Hello and bonus nachos to you. The government gave me a bonus hour this morning, and good gosh do I need it. I am about to power through the last world of Super Mario 3D Land and then spend the rest of my day tramping through Skyrim to see if I can get my game clock to the 50-hour mark. Note that I am not complaining about this, but it does mean I don’t have time for anything else. I will be glad when review season is over, because it means I will finally be able to take the time to walk to the barbershop a block from my apartment and get my shaggy disgrace of a hairstyle wrestled back into shape.
So, before I go offline for the day, here is another GameSpite Journal 10 piece, this time a short explanation of what Mode 7 actually was… and also what it isn’t. A feature on any other console, for starters.
There’s some controversy over whether the MD’s 68000 was actually faster than the SNES’ 5A22/65c816, considering the two chips were of entirely different architectures which makes comparisons of cycle frequencies sort of meaningless. In practice, yes, SNES games, particularly older ones, suffered a lot of extra slowdown, but that may also be because the 68k would have been incredibly more familiar to programmers of the day (considering it was powering everything from arcade machines to Macs & Amigas in those days) and that that the increase in visual detail in SNES games required an attendant increase in processing capability.
also: derp i’m a dork about old system specs
I interpreted “Blast Processing” as a lie with a grain of truth. It was a misnomer for Genesis extra CPU speed and the difference it made was not that Sonic moved faster but that shooters and brawlers could put more sprites onscreen without slowdown.
What were the arguments for the 5a22 being as fast or faster? One Genesis programmer told me that the 68000 not only had a higher clock speed but also double the data width both internally and externally.
This article taught me that Cameltry got an SNES port.
@Vorpal That’s the first thing I was wondering when I saw the image.
I was delighted to be reminded of On The Ball, to an extent that surprised me. I never owned it, but it was a fun and cleverly designed game.
Until your hair goes all Neil Gaiman on you it isn’t too bad. Now that is hair that refuses to be wrestled into place.