N64, fillrate monster of the previous generation?

Nintendo is enforcing its rules on its hardware... that can be seen as being a dictator.

Hopefully Nintendo don't own the whole market, neither almost all of it, so if you don't like their rules, you can just work on another system.

BTW, I do beleive that Nintendo blended the rules to get more devs on the NGC and GBA, which is a good thing, as long as quality still preveils.

my 2 € cents.

 

"Regarding the SETA chip from what I remember (Got A Screw Driver Magazine was great for this) it was touted as a 21MHz RISC Chip but I don't think it saw the light of day (or at least in it's original carnation)."

that's about what I remember, yeah.

"The SNES CDROM was co-developed with Sony until Nintendo pulled the plug on that and was in fact called the xxxxstation even then. Sony learnt a lot about the games market and capitalised with a firm two fingers up at Nintendo with the amazing Playstation (which in itself was touted as being as powerful as the hardware running Ridge Racer at the time)."

of course, there were three seperate CD-ROMs developed for the SNES, two of them were 16-bit, the final one was the ND (Nintendo Disc) which was 32-bit. Sony worked on at least two of them, in several incarnations. Phillips worked on one of the 16bit CD-ROMs, to be compatable with the CD-I format, IIRC. Nintendo had an agreement with Sony, as far back as 1988, years before the SFC/SNES arrived on store shelves, to build a CD-ROM unit for the SFC/SNES. Nintendo had many on-again/off-again flip flops with Sony and Phillips over the various CD-ROMs - Nintendo screwed Sony at the 1991 CES in Chicago by annoucing they would go with a Phillips CD-ROM, then they went back to Sony. And Phillips, and Sony again. This nonsense lasted until 1993 when Nintendoput the brakes on any CD-ROM for SNES, annoucing they would parnter with SGI for the 64bit "Project Reality" aka Ultra64 aka N64.

"Ahh... nostalgia."

Ahhh yeah

 

As for Sony claiming that the PSX was as powerful as the hardware that ran the Ridge Racer arcade, that was true. that Sony claimed that. In reality, the PSX was roughly 1/2 as powerful, and no lacked z-buffering and high res display with 60fps and 240,000 texture mapped, gouraud shadded polygons that the System22 Ridge Racer hw could achieve.

Sony's inflated figures of 500,000 textured & lit polygons/sec was utter nonsense. even the 360,000/sec figure for the same kind of polygons was also nonsense (otherwise PSX would have been more powerful than Sega's Model-2 board)
Around 180,000 textured, lit and g.shaded polygons/sec was about the max for PSX. First gen software like Toshinden hovered around 70,000-90,000/sec - RR1 was maybe 100,000/sec - developers got alot more out of PSX, but I doubt any games got much more than 180k/sec.

 

you mean other console manufacturer aren't enforcing their rules on their hardware ?

Hopefully the market isn't owned by a single manufacturer.

whichever it would be: nintendo, sega, sony, microsoft, amstrad.. it wouldn't be a good thing.

as every console maker, with the pressure of competition nintendo has to be more friendly with the developpers.

 

Here is the last known specs for the SNES Nintendo Disk


RAM: 8 Mbit
Sub memory: 1 Mbit
Rom Memory: 2 Mbit
Co-CPU: 32-bit RISC
CPU speed: 21.477Mhz
Cache: 8 Kbit
Access time: 0.7 sec
Data transferring speed (between the SNES and the CD-rom): 150 or 300 Kbit/sec
CD-I compatible: Yes
Price: 299 dollar
Colors: 16.7 million

Here is some Super Fx chip info

This invention from the people at Argonaut is a special chip that is implanted in a SNES cart, like the ones above and is called the Super FX chip. It was specialized to help the SNES to create 3D worlds made by shaded polygons and texture mapping and light source shading. The Super FX chip is a RISC type mathprocessor and a supplemental CPU to the real SNES CPU. With the FX chip in a game the SNES´s speed goes up from 3.58 Mhz to 10.5 Mhz. This is a truth with modifications though. The 'real' speed never exceded the SNES CPU's 3.58Mhz, but with the Super-FX certain difficult graphic calculations could be done faster.
The FX-chip can also make ordinary 2D games better. It has been used in StarFox (StarWing) and Vortex (formerly known as Citadel) by Argonaut; a shoot 'em up where you can transform between being a walker, a boggie, a tank or a jetplane and Stunt Race FX (a.k.a. FX Trax and Wild Trax) a nice polygon racer made by Nintendo.

 

In some ways PSX was comparable to model 2...

The raw 3D transform on the PS is way higher than the base model 2, in theory peaking at over 3 million vert transforms/second.
The pixel fillrate is an order of magnitude higher ( 33Mpixels/66Mpixels flat compared against 1.2Mpixels )
The lack of FP and the perspective correct texturing are the main weaknesses. Even the CPUs are comparable ( 33MHz mips against 25MHz i960 )
The biggest visual improvement is the lighting and semitransparency support. ( The model 2 uses cross hatching and rendered to a palletted frame buffer... )
However the one advantage the Model 2 has ( probally the most important ) is the amount of memory available for textures, ( the texturing in general )

 

The main difference that I notice between PSX and Sega Model-2 is that PSX had gouraud shading, Model-2 does not. However, I don't care how many theoretical vertices the PSX GTE can push out. that is peak performance on paper. paper specs don't impress me. Model-2 pushed more polygons on screen in games than any PSX game, and with massively better textures, image quality and FRAMERATES.

The vertice/sec rate for Model-2 was 900,000 anyway, not the 300,000/sec most ppl think for its specs. The 300k figure is for fully textured, perspective correct, z-buffered and bilinear filtered four sided polygons/sec, IIRC. Again, PSX games did not go beyond 180k textured polygons, AFAIK, or much beyond that. The actual displayable flat shaded polygon count for PSX was 360,000/sec, which is like twice as much as Model-1, but again that's untextured, and without anything like z-buffer (PSX didnt have it)

Model-2 was a whole order of magnitude beyond PSX/ Saturn / N64 in power and image quality. Even the best 3D cards for the PC at the time, Voodoo1 & PowerVR PCX1/2, could not match Model-2 overall, even though they had newer features and g.shading. Not until 1998 was the technology good enough at home to surpass Model-2 in performance in the form of Voodoo2, TNT and Dreamcast.

 

good point

PSX like model 2 in a way pushed 360k flat tris max with 3 independant verts/tri, so vert/sec was theoretical max of >1m - but you are right, that is theory not practice...

180K/s was actually comparable ( in the same range ) to Model 2, with the effect that most titles ran at 30Hz, rather than the 60Hz of the arcade.

Another point of comparision - I only compared against the base model 2, the various revisions increased the fpu support by a factor of 5 - something not practical on a console

Apart from resolution I think that RR4 compared quite well with the model 2 titles, and DOA on PSX is very comparable to the original arcade version.