What's the most powerful system ever, in its day?

[Zap!]

The key words here are "in its day." I am not asking which is the most powerful system ever, because that would be the Xbox One X (as of December 2019 at least). I'm asking what system was so powerful when it was released that it was light years ahead of everything else at the time. A couple of rules first:

 

It must have been released. No prototypes or systems with less than 10 units sold (Halcyon). Finally, it must be on the market for at least a year. Reason being is because someone will say "XBox 360 on November 22, 2005!" while a far better rival in its generation came out shorty after.

 

Anyway, here's my two picks:

 

1) SNK Neo-Geo, 1990. This system absolutely demolished the completion. I got this for my 18th birthday in November of '90, and it was literally worlds ahead of my Genesis and Turbo Grafx. A true legend, it lasted into the 2000's!

 

2) Sony PlayStation 3, 2006. An absolute beast of a system. It's Cell processor was so powerful that it still beats out many traditional processors today. A Blu-Ray drive way back in 2006 that worked as a great player as well, and fully 1080p! It was made to compete for 10 years, and it did!

Edited December 16, 2019 by Zap!

[+stupus]

Colecovision.....the first system to bring arcade game feel to the home. And lots of great arcade titles released. Huge!!!!!

[Zap!]

10 minutes ago, stupus said:

Colecovision.....the first system to bring arcade game feel to the home. And lots of great arcade titles released. Huge!!!!!

While it demolished anything when it was released in August 1982, the Atari 5200 came out just two months later, and was comparable in graphics.

[masschamber]

probably the astrocade, 1978 until the the 82 next gen systems seemed a decent bit more capable then the 2600 , odyssey 2 or intellivision, though homebrew on all three of those...

[DragonGrafx-16]

1987 PC Engine 

[pablum]

I played Vs Super Mario Bros in the arcade and was blown away by the ability to play the game with the same graphics and sound on the NES.

 

I’d credit the Neo-Geo as the best for its 1:1 arcade ports of every game.

 

The Sharp X68000 was no slouch either with lots of amazing arcade perfect ports, but it was a Japanese PC that cost around $3,000.

 

 

[high voltage]

Magnavox Odyssey 1972, play video games on your home TV

Atari 2600, 1977, Space Invaders in your home? Killer-app.

[Magmavision2000]

Vectrex. There was literally nothing like it.

 

 

This one's cheating, but if it were released, Nintendo's "Project Atlantis" would've been the most powerful handheld from it's release to the DS.

[spacecadet]

Do you mean the system that had the biggest advantage over its competitors of any throughout history (not just at the time)? I'd probably have to give it to the Neo Geo AES in that case too if that's the criteria. It's kind of a special case, though, because it's a barely disguised MVS system. I suppose you could argue that Sega did something similar with the Dreamcast/Naomi (though the DC was also much more powerful than anything else until the PS2's release), but at least the Dreamcast had a cheaper storage medium and less VRAM. I feel like it's kind of "cheating" in terms of a question like this to include a system that's literally a re-packaged arcade machine with no attempt at making it affordable or mainstream.

 

In terms of mainstream systems, I'd probably go with the under-appreciated Sega Genesis, whose only real competition for quite some time was the NES. Originally released in Japan in October 1988, it was a full two years before the launch of the Super Famicom even came close to equaling it, and in some ways it still didn't. The Neo Geo AES was launched in the meantime, but it was not intended for the same market with its $650 price point in 1990 dollars. That left the NES and TurboGrafx 16/PC Engine as the Genesis/MegaDrive's only direct competition for the first couple years of its lifespan, and both of those were a joke compared to the Genesis in terms of raw power. There is a reason the Genesis was such a popular system in its early years, despite Sega never having had much commercial success in the home market before it (or since).

 

I had both a Genesis and an NES in those early Genesis years. It was like comparing not a PS3, but a PS4 vs. the original Wii. It wasn't just more powerful, it felt like an entirely different era despite the systems being on the market at the same time. They are considered different generations of systems and I don't argue that, but people forget that they were competing with each other for quite some time. It wasn't like both companies announced new systems and Sega just got theirs out a little beforehand. Nintendo didn't even *consider* replacing the NES until about a year after the Genesis' launch, when it was clear that Sega was having success and the NES was faltering as a result. For all that time, and then up until the SNES finally launched, it was just the Genesis vs. the NES. (And some less powerful also-rans like the TurboGrafx and Atari 7800, which was also still on the market.)

 

[128Kgames]

Neo Geo, no comparison, and maybe even an unfair advantage as you were literally on the same hardware (99%) as the MVS arcade system playing the exact, same games.  Not ports of the arcade game, but the same.  

[CatPix]

4 hours ago, spacecadet said:

That left the NES and TurboGrafx 16/PC Engine as the Genesis/MegaDrive's only direct competition for the first couple years of its lifespan, and both of those were a joke compared to the Genesis in terms of raw power.

That's debatable for the PC-Engine. Most PC-Engine specs seems inferior on paper to the Megadrive, but "raw numbers" are not massively significant.

For example, the fact that the PC-Engine use a 8 bits CPU VS the 16 bits CPU of the Megadrive,  isn't that big of a deal since the PC-Engine mostly use the 16 bits GPU to do all the graphic work.

The PC-Engine can display more colors on screen than the Megadrive, and with the release of the Cd-ROM add-on in 1988, games got increasingly complex, lenghty and beautiful. You might argue that then I should consider the Mega-CD, but the Mega-CD was a failure, where the CD-ROM² was not - it's an integral part of the PC-Engine system, with CD games making almost half of the PC-Engine library.

There is probably here a case of well-exploited console (PC-Engine) VS underexploited console (the Megadrive). It's also a though system to classify. Is the PC-Engine the last system of the 8 bits era or the first of the 16 bits?

Either way, saying that the PC-Engine is a joke is.. a joke. Or you never played one.

 

[Tanooki]

Yeah calling the PC Engine is joke just shows how utterly wrong and uninformed you are.  CatPix nailed it, just because the CPU itself wasn't 16bit meant nothing given the totality of the hardware, and if you extend it into the CD unit that was out notably before Sega did theirs too and them alone so they brought amazing hardware well over a year before Genesis that could beat it out with colors, audio, sprites, and yet again later with the power of that CD/SCD/ACD unit given the system card you gave it (or just the Duo in general.)  PCE was to console gaming leaps as the Neo Geo was to arcades.

 

Raw power nothing, I'd put the PCE family of shooters and what's happening on screen against the Genesis any day, let alone other genres too.

Edited December 16, 2019 by Tanooki

[deepthaw]

12 hours ago, Zap! said:

The key words here are "in its day." I am not asking which is the most powerful system ever, because that would be the Xbox One X (as of December 2019 at least). I'm asking what system was so powerful when it was released that it was light years ahead of everything else at the time. A couple of rules first:

 

It must have been released. No prototypes or systems with less than 10 units sold (Halcyon). Finally, it must be on the market for at least a year. Reason being is because someone will say "XBox 360 on November 22, 2005!" while a far better rival in its generation came out shorty after.

 

Anyway, here's my two picks:

 

1) SNK Neo-Geo, 1990. This system absolutely demolished the completion. I got this for my 18th birthday in November of '90, and it was literally worlds ahead of my Genesis and Turbo Grafx. A true legend, it lasted into the 2000's!

 

2) Sony PlayStation 3, 2006. An absolute beast of a system. It's Cell processor was so powerful that it still beats out many traditional processors today. A Blu-Ray drive way back in 2006 that worked as a great player as well, and fully 1080p! It was made to compete for 10 years, and it did!

I don't see any way the PS3 was "light years" ahead of the Xbox 360, and I'm unaware of any traditional processors of today that the Cell beats out. 

 

The Neo*Geo *was* light years ahead, but feels a bit like cheating since it wasn't really aimed at the same market. But it was unique in the overpriced console family ($699 3DO?) in that it wasn't immediately overshadowed by another system (RIP 3DO, 9/9/95. Long live PS1.)

 

If you look at the portable space, Nintendo's offerings regularly got trounced specs-wise by handhelds that *were* light years ahead. Yet all of them fell before the juggernaut that is Big N when it came to market share.

[derFunkenstein]

When a home console costs 3x as much as the competition, it damn well better have incredible specs. So for me the NeoGeo is a big "duh". 

 

I think this is more interesting when you talk about comparably priced hardware. For me that means, weirdly enough, the Dreamcast. Since it was discontinued shortly after the PS2's launch, Sega had the most powerful hardware for the duration of its lifecycle, since it was going up against the PS1 and N64. 

 

The only other one that immediately jumps out at me is the Lynx. That thing beat the pants off the OG Game Boy and even had a good hardware advantage over the Game Gear. Being able to switch palettes per scan line really helped enhance colors (see the recent Lynx MK thread for an example) and much more powerful CPU configuration. 

[Eltigro]

A lot of times, things like this can be kind of subjective.  People will argue about a system's potential and that games weren't made that reached that potential... also which specs are more important or whatever...  I think it can be more interesting to think about which systems were definitely NOT the most powerful when released as it is often something more agreed upon.  For example, the Wii was definitely not more powerful than the 360 or PS3.  The 7800 sat on a shelf for long enough that other machines had passed it by, so when it finally released, the NES was already past it.

[derFunkenstein]

Starting with the Wii, Nintendo started chasing something else entirely...they were desperate for a gimmick that would move hardware. That's why the Wii sold so well - the motion gimmick. Once the appeal wore off, the system stopped selling. The Wii U didn't move nearly enough units with its gimmicky second screen thing. The Switch got the screen thing right by putting the whole system into the the screen, like a tablet or a phone.

 

Nintendo's strategy appears to be to undercut the competition on both retail cost AND component cost, which allows them to sell the thing cheaper than Sony/Microsoft and make a profit while doing it. The Wii U kind of failed since it didn't move nearly enough units. The other two did fine. 

 

That said, all three of those systems work great for me because they've got a collection of really fun games (same with the 3DS/2DS). This thread is about hardware but video games have always been about the software. As far as I'm concerned, having fun is all that matters.

[Flojomojo]

13 hours ago, Zap! said:

SNK Neo-Geo, 1990. This system absolutely demolished the completion. I got this for my 18th birthday in November of '90, and it was literally worlds ahead of my Genesis and Turbo Grafx. A true legend, it lasted into the 2000's!

With a price to match! $650 in 1990 is like double that today. I still get a bit of a kick out of the fact that it's easy to emulate and that the NeoGeo games have appeared elsewhere. But you were in from the beginning, money-boy!

 

I can't get behind PS3 in the same way, if only because Xbox 360 got so many of the same games, and could match it in most respects except for the Blu-Ray drive. I can't think of a similar "cheat" that a next-gen system will be able to pull off in the same way that Sony did with both DVDs and Blu-Ray discs. 

 

I guess iPad counts. There wasn't an equivalent touchscreen tablet with the same level of quality and software ecosystem for a while.

 

I'd also submit that the Palm Pilot was pretty neat in its time, a huge number of fun software titles in a form factor that ran for a long time on a small battery. The PocketPC was more technically impressive, but much like GameBoy vs Lynx, the simpler, better-supported, more portable thing won out. 

[Punisher5.0]

This is a tough question. There are so many systems that were better in some aspects but not others with their counterparts. The 16 bit era is heavily effected with this. While the Neo Geo was the most powerful it was also the most limited. The hardware could only draw sprites where as the SNES and Genesis could also do polygons. Also, in 1990 the SNES was the only system that could pull off a game like FZero.

 

For the time they came out I would say the 3DO was a gigantic leap from prior systems. Need for Speed was a true new generation of gaming.

[derFunkenstein]

29 minutes ago, Punisher5.0 said:

For the time they came out I would say the 3DO was a gigantic leap from prior systems. Need for Speed was a true new generation of gaming.

I thought about the 3DO but to me it fell in that Neo Geo category of "omg for the price it sure as heck better beat everything else", and also it was fairly quickly supplanted by the PlayStation.

 

The 3DO had the same two-year head start over the PS1 that the Genesis did over the SNES in North America, a one-year advantage in Europe, and just a few months in Japan. It was more the start of the next generation than the continuation of the one before it, and ended up being relatively underpowered as a result, much like the Dreamcast. 3D games on the 3DO were nothing compared to what came just a little bit later, for example. 

[Tanooki]

Wasn't the old taco phone n-gage kind of well ahead of the handheld curve within the 1yr limit of this topic?  I remember it doing some pretty impressive 3D games you wouldn't see on phones for some time yet, even longer on handheld dedicated gaming devices too.

[glazball]

@masschamber was correct: the Bally Professional Arcade (aka Astrocade), the Neo Geo of the 70's.

[Zap!]

15 hours ago, DragonGrafx-16 said:

1987 PC Engine 

The Mega Drive came out in 1988 though. From OP:

 

Finally, it must be on the market for at least a year. 

[CatPix]

That's only if you consider that the Mega Drive was superior to the PC-Engine. Which as we pointed out is debatable, especially when you take in account the fact that the CD-ROM add-on was so popular that it's basically part of the console specs.

[Zap!]

12 minutes ago, CatPix said:

That's only if you consider that the Mega Drive was superior to the PC-Engine. Which as we pointed out is debatable, especially when you take in account the fact that the CD-ROM add-on was so popular that it's basically part of the console specs.

Even if you don't consider the MD more powerful, no one would consider the PC Engine as far more powerful. If the MD didn't come out until 1989, then the PC Engine would have been an excellent answer. It was far more powerful than the SMS and NES.

[DragonGrafx-16]

I looked... the Mega Drive came out pretty much exactly 1 year later...

 

PC Engine in Oct 30, 1987

Mega Drive in Oct 29, 1988