for the machine.
I was lucky to have an older brother who played and brought a lot of video games back then, so we had the chance to play NES/SMS, MD/SNES and Sat/PS1, which one do you prefer? I prefer each and every one of them, specially from that era where each game, even if most shared exact same names, they were different experiences, from the hardware and developer sides.
a 6502 at that speed is likely the technically fastest.
Complaint: when talking about sound you don't _play_ any of it until the Secret of Mana part. Like, would do well for you to be quiet for a few seconds and let us hear what the machine sounds like, yanno?
people say that movies are 60% audio. star wars would end up feeling like a B movie if it didn't have its epic score for example.
SNES focusing on the sampling, which would essentially be how most music is made till this day, is honestly probably the biggest deciding factor for many.
likewise, people that love how FM synthsesis sounds is probably why they choose Genesis over SNES.
I totally agree, that why I have chosen the SNES as the platform to port some of my favorite arcade games that were never ported to any system👌
Well, I very much look forward to seeing your work there. :)
Good luck with that minefield of the SNES architecture 😂😂😂
Pretty good until you starting blathering on about snes at end.
The PC engine was out in Japan 3 years before the the super famicom at which point it was competing against the famicom or NES, and did quite well so you can't really say it's the distant third
Parasol Stars and Rainbow Islands are two of the best games on the TG16. It always seemed to me that the TG16 was similar in many ways to the NES, just with more colors.
Frankly, cartridge size held back all 3 of these systems far more than their hardware.
Sega's DSP was far too expensive to put into cartridges. Virtua Racing ( a ONE HUNDRED Dollar cartridge) got away with it because it was a 1 Dollar arcade machine. Virtua Racing could really munch money. I remember I was with a couple of friends in a mall when Virtua Racing was brand new in the arcade and we each blew like 20 bucks in a few minutes on this machine.
MAYBE they could have got the price down by continuing to use it and ramp up production numbers. But we will never know.
Svp dsp was was paid and licensed by Samsung. That's why the chip is so expensive. Had sega created a risc based dsp or coprocessor, virtua racing will be less than $100
@@maroon9273 That's like saying if pigs had wings, they could fly. The same was true with Nintendo. They didn't create their own DSPs either. I know one of them was made by Argonaut Games.
Frankly, I think the SVP was built around the requirements of an advanced 3d arcade system and so this limited budget considerations in a way that the SFX and other enhancement chips did not.
Virtua Racing for the Genesis is absolutely amazing for being on a Genesis.
@@tarstarkusz even sega could've asked Hitachi to create a risc dsp core chip since they partnered with Sega for the saturn. Nintendo had 3rd party developers (ie araugnaut, capcom: hitachi, hudson: epson, and nintendo like zicoh/working design via snes manufacturing parts sa1, sharp (super game boy via gameboy hardware), ninetendo with sdd1, and nec with the dsp chips, seta's st010, st011. Last, arm from seta for its st018 using the armv3 cpu.
@@maroon9273 Do you know if the SVP is custom? If so, to what degree (meaning an all new entirely custom chip or modification to an existing chip)?
There is really nothing on the SNES that I know of that approaches the complexity of Virtua Racing. It's full screen fully 3d without any mode 7 or the high color count helping to make it look great.
Though I don't actually know, I'm guessing the SVP chip is way advanced of what Nintendo was putting in SNES cartridges at the time.
It's a shame they didn't continue to use it. The price comes down. By late in the Genesis' life, they probably could have got them much cheaper and that's besides being able to place much larger orders by using it in multiple games.
I don't know who fabbed chips for either one of them. They seem to have multiple sources and not single sourced. If Sega had flat out owned or licensed with manufacturing allowed, they could have also produced it much cheaper if they had their own fab capable of whatever process was used for the chip.
I just looked it up, it was published in August of 92. It's hard to fathom that it's been 30 years!!!
@@tarstarkusz not custom, it is Samsung dsp. It is called the SSP1601 chip and Sega bought its license from Samsung. Even with the svp high cost. Sega would've never lose money like they did with the 32x add-on. Which Sega sold it at a loss everytime someone purchase the add-on and its free games from the coupons.
I think of the Madden football games as the Rosetta Stone to understanding the differences in practice. The SNES versions had brighter colors, and each player had his correct skin tone, but in most cases they ran like they were trying (poorly) to imitate the Genesis versions, which ran more smoothly, but all players had the same skin tone (the Genesis' color count), and behind the end zone was mostly a sad abyss with sub-8-bit-looking fans unnaturally far away from the field, as opposed to the SNES where the fans behind the end zone looked great in the stands, properly placed and human-looking, even displaying fan-made signs personalized for each team (like "team of the 90s" at San Francisco's Candlestick Park, etc.).
The interesting thing here is that I think the Genesis' visuals could certainly be tweaked slightly and the SNES versions could have been much better optimized for that system too. So, it would be interesting to see what both systems would be capable if actually pushed to their full limits. I mean, what could Sega do to polish those games on Genesis further, and what could Nintendo or Rare do to polish those games on SNES further to make sure we really were getting the best of the best in both cases. . . .
As far as I'm concerned, you can say that everything was better with the SNES than with the MegaDrive. But when it comes to the sound: no, nobody convinces me. That usually just sounded awful with the original SNES. Nintendo already knew why they didn't install a headphone output like Sega. Sadly i never tested a real PcEngine so i can't say anything about the soundsystem there.
But SEGA, as sayed in the video, have bin the most clevered of the area. Using two very well known cpu's at the time, using a common resolution of other M68K based Systems, using a very well known Soundchip of the time. This made it very easy vor developers to port there games to and from the megadrive to other systems.
Since the SNES uses sound samples a developer can theoretically sample the Megadrive or TG sounds and come out with something close it them, although at a lower bit rate.
Oh yes, this divvy said the SNES can replicate any sound, with it's 4bit adpcm samples in 64K of memory. You realise the Genesis is a synthesizer which outputs 9bit sound at 54Khz frequncy. A synthesizer instrument can change, whereas a sample is simple playback of a recording. In music engineering, the adsm envelope controls four stages of a note. The sustain portion loops the middle of the sample. A sampler on it's own it limited in terms of the potential to control the sound. It can only alter the pitch and volume. So if you made a note on the Genesis that was 10 seconds long and changing the whole time, it would be completely impossible to replicate on the SNES 4bit sound chip.
The only way to reproduce clear sound on the SNES is to take that loop point and shrink it as much as possible. If you have too many samples loaded in at once, they must reduce the quality of the sample.
Not comparing apples with apples. Megadrive was out well before snes. In fact over two years.
At age 44 the sega genesis will always be a remembers piece of videogame entertainment system
I've said this before and I'll say it again - the Super Nintendo was overrated.
Now don't get it twisted, the console definitely smoked its competition in terms of raw numbers/capability, but we didn't really start to see what it could do until mid way to near the end of the console's life.
In my opinion, Sega's inhouse development pushed every drop of juice out of the Mega Drive as early as it could and gave us some truly original and innovate pieces of software.
Sega's IP's and launch line up, especially in the first 3 years, was much stronger than Nintendo's in my opinion.
Sega actually dared to double down on 16-BIT before everyone else, whereas you felt the PC Engine didn't really do that (it technically wasn't 16-BIT) and Nintendo only came out with the SNES because they were forced to. If Sega hadn't have pushed anything, Nintendo would probably have rinsed the 8-BIT NES for another few years. You could just tell because they released Super Mario Bros 3 on the system and charged £54.99 UK for it, when the game was never supposed to be produced on the system in the first place, it was meant for the next console.
Super Mario World looked rushed to me, all you have to do is look at that crappy intro sequence. It just looks like a weak tech demo to me, made into a full game. Sonic absolutely smoked it in terms of showcasing the leap from 8-BIT to 16-BIT, Super Mario World just looked like a really gimmicky slight upgrade on super Mario Bros 3 with prettier colours. Depending on who you ask, especially staunch Mario fans, many have suggested Super Mario Bros 3 was actually the better game.
AM2, Team Shinobi and Sonic Team absolutely smoked all the early SNES stuff in my opinion.
The Mega Drive was worth more than the sum of its parts, there's just so much that goes into producing great games than just raw on paper numbers.
That's just me anyway.
Whatever you want to believe I’ll respect it but I believe the snes is the goat of home consoles
Super Mario Bros 3 was a far better game than Super Mario World. SMB3 is probably my favorite game ever while I just dont find SMW very fun. Also Japan only but StarCruiser was a great example of the Megadrive pushing the technical boundaries far beyond what the SNES did.
@@stevesteve0521 The SNES wasn't even close to being the best home console, in any era.
The console was full of gimmicks and much of its load was carried by third party developers, which deserves no kudos in my opinion. Sega's inhouse development teams were far superior to Nintendo's in my opinion.
Yeah sure, the SNES produced some really good games near the end of its life, but the quality that came was expected of it by that point, they weren't really pushing the mantle in moving 16-BIT gaming on to the next generation with any significance the way Sega did. Sega laid all the foundations for 16-BIT and Nintendo came and added their little bells and whistles on at the end. Considering how much longer they had to work on their machine, their challenge was pretty anaemic but for the third party devs propping them up and some shady ports on the Mega Drive, which indies have shown recently could have been done much better at the time.
Nintendo were happy to get trounced for those first few years of the Mega Drive's launch because they were so greedy charging £50+ for 8-BIT games and knew their die hard followers (or rather their parents) would go ahead and pay the mark up no matter what.
The best home console ever rests between the Saturn and the Dreamcast for me. My personal favourite was the Saturn (geared for Jap imports), the Dreamcast is a close second.
Both consoles were producing things the mainstream simply had no clue about nor were ready for. The libraries are going for as much as $2,000 per title now in some cases - that is telling you something....
@@Longlostpuss Sounds good, good to know your opinion, I’ll stick with mine
@@Longlostpuss I’m a huge fan of the Saturn as well, the game library with the imports is just unbelievably great, I’m hoping games like princess crown and suikioden would get English translations like how the entire shining force 3 and grandia did so I can play them fully. Saturn is definitely up there for me, the 8 button Japanese/model 2 North America controller is probably my favorite controller of all time, the the sheer amount of fantastic fighting games and shoot ‘em ups on the Saturn make it a must have for anyone into retro games in my opinion. Surprisingly I don’t love the Dreamcast as much as the Saturn despite it arguably having more heavy hitters in the fighting game and shoot ‘em up department but I think that has to do with the Dreamcast controller just being mediocre to me. The d pad just was too stiff and I didn’t understand the point of downgrading from 8 buttons in the Saturn to 6 buttons on the Dreamcast. The vmus although they were a great concept and very innovative, they really didn’t store all that much memory on it and it sucked that there were some games that I just had to buy the regular memory card for just to save them. I guess the bigger thing the Dreamcast had for me at the time that was so much better than the Saturn was the sports game which I absolutely loved but those aren’t games I’m going to go back and play like I did when I was playing at the time of their release. I remember getting the total control 3 back in like 2005 and I was finally able to really enjoy the Dreamcast more since I was able to play games with a Saturn controller. To sum it up I still like the Dreamcast library of games and the fact that atomiswave arcade ports from 2006 are able to run on the Dreamcast 1998 hardware tells us just how way ahead of its time the hardware on that console had but I just like the Saturn and what it offers as a whole better
In the end it only comes down to the games you can only really compare based on the games, and the fact is it was far more common to find fast, smooth playing shoot'em up games on the PC engine and the Genesis, so no the SNES is not the clear cut winner in all regards, if anything Nintendo went with underpowered hardware considering the rapid advancement of computer technology and the console was released a few years after the other two
Developers using cheaper SlowROM cartridges is largely the cause of that rather the underlying SNES console. For example, almost every SNES shmup that suffers from slowdown is artificially crippled by these cheaper cartridges and running in SlowROM at 70% of the console's full CPU speed. Even then, look at a game like Rendering Ranger R2 running at a paltry 2.68 MHz on SNES, which is a whopping 70% slower CPU speed than the Genesis and PC Engine, and 30% slower than even the Master System, and I think you can see what the stock SNES is capable of in the right hands (especially in the shmup sections). Same with other SlowROM games like Super Smash TV, Parodius Da!, and Super Aleste as another few examples. I think the SNES' CPU is a lot more capable than many people have led many other people to believe in recent times.
68000 is a much better, more advanced and faster CPU. Fake performance advantage of 6502-derived CPUs disappears after you understand that all code and data they process moves 8 bits at a time, instead of 16 on 68000 and in addition to that 68000 has many 32-bit registers so data doesn’t even need to be moved to/from CPU as often as with 6502/65816. Z80 is more powerful than 6502 for these reasons too, except that it has 8-bit bus, obviously. More regs less memory accesses, more powerful instructions requiring smaller volume of code for many tasks..
@@Vinicius-hs2rf then you don’t understand what I wrote. 68k requires more cycles but also does more with less instructions and normally has higher clock speeds. Any code to execute, any data to process moves through 8-bit bus on 65816. And it doesn’t have many registers, so the variables that could live in CPU registers on 68k, often need to be repeatedly read or written, byte at a time, on 65816. You need more instructions to express the same algorithm on 65816. These extra instructions will also be read byte at a time, wasting clock cycles.
Sure, you can add one register to another repeatedly faster on 65816 to get higher bogus MIPS. But *useful* code often works faster on 68k.
I found your channel recently and have enjoyed it immensely.
May I ask about the meaning of your channel’s name? On the face of it, the name simply means “Shar’s city.” Is there more to it?
In the background comparison, it should said that the Megadrive was able to simulate the mode 7 with software programming. There were actually various things it can do this way.
About the sound capabilities comparaison, well if you wanted to be fair, you would have give each console the same amount of time for displaying what it can offer. For example you could have played a bit of Street of Rage themes, that has some of the best soundtrack of the Megadrive.
Great video, I've owned/own all three of the devices over the decades, recently reduced myself to the PCE Mini though to streamline my focus though. I think calling them comparable is a little misleading, yet not, it's odd, because realistically raw clock speed of the Gen/MD aside, the SNES slammed them largely otherwise. What really got me was saying the PCE struggled, in its home market it throttled the Famicom out of first for a few years and Sega was laughable there, they never stood a chance against the other two. The PCE is a wonderbox hybrid, sure it's partly 8bit yet the system could do better visuals, better color(and more color), better audio, just overall performance OVER the Genesis, and it was a good year older hardware. The fact it could keep up better in lush visuals with the SNES than the Genesis speaks volumes. I really enjoyed your technical breakdown, it's why I continue to watch your stuff, you're fair, don't spit out sad reruns for clicks, and contribute some value in a sea of attention seekers.
I do enjoy the care on audio, it is subjective, so much it almost deserves exceptions, but you can't go there either really. SNES had this near technically CD quality 33khz sampled audio output, it would utterly blow you away when someone put the right effort into the work, it was a generation ahead almost in that respect. The other two, chip tune generators basically, traditional audio with arcade style roots, but strangely again, once more the Sega unit was so watered down compared to their own comparable arcade hardware it went into this oddly usually tinny, buzzing, muffled mess in most the titles...yet then you have the PCE audio which largely just smeared Sega into the mud, amazing clean audio that didn't get into those defects. PCE was peak chiptune for that generation of home consoles, just amazing work.
Your assessment was on point. Both the SNES and Turbo Grafx 16 generally had better looking and sounding games and they completely creamed the Genesis in Japan which resulted in far more support from the best developers in the world.
@Benjamin Jagun I've heard all of those Genesis games. Have you heard Air Zonk, Soldier Blade, Super Star Soldier, Aero Blasters, Jackie Chan's Action Kung Fu, Ninja Spirit, etc.? As for graphics, that shadow/highlight mode gets brought up all the time by Sega fanboys that don't understand how limited it truly is. Prove me wrong. Show me these mysterious games that supposedly sound and look better than the best Turbo Grafx 16 and SNES games.
PC engine having better sound than the mega drive don’t make me laugh. The PC engine has great sound but only when it’s games are exclusive like bomber man 94 but lay off the drugs if you’re gonna be telling me that the PC engine has better audio done a dedicated 16-bit console the PC engine is 8 bit not 16 bit.
@@davidaitken8503 I’ve already mentioned the games that look and sound better than the SNES and PC engine games. There is no way the SNES could do a game like streets of rage and revenge Shinobi golden ax and Gauntlet your ignorance is showing you just expose yourself as an ignorant fanboy 😂😂
@@Adamtendo_player_1 Try harder, TROLLBOT.
Back in the '90s an argument could be made for either one, but today I'd say that the Genesis/Mega Drive is clearly superior. The games that the SNES excelled at, such as the pseudo-3D stuff using Mode 7 or large, graphics-heavy RPGs were done better by later systems, but for the kind of fast, arcade-style 2D arcade-style games the Genesis is still often your best option unless you're going to spend crazy amounts of money on a Neo Geo or even crazier amounts on arcade JAMMA boards.
The example I like to use is that the SNES had Super Mario Kart, which was a great game in its time, sure, but has had a lot of sequels and derivatives that outclassed it in the years since, while the best Genesis games like Streets of Rage II are often still at the top of their genres to this day. The Genesis represented the absolute peak of a particular era in gaming, while the SNES provide a glimpse into a future that has already come and gone.
EXACTLY.
The SNES did not have an answer to many Mega Drive IP's whereas I think Sega for the most part had an answer to everything Nintendo put out.
Only in the multiplat war did Sega lose, that's the only reason Nintendo won out in the end, just by sheer brute force in the numbers game.
I'm team Megadrive but Streets of rage ii is one title i dont get the hype for, especially now since it's easier to emulate arcade beat em up titles which I think were often far better. In terms of action platformers though Megadrive is still king especially with Treasures output.
I never appreciated the megadrive musical capabilities until I was in my 40's and I started using emulators to revisit my 16-bit youth.
My preference is the mega drive. I prefer it sound while I do like this Nintendo it’s audio hasn’t aged nearly as well as the mega drives in my opinion and I’m talking about Japanese developed games pacifically that aged very well for the mega drive.
A person with Mario pfp and Nintendo name prefers Genesis over SNES? Oh boy finally
The SNES was about 10 years ahead of its time when it came to sound. Imagine what the hardware could've done with a faster CPU and more RAM.
Ehh, the amiga came out in 1985...
It sounded a lot better even though its got half the channel count
The S-SMP is really only an evolutionary improvement over the wavetable sampling of the PC-Engine's HuC6280, and the Sega peripheral units had it beat in only a few years. The Sega CD had (besides Redbook CD audio) the Ricoh RF5C164 which had the same PCM capabilities as the S-SMP, that could be combined with the MD's FM synth; and the 32X had the QSound Virtual Audio chip, which was technically and conceptually far more sophisticated than the SNES' audio chip.
@Jon all of Neo Geo's RAM chips are fast SRAM. It was a really expensive console for that very reason. The Atari ST and Amiga had 512K DRAM, and they were so much cheaper despite the vastly superior data space. Most of SNES RAM is DRAM I think, and the mega drive had 64K DRAM only.
@@aboriginalmang The Amiga sounded like garbage in practice precisely because of it's lack of sound channels. Plenty of games didn't even have music and sound effects playing at once. You had to choose one or the other.
@@ostiariusalpha Prove it with some examples of better sounding games than the best available on the SNES. Oh wait! You can't... because they don't exist!
counting SNES add-on chips would be equivalent to counting Genesis add-ons like 32X/SegaCD
Sound certainly is a personal preference. At the time, reviewers almost always choose the SNES audio. But a decade or three later, SNES games almost all sound like they've been recorded over an analogue phone line, and can't match the clarity of the top Mega Drive soundtracks. Although somehow the SNES game Plok seems to sound amazing. Apart from that though, I'd choose Amiga sound over both of them, and that's a machine from 1985!
The decision to be a cheapskate over the Mega Drive's graphics memory is so frustrating though, considering how so many other aspects weren't compromised, like the backwards compatibility, high resolution and volume control. And then it bit the Mega CD in the butt as well, because you can't just add colours from the data storage side of things. I heard the the Mega Drive was mainly one person's design, rather than the product of a team. So even with all that arcade hardware expertise, it seems likely that no-one pointed out that games might soon benefit from pastel colours, smooth gradients, digitisation and CG.
35:29
Considering they got this game running on a base Gameboy, this is an optimization issue. Not a power issue.
Mega Drive/Genesis may have had more CPU power onboard, but SNES blew it out of the water with its PPU.
SNES had an 8-bit data bus and wasn't even true 16-bit 😆
@@genesislives1131 And yet it still beat the Genesis like it owed it money.
@@SomeOrangeCat The genesis was more popular amongst adults and teens, what does that tell you?
@@genesislives1131 You can move the goal posts all you want, but at the end of the day, Sega lost the console war. 49 million units sold vs 29 million sold. I guess Sega should have spent less time trying to be edge lords, and fighting with their own corporate branches.
@@SomeOrangeCat Did you know the genesis still continues to get new games of top notch quality while the snes doesn't?