What's so special about the 68000?

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I saw this in another thread (Scary things in non-horror games), and I thought it was pretty impressive.


This has fast, fluid motion, a gigantic multi-part boss monster, a pseudo-mode 7/parallax effect with the background layers that make them appear to span out into the distance, what appears to be a transparency effect (thought it could just be a checkerboard effect with a filter applied to the video), and awesome music with clear drum samples. The Genesis is doing stuff here that you'd normally expect from the SNES, as well as things the SNES would likely struggle with. I'm honestly amazed people don't cite this game when they talk about the Genesis' capabilities.

Ecco was always good at showing what beauty could be achieved with 64 colors.

I really consider it a work of art overall. Even my dad was impressed with it in the mid 90's. He got a degree in marine biology if I'm not mistaken.

Tim Follins made the soundtrack for the Sega Dreamcast Ecco game. He used a sampling program of some kind.

That paneling effect was also in Sonic games. Most prevalent in Sonic 2 and 3. Although, Mode 7 on SNES was more about full scaling. That is in Mario Kart where the character is able to turn around 360. It's a full 3D plane of movement for the 2D sprite.

With the Sega CD, this could be achieved easily. Look up the special stages for Sonic CD.

The paneling effect however has been done even on Sega Master System back in 1986:



Hehe, that was my first SMS game. Pretty fun and well made.

The 68000 takes 4 cycles to access memory. 4 CYCLES! What don't people understand about that?

Then does the SNES take only 1 cycle to access memory?

Exactly.

But how many memory accesses can the 68000 do in the time it takes for the 65816 to do a memory access? The 68000 may take more cycles to do a memory access, but that wouldn't really matter if it can burn through those cycles faster than the 65816. I don't know if it does or not, but it would be interesting to see.

In fact, I'd like to see someone code a benchmark for both systems, as well as other consoles from around the same era, to see which has the most raw CPU horsepower. This would mean programming the benchmark in portable code, and somehow finding compilers for each console's CPU architecture that are equal in ability.

According to this TvTropes page http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/HowVideoGameSpecsWork
The Genesis CPU is about 7% faster that the SNES CPU; not much of a difference. I did read in some places that SNES memory was rather slow though.

There is some polygons used without expansion chip in Zelda:alttp (The Triforce and the rotating crystals when you free the maidens). Maybe also in Chrono trigger for some spells; though maybe it's made from other way that "true" 3D polygons. In both those cases there is little action on screens beside those polygons however.

During the mission briefings in Front Mission, there are crude polygon models of the targets that you can spin and rotate, but the controls lag when you manipulate them. There's also a "sales pitch" for some of the ingame weapons during the attract sequence where you can do the same thing with polygonal graphs of the weapons' stats. This game used no special chips to my knowledge, other than battery saving. That said, some of the on-cart SRAM could've been used as extra RAM, though I'm not 100% sure if this is actually possible or not.

Steel Talons is another example of an unenhanced SNES game that uses polygons; in fact the whole game consists of polygons, but it's pretty clear from playing it that this is just too much for the SNES to handle. Then again, the last time I played it was ages ago on ZSNES, and this emulator is actually a fairly poor representation of the SNES' capabilities. Reportedly, it'll blitz through sections of Megaman X that have slowdown on the real system.

Last edited by mr_bigmouth_502 on 27 Jul 2016, 6:52 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Oh, a little 3D polygon triforce, and a few polygons for some spells...

How about an entire bonus level with no expansion chip?



Thought it was time to pull out the big guns.

I remember bounding box collision being something the 65816 is good at.

It only takes 63 cycles, which means it can do almost 1000 collision pairs per frame. The ironic thing is that everyone assumes the 65816 is bad at collision, so they program all kinds of crazy complicated sprite sorting tricks that ends up making the 65816 run slower.

Now let's see how the 68000 handles collision.

Twice as many cycles.

Boy were those old programmers ever wrong!

Wow! I just found this unreleased Genesis game:



Looks like they figured out how to get that 360 scaling with alternate road routes.

Old thread, i know, but OP should google "CISC vs RISC".

It's funny you bring that up, because it has been argued that the 6502 is an early example of a RISC CPU. The 65816 is basically just a 16-bit 6502 with a few additional instructions.

I honestly think the SNES would've had a good edge over the Genesis if Nintendo had clocked the SNES' CPU higher and found a way to access the cart memory at full speed from the get-go. Running at the same clock speed, the 65816 should be able to outperform the 68000 for sure. It already trades blows with the Genesis 68000 at the speed it runs at.

Something that gives the Genesis a benefit with 3D polygons is the graphics format. Genesis uses packed pixel format while the SNES uses planar. If the SNES had packed pixels, I could easily program a 3d polygon demo, since every pixel would be stored individually.

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It's been done, although I wonder if it could be done better.