People lacking in technical knowledge to this very day inaccurately refer to Blast processing as a marketing gimmick. However as you are about to learn SEGA was actually referring to an actual hardware component within it's Genesis/MegaDrive console. A feature not found in the competing SNES format.
http://trixter.wordpress.com/2008/12/05/blast-processing-101/
Blast Processing was a
MARKETING term (not feature )coined by
Sega to advertise the fact that the main processor of the
Sega Mega Drive was over two times faster than the one in its rival product, the
SNES.
Sonic the Hedgehog 2 was the posterboy for this campaign, being faster than any other platform game at the time. The ad campaign featured commercials with races between two vehicles, with the SNES strapped to one and the Mega Drive strapped to the other.
However, the campaign was
MISLEADING: while the SNES CPU did run slower in clock cycles per second, it would put out
more instructions per clock cycle. The Mega Drive would have to
freeze background and enemy animations while the game is moving at high speeds. That's why being SUPER SONIC seemed to have a far slower "framerate, not because of a slowlag from obj limits or etc, but the programming paused sprite cycles because it couldn't do it otherwise.
This idea of simply comparing CPU clock rates to determine performance, regardless of other characteristics, is commonly known as the "
megahertz myth".
claim that the Genesis' DMA controller was faster than its CPU during the vblank interval, but that the Genesis' 7.6MHz 68000 was fast enough to give the DMA unit a workout. That sounds like a roundabout way of saying that blast processing is thanks to the CPU.
