Atari's numbering was plenty confusing: 400, 800, 600XL, 2600, 5200, 7800.Numbers are boring, but they don't confuse the average consumer.
Atari's numbering was plenty confusing: 400, 800, 600XL, 2600, 5200, 7800.Numbers are boring, but they don't confuse the average consumer.
Atari's numbering was plenty confusing: 400, 800, 600XL, 2600, 5200, 7800.
Great write up but just wanted to point out that I spotted a typo.This means you can represent 256 unique numbers - like 0 to 256, or -128 to 127, with one byte.
Great write up but just wanted to point out that I spotted a typo.
I'm just trying to figure out when I dozed off and we switched from polygons to triangles.
Like... I straight up missed it.
Xbox 12 Trillion
Xbox 360 or Xbox One X?
iPhone 8 or iPhone X?
Kindle Oasis or Kindle Fire 8.9?
iPad 2 or the new iPad?
Halo 12 Trillion when?
Whereas both GDDR5 and GDDR5X used a single 32-bit channel per chip, GDDR6 instead uses a pair of 16-bit channels. This means that in a single memory core clock cycle (ed: not to be confused with the memory bus), 32 bytes will be fetched from each channel for a total of 64 bytes.
Brain fart.
I'm done for.
Edit- wait... I meant the industry, like bits and teraflops, use to talk about polygons per second... but now I don't see polygons meantioned anymore, more so triangles per second.
I meant in that sense.
Fuel for the fire.
And Pong consoles must have been 2-bit and Tennis for Two was just a single bit.
And Pong consoles must have been 2-bit and Tennis for Two was just 1-bit.
ST 260 -> 256 KB RAM
ST 520 -> 512 KB RAM
ST 1040 -> 1024 KB RAM
ST 4160 -> 4096 KB RAM
why the hell did they round the numbers like that?!
The Atari 2600 CPU is an 8-bit MOS 6507, a variant of the 6502 family of CPUs that were also used in things like the Commodore 64 and NES, which has access to only 1/8 the ram the variants in the other mentioned computers have access to.
I think we can all agree that we should ditch the terminology and go back to vague and lame insults about the other console. Its a language we can all understand.It's funny that Bits have effectively been replaced by Tera Flops; neither figure ultimately means that much, but everybody is using it to prove a supposed point.
I always used to hear that the difference between PS1 and Saturn is that the PS1 did polygons and the Saturn rendered quads. I have no idea which is better , I just know it made Saturn development hard.
So kind of like Sword and Sworcery vs Shovel Knight.That's funny how it's still considered an 8-bit machine. That used to be the talk of elementary school. Friends used to be like, "Atari games are blocky so they don't have the power to make them look like people like the NES could!"
Honestly, I would like to go back to this. It would at least be more fun.I think we can all agree that we should ditch the terminology and go back to vague and lame insults about the other console. Its a language we can all understand.
Sony can make fun of how long you will have to wait to load games on the XBOX and MS can make jokes about how weak the PS5 is. Nintendo can say their console is the only one that is rooftop compatible.
I'd say it's between PS1 and 32X in power.I lost faith in bits when the Game Boy Advance was 32-bit and yet couldn't do PlayStation level graphics.
iPhone 8 or iPhone 10?Numbers are boring, but they don't confuse the average consumer.
Sega Genesis or Sega Saturn, which is the newest one?
Playstation 2 or Playstation 3?
iPhone 4 or iPhone 6?
Galaxy S7 or Galaxy S9?
Easy to understand progression. But yes, I too would prefer actual console names. Yet, if mainline phones ever did that I'd be confused as all hell due to their yearly releases.
Me too.So kind of like Sword and Sworcery vs Shovel Knight.
Honestly, I would like to go back to this. It would at least be more fun.
And that's the problem, being too steadfast in generic terms like this. TF is so, so generic, just like the bitness was back in the day. I mean, considering the NeoGeo wasn't actually 24-bit...Me too.
But honestly its only fun if you remember how dumb it all is. This shit gets deadly serious if you believe in it.
I expect some VERY angry posts about flurbs, nurbs, teraflops, fps, resolution load times, etc. Especially right before and after launch. Thats when it is going to be popping. A lot of people are going to say the most absurd things. Accounts will burn. Reputations will rise and fall. Sales numbers will be used.
And it will be glorious...
the difference between using quads and triangles does not make the saturn harder to develop for, there are other reasons namely related to parallelism that the Saturn is hard to program for. The difference between how the Saturn and PSX render mainly comes down to flexibility and ram management. The PSX using triangles was thus very flexible, but everything it did ate up a ton of RAM. The Saturn's use of quads made it extremely memory efficient for certain types of artwork. On top of that, the Saturn could perform actual perspective correction, the VDP would tessellate a quad as it distorts. The PSX uses affine texture mapping which preserves parallelism resulting in weird textures.
The main drawback of quads is, of course, they can't represent triangles very well. The closest shape you can get to a triangle if quads are your primative is a trapezoid. Unlike the PSX, the Saturn doesn't offer any sort of UV Mapping ability. That is to say, you can't map arbitrary points on a texture to a polygon. Textures are mapped to the entire quad as-is. This is because the saturn really doesn't have polygons as people consider them. They are actually skewed and distorted sprites. The difference between sprite and polygon comes down to the difference in how visual data on the screen is stored in memory in what is called a frame buffer. The Playstation stores every pixel on the screen individually in a large block of memory called a frame buffer, which lets them change any individual pixel on screen with granularity. Addressing every pixel on screen in memory is very expensive in those days because it ate up lots of memory. The Saturn, instead, uses a tilemap, which can draw an entire screen's worth of graphics with a fraction of the memory usage. This compression comes at the expense of granularity -- the saturn can't arbitrarily change any pixel on screen; for backgrounds it can only change groups of 64 pixels at a time (8x8 pixel blocks in a tile). Obviously, if you're drawing 3D characters, you need to be able to draw with more granularity than 8x8 blocks, so it sets aside another form of memory for sprites. Sprites are blocks of pixels that can be placed anywhere on screen. When the Saturn renders "polygons," each polygon is actually just a distorted sprite.
The way the saturn handles full screen graphics makes it terrific for 2D games. The same exact art on the Sega Saturn will take up a fraction of the art's size on the playstation, which is why fighting games from that era could display way more frames of animation.