21–30 of 33 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I may be a biased Genesis Kid, but SEGA was always ahead of its time.
PC Engine was also ahead of its time, actual 8-bit games on CD-ROM!
NEC made some good looking console hardware for the Japanese market too.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not sure how any of these except maybe the Dreamcast (and then not by that much - it was almost literally a contemporary arcade board clone) were examples of “ahead of its time”.
https://dcemulation.org/?title=Bleemcast%21
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I bought a DC on launch week, it's one of my favourite consoles of all time. I still own one. But what has bleemcast got to do with what the parent said?
To demonstrate how powerful and far ahead it was.
A technical demo like Bleemcast doesn’t demonstrate how far ahead something is, it has to be seen relative to the hardware of a similar generation. Having said that the PS2 which had some early programming hiccups would go on to eat DC’s lunch.
They were a big step up from the original nintendo cartridges we blew in and wiped with alcohol to keep Tyson winking, but I went the Sega route as Genesis was a better system at the time, but that of course is debatable. Happy people still are interested in the archaic gaming systems.
I may be a biased Genesis Kid, but SEGA was always ahead of its time.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
To demonstrate how powerful and far ahead it was.
The Dreamcast charm is partly how simple it is, a jellybean CPU. The PowerVR is competent but it’s not outside the norm for 3D accelerators of the period (and there was a mass produced PCI card available of it). Nothing about the Dreamcast is exotic. Though the pack in modem and VMU are neat (did say “maybe” for the DC). GD-ROM vs DVD was obviously a dumb move. Perhaps Sega didn’t have the war chest to loss leader a…
The softer curved design of the PAL versions of these cartridges casings always appealed to me more than the chunky ones sold in the US. I never understood why they were different though.
My personal favorite was the hack on some NES carts that would use a "stun gun" approach to the 10NES lockout chip for loading unlicensed carts onto the console. They'd literally charge up a capacitor to spike a shock to the chip to "stun" it long enough to boot the rom. Classic stuff.
Shoving extra chips for bank switching, co processors, and license protection bypasses had been in play since the Atari days (although 2600 had no lock out/cic chips.) NES did though. My personal favorite was the hack on some NES carts that would use a "stun gun" approach to the 10NES lockout chip for loading unlicensed carts onto the console. They'd literally charge up a capacitor to spike a shock to the chip to "st…
The 2600's Pitfall II cart even added their own co-processor (Display Processor Chip/DCP) providing advanced music generation, improved graphics handling, and increased data storage.
I truly love the ingenuity involved in enhancing and prolonging the life of game systems and the bypassing of inherent limitations. True hacks in the literal sense. Some beautiful, some funny (in retrospect like the stun chip I mentioned.)