I was thinking about 16-bit systems lately, which mostly comes down to the SNES versus the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive.
And today, actually I was just thinking about rendering sprites. Wasn't that one of the categories where Sega beat Nintendo hands down? Or was it not so hands-down, or am I mistaken entirely?
I definitely notice that Genesis games frequently made use of having creations built out of many sprites, (eg Vectorman) and I was under the impression that this was something the Genesis did better than the SNES, that the Genesis could render more sprites on the screen than the SNES could.
Well I was trying to look up some technical data, but I couldn't find much that was presented in a way that was easy to understand.
I did gather that the Genesis could draw 80 sprites on the screen with up to 20 on a scanline, (some oddly non-power-of-2 numbers,) and sprites could be drawn in any multiple-of-eight size up to 32x32. (More correctly, any size of 1 to 4 tiles per dimension, and tiles are stored as 8x8.)
Having 80 32x32 sprites on the screen does sound impressive, (though I don't know if the system would get slow-down before then,) but it doesn't give me much more information. What kind of palettes do these sprites have access to? (What size and how many?) And how much memory does the system have that can be used for sprites; how many tiles could be used for sprite data?
And then for the SNES, well honestly I can't find anything about what the SNES could do. I'm getting conflicting data about what size tiles it even stores in its memory. (16x16 or the standard 8x8?)
But I figure if any place on the internet knows what these systems can do, it's this site. I'm sure someone here knows.
Also since we're on the subject, what about other systems from the era? If anyone here knows about the capabilities of other 16-bit systems, I'm interested in hearing about them too. I love this stuff and never get tired of it!
And today, actually I was just thinking about rendering sprites. Wasn't that one of the categories where Sega beat Nintendo hands down? Or was it not so hands-down, or am I mistaken entirely?
I definitely notice that Genesis games frequently made use of having creations built out of many sprites, (eg Vectorman) and I was under the impression that this was something the Genesis did better than the SNES, that the Genesis could render more sprites on the screen than the SNES could.
Well I was trying to look up some technical data, but I couldn't find much that was presented in a way that was easy to understand.
I did gather that the Genesis could draw 80 sprites on the screen with up to 20 on a scanline, (some oddly non-power-of-2 numbers,) and sprites could be drawn in any multiple-of-eight size up to 32x32. (More correctly, any size of 1 to 4 tiles per dimension, and tiles are stored as 8x8.)
Having 80 32x32 sprites on the screen does sound impressive, (though I don't know if the system would get slow-down before then,) but it doesn't give me much more information. What kind of palettes do these sprites have access to? (What size and how many?) And how much memory does the system have that can be used for sprites; how many tiles could be used for sprite data?
And then for the SNES, well honestly I can't find anything about what the SNES could do. I'm getting conflicting data about what size tiles it even stores in its memory. (16x16 or the standard 8x8?)
But I figure if any place on the internet knows what these systems can do, it's this site. I'm sure someone here knows.
Also since we're on the subject, what about other systems from the era? If anyone here knows about the capabilities of other 16-bit systems, I'm interested in hearing about them too. I love this stuff and never get tired of it!