mikejmoffitt wrote:
some completely garbage argument
That's what I thought...
mikejmoffitt wrote:
for those wanting to pay more for an arcade experience, its price point made sense.
Exactly. What I'm not trying to say is that if you added up every part of the system and put it together it wouldn't (or at least shouldn't) round to $700
mikejmoffitt wrote:
If you want to talk custom chips, the SNES has a few ASICS that Nintendo semi-designed (obviously the 65C816 inside the 5A22 is not designed by Nintendo) while the Neo-Geo has much more to deal with. More RAM for palettes, video RAM intended just for storing what you'd call OAM, FIX layer RAM, dedicated palette RAM, sprite deserializer, multiple ASIC glue logic chips, a Z80 + the higher-end 12MHz-rated 68C000, a YM2610 + the appropriate DAC for that chip, and of course, the much celebrated graphics chipset.
Was all this really needed though? No game I know of even uses a quarter of the palettes (I'm not sure how much money would have been saved going with 1KB vs. 4KBs, considering it would still probably have to be external from the video chip, but whatever) and the fix layer could have easily been avoided by allowing 8x8 sized sprites, although I'm not sure how easy this would have been, but in most cases, it would have allowed more bandwidth for sprites considering fix layer text usually doesn't occupy much of the screen.
Also, is video ram really a "solid" term? I'd always heard that whatever is called "vram" is usually tied between two chips (CPU and video chip) and that whenever the video chip is pulling data from it, all reads to it from the CPU are ignored. I don't know if that's part of the definition, or if it's just a coincidence, if it even is true.
mikejmoffitt wrote:
An exact production cost can be nitpicked, but SNK didn't pick its price point just to be greedy.
Like I said above, do you think that maybe SNK could have better optimized the resources for the Neo Geo when building it?