🚀 go-pugleaf

saxena@bohr.physics.purdue.edu (Virendra K. Saxena) writes:

>	I rented a Super Nintendo for a couple of days and was totaly amazed 
>by its graphics capabilities.  The question I have is why can the PC not do
>the same things that the SNES can.  The SNES double and triple scrolls with no  slow down, and it easily moves large sprites around the screen(street fighter 2 and tmtm 4).  The SNES is based on an 8 bit proccessor, while most pcs this day are based on 32 bit processors.  Why don't we see such high quality games on 
>PCs?  The CPU is definetely powerfull enough, and the resolution is higher then the SNES.

What you are seeing in action is 'hardware assist'. The SNES no doubt has
hardware to automatically handle the double and triple scrolling graphics,
and special bit blitting hardware to move the sprites around the screen.

Machines like the SNES are designed specifically for games, and thats
it. The PC is a business machine, not a games machine, so the graphics
are not designed specifically for games. 

Take the Amiga's for example. These machines were designed from the start
to have built in hardware assist for graphics and sound - and the games
are awesome...

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