During the great war of the 90s, Sega and Nintendo used all the weapons in their weapons to gain a hand. Any feature or process deemed profitable quickly turned into a marketing destination, and when Sonic the Hedgehog arriving on the scene, Sega was quick to focus on its console being able to do things faster than the competition.
Some of this is based on strong truth; the Motorola 68000 CPU inside the Mega Drive / Genesis is left at 7.6 MHz, which means it is more than twice the speed of the SNES-powered Ricoh 5A22, running at 3.58 MHz.
However, consoles are sold by buzz words and not geeky details, so when Sega of America Marty Franz discovered a tactic that allowed developers to compress data on a graphics chip while the scanline was pulled from the screen, colleagues Scott Bayliss destroyed it & # 39; Blast Processing & # 39; It even made the slogan a part of its advertising campaign, boasting that Genesis had it, but the SNES did not.
However, former Sculptured Software software engineer Jeff Peters – who has worked on many console games, including SNES port for Death of the Combat – says his studio got the same trick on the SNES before
When Mortal Kombat was installed on Nintendo's console, the software shown came with a huge problem – the amount of graphic data being added to the cart meant that the audio had to be cut back a lot. To overcome this problem, Peter and his team used a home system that allowed them to read the sounds in one box at a time and blast them directly to a handle in audio memory. Inside, it's called (you guessed it) to process
Speaking to David L. Craddock about his book Arcade Perfect, Peter said:
That was before Sega accepted the motto. We just blow the sound from the jacket into the stadium. That allowed us to keep the resolution and VO sample level high, and to be able to have audio samples to use in a given battle, or at a specific level.
While these two tactics do things differently, it's interesting to note that both were possible on any console – despite Sega's insistence that only his console could do such a thing. These days, you might have found companies that compared TFLOPs with SDD access speeds, but the & # 39; 90s were an extremely innocent time, where small advertising like blast blasting could make all the difference.