Man, Nintendo had to go through this in the cartridge era. No BC = gamers having no incentive to stay with you = those same gamers defecting to the competition. And we all laughed at Nintendo for it.
BC didn't become a trend at all until the PS2 though.
Also, the GBA used carts and was BC...
actually, nintendo broke the trend of BC. Prior to the SNES, all game consoles had been BC with their previous systems.
the Saturn was originally going to be BC with the genesis, 32X, and Sega CD, but plans were dropped. The only consoles in history which aren't BC (but by all means should have been) are the SNES, Saturn, Dreamcast, GCN, and now apparently the PS3.
Although, I have to admit, BC has never been a big factor for me. I was honestly surprised when it was so highly touted for the PS2.
Now you know the Saturn architecture as well as I do, TSR; there was no fucking way they could have made the Dreamcast BC. Unless you meant by "by all means should have been" that they shouldn't have botched the Saturn's hardware design so badly that it couldn't be easily scaled down and integrated like, say, the PS1 hardware.
Man, Nintendo had to go through this in the cartridge era. No BC = gamers having no incentive to stay with you = those same gamers defecting to the competition. And we all laughed at Nintendo for it.
BC didn't become a trend at all until the PS2 though.
Also, the GBA used carts and was BC...
actually, nintendo broke the trend of BC. Prior to the SNES, all game consoles had been BC with their previous systems.
the Saturn was originally going to be BC with the genesis, 32X, and Sega CD, but plans were dropped. The only consoles in history which aren't BC (but by all means should have been) are the SNES, Saturn, Dreamcast, GCN, and now apparently the PS3.
Although, I have to admit, BC has never been a big factor for me. I was honestly surprised when it was so highly touted for the PS2.
Wait, I thought the Saturn was BC. My Saturn has a place to put Genesis games in it. I mean, I guess that's "sort of" BC. Maybe not.
Edit: What's a Master System?? Maybe that's what i have. I have no clue, and I am now confused.
the saturn is not BC. the cart slot on the saturn is shaped differently from a genesis cart (although, oddly enough, it is shaped like an SMS cart). It's used for saving games, additional ram for games like King of fighter 96 or Street fighter vs Xmen (which provided for loadless gameplay as well as arcade perfect ports, unlike PSX versions), or gamecheat devices like a pro-action replay or gameshark.
The master system is sega's 8-bit video game console. The one that came out before the Genesis. the one that competed against the NES.
Ah, thanks for setting me straight. Now that I actually think about it, I have never tried to put a Genesis game in the slot, becuase I have a Genesis as well. That would have totally messed with my mind if I had tried, and it wouldn't have fit though.
yup. the sound processor on the genesis is a z80 cpu - the same as the SMS' main cpu. the genesis video display processor (VDP), developed by TI, was actually an improved version of the SMS VDP, and like most TI chips at the time, it was backwards compatible. The genesis had 2 graphics modes it could be set to - mode 5 (which all genesis games ran on) which enabled a full palette with all the genesis calls, and mode 4 which set the VDP to behave exactly like the master system's VDP.
When the genesis was set to mode 4, the genesis suspended the m68k cpu to allow for direct memory management, and also set the z80 to be the primary cpu. After the genesis was set to mode 4, you could literally plug in a SMS cart and play. All you needed was a small cart which included a bootup sequence that set the genesis in SMS mode. Thus, they released the Power Base Converter for the genesis:
though it looks like an add-on, it isn't. There is no hardware in the power base converter - it simply passes through the cart input (and card input) directly into the genesis and includes a small bios which sets the genesis in mode 4. Sega actually rereleased phantasy star I on the genesis in japan - the cartridge looked slightly taller. In actuallity, it was a sega master system PCB inside a larger cart which included a small pass-through converter to change the genesis to mode 4, sort of like how old NES games were actually famicom games with converters.
Sega purposely designed the genesis to be BC with the SMS. A fun side effect of being BC with the SMS is that, technically, the genesis is also BC with the SG-1000, but I don't know if any hacks have been attempted to make the games run on a genesis.
Man, Nintendo had to go through this in the cartridge era. No BC = gamers having no incentive to stay with you = those same gamers defecting to the competition. And we all laughed at Nintendo for it.
BC didn't become a trend at all until the PS2 though.
Also, the GBA used carts and was BC...
actually, nintendo broke the trend of BC. Prior to the SNES, all game consoles had been BC with their previous systems.
the Saturn was originally going to be BC with the genesis, 32X, and Sega CD, but plans were dropped. The only consoles in history which aren't BC (but by all means should have been) are the SNES, Saturn, Dreamcast, GCN, and now apparently the PS3.
Although, I have to admit, BC has never been a big factor for me. I was honestly surprised when it was so highly touted for the PS2.
Now you know the Saturn architecture as well as I do, TSR; there was no fucking way they could have made the Dreamcast BC. Unless you meant by "by all means should have been" that they shouldn't have botched the Saturn's hardware design so badly that it couldn't be easily scaled down and integrated like, say, the PS1 hardware.
Through software - yeah, it would have been impossible. But hardware wise, the DC isn't too far off. The DC's main CPU - the SH4, was built to be BC with the SH2, and the VDPs on the saturn was simply a super beefed up VDP from the genesis. They were already able to make the dreamcast's powerVR gpu behave like a VDP and it's sound processor behave like a m68k (both tricks employed to get the genesis emulator running at full speed on the dreamcast). simply adding a second SH2 processor and a VDP would have provided saturn BC.
Man, Nintendo had to go through this in the cartridge era. No BC = gamers having no incentive to stay with you = those same gamers defecting to the competition. And we all laughed at Nintendo for it.
BC didn't become a trend at all until the PS2 though.
Also, the GBA used carts and was BC...
actually, nintendo broke the trend of BC. Prior to the SNES, all game consoles had been BC with their previous systems.
the Saturn was originally going to be BC with the genesis, 32X, and Sega CD, but plans were dropped. The only consoles in history which aren't BC (but by all means should have been) are the SNES, Saturn, Dreamcast, GCN, and now apparently the PS3.
Although, I have to admit, BC has never been a big factor for me. I was honestly surprised when it was so highly touted for the PS2.
Now you know the Saturn architecture as well as I do, TSR; there was no fucking way they could have made the Dreamcast BC. Unless you meant by "by all means should have been" that they shouldn't have botched the Saturn's hardware design so badly that it couldn't be easily scaled down and integrated like, say, the PS1 hardware.
Through software - yeah, it would have been impossible. But hardware wise, the DC isn't too far off. The DC's main CPU - the SH4, was built to be BC with the SH2, and the VDPs on the saturn was simply a super beefed up VDP from the genesis. They were already able to make the dreamcast's powerVR gpu behave like a VDP and it's sound processor behave like a m68k (both tricks employed to get the genesis emulator running at full speed on the dreamcast). simply adding a second SH2 processor and a VDP would have provided saturn BC.
But they were already struggling to make a profit on the unit and, to be honest, Saturn BC didn't matter all that much; nobody in America bought the thing.
What I'm saying is Sony was trying to sell the PS3 to the people who had PS2s (i.e. damn near everyone), and that's where BC really matters. Sega was trying to sell the Dreamcast to people who bought PS1s, and Saturn BC wasn't a huge deal and the lack can be excused.
(besides, the controller didn't have enough buttons)
And you have just mentioned the thing that made me dislike sony as a company.
Bleem! was perfectly legal. Every court case they went against Sony with was ruled in favor of Bleem!
Sony litigated them into the ground, sent threatening letters to retailers promising them they wouldn't give them PS2s if they stocked Bleem! on the shelf, etc. etc.... until the company was reduced to two guys in a garage.
Sony effectively killed an awesome vehicle to play their legitimately owned and purchased games on a superior platform, with no reverse engineering or shady practice whatsoever.
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SW-4158-3990-6116
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
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Dirty DrawersLord of the undie worldRegistered Userregular
edited October 2007
Not having BC doesn't bother me. I would be looking forward to the 40GB PS3, but I'm not. Why? Their fucking software library can't match what the competition has. Their public relations people need to retake public relations 101 or whatever the fuck that major teaches in college, cause they do the foot-in-mouth thing quite a bit.
Man, Nintendo had to go through this in the cartridge era. No BC = gamers having no incentive to stay with you = those same gamers defecting to the competition. And we all laughed at Nintendo for it.
BC didn't become a trend at all until the PS2 though.
Also, the GBA used carts and was BC...
actually, nintendo broke the trend of BC. Prior to the SNES, all game consoles had been BC with their previous systems.
the Saturn was originally going to be BC with the genesis, 32X, and Sega CD, but plans were dropped. The only consoles in history which aren't BC (but by all means should have been) are the SNES, Saturn, Dreamcast, GCN, and now apparently the PS3.
Although, I have to admit, BC has never been a big factor for me. I was honestly surprised when it was so highly touted for the PS2.
Now you know the Saturn architecture as well as I do, TSR; there was no fucking way they could have made the Dreamcast BC. Unless you meant by "by all means should have been" that they shouldn't have botched the Saturn's hardware design so badly that it couldn't be easily scaled down and integrated like, say, the PS1 hardware.
Through software - yeah, it would have been impossible. But hardware wise, the DC isn't too far off. The DC's main CPU - the SH4, was built to be BC with the SH2, and the VDPs on the saturn was simply a super beefed up VDP from the genesis. They were already able to make the dreamcast's powerVR gpu behave like a VDP and it's sound processor behave like a m68k (both tricks employed to get the genesis emulator running at full speed on the dreamcast). simply adding a second SH2 processor and a VDP would have provided saturn BC.
But they were already struggling to make a profit on the unit and, to be honest, Saturn BC didn't matter all that much; nobody in America bought the thing.
What I'm saying is Sony was trying to sell the PS3 to the people who had PS2s (i.e. damn near everyone), and that's where BC really matters. Sega was trying to sell the Dreamcast to people who bought PS1s, and Saturn BC wasn't a huge deal and the lack can be excused.
(besides, the controller didn't have enough buttons)
Really obscure fun fact about the dream cast - it's controller actually has 6 face buttons and 2 triggers. More accurately, the chip inside the DC controller had support for 2 more buttons and they were even functional, just left off the controller. The 2 buttons were labelled C and Z. A few 3rd party controllers, notably the Mad Catz fighter Pad, actually included the 2 ommited buttons. Select games would even recognize them - Marvel vs Capcom lets you map the final two attacks to C and Z, and they even show up as C and Z on the menu. Though they've never said it, I'm willing to bet at one point BC was at least considered for the DC.
And you have just mentioned the thing that made me dislike sony as a company.
Bleem! was perfectly legal. Every court case they went against Sony with was ruled in favor of Bleem!
Sony litigated them into the ground, sent threatening letters to retailers promising them they wouldn't give them PS2s if they stocked Bleem! on the shelf, etc. etc.... until the company was reduced to two guys in a garage.
Sony effectively killed an awesome vehicle to play their legitimately owned and purchased games on a superior platform, with no reverse engineering or shady practice whatsoever.
Bleemcast also used HLE, not LLE like the genesis BC (and presumably the saturn BC). As such, emulation wasn't trying to be perfect, it was trying to make PSX games into DC games. And, unlike the PS2, the DC supported hardware FS AA. Bleemcast games looked much better than PS2 BC.
The reasoning is this: sure, they're making money of the PS2 now, but it'll die off eventually and cut off our money flow. In the meantime, we really, really need to get people in the habit of buying PS3 games NOW or it'll be even tougher later on.
This reasoning falls apart when you realize that this only applies to people who have already bought a PS3, and won't exactly encourage people to buy the system. Meanwhile, people who HAVE bought the system even with BC will be perfectly happy to buy a PS3 game if it's, y'know, GOOD.
The fact that a mainstream hit like skate has sold five times more on the 360 than the PS3 shows you what kind of trouble Sony's in.
I really wish I knew what went on in the minds of people in the video game industry. When a game doesn't sell, they blame everything under the sun for it EXCEPT the fact that it might have been a shitty game.
"Our game is a buggy port of a 6 year old release. We did zero advertising for it, it can't compete against a Nintendo 1st party game, and now it's losing to a previous generation of games. What's going on? It can't be OUR fault."
Well, slight Nintendo slant there, but this echos the story of how games apparently can't compete with Nintendo's product. God forbid people take some accountability when their product fails.
The Wolfman on
"The sausage of Green Earth explodes with flavor like the cannon of culinary delight."
The NES and the Famicom were 99.999999% identical on the hardware. The "converter" was just a pinout switcheroo.
The SNES could have probably been BC if it was designed for it, but that would have crippled things a fair bit, and severely complicated the board. NES carts have at least two memory chips in them, ROM for the code, and RAM or ROM for the character graphics. These are on completely seperate busses, and the mapper chips inside did all sorts of dirty horrible things behind the scenes.
SNES carts just have one memory chip, and one bus to the cart connector. All video memory is onboard RAM inside the console. The audio hardware is significantly different, and the PPU's, while quite similar, are not similar enough for binary compatability.
The significant differences between the two are why the SNES audio is near-godly, and the Genesis sounds like a SMS with a couple of crappy fm channels.
SNES -> N64 would have been ludicrous, given the total architecture shift. N64 to GC is similarily insane, other than software emulation (what they did with OOT/MM). Getting an N64 cart hookup onto the thing wouldn't really have helped much.
The Intellivision/Colecovision 2600 backcompat was via external hardware, that tossed 2600 parts in IIRC. The video chips on the two had nothing to do with the TIA. Hardware wise, the Coleco was essentially a Sega Master System using a 6502 for the main CPU instead of a z80.
Also, in the Pre-32bit era backcompat realm, only the Genesis pulled off 8 bit to 16 bit backcompat. The 16 in TurboGrafix-16 referred to the video chip, not the CPU. I don't know enough about the TurboDuo to comment on that part, but that entire system was stuffed to the gills with rather custom stuff. The atari systems were all 6502 based, and were more just slight variations on each other, rather than significant upgrades.
I'm probably being a little extreme here, but what happens to our old games in the future? Is there some sort of preservation system in place? I have always thought that backwards compatibility would be the catalyst for this.
This sounds like supreme overreacting but I do worry about old games being forgotten.
I'm probably being a little extreme here, but what happens to our old games in the future? Is there some sort of preservation system in place? I have always thought that backwards compatibility would be the catalyst for this.
This sounds like supreme overreacting but I do worry about old games being forgotten.
I think in a few years nearly every retro title will be on a Virtual Console type system somewhere.
Whether it is unified or not remains to be seen.
Im talking about everything from NES to Xbox generations. Maybe on the next generation of consoles.
The other thing that might play into this is the PSP/PSX down loadable games we're supposed to be seeing coming down the pipeline. I mean, if you could actually play your old PSX games you wouldn't have to pay to download them from scratch again.
This has pretty firmly pushed me from on the fence to a 360 though. Need a new screen first though, but this is seriously going to bit them on the ass for removing it from the 40gb.
The NES and the Famicom were 99.999999% identical on the hardware. The "converter" was just a pinout switcheroo.
Yeah, I know, thats why I said the SMS converter was similar. It simply changes the pinout and loads a bios into the genesis restricted (aka second) RAM.
The SNES could have probably been BC if it was designed for it, but that would have crippled things a fair bit, and severely complicated the board. NES carts have at least two memory chips in them, ROM for the code, and RAM or ROM for the character graphics. These are on completely seperate busses, and the mapper chips inside did all sorts of dirty horrible things behind the scenes.
SNES carts just have one memory chip, and one bus to the cart connector. All video memory is onboard RAM inside the console. The audio hardware is significantly different, and the PPU's, while quite similar, are not similar enough for binary compatability.
the SNES was designed with backwards compatibility in mind. It's CPU, the 65c816, is fully compatible with the 6502, which the NES used.
The problem of the NES ununified memory could be pretty easily overcome. The SNES includes a bus for enhancement chip mappings - it wouldn't have been too difficult to read the NES' secondary mappings through this.
The custom PPU of the SNES and NES were more compatible than you think. Mode 6 of the SNES PPU was basically the NES PPU mode - 1 scrolling background at 16 color depth.
Rather, the real problem comes from sound. Nintendo would have had to include a seperate sound chip for NES sound, which would have driven up the cost. This is the stated reason (by nintendo) for not making the SNES bc. But in all honesty, it SHOULD have been.
The significant differences between the two are why the SNES audio is near-godly, and the Genesis sounds like a SMS with a couple of crappy fm channels.
Actually, no. The Mark III is an SMS with FM channels. The genesis used a pretty different sound processor. The genesis PSG was handled by the VDP on the genesis, and while it was similar to the SN76489 of the SMS in function and compatibility, it sounded pretty different (which is why SMS games on the Powerbase converter sound different). the big difference between the genesis and SMS sound is that the 6th channel for the FM chip on the channel could be used to play back PCM.
SNES -> N64 would have been ludicrous, given the total architecture shift. N64 to GC is similarily insane, other than software emulation (what they did with OOT/MM). Getting an N64 cart hookup onto the thing wouldn't really have helped much.
Early, early plans for the N64 actually called for SNES BC, but those were nixxed when the console started to come together. GC compatibility isn't really expected - it was a CD based system.
The Intellivision/Colecovision 2600 backcompat was via external hardware, that tossed 2600 parts in IIRC. The video chips on the two had nothing to do with the TIA. Hardware wise, the Coleco was essentially a Sega Master System using a 6502 for the main CPU instead of a z80.
Yeah, the colecovision and intellivision BC was hardware. The intellivision was only used to power the module, IIRC. But I don't really care about how the BC is achieved, I'm just pointing out that it DID have BC.
the colecovision was identical to the sms. it used a Z80 as well. The only difference was vram size and I believe ram size.
Also, in the Pre-32bit era backcompat realm, only the Genesis pulled off 8 bit to 16 bit backcompat. The 16 in TurboGrafix-16 referred to the video chip, not the CPU. I don't know enough about the TurboDuo to comment on that part, but that entire system was stuffed to the gills with rather custom stuff. The atari systems were all 6502 based, and were more just slight variations on each other, rather than significant upgrades.
The Turbo Duo used different memory mappings than the Turbo CD. It had more vram, but it was also mapped differently. On a turbo CD, to achieve forward compatibility, you had to change out a cd system card - a cd system card 2 couldn't play cd system card 1 games. The Turbo Duo used a built in cd system card 2, and it was compatible with cd system 1 games
Oh, and the SuperGrafx was also BC with the Turbo Grafx.
This seriously disheartens me. Now mind you, I bit the bullet on a 60gb PS3 precisely because of this trend, but still. BC was a huge, huge selling point for the PS2.
Regardless of the fact that I don't have to worry about it now, I kind of want Sony to not continually shoot themselves in the foot. I bought this system on the assumption that in a year or two it'd have a big userbase (and therefore tons of software support), but Sony seems to be doing everything in their power to stop that from happening.
You aren't by any chance the SALT WATER PARTICLES guy are you TSR? cause that's some mad knowledge you got there.
I dunno who that is.
And you pick it up pretty easily if you're surrounded by it.
So which Sonic game is best and why?
Your answer will be graded on how close your answer is to the sentence 'Sonic and Knuckles'
Sonic CD.
And if you want to find out why, just read some of my sonic threads. I've been up since wednesday, waiting for night to fall so I don't fuck my sleep schedule up when I finally hit the hay, so I don't feel like typing out 2000 word replies right now.
You aren't by any chance the SALT WATER PARTICLES guy are you TSR? cause that's some mad knowledge you got there.
I dunno who that is.
And you pick it up pretty easily if you're surrounded by it.
So which Sonic game is best and why?
Your answer will be graded on how close your answer is to the sentence 'Sonic and Knuckles'
Sonic CD.
And if you want to find out why, just read some of my sonic threads. I've been up since wednesday, waiting for night to fall so I don't fuck my sleep schedule up when I finally hit the hay, so I don't feel like typing out 2000 word replies right now.
I know. I was only kidding.
your views on Sonic are extremely well documented around these parts.
You should totally do a Lets play through every sonic game ever made.
The split bus thing would be a bit tricky though the expansion bus, as I don't think it had it's own set of address lines. It probably could have been done, but it definitely would have hosed things up.
The audio would be a seperate mess, as it would mean either dropping the NES CPU in, with all that entailed (sucked power like nothing else) or cooking up a custom chip to provide it, since it was just stuffed right into the 2A03.
While mode 6 is pretty close to what the NES PPU provided, I don't think it would likely be compatible enough for the mapper insanity. For example, the mapper-assisted scanline IRQ on most games (All MMC3/6 ones, so SMB2, 3, later megamans, StarTropics, etc) counted PPU tile memory accesses, and depending on how you had the tiles set up, could fire at the beginning or end of a scanline, and could be manipulated by black magic. There's a few other color reproduction issues you'd run into, but most of those are relatively minor.
Directly using the 6502 mode of the 65c816 would lead to subtle incompatabilities though, I'd say Final Fantasy I and just about everything RARE produced would probably break. Battletoads is infamous for this sort of thing, emulating it properly requires just about every single thing in the system to be cycle perfect, including a fair amount of the internal state. Most of it tended to be carefully timed code, and the cycle count differences between the NMOS and CMOS 6502 would hose it.
Essentially, by the time the SNES started getting rolling, the only reliable way of even getting the first and second party libaries running on it would be to drop a NES inside. Doing that cheaply would require designing some new ASICs, which in the case of the CPU, would have probably been a bit excessive.
It seems I was misremembering on the CV, which isn't too suprising. I will of course defer on all things Sega, as I was a Nintendo fanboy through and through back in the day.
The only other counter on the CV/Intellivision part is that it isn't really backwards compatability if you're playing the competitor's frontline titles
summary: I maintain that an SNES built for NES backcompat would have been a decidedly more expensive, and probably rather different SNES than what we know and love. Initial designs probably had backcompat in mind, but those plans fell afoul of the rampant insanity perpetrated by their developer community, as well as the custom mapper designs.
When I heard the PS3 won't have BC anymore, I wasn't all that worried.
And then I saw this again: Metal Gear Boxed Set
And those discs ARE in PS1 and 2 format, meaning I'd be SHIT out of luck if I do buy the PS3 when MGS4 drops (Which I plan to) and want that set.
Yeah, I think Game Over quotes the price of adding backwards compatability to the SNES at somewhere between $50-$80 but then again I haven't read it in awhile. Considering the history Nintendo has with making mass market systems this was just wasn't going to fly.
They wanted it though, and that's why they really focused on BC with the Gameboy line.
When I heard the PS3 won't have BC anymore, I wasn't all that worried.
And then I saw this again: Metal Gear Boxed Set
And those discs ARE in PS1 and 2 format, meaning I'd be SHIT out of luck if I do buy the PS3 when MGS4 drops (Which I plan to) and want that set.
Now that you mention it, I wonder how much this'll piss off Kojima.
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augustwhere you come from is goneRegistered Userregular
edited October 2007
That stament by Sony about getting people to buy PS3s sounds like it was targeted to the shareholders. Suits who read Wall Street Journal. Yeah.
The split bus thing would be a bit tricky though the expansion bus, as I don't think it had it's own set of address lines. It probably could have been done, but it definitely would have hosed things up.
It did. Offset $6000-$7FFF.
The audio would be a seperate mess, as it would mean either dropping the NES CPU in, with all that entailed (sucked power like nothing else) or cooking up a custom chip to provide it, since it was just stuffed right into the 2A03.
The smarter thing to do would be create a custom chip, which is what I'd imagine they'd do.
While mode 6 is pretty close to what the NES PPU provided, I don't think it would likely be compatible enough for the mapper insanity. For example, the mapper-assisted scanline IRQ on most games (All MMC3/6 ones, so SMB2, 3, later megamans, StarTropics, etc) counted PPU tile memory accesses, and depending on how you had the tiles set up, could fire at the beginning or end of a scanline, and could be manipulated by black magic. There's a few other color reproduction issues you'd run into, but most of those are relatively minor.
Man, it's been a while since I've looked at the 6 NES memory mappers, but you're talking about MMC6, right? They used scanline IRQ to set up bankswitching to provide scrolling in 2 directions, right? Basically split screen? They used these because the NES didn't have hblank or vblank interrupt, correct? The SNES did, however... it doesn't seem too hard to create a custom chip which translated scanline IRQ into hblank interrupt. or am I wrong and did the mmc use scanline IRQ for different purposes?
Directly using the 6502 mode of the 65c816 would lead to subtle incompatabilities though, I'd say Final Fantasy I and just about everything RARE produced would probably break. Battletoads is infamous for this sort of thing, emulating it properly requires just about every single thing in the system to be cycle perfect, including a fair amount of the internal state. Most of it tended to be carefully timed code, and the cycle count differences between the NMOS and CMOS 6502 would hose it.
it probably would have lead to small incompatibilites. No BC is perfect - there are several SMS games which don't work on the genesis.
Essentially, by the time the SNES started getting rolling, the only reliable way of even getting the first and second party libaries running on it would be to drop a NES inside. Doing that cheaply would require designing some new ASICs, which in the case of the CPU, would have probably been a bit excessive.
I'm not sure I follow... I don't think all NES games are so hard coded to interal timing of all chips. As I recall, only scanline IRQ enabled MMCs and the main CPU are important unless you're talking about over seas games. Remember - domestic games prohibited outside chips, there were only the 6 mmcs. I guess that means SFC would have more problems than SNES.
It seems I was misremembering on the CV, which isn't too suprising. I will of course defer on all things Sega, as I was a Nintendo fanboy through and through back in the day.
It's cool, nintendo hardware isn't my thing. I'm much, much, oh so much more familiar with sega hardware.
The only other counter on the CV/Intellivision part is that it isn't really backwards compatability if you're playing the competitor's frontline titles
heh, well would you call the PS3 BC then? I mean, it's playing PS2 front line titles.
summary: I maintain that an SNES built for NES backcompat would have been a decidedly more expensive, and probably rather different SNES than what we know and love. Initial designs probably had backcompat in mind, but those plans fell afoul of the rampant insanity perpetrated by their developer community, as well as the custom mapper designs.
It would have been more expensive, that's not up for debate. I don't think it'd be too different, but it probably would be a little.
The other thing that might play into this is the PSP/PSX down loadable games we're supposed to be seeing coming down the pipeline. I mean, if you could actually play your old PSX games you wouldn't have to pay to download them from scratch again.
The 40gig does still play PS1 games because it's all software emulated now see PSP.
Now I don't see why some people are making such a big deal about this since there are still 60gig & 80gig models out PS2 BC. The 80gig is even dropping down to $499 when the 40gig launches.
I'm going to be an optimist and believe that Sony will add PS2 BC software emulation via firmware updates. I'm going to go towards the edge of the lime and even surmise this update will be for all PS3s and will disable any & all hardware BC. Just to put everyone on the same BC system.
The other thing that might play into this is the PSP/PSX down loadable games we're supposed to be seeing coming down the pipeline. I mean, if you could actually play your old PSX games you wouldn't have to pay to download them from scratch again.
The 40gig does still play PS1 games because it's all software emulated now see PSP.
Now I don't see why some people are making such a big deal about this since there are still 60gig & 80gig models out PS2 BC. The 80gig is even dropping down to $499 when the 40gig launches.
I'm going to be an optimist and believe that Sony will add PS2 BC software emulation via firmware updates. I'm going to go towards the edge of the lime and even surmise this update will be for all PS3s and will disable any & all hardware BC. Just to put everyone on the same BC system.
The other thing that might play into this is the PSP/PSX down loadable games we're supposed to be seeing coming down the pipeline. I mean, if you could actually play your old PSX games you wouldn't have to pay to download them from scratch again.
The 40gig does still play PS1 games because it's all software emulated now see PSP.
Now I don't see why some people are making such a big deal about this since there are still 60gig & 80gig models out PS2 BC. The 80gig is even dropping down to $499 when the 40gig launches.
I'm going to be an optimist and believe that Sony will add PS2 BC software emulation via firmware updates. I'm going to go towards the edge of the lime and even surmise this update will be for all PS3s and will disable any & all hardware BC. Just to put everyone on the same BC system.
there are already PS3s with software PS2 emulation. So, if the 40 gb PS3 doesn't include this software emulation of the PS2, why would it include software emulation of the PSX?
The other thing that might play into this is the PSP/PSX down loadable games we're supposed to be seeing coming down the pipeline. I mean, if you could actually play your old PSX games you wouldn't have to pay to download them from scratch again.
The 40gig does still play PS1 games because it's all software emulated now see PSP.
Now I don't see why some people are making such a big deal about this since there are still 60gig & 80gig models out PS2 BC. The 80gig is even dropping down to $499 when the 40gig launches.
I'm going to be an optimist and believe that Sony will add PS2 BC software emulation via firmware updates. I'm going to go towards the edge of the lime and even surmise this update will be for all PS3s and will disable any & all hardware BC. Just to put everyone on the same BC system.
there are already PS3s with software PS2 emulation. So, if the 40 gb PS3 doesn't include this software emulation of the PS2, why would it include software emulation of the PSX?
It's not all done in software, 80GB PS3 still has some hardware to help it chug along. Otherwise emulators like pcxs2 would have been able to run KH on my rig fine a long time ago.
And not including a PS1 emulator would be stupid unless they were really that strapped for firmware space, which obviously won't be the case.
The other thing that might play into this is the PSP/PSX down loadable games we're supposed to be seeing coming down the pipeline. I mean, if you could actually play your old PSX games you wouldn't have to pay to download them from scratch again.
The 40gig does still play PS1 games because it's all software emulated now see PSP.
Now I don't see why some people are making such a big deal about this since there are still 60gig & 80gig models out PS2 BC. The 80gig is even dropping down to $499 when the 40gig launches.
I'm going to be an optimist and believe that Sony will add PS2 BC software emulation via firmware updates. I'm going to go towards the edge of the lime and even surmise this update will be for all PS3s and will disable any & all hardware BC. Just to put everyone on the same BC system.
there are already PS3s with software PS2 emulation. So, if the 40 gb PS3 doesn't include this software emulation of the PS2, why would it include software emulation of the PSX?
It's not all done in software, 80GB PS3 still has some hardware to help it chug along. Otherwise emulators like pcxs2 would have been able to run KH on my rig fine a long time ago.
And not including a PS1 emulator would be stupid unless they were really that strapped for firmware space, which obviously won't be the case.
nope, it doesn't. the 80 gb ps3 removed hardware ps2 support.
And the fact that KH2 doesn't run on your computer is not proof that the 80 gb ps3 has hardware ps2 support. I don't even know how you could infer that.
I heard it has the emotion engine chip, but no ps3 graphics chip. Or vice versa.
uh, no. The slim PS2 combined the Emotion Engine and the Graphics Synthesizer into one chip, which is what hardware emulation on the PS3 is done with.Thus, they can't remove just the EE or the GS. and it's the only piece of legacy PS2 hardware on the PS3. the PS3 removed it - it' all done through software.
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Now you know the Saturn architecture as well as I do, TSR; there was no fucking way they could have made the Dreamcast BC. Unless you meant by "by all means should have been" that they shouldn't have botched the Saturn's hardware design so badly that it couldn't be easily scaled down and integrated like, say, the PS1 hardware.
Ah, thanks for setting me straight. Now that I actually think about it, I have never tried to put a Genesis game in the slot, becuase I have a Genesis as well. That would have totally messed with my mind if I had tried, and it wouldn't have fit though.
yup. the sound processor on the genesis is a z80 cpu - the same as the SMS' main cpu. the genesis video display processor (VDP), developed by TI, was actually an improved version of the SMS VDP, and like most TI chips at the time, it was backwards compatible. The genesis had 2 graphics modes it could be set to - mode 5 (which all genesis games ran on) which enabled a full palette with all the genesis calls, and mode 4 which set the VDP to behave exactly like the master system's VDP.
When the genesis was set to mode 4, the genesis suspended the m68k cpu to allow for direct memory management, and also set the z80 to be the primary cpu. After the genesis was set to mode 4, you could literally plug in a SMS cart and play. All you needed was a small cart which included a bootup sequence that set the genesis in SMS mode. Thus, they released the Power Base Converter for the genesis:
though it looks like an add-on, it isn't. There is no hardware in the power base converter - it simply passes through the cart input (and card input) directly into the genesis and includes a small bios which sets the genesis in mode 4. Sega actually rereleased phantasy star I on the genesis in japan - the cartridge looked slightly taller. In actuallity, it was a sega master system PCB inside a larger cart which included a small pass-through converter to change the genesis to mode 4, sort of like how old NES games were actually famicom games with converters.
Sega purposely designed the genesis to be BC with the SMS. A fun side effect of being BC with the SMS is that, technically, the genesis is also BC with the SG-1000, but I don't know if any hacks have been attempted to make the games run on a genesis.
Through software - yeah, it would have been impossible. But hardware wise, the DC isn't too far off. The DC's main CPU - the SH4, was built to be BC with the SH2, and the VDPs on the saturn was simply a super beefed up VDP from the genesis. They were already able to make the dreamcast's powerVR gpu behave like a VDP and it's sound processor behave like a m68k (both tricks employed to get the genesis emulator running at full speed on the dreamcast). simply adding a second SH2 processor and a VDP would have provided saturn BC.
What I'm saying is Sony was trying to sell the PS3 to the people who had PS2s (i.e. damn near everyone), and that's where BC really matters. Sega was trying to sell the Dreamcast to people who bought PS1s, and Saturn BC wasn't a huge deal and the lack can be excused.
(besides, the controller didn't have enough buttons)
True that
In fact other than possibly the PSP the Dreamcast is the best system for Homebrew (which yes includes emulators)
Bleem! was perfectly legal. Every court case they went against Sony with was ruled in favor of Bleem!
Sony litigated them into the ground, sent threatening letters to retailers promising them they wouldn't give them PS2s if they stocked Bleem! on the shelf, etc. etc.... until the company was reduced to two guys in a garage.
Sony effectively killed an awesome vehicle to play their legitimately owned and purchased games on a superior platform, with no reverse engineering or shady practice whatsoever.
Let's play Mario Kart or something...
Really obscure fun fact about the dream cast - it's controller actually has 6 face buttons and 2 triggers. More accurately, the chip inside the DC controller had support for 2 more buttons and they were even functional, just left off the controller. The 2 buttons were labelled C and Z. A few 3rd party controllers, notably the Mad Catz fighter Pad, actually included the 2 ommited buttons. Select games would even recognize them - Marvel vs Capcom lets you map the final two attacks to C and Z, and they even show up as C and Z on the menu. Though they've never said it, I'm willing to bet at one point BC was at least considered for the DC.
Bleemcast also used HLE, not LLE like the genesis BC (and presumably the saturn BC). As such, emulation wasn't trying to be perfect, it was trying to make PSX games into DC games. And, unlike the PS2, the DC supported hardware FS AA. Bleemcast games looked much better than PS2 BC.
I really wish I knew what went on in the minds of people in the video game industry. When a game doesn't sell, they blame everything under the sun for it EXCEPT the fact that it might have been a shitty game.
"Our game is a buggy port of a 6 year old release. We did zero advertising for it, it can't compete against a Nintendo 1st party game, and now it's losing to a previous generation of games. What's going on? It can't be OUR fault."
Well, slight Nintendo slant there, but this echos the story of how games apparently can't compete with Nintendo's product. God forbid people take some accountability when their product fails.
The NES and the Famicom were 99.999999% identical on the hardware. The "converter" was just a pinout switcheroo.
The SNES could have probably been BC if it was designed for it, but that would have crippled things a fair bit, and severely complicated the board. NES carts have at least two memory chips in them, ROM for the code, and RAM or ROM for the character graphics. These are on completely seperate busses, and the mapper chips inside did all sorts of dirty horrible things behind the scenes.
SNES carts just have one memory chip, and one bus to the cart connector. All video memory is onboard RAM inside the console. The audio hardware is significantly different, and the PPU's, while quite similar, are not similar enough for binary compatability.
The significant differences between the two are why the SNES audio is near-godly, and the Genesis sounds like a SMS with a couple of crappy fm channels.
SNES -> N64 would have been ludicrous, given the total architecture shift. N64 to GC is similarily insane, other than software emulation (what they did with OOT/MM). Getting an N64 cart hookup onto the thing wouldn't really have helped much.
The Intellivision/Colecovision 2600 backcompat was via external hardware, that tossed 2600 parts in IIRC. The video chips on the two had nothing to do with the TIA. Hardware wise, the Coleco was essentially a Sega Master System using a 6502 for the main CPU instead of a z80.
Also, in the Pre-32bit era backcompat realm, only the Genesis pulled off 8 bit to 16 bit backcompat. The 16 in TurboGrafix-16 referred to the video chip, not the CPU. I don't know enough about the TurboDuo to comment on that part, but that entire system was stuffed to the gills with rather custom stuff. The atari systems were all 6502 based, and were more just slight variations on each other, rather than significant upgrades.
This sounds like supreme overreacting but I do worry about old games being forgotten.
I think in a few years nearly every retro title will be on a Virtual Console type system somewhere.
Whether it is unified or not remains to be seen.
Im talking about everything from NES to Xbox generations. Maybe on the next generation of consoles.
Still, dont lose your hard copies.
This has pretty firmly pushed me from on the fence to a 360 though. Need a new screen first though, but this is seriously going to bit them on the ass for removing it from the 40gb.
they will probably fucking cancel their price drop and instead, for every PS3 you buy, you get a free slim PS2!! BC is back baby!
Yeah, I know, thats why I said the SMS converter was similar. It simply changes the pinout and loads a bios into the genesis restricted (aka second) RAM.
the SNES was designed with backwards compatibility in mind. It's CPU, the 65c816, is fully compatible with the 6502, which the NES used.
The problem of the NES ununified memory could be pretty easily overcome. The SNES includes a bus for enhancement chip mappings - it wouldn't have been too difficult to read the NES' secondary mappings through this.
The custom PPU of the SNES and NES were more compatible than you think. Mode 6 of the SNES PPU was basically the NES PPU mode - 1 scrolling background at 16 color depth.
Rather, the real problem comes from sound. Nintendo would have had to include a seperate sound chip for NES sound, which would have driven up the cost. This is the stated reason (by nintendo) for not making the SNES bc. But in all honesty, it SHOULD have been.
Actually, no. The Mark III is an SMS with FM channels. The genesis used a pretty different sound processor. The genesis PSG was handled by the VDP on the genesis, and while it was similar to the SN76489 of the SMS in function and compatibility, it sounded pretty different (which is why SMS games on the Powerbase converter sound different). the big difference between the genesis and SMS sound is that the 6th channel for the FM chip on the channel could be used to play back PCM.
Early, early plans for the N64 actually called for SNES BC, but those were nixxed when the console started to come together. GC compatibility isn't really expected - it was a CD based system.
Yeah, the colecovision and intellivision BC was hardware. The intellivision was only used to power the module, IIRC. But I don't really care about how the BC is achieved, I'm just pointing out that it DID have BC.
the colecovision was identical to the sms. it used a Z80 as well. The only difference was vram size and I believe ram size.
The Turbo Duo used different memory mappings than the Turbo CD. It had more vram, but it was also mapped differently. On a turbo CD, to achieve forward compatibility, you had to change out a cd system card - a cd system card 2 couldn't play cd system card 1 games. The Turbo Duo used a built in cd system card 2, and it was compatible with cd system 1 games
Oh, and the SuperGrafx was also BC with the Turbo Grafx.
I dunno who that is.
And you pick it up pretty easily if you're surrounded by it.
Regardless of the fact that I don't have to worry about it now, I kind of want Sony to not continually shoot themselves in the foot. I bought this system on the assumption that in a year or two it'd have a big userbase (and therefore tons of software support), but Sony seems to be doing everything in their power to stop that from happening.
So which Sonic game is best and why?
Your answer will be graded on how close your answer is to the sentence 'Sonic and Knuckles'
Sonic CD.
And if you want to find out why, just read some of my sonic threads. I've been up since wednesday, waiting for night to fall so I don't fuck my sleep schedule up when I finally hit the hay, so I don't feel like typing out 2000 word replies right now.
EDIT: I explain why Sonic CD is supreme in this topic near the bottom
I know. I was only kidding.
your views on Sonic are extremely well documented around these parts.
You should totally do a Lets play through every sonic game ever made.
The audio would be a seperate mess, as it would mean either dropping the NES CPU in, with all that entailed (sucked power like nothing else) or cooking up a custom chip to provide it, since it was just stuffed right into the 2A03.
While mode 6 is pretty close to what the NES PPU provided, I don't think it would likely be compatible enough for the mapper insanity. For example, the mapper-assisted scanline IRQ on most games (All MMC3/6 ones, so SMB2, 3, later megamans, StarTropics, etc) counted PPU tile memory accesses, and depending on how you had the tiles set up, could fire at the beginning or end of a scanline, and could be manipulated by black magic. There's a few other color reproduction issues you'd run into, but most of those are relatively minor.
Directly using the 6502 mode of the 65c816 would lead to subtle incompatabilities though, I'd say Final Fantasy I and just about everything RARE produced would probably break. Battletoads is infamous for this sort of thing, emulating it properly requires just about every single thing in the system to be cycle perfect, including a fair amount of the internal state. Most of it tended to be carefully timed code, and the cycle count differences between the NMOS and CMOS 6502 would hose it.
Essentially, by the time the SNES started getting rolling, the only reliable way of even getting the first and second party libaries running on it would be to drop a NES inside. Doing that cheaply would require designing some new ASICs, which in the case of the CPU, would have probably been a bit excessive.
It seems I was misremembering on the CV, which isn't too suprising. I will of course defer on all things Sega, as I was a Nintendo fanboy through and through back in the day.
The only other counter on the CV/Intellivision part is that it isn't really backwards compatability if you're playing the competitor's frontline titles
summary: I maintain that an SNES built for NES backcompat would have been a decidedly more expensive, and probably rather different SNES than what we know and love. Initial designs probably had backcompat in mind, but those plans fell afoul of the rampant insanity perpetrated by their developer community, as well as the custom mapper designs.
And then I saw this again: Metal Gear Boxed Set
And those discs ARE in PS1 and 2 format, meaning I'd be SHIT out of luck if I do buy the PS3 when MGS4 drops (Which I plan to) and want that set.
They wanted it though, and that's why they really focused on BC with the Gameboy line.
Now that you mention it, I wonder how much this'll piss off Kojima.
Also, lolsony.
It would be the first good decision they've made in years
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It did. Offset $6000-$7FFF.
The smarter thing to do would be create a custom chip, which is what I'd imagine they'd do.
Man, it's been a while since I've looked at the 6 NES memory mappers, but you're talking about MMC6, right? They used scanline IRQ to set up bankswitching to provide scrolling in 2 directions, right? Basically split screen? They used these because the NES didn't have hblank or vblank interrupt, correct? The SNES did, however... it doesn't seem too hard to create a custom chip which translated scanline IRQ into hblank interrupt. or am I wrong and did the mmc use scanline IRQ for different purposes?
it probably would have lead to small incompatibilites. No BC is perfect - there are several SMS games which don't work on the genesis.
I'm not sure I follow... I don't think all NES games are so hard coded to interal timing of all chips. As I recall, only scanline IRQ enabled MMCs and the main CPU are important unless you're talking about over seas games. Remember - domestic games prohibited outside chips, there were only the 6 mmcs. I guess that means SFC would have more problems than SNES.
It's cool, nintendo hardware isn't my thing. I'm much, much, oh so much more familiar with sega hardware.
heh, well would you call the PS3 BC then? I mean, it's playing PS2 front line titles.
It would have been more expensive, that's not up for debate. I don't think it'd be too different, but it probably would be a little.
The 40gig does still play PS1 games because it's all software emulated now see PSP.
Now I don't see why some people are making such a big deal about this since there are still 60gig & 80gig models out PS2 BC. The 80gig is even dropping down to $499 when the 40gig launches.
I'm going to be an optimist and believe that Sony will add PS2 BC software emulation via firmware updates. I'm going to go towards the edge of the lime and even surmise this update will be for all PS3s and will disable any & all hardware BC. Just to put everyone on the same BC system.
Well that would make sense.
But...
there are already PS3s with software PS2 emulation. So, if the 40 gb PS3 doesn't include this software emulation of the PS2, why would it include software emulation of the PSX?
And not including a PS1 emulator would be stupid unless they were really that strapped for firmware space, which obviously won't be the case.
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nope, it doesn't. the 80 gb ps3 removed hardware ps2 support.
And the fact that KH2 doesn't run on your computer is not proof that the 80 gb ps3 has hardware ps2 support. I don't even know how you could infer that.
uh, no. The slim PS2 combined the Emotion Engine and the Graphics Synthesizer into one chip, which is what hardware emulation on the PS3 is done with.Thus, they can't remove just the EE or the GS. and it's the only piece of legacy PS2 hardware on the PS3. the PS3 removed it - it' all done through software.