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Competition Gets Stronger With NEC still reigning champ in Japan, Sega brought out its 16-bit successor to the Master System – the MegaDrive – in 1988. It was an instant hit – outselling the PC Engine. Then Nintendo brought out its 16-bit successor to the Famicom in 1991 – the Super Famicom. Sega’s MegaDrive and Nintendo’s Super Famicom (Sega Genesis and Nintendo Super Nintendo, respectively) boasted “true” 16-bit CPUs. Nintendo’s offering was technically superior. The Genesis had one technical advantage over the TurboGrafx-16: CPU. While it’s true that two 8-bit CPUs can process data through memory twice as efficiently as one 16-bit CPU, there is still a speed difference. The 16-bit CPU is faster. Genesis and TurboGrafx-16 both used a colour palette of 512, but the TurboGrafx-16 could display all 512 colours onscreen at one time, whereas the Genesis was limited to only 64 simultaneous colours. As a result, the TG-16 games appear much crisper and quite a bit more colourful than its Genesis counterpart, which is evident when you compare Fantasy Zone ports between the two systems. The Super Nintendo, however, wasn’t technically superior in ALL areas either, but where it was – graphical special effects, WAY larger colour palette, and more onboard RAM – it was superior in spades. Almost every game developed for the Super Nintendo in its first few years made great use of the large colour palette and special graphical effects (mode 7, transparencies, etc.) – something the PC Engine’s hardware couldn’t touch. It’s argued that the TurboGrafx-16 was dead long before the Super Nintendo came along. Sega’s Genesis came out four months after the TG-16 did (almost two years before the Super Nintendo did), and during the Christmas season of 1989 the war was on. Sales for both systems were hot – the TG16 had a larger library of games, and took advantage of the massive storage capacity and better soundtrack offered by CD-ROM technology. |
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Index: The Competition Gets Stronger |