Or even better, fire who decided that SPPU space was better used for a limited, gimmicky hi-res mode than enough space for each oam entry to be 5 bytes instead of 4 and 1/4. I've asked this before, but was the SNES originally going to have twice the vram bandwidth or something, because half of the video modes are so crippled by it that they're useless.Gilbert wrote:Or, better, fire the one who decided 4 sub-palettes were already enough for the Mega Drive, backgrounds and sprites combined.
Though as explained in the Famicom's case here, there were many reasonable... er... reasons to this, Sega seemed to be quite bad in this area. The Game Gear is another odd ball, as it has a HUGE master palette despite having only 2 sub-palettes (though some games did change colours mid-screen), and this is more or less the only improvement over the original SMS (and the reduced resolution, if you call this an improvement).
What I really want to do with time traveling though, is to let the PC Engine have a larger master palette (4096 colours is enough). This can certainly make its arcade and PC conversions much more accurate. And AFAIK this is relatively "easy" to pull off too. You only need to change the VCE and keep the original VDC, which was already done by some arcade games using the same VDC and probably the PC-FX, which I'm not very familiar with its specs, but I think its VDC was just a minor upgrade from the PCE one.
Color is where basically where every home console was severely behind. Even the SNES, which is considered "colorful" (really only in comparison to the Genesis) has 1/16 the amount of palette entries as the Neo Geo, which has a standard number of palette entries for arcade systems of the time. No other spec is even close to that far behind. Even the GBA, which handily destroys the Neo Geo and other arcade machines of the time, has 1/8 the palette entries. (Which really make the 8bpp support for sprites and BGs far less useful.) I don't know how much more a 2-8KB ram chip would have cost in 1990.