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Is The 32-Bit Gaming Era The New Retro?
Thanks to GameSpy for its 'Pixel' column discussing whether the early days of the PlayStation and Saturn are a newer, but nevertheless interesting stage of 'retro'. The author points out: "Moving to 3D brought a lot of challenges along with it, not the least of which involved graphics. The 32-bit generation differs greatly from its 16-bit predecessor in that a lot of 32-bit games' visuals have not aged well." But he nevertheless highlights the fact "there were so many vibrantly original games released for these machines, some obscure, some blockbusters... Motor Toon Grand Prix brought cartoonish designs to 3D life. King's Field put you in a truly non-linear, 3D dungeon. WipeOut married futuristic racing with high-caliber visual design. Panzer Dragoon gave flight to every kid's 'Neverending Story' fantasies." What were your favorite titles from the early days of 32-bit?
check out wipeoutzone.com. In the US, the first game's soundtrack was done in-house, under the name Cold Storage.
Crash Team Racing (CTR) for PS1. It did a great job of copying Mario Cart. Unoriginal? You bet. Fun as hell? Oh yeah. I never had an N64, but I played Mario Cart on a friends, and was extremely pleased to see a "version" of it come out on PS1. It wasn't exactly the same, but I actually prefer the PS1 Crash version better.
The Cube is 64 bit. It's a slightly modified Power PC 750.
Can anyone clear up the whole "N-bit" naming scheme?
"Bits" refers to the data size of the CPU. You don't add it when a machine has multiple processors, and you definitely don't count sound processors when measuring bits.
The Genesis and SNES were 16-bit because they used 16-bit CPUs, but IIRC they had 8-bit sound.
The SNES had a 16-bit sound processor (SPC700), and the Genesis had a Z80 for sound.
though I believe the SNES at least could pull from a palette of 2^16 colors, and the Genesis from 2^15 or so
32,768 (2^15) total for SNES, 512 total for Genesis.
I don't know why the PC Engine/TurboGrafx-16 was 16-bit, because IIRC it used an 8-bit CPU.
Two of them, in fact. That was brought up quite often in gaming discussions, the fact that NEC was in effect lying about the machine being 16 bit.
The Jaguar was "64-bit" because it had two 32-bit processors, and everybody knows that 32 + 32 = 64.
32+32=64, but only when you're allowed to add them in the first place. It's a moot point, because the main processors "Tom" and "Jerry" (seriously, those are their names) in the Jaguar are both 64-bit.
How is the N64 64-bit?
By having a 64-bit CPU inside it, of course.
What about the Dreamcast, PS2, GameCube, or XBox?
DC: 128
PS2: 128
GC: 64
Xbox: 32
And yet the Xbox is the most powerful. This is why you use bits only to refer to different generations of game consoles, and not to compare their computational power.