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3DO vs Genesis (all add ons)


Jackel192

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Ask a silly question, get a silly answer. The 3DO is many years newer than the Genesis and has a completely different architecture.

You can look at specs all day. I suggest playing Road Rash on both for a flavor.

An old fashioned specs page is here. Caution: dont get too hung up on comparing MHz of processors, because clock speeds are like revolutions per minute in engines: meaningless without more context.
http://www.angelfire.com/electronic2/mariotan/

Asking to compare speed implies theres a common benchmark you can run for comparisons sake. There isn't one.

3DO is newer, but I still play and enjoy Sega Genesis games today. I think 3DO is pretty laughable. There's a lot more to game design than power.

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From everything I've read, the Genesis/Sega CD/32X combo had some weird bottlenecks that kept it from being as powerful as one might expect. A lot of people have overestimated what can be done with the 32X in particular -- it really can't sustain 60fps in 2D games of any complexity, and it chugs in 3D (especially if any texture-mapping is involved). Many 32X games are using the Genesis far more than you might expect.

 

The 3DO was built for 3D and does it fairly well, and most of its shortcomings were due to the slow-ish processor -- the system architecture itself is sound. It's not so great at 2D, with frequent slowdown or dropped frames in many games. The 32X port of Doom is much better than the 3DO version, but that seems to have more to do with tight timetables and buggy devkits than hardware/platform power -- not to mention that Carmack himself handled the 32X and Jaguar versions of the game, while the 3DO version was foisted on someone who was given very little time to pull it off.

 

OTOH the Genesis/Sega CD combo on its own is somewhat underrated. It can pull off some impressive sprite-scaling pseudo-3D, and even with the limited color palette (which compromises presentation somewhat) it can be a real 2D powerhouse in the right circumstances.

 

Personally, I like all of these systems and find that they all have worthwhile games.

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no, the one for doom for 32X

 

Well, let's try out the Google machine.

 

Here's the advertisement. Ew, it's gross.

 

"Six times more powerful than 3DO"

 

Here's a good writeup at Segaretro.org

 

Comparison

North American marketing pitched the 32X as being 40 times more powerful than the Super NES and 6 times more powerful than the 3DO. This is true in terms of CPU performance, as the 32X's dual SH-2 are capable of processing nearly 60 MIPS, compared to the Super NES's Ricoh 5A22 which processes 1.5 MIPS and the 3DO's ARM60 which processes 10 MIPS.

In terms of 3D polygon performance, the 32X is capable of rendering 160,000 flat-shaded polygons/sec and 50,000 textured polygons/sec. In comparison, the 3DO renders 20,000 textured polygons/sec,[7]while the Super Nintendo's Super FX 2 cartridge enhancement chip renders 4,000 flat-shaded polygons/sec and 2,000 textured polygons/sec. This means the 32X renders 40 times as many polygons as the Super FX 2 chip and more than twice as many textured polygons as the 3DO.

Compared to other systems at the time, the Atari Jaguar renders 10,000 textured polygons/sec,[8] while a Pentium 60 PC renders 30,000–50,000 flat-shaded polygons/sec[9] and 6,000 textured polygons/sec,[10]. Meanwhile the Pentium 66 renders 3.6 MPixels/s[11] (compared to the 32X's 18–36 MPixels/s).

Compared to the Sega Saturn, however, the 32X is extremely limited, and indeed owes much of its graphical prowess to the Mega Drive hardware it sits on top of. In the vast majority of circumstances, the 32X works with the Mega Drive to produce an image, to the point where without the connector cable attached, games will still run and may even be considered playable.

While the 32X side is able to output up to 32,768 colours on-screen at once, it is comparitively slow at rendering a full 320x224 image in this mode than the Mega Drive can with its 64 on-screen colours. As such, it is common to see 32X games rely on the Mega Drive hardware to draw large, detailed backgrounds or foregrounds instead (Chaotix, Tempo, Mortal Kombat II). With the 32X side able to pick up some slack in terms of graphics processing, more colours can be reserved by the Mega Drive for this purpose than in the average Mega Drive-specific game, though a 64 colour limit is still in place most of the time.

This hybrid approach was used by many developers to ensure a full 60FPS refresh rate in 2D games. Games which opt to swap the pipeline around - giving the 32X the bulk of the 2D rendering and have the Mega Drive fill the gaps, are often left with slower frame rates (Pitfall: The Mayan Adventure, Brutal Unleashed: Above the Claw), though there are rare exceptions (Kolibri) that manage to display high colour graphics at 60FPS. The ability to fall back on the 16-bit hardware, however, can put the 32X at an advantage over systems such as the Atari Jaguar which is known to befall similar frame rate issues when tackling 2D games.

Similarly the 32X adds a two channel PWM sound chip, itended to complement the existing Mega Drive audio capabilities rather than replace them outright. This means in many cases, the quality of 32X and Mega Drive audio is virtually identical, with some developers failing to make use of this new chip at all.

In the real world, you'd be hard pressed to find a good comparison game that was common to both the 32X and the 3DO. Doom is compromised on both systems, but the 3DO port is famously bad. 3DO doesn't have any Sega arcade games on it. 32X doesn't have as many CD-based full motion video extravaganzas. Personally, I like vanilla Sega Genesis better than either one.

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good to know. alright, lets try night trap and corpse killer.

 

 

just saw some really cute baby chicks at robinson feed. pity I couldn't buy them. but i'm going off topic

 

Yes but the combo of the 2 statements is like the 32X attachment giving you a whole new level. Check out what you could have said.

 

just saw some really cute corpse killer chicks at robinson feed. but i'm good to know. alright, lets try night trap but i'm going off topic.pity I couldn't buy them

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Could the Genesis (with the add-ons) run army men?

If it ran on the GameBoy Color, it's safe to say it could work on the Genesis. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Army_Men

 

Road Avenger is a Sega CD full motion video game. It could run on a toaster so long as there was enough storage space for the video files. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Road_Blaster

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