🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <2362.1599.uupcb@spacebbs.com> mike.mcaulay@spacebbs.com (Mike Mcaulay)  writes:
>
>VKS>        I rented a Super Nintendo for a couple of days and was totaly amaze
>VKS>by its graphics capabilities.  The question I have is why can the PC not do
>VKS>the same things that the SNES can. 
>
>The SNES has hardware dedicated to sprite management, scrolling,
>rotation, etc.  The PC does not.

Don't forget the fact that your fancy 33 MHz '486 chip talks to your
video card along a 16-bit path at 5 MHz.  Or was it 10 MHz? 

Anyway, the bus speed is __s__l__o__w__ compared to modern processors,
and it is relatively narrow as well.  That makes a _big_ difference (which
is why you should spring the bucks for a motherboard with on-board RAM,
rather than using an expansion board).

On top of that, your SNES probably uses a graphics chip while the PC is
a general purpose chip.  That means a lot of graphics routines are implemented
in hardware instead of several layers of software.  (A company I used to
work for used a graphics chip as the CPU for an embedded system; it had
direct CPU support for graphics functions that have taken me hundreds of
lines to write (in 80x86 assembler) -- circles, ellipses, pattern floods, etc).


Bear Giles
bear@fsl.noaa.gov/cs.colorado.edu