Fox5 said:
Hmm, this may be so, and the gamecube has less ram than xbox, but the main thing I noticed after getting an xbox is that the big games on xbox load much much slower or have more load points than the big gamecube games.
Yeah, it's not that I think having a disk cache is a bad idea (on the contrary - the low load times on the GC are very nice), it's just it doesn't substitute for a larger pool of main memory. Developers
could allocate a large chunk of Xbox ram for preloading data from the DVD or HDD, but they don't seem to feel that it's a good use of resources.
I believe the saturn got more use out of its ram expansions though.
Yeah, never bothered to import one. Somehow a 4MB expansion for aracde perfect ports of 'hardcore' animation heavy arcade games doesn't seem bad (actually it seems good), where as as a 4MB expansion for a much newer system so it can play original titles designed for that platform seems like trying to close the stable door after the horse has ... casually walked off.
BTW, I thought DC only had 16MB of ram, not 26MB.
16 MB main ram, 8 MB video RAM, 2MB Audio ram. All of it 100mhz 64-bit SDRAM. Aggregate bandwidth almost the same as the GC main ram too, come to think of it (remember that the DC's video chip had a tile buffer too).
Nintendo has never given the most powerful possible to give, but they've given powerful systems. NES was the most powerful at its time(1982 in Japan?)
Nes was bested by the Mark 3 / Master System hardware though, although I can't remember exact timeframes off the top of my head ...
SNES was the most powerful in its generation unless you count add ons and really expensive machines,
SNES was a great machine, possibly Nintendo's best balanced machine IMO, but despite coming 2 years after the Megadrive (and on the whole looking better) it had a much, much weaker CPU and often a lower resolution. Gaming lore has it that the SNES was originally planned with a 10 or 12 mhz 6800 (like the MD CPU, only faster) but this was pulled in favour of a much cheaper CPU, as most of the kind of games Nintendo thought would be popular weren't CPU heavy. Or something like that ...
n64 was the most powerful in its gem, and it had carts unlike the other two systems so ram wasn't quite as critical, and gamecube was pretty powerful.
Being "the most powerful in a gen" is all dependent on when you want to draw the boundry lines for that generation. N64 was, on balance, more powerful than the PS1 and Saturn, but it came 18 months later. If you look
less than 18 months later than the N64, you see a console appear (the Dreamcast) that absolutely beasts the N64 by a margin several times that of the margin by which the N64 was better than the Saturn and Playstation. And thats despite
costing less than the N64 at launch, and including a modem and optical drive.
On the handheld side, gameboy color was underpowered, but gba was the most powerful by far when it launched, and I wouldn't say GP32 was only a bit more expensive. I seem to recall GP32 going for around $150 or $200 when GBA was around $80 or $90, and I don't think gp32 had a cpu 8x as fast.(if it does then it probably lacks the graphics hardware of the gba, but didn't gp32 use basically the same arm7 as the gba, but at twice the mhz and with different graphics capabilities?) Nintendo makes hardware that is powerful enough while meeting a cheap enough price point.
Come on now, the GBA was a really weak peice of hardware, even when it launched.
The GP32 never got official distribution in the US or the UK, and so shipping and reseller costs bumped the price up massively. It was being producing in small numbers (something like 1% of the numbers of the GBA) and comprehensively outspecced the GBA. And Gamepark had to make their money on the hardware, rather than game lisencing fees on high volume game sales. Despite this I could buy one for £130 when the GBA was £90 (and that included import duty and VAT), and likewise get frontlit and later backlit versions (with a much better screen than the GBA SP) for a similar ~50% increase on highstreet GBA SP prices.
As for the specs, you're underestimating the GP32. It had a 133 mhz ARM 9 cpu compared to the GBAs 16 mhz ARM 7 (an 8 fold increase), and 8 MB's of ram compared to the GBAs 384 (or so) KB. It doesn't have the GBAs sprite and tile hadrware, but frankly given how much extra power it has and how easy it is to to these things in software you shouldn't need them to outperform the GBA at 2D!
...
... why did I just spend ages typing all that on a friday night?
