Joined: Sun Dec 12, 2010 10:27 pm
Posts: 325
Location: Hong Kong
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strat wrote: Not exactly misconceptions so much as stuff I didn't know:
-I once believed the SNES could play NES games if not for the cartridge slot. This is fair though, as this is the case for the Sega Mega Drive, which is hardware compatible with the SMS, if not for the cartridge slot. (They probably just wanted to grab more money by selling the slot converter. Also, the Mark III could also run SG-1000 games, though without the need of a converter.) Together with the fact that Most of Nintendo's handheld systems could play games of at least one generation before (like GB games on the GBC, GB(C) games on the GBA, GBA games on the NDS, etc., at least for the initial versions), it's convincing enough that the SFC could run FC games, as there is only a "Super" sticked onto the name. This was supposed to be true also, that the SFC was initially designed to run also FC games (as depicted in say, early magazine articles), but the idea was probably scraped early in development, for the better IMO, so the designers are more free to do more alternations and enhancements to the system without the need to care for backward compatibility. Otherwise there weren't much justified reasons to use a 65816 as the SFC's CPU. I'm not saying the 65816 is bad compared to other CPUs such as the 68000 (as many people here will prove otherwise), but the 65816 was so obscure at the time that it was only used by a few obscure systems (neither of which popular in Japan), which led to programmers inexperience with it to produce not-as-well-coded games in the system's early days, unless alienating the programmers was intentional in their plans(such as, sometimes it was said they used 6502 in the original FC intentionally to make programmers suffer as that CPU wasn't popular in Japan). Oh... right! Back to misconceptions. - Back in the days, some magazine posted some articles (clearly written by noobs) about Nintendo designing the 16-bit descendant of the Famicom (before even the PCE and MD came out), citing the use of the 16-bit 65816 would be like being able to work on stuff with both hands instead of just one(I think this is true to some degree) and that you can do twice the stuff with the same amount of memory! As I always trusted word for word from these magazines I believed this kind of BS for a while.
- There used to be some practice in some gaming magazines to post intentionally incorrect information, so that they'd know when some other rival magazines had copied their stuff verbatim (this practice is common in map makers too, as they would introduce fake cities, streets, etc. in their maps to avoid others copying them). I think some magazines had some prizes for readers spotting the errors in each issue too. Again, as I trusted them that much (they had (mock-up) screenshots for proof!) I tried and tried repeatedly with some of the tricks, which never worked, thinking it's my fault in missing something. Two frustrating examples are, a) in Double Dragon (1), if you do some sequence involving the VS mode, you can actually have 2-P coop in the main game! and the player 2 is Kunio, not Jimmy!, and b) if you boot Bio Miracle Upa from side B, you can actually play a hidden Salamander game, with Upa himself as your ship! (Ironically this was made sorta possible in some of the Parodius games later.)
- There was a time (probably late 90's to early 00's when PCE emulation started to become a thing), where there were numerous rumours spreading around online, that the PCE used two 8-bit CPUs, each clocking at ~3.5MHz. That's why it was advertised as a 16-bit system with "total" clock speed ~7MHz. Because parallel computing wasn't easy at the time, many games ended up using only one CPU core so these games could never drive the system to its full potential (similar things actually happened in the Sega Saturn), so Mega Drive games were much better! This is of course BS. The PCE has one single CPU derived from the 8-bit 65C02, clocked at full 7+ MHz (unless you set it to low speed mode to access save RAM).
- The above are mostly caused by misinformation provided from materials in various media, but for a real "self-made" misconception: When the PCE and MD were out, I thought the MD games looked much better as the graphics looked cleaner and brighter and more colourful, whereas PCE games tended to use over-heavily shading, that made them look dark and unpleasant, possibly done deliberately to hide the fact that the PCE was only a 8-bit system, and that it even lacked parallax scrolling so it was worthless! Also, FM synthesis sounded much more high tech than the Waveform Memory technique (whatever they called it BiTD) used in the PCE so the sound in PCE sucked! After a few years I ended up liking PCE games more and eventually got the system, never bothering the the MD anymore. Then a few more years had passed and I was toying around the Genecyst emulator, opening up some of the windows, which shocked me heavily when I discovered the MD only had 4 sub-palettes, backgrounds and sprites combined. Then I realised that the reason there rarely was heavy shading in MD games was that it could hardly handle that (unless you sacrifice colours).
Last edited by Gilbert on Sun Sep 03, 2017 11:58 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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