There were master system games that ventured into that 30fps territory too. Earlier titles.tepples wrote: I'm beginning to understand why some Game Boy games ran at 30 fps or slower
A lot of z80 programmers tend to boast about the available regs to work with on the z80 compared to accumulate based processors (65x, 6809, etc). But I always found it to be the complete opposite. Data registers are kind of a moot point on the 65x simply because it has a lot of direct memory addressing modes (and fast mode; direct or zero page). A lot more operations actually have to go through the A reg on the z80, from another reg or from indirection (address regs). I always felt like a constraint of constantly juggling things - way more than what might be done with Acc on the 65x. And the having ZP as off processor address registers (address vectors) - feels soo free in comparison. Even the 68k felt a tiny bit cramped in this respect to the 65x (only 7 address regs; SP is the 8th address reg).
Of course, the context of 65x to me is not limited to the NES - so my view of optimization and use of quick LUTs for logic are probably expanded compared to the NES environment.