questions about SNK ports on Super Famicom.

ForeverSublime

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Madman, is there a step 2 after instruction number 1: "SEARCH FUNCTION"? Or is this what happens?
 

joe8

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Some Neo Geo games seem to be better on Genesis, than SNES. Samurai Shodown plays smoother and faster on Genesis, and the graphics are better (even though the backgrounds aren't as detailed as the SNES port), but it's missing the Earthquake character, which isn't a deal breaker. This is probably because the Genesis hardware is more similar to the Neo Geo MVS/AES hardware. The Genesis CPU, the Motorola 68000, was used in a lot of other arcade systems, as well. The SNES had an unusual CPU that was never used in any arcade system, so any arcade game had to be modified quite a lot to produce a SNES version. So, even though the SNES technically could produce better graphics, the Genesis sometimes had the edge.

The Genesis console was a cut-down version of the System 16 arcade hardware. I don't know why the Genesis and SNES had so much less power than arcade systems of the time, you'd think they could have made them more powerful (better sound, and bigger sprites, even if not as good as the arcade), as the consoles were sold at a loss in many cases anyway. They made up for the loss with game sales.
 
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Neo Alec

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The Genesis console was a cut-down version of the System 16 arcade hardware. I don't know why the Genesis and SNES had so much less power than arcade systems of the time, you'd think they could have made them more powerful (better sound, and bigger sprites, even if not as good as the arcade), as the consoles were sold at a loss in many cases anyway. They made up for the loss with game sales.
That's mostly memory limitations. Playing the Neo now, a lot of the limitations of the day are muted and we forget that, but memory was expensive. The Neo could directly access a ton of memory, just like arcade PCBs at the time. That's why the carts were so expensive.

It also comes down to the quality of porting.
 

joe8

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That's mostly memory limitations. Playing the Neo now, a lot of the limitations of the day are muted and we forget that, but memory was expensive. The Neo could directly access a ton of memory, just like arcade PCBs at the time. That's why the carts were so expensive.

It also comes down to the quality of porting.
The games on home consoles were built to a price. They couldn't sell carts to parents for more than a certain amount, whether it was $50 USD or $99 AUD. So that limited the amount of memory that could be used.
The Neo wasn't limited like that so much, because the games were primarily made for the arcade, where the amount of memory used didn't really matter, as the arcade operator could make money from the game. And the AES version was an afterthought, AES owners were people who could pay a lot for their games, and SNK was trying to make money from the MVS rather than from the AES. The AES was mostly just a promotional tool for the MVS.

I don't know if it would be technically possible to program a megashock (116 MEG- the same as MVS/AES) version of Samurai Shodown for the SNES, but if it were, would the graphics and sound be much better, as the CPU, graphics and sound chips would still be the same?
 
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