17th April 2010, 9:47 PM
Keep in mind that the 32X neve really had a chance of being heavily utlized. I mean the Playstation was coming out and the Saturn was under development at the time it was released. It was a mistake to even make the thing. Certainly, it basically made the Genesis more powerful than the SNES, including in the music department, but if they'd focused on making the Saturn (and also didn't go with that bizarre 3D architecture that used rectangles instead of triangles as the basic unit of rendering (seriously, I'd never even heard of that until I read about the inner workings of the Saturn a while ago)) they'd probably have been better able to survive. Then again, in that reality Nintendo probably failed during the 32 bit era instead.
The Genesis did have a more powerful processor didn't it? Still, that has nothing to do with "faster gameplay". Mario could run just as fast as Sonic had they programmed that in. In fact I remember at least one SNES game that did have that kind of fast scrolling, Super Metroid. At any rate, I still noticed all the SNES games looking and sounding better than their Genesis versions, and I don't recall any slowdown issues between them. That might be because the graphical capabilities could be utilized to get around that. At any rate, Nintendo's solution to limitations in the hardware was all sorts of addon chips, just like the NES. Super Metroid didn't use it, but as I recall Super Mario RPG, Kirby Super Star, and Megaman X2 and X3 all had addon chips of one sort or another, and of course Starfox famously used that "Super FX microchip".
I think Sega had an even better 3D chip they stuck in the Genesis version of Virtua Racing, though that version still wasn't nearly as good as the 32X version of the same game (which is the one I have).
The Genesis did have a more powerful processor didn't it? Still, that has nothing to do with "faster gameplay". Mario could run just as fast as Sonic had they programmed that in. In fact I remember at least one SNES game that did have that kind of fast scrolling, Super Metroid. At any rate, I still noticed all the SNES games looking and sounding better than their Genesis versions, and I don't recall any slowdown issues between them. That might be because the graphical capabilities could be utilized to get around that. At any rate, Nintendo's solution to limitations in the hardware was all sorts of addon chips, just like the NES. Super Metroid didn't use it, but as I recall Super Mario RPG, Kirby Super Star, and Megaman X2 and X3 all had addon chips of one sort or another, and of course Starfox famously used that "Super FX microchip".
I think Sega had an even better 3D chip they stuck in the Genesis version of Virtua Racing, though that version still wasn't nearly as good as the 32X version of the same game (which is the one I have).
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)