1. The Genesis Motorola 68000 CPU was 16-bit running at approx 7.16MHz not 32-bit.
Ah, that's true about the clock speed, my mistake. As for the processor itself -- I definitely remember using 32-bit instructions when programming for it, such as move.l #$c00000,d0. This was the same for the data bus and data registers (d0-d7), and for the address bus and address registers (a0-a7) (though perhaps the upper 8-bits were ignored / mirrored). If there was some sort of black magic and it really was only 16-bit, then the processor did a wonderful job of faking being 32-bit.
2. The Genesis was capable of displaying 64 colors out of a maximum of 512. They were able to beat this limitation with software tricks as I remember (Ranger-X used the trick), but 64 out of 512 was its official limit.
3. SNES was capable of displaying 256 colors out of 32,768.
The point was the ability to display the colors, and how many bits you had per palette entry (15-bit 0bbbbbgg gggrrrrr SNES vs 9-bit 0000000r rrgggbbb Genesis). Of course, 64/Genesis and 256/SNES were the practical limits ... there was also a tech demo for the SNES to display all 32,768 colors onscreen at one time. Typically, color add/sub effects greatly enhanced the number of onscreen colors in most games (eg Dracula X level 1 fire background), but usually it didn't reach more than ~256 - 2,048 colors at any one time.
But yeah, the point was the depth of colors possible. It made for much more vibrant games.
Sega lost in the end because they saturated the market with to much hardware and little to no support for any of it.
I don't know, really. The Master System had horrible advertising, I've only ever even seen two in my lifetime. The Genesis had the aforementioned problems with video and sound. The Sega CD was way too early to market, and thus way too expensive (funny, and the PS3 started at $600.) The 32X -- I don't even want to know what they were thinking there.
The Saturn suffered from being
way too complex. A real shame, Sega of America had a great system design, but the Japanese had too much pride and pushed ahead with their design, ignoring that developers would never be able to utilize it all. They even had their chance to beat Nintendo -- the N64 was one of the biggest duds in history, again mostly for pride issues. It's really telling that it's the
only example I have where the system made after it (Dreamcast) is both easier and faster to emulate.
The Dreamcast, that really was a rock solid system. I loved mine. Despite getting in bed with
The Devil, who continues to haunt gaming to this day, the system was surprisingly stable and well designed. It's just a shame nobody at Sega ever bothered to try running a standard CD-R on the system :/
And with all of their other failed projects beforehand ... yeah, they were in really bad shape.
It's really funny now watching Sony repeat all of Sega's mistakes this generation. You really have to love the pride these Japanese companies have. And Microsoft's laughable attempts to enter the Japanese market. Silly gaijins.
you have 2 copies of your text in your post byuu.
... how the hell did that happen? o.O
Fixed, thanks.
Genesis resolution was 320x224 vs. SNES resolution of 512x448.
Well, RPM Racing was the only game I've seen actually use full 512x448. Those modes had serious color / BG restrictions. It was a more practical limit in most games to use 256x224. The difference was infinitesimal, and if anything it helped out the slower SNES CPU.
The Genesis was so much better at pushing sprites though.
... because it controlled each sprite with the CPU. The SNES video circuitry was more powerful, but the CPU didn't have the processing power to calculate the AI for so many sprites and still run quickly.
SNES @ 256x224: 128 max/screen, 32 max/scanline
Genesis @ 256x224: 80 max/screen, 20 max/scanline
Genesis @ 320x224: 64 max/screen, 16 max/scanline
Really, the SNES with the Genesis CPU would've been a force to be reckoned with.