@RetroGames "Because, unlike with the SNES where the hardware was very intentionally designed with these coprocessor expansion chips in the carts in mind from literally day one (see Pilotwings), the Genesis never was." The capability for in-cart processors existed from day one on the Genesis as well, it just wasn't used very often. The way the system is designed very intentionally allows for this type of expansion. That's what people are trying to tell you and also what you seem to be trying very hard not to acknowledge. "I don't know the ins and outs of the tech being used in the Virtua Racing cart, but I feel like Virtua Racing's SVP probably came closer to basically being a separate console just shoved into a cart than any of the SNES' extra chips ever did." The SVP is a very beefy DSP chip with 128kb of RAM. A separate console it ain't. It very much needs the Genesis to tell it what to do and to output its results. A co-processor in the truest sense, and it's in a cartridge! It could do it all along! Almost as if... Someone deliberately designed the machine to be able to be expanded with co-processors via the cartridge slot! Why, that's the very thing we're discussing! How about that?
@RetroGames There's no narrative. There's a bloody technical implementation that is clearly very deliberate. The system wouldn't be wired the way it is if it weren't. It's just that simple, and your original post has tons of factual errors in it. Oh, your - What is that, third? - edit just came through. Perfectly implemented is a stretch. The Super FX, especially the SFX2, are very much hamstrung by the system's memory bandwidth and overhead caused by the planar graphics format. In fact, if a system were to be designed for expanding video capabilities, you'd probably want to have a packed pixel mode like the Ge- ah, you know what? Never mind. You're totally right, Nintendo didn't do anything short-sighted with regards to expansion at all.
@RetroGames Again, because it wasn't pursued does not mean it wasn't designed to be able to do it. You are confusing how the expansions were marketed with technical design and intent. Both machines do the same thing, the companies simply decided to package those expansions differently. They were both designed to be able to expand in these ways, and they were from day one. Sega could have taken Nintendo's per-cart approach, and that would work fine on the Genesis, and Nintendo could have taken Sega's "buy the chips once" approach, and that also would have worked fine on the SNES. And this isn't someone spinning Sega bias. I will take the SNES over the Genesis every single time, and I won't even need to think about it. This is about you being incorrect and (some, not all) people trying to give you actual information. As I said earlier, there's plenty to call out about the Genesis, this just isn't one of those things.
@RetroGames Look, nobody is saying that the SVP was in any way elegant or well thought-out. The argument you're making, that the Genesis wasn't designed to accept co-processors from the ground up, is provably incorrect. I don't need to pretend that the Sega CD is, from the perspective of the machine, a cart with co-processors. It is exactly that. How Sega decided to package that has nothing to do with what the machine is capable of or designed to do. You're conflating technical implementation with marketing philosophy. Sega's strategy was to sell you the extra chip once as a permanent fixture, Nintendo put the chips in games a la carte and bumped the price up on the carts. Everything you're tripped up on is marketing, not technical capability or design. The capability exists on both machines to expand in either way, and both machines were designed to do so. You can have a regular-sized Genesis cartridge with a co-processors. You can have a massive SNES cartridge that has a Netburst P4 in it that needs a heatsink and its own power cable.
And, assuming you haven't edited it out by now, quit whining about this "Church of Sega" crap. The Genesis and Sega writ large have plenty of mistakes and hardware shortcomings to call out, this just isn't one of them. The Genesis is very expandable, whether it's co-processors or expandable media or modems, and it can all happen on the cartridge bus. They just decided to package their expansions differently.
@RetroGames What do you think the Genesis sees the Sega CD as? The Sega CD, as far as the Genesis sees it, is functionally a cartridge with an in-cart chip. It interfaces with the machine the same way a cartridge does (looking at a wiring diagram will confirm that most of the expansion port's pins are wired up to the same lines the cartridge connector uses), and there's a pretty zippy 68K in there, as well as additional video hardware. Those are co-processors. There was nothing stopping anyone from putting those things in a cartridge other than the ungodly expense that would incur. The SVP was - I mean let's face it - kinda dumb, but that doesn't mean every Genesis co-processor would have been had they gone that route. That Shogi game on the SNES that has a full-on ARM CPU is ridiculous, but that doesn't make the Super FX or SA1 bad. Sega just didn't use them much, and that's likely for a variety of reasons. Cartridge cost would be a big one. While the Genesis was popular in the US and Europe, it fared quite badly in Japan where the decisions were being made. Doing R&D on such a product and producing it costs money, which incurs risk, which you'd be very averse to in SoJ's position. Also, as someone pointed out above, the Genesis competed heavily on price. Making expensive carts on a regular basis could harm that perception of value that they had. Nintendo was a more established brand and could command a premium, so the extra costs of co-processors weren't as big of a deal. Then there's ease of development. The Genesis has always been much easier to develop for. Why complicate it? The SNES was always difficult to develop for, so sometimes a brute-force co-processor like the SA1 could reduce dev time by making it easier because the code doesn't need to be as tight to be performant.
@RetroGames
The Genesis was deliberately and obviously designed to be expanded, and through the cartridge port specifically. The TerraOnion can function as a Sega CD, and that's got a BIG 'ol coprocessor in it in the cartridge port. Just because they didn't do it often doesn't mean they couldn't. And actually, in the case of something like the Super FX, when used mostly as a 3D accelerator, the Genesis would actually make better use of it. The Genesis doesn't need to do Chunky->Planar conversion, which is non-trivial, and it has higher bandwidth for moving the drawn graphics to VRAM, so it's very likely it could do higher resolution and/or framerates with the same chip. It's not only designed for expansion, it's pretty good at it! I prefer the SNES to the Genesis, too, but if you're going to call it out on stuff, at least be correct.
Now, that said, that Star Fox demo isn't quite Star Fox. There's no collision detection on the ship (the demo tries to hide it by avoiding anything, including powerups, that might touch the ship), heavily reduced particle effects, reduced game logic, and I'd be surprised if the physics model that the ship uses is as complex as the one in the real deal. Every time you add one of those things, you lose CPU cycles with which to process the 3D, lowering the framerate. Still really impressive, but the chugging when those buildings get dense shows that the Genesis would need help to run it full-bore, too. Even moreso back in the day when people didn't have extra decades of coding knowledge to draw upon and had deadlines to hit, so a little extra brute force to get the game out quicker would outweigh spending ages optimizing.
And nobody's confusing Rendering Ranger R2, Super Turrican 2, F-Zero, Axelay, Contra 3, or Super Aleste for an NES game, @DestructoDisk . You're fanboying just as hard as Retrogames when you say stuff like that. Both machines are capable of great things when handled by developers who know how to push them.
Comments 56
Re: Genesis Virtua Racing Port Almost Cost As Much As The Console Itself, Thanks To The SVP Chip
@RetroGames
"Because, unlike with the SNES where the hardware was very intentionally designed with these coprocessor expansion chips in the carts in mind from literally day one (see Pilotwings), the Genesis never was."
The capability for in-cart processors existed from day one on the Genesis as well, it just wasn't used very often. The way the system is designed very intentionally allows for this type of expansion. That's what people are trying to tell you and also what you seem to be trying very hard not to acknowledge.
"I don't know the ins and outs of the tech being used in the Virtua Racing cart, but I feel like Virtua Racing's SVP probably came closer to basically being a separate console just shoved into a cart than any of the SNES' extra chips ever did."
The SVP is a very beefy DSP chip with 128kb of RAM. A separate console it ain't. It very much needs the Genesis to tell it what to do and to output its results. A co-processor in the truest sense, and it's in a cartridge! It could do it all along! Almost as if... Someone deliberately designed the machine to be able to be expanded with co-processors via the cartridge slot! Why, that's the very thing we're discussing! How about that?
Re: Genesis Virtua Racing Port Almost Cost As Much As The Console Itself, Thanks To The SVP Chip
@RetroGames There's no narrative. There's a bloody technical implementation that is clearly very deliberate. The system wouldn't be wired the way it is if it weren't. It's just that simple, and your original post has tons of factual errors in it.
Oh, your - What is that, third? - edit just came through. Perfectly implemented is a stretch. The Super FX, especially the SFX2, are very much hamstrung by the system's memory bandwidth and overhead caused by the planar graphics format. In fact, if a system were to be designed for expanding video capabilities, you'd probably want to have a packed pixel mode like the Ge- ah, you know what? Never mind. You're totally right, Nintendo didn't do anything short-sighted with regards to expansion at all.
Re: Genesis Virtua Racing Port Almost Cost As Much As The Console Itself, Thanks To The SVP Chip
@RetroGames
Again, because it wasn't pursued does not mean it wasn't designed to be able to do it. You are confusing how the expansions were marketed with technical design and intent. Both machines do the same thing, the companies simply decided to package those expansions differently. They were both designed to be able to expand in these ways, and they were from day one. Sega could have taken Nintendo's per-cart approach, and that would work fine on the Genesis, and Nintendo could have taken Sega's "buy the chips once" approach, and that also would have worked fine on the SNES.
And this isn't someone spinning Sega bias. I will take the SNES over the Genesis every single time, and I won't even need to think about it. This is about you being incorrect and (some, not all) people trying to give you actual information. As I said earlier, there's plenty to call out about the Genesis, this just isn't one of those things.
Re: Genesis Virtua Racing Port Almost Cost As Much As The Console Itself, Thanks To The SVP Chip
@RetroGames
Look, nobody is saying that the SVP was in any way elegant or well thought-out. The argument you're making, that the Genesis wasn't designed to accept co-processors from the ground up, is provably incorrect. I don't need to pretend that the Sega CD is, from the perspective of the machine, a cart with co-processors. It is exactly that. How Sega decided to package that has nothing to do with what the machine is capable of or designed to do. You're conflating technical implementation with marketing philosophy. Sega's strategy was to sell you the extra chip once as a permanent fixture, Nintendo put the chips in games a la carte and bumped the price up on the carts. Everything you're tripped up on is marketing, not technical capability or design. The capability exists on both machines to expand in either way, and both machines were designed to do so. You can have a regular-sized Genesis cartridge with a co-processors. You can have a massive SNES cartridge that has a Netburst P4 in it that needs a heatsink and its own power cable.
And, assuming you haven't edited it out by now, quit whining about this "Church of Sega" crap. The Genesis and Sega writ large have plenty of mistakes and hardware shortcomings to call out, this just isn't one of them. The Genesis is very expandable, whether it's co-processors or expandable media or modems, and it can all happen on the cartridge bus. They just decided to package their expansions differently.
Re: Genesis Virtua Racing Port Almost Cost As Much As The Console Itself, Thanks To The SVP Chip
@RetroGames What do you think the Genesis sees the Sega CD as? The Sega CD, as far as the Genesis sees it, is functionally a cartridge with an in-cart chip. It interfaces with the machine the same way a cartridge does (looking at a wiring diagram will confirm that most of the expansion port's pins are wired up to the same lines the cartridge connector uses), and there's a pretty zippy 68K in there, as well as additional video hardware. Those are co-processors. There was nothing stopping anyone from putting those things in a cartridge other than the ungodly expense that would incur.
The SVP was - I mean let's face it - kinda dumb, but that doesn't mean every Genesis co-processor would have been had they gone that route. That Shogi game on the SNES that has a full-on ARM CPU is ridiculous, but that doesn't make the Super FX or SA1 bad. Sega just didn't use them much, and that's likely for a variety of reasons.
Cartridge cost would be a big one. While the Genesis was popular in the US and Europe, it fared quite badly in Japan where the decisions were being made. Doing R&D on such a product and producing it costs money, which incurs risk, which you'd be very averse to in SoJ's position. Also, as someone pointed out above, the Genesis competed heavily on price. Making expensive carts on a regular basis could harm that perception of value that they had. Nintendo was a more established brand and could command a premium, so the extra costs of co-processors weren't as big of a deal.
Then there's ease of development. The Genesis has always been much easier to develop for. Why complicate it? The SNES was always difficult to develop for, so sometimes a brute-force co-processor like the SA1 could reduce dev time by making it easier because the code doesn't need to be as tight to be performant.
Re: Genesis Virtua Racing Port Almost Cost As Much As The Console Itself, Thanks To The SVP Chip
@RetroGames
The Genesis was deliberately and obviously designed to be expanded, and through the cartridge port specifically. The TerraOnion can function as a Sega CD, and that's got a BIG 'ol coprocessor in it in the cartridge port. Just because they didn't do it often doesn't mean they couldn't. And actually, in the case of something like the Super FX, when used mostly as a 3D accelerator, the Genesis would actually make better use of it. The Genesis doesn't need to do Chunky->Planar conversion, which is non-trivial, and it has higher bandwidth for moving the drawn graphics to VRAM, so it's very likely it could do higher resolution and/or framerates with the same chip. It's not only designed for expansion, it's pretty good at it! I prefer the SNES to the Genesis, too, but if you're going to call it out on stuff, at least be correct.
Now, that said, that Star Fox demo isn't quite Star Fox. There's no collision detection on the ship (the demo tries to hide it by avoiding anything, including powerups, that might touch the ship), heavily reduced particle effects, reduced game logic, and I'd be surprised if the physics model that the ship uses is as complex as the one in the real deal. Every time you add one of those things, you lose CPU cycles with which to process the 3D, lowering the framerate. Still really impressive, but the chugging when those buildings get dense shows that the Genesis would need help to run it full-bore, too. Even moreso back in the day when people didn't have extra decades of coding knowledge to draw upon and had deadlines to hit, so a little extra brute force to get the game out quicker would outweigh spending ages optimizing.
And nobody's confusing Rendering Ranger R2, Super Turrican 2, F-Zero, Axelay, Contra 3, or Super Aleste for an NES game, @DestructoDisk . You're fanboying just as hard as Retrogames when you say stuff like that. Both machines are capable of great things when handled by developers who know how to push them.