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The original use of the word comes from one of the developper speaking about cool tricks that you could do by abusing DMA to blast data to the VDP.

(Among other doing high color tricks mentioned in the Eurogamer articles, explored but eventually unused by some developers back in the day, and found on some modern-day demos).

Then marketing department found the term cool and ran with it, basically using it to say "our device has more raw power than the competitor's" and plastering it all over any communication channel.

The original use of the word comes from one of the developper speaking about cool tricks that you could do by abusing DMA to blast data to the VDP.

(Among other doing high color tricks mentioned in the Eurogamer articles, explored but eventually unused by some developers back in the day, and found on some modern-day demos).

Then marketing department found the term cool and ran with it, basically using it to say "our device has more raw power than the competitor's" and plastering it all over any communication channel.

Turbo Boost Max Technology 3.0

Not only does it have Turbo Boost Max Technology, but it has the third version of it! Some marketing dickhead must have had one hell of an orgasm when that name got approved. Sounds way too similar to "Blast Processing" for me.

from the still-waiting-on-the-xbox-dreamcast dept.

That exists. Xbox was contracted from "DirectX box". A few dozen Dreamcast games were made with Windows CE, which included DirectX.

These devices are now sold primarily to users lacking the brainpower to use a mouse

http://segaretro.org/Sega_Mous...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

http://segaretro.org/NetLink_M...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

http://s.hswstatic.com/gif/ps2...

http://www.jokergameth.com/ps3...

http://www.tech21century.com/w...

on a platform that costs too much and is far too slow.

That better describes the most common machines in the Steam Hardware Survey than the PS4 or Xbox One consoles. My guess is laptops with integrated graphics. Dual core's still outnumber quad-cores in the survey and still plenty of integrated graphics chips.

These devices are now sold primarily to users lacking the brainpower to use a mouse

http://segaretro.org/Sega_Mous...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

http://segaretro.org/NetLink_M...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

http://s.hswstatic.com/gif/ps2...

http://www.jokergameth.com/ps3...

http://www.tech21century.com/w...

on a platform that costs too much and is far too slow.

That better describes the most common machines in the Steam Hardware Survey than the PS4 or Xbox One consoles. My guess is laptops with integrated graphics. Dual core's still outnumber quad-cores in the survey and still plenty of integrated graphics chips.

It's messy and artibitrary. Why the WuTang controller and no CharacteriSticks? Both are novelty shapes that did nothing to advance the state of the art. Why no mention of the Konix SpeedKing, the first home computer stick that I'm aware of to face the reality of living room gaming, and get rid of the sit-on-computer-desk design (although the later Cheetah bug was much better)? And then there's huge gaps in the heredity, implying the joystick was invented independently several times.

SMS won drastically on colors on screen (32 vs 16)

Where do you get 16? NES has 25: one backdrop color, four 3-color palettes for backgrounds, and four 3-color palettes for sprites. I will grant that a lot of games have duplicate blacks or whites in multiple palettes though. But the NES has a nicer composite output, as the color fringing pattern changes from scanline to scanline and from frame to frame, unlike the constant color fringing of the SMS that's especially visible on vertical lines.

sprite size

Where do you get that information? I'm seeing 8x8 or 8x16, just like the NES and Game Boy. Are you talking about pixel-doubling modes?

most notably NES had fugly 4 color sprites while SMS could use 16

You wouldn't know it from games like Contra, Mega Man series, and Battletoads, which use different palettes for different parts of a character.

Altered Beast is a pretty drastic example of the difference those factors that can make.

Of course Sega would make a more polished port of its own game for its own platform.