Japanese consoles had so much soul>SNESSNES with SA-1 chip as seen in Kirby Super Star and Super Mario RPG is essentially a 2nd independent CPU at triple the clock rateMode 7 rotation (Super Mario Kart, Secret of Mana, etc) and could do transparency in hardware versus forced to with dithering>SaturnSaturn has a dual-CPU architecture and eight processorsCartridge slot to allow for instant load times and storage of sprites/backgroundsCD-ROM to allow for CD quality sound and mass storage of sprites/backgrounds that could have been stream loaded over to the cartridge to avoid load timesbuilt to do 2D games in the 3D era>DreamcastHitachi SH4 chips480p with the DC's PowerVR GPURarely-used volumetric per-pixel shadows and volumetric fog featuresOrder Independent Transparency and is the only system to date that came with OIT at the hardware levelPlanned HDD and DVD DriveVMU>PS2PS2 Emotion EngineThe PS2's strong suit was the amount of particle effects it could display simultaneously60fps
>>12171707Even Saturn with the VDP 2 effects or games with the background running at a different framerate from the main game, they all had particular graphics unique to them that made them interesting to look at. Custom silicon that you can't buy off the shelf from anywhere.
It's sad that unique hardware stopped being a thing, now we get all the same bullshit under different names
>>12171945It is, but it's also an inevitability of hardware becoming more powerful and efficient. You can just have all the colors, resolutions, and audio that you want now.It's actually rather unfortunate now when technology lets videogames be kind of almost anything you want to imagine, that AAA games then are so rigidly formulaic and samey in all sorts of ways.I guess that's why we have indies, but I would honestly like more variety down on the AA and A level.Really, it's why you and I were very fortunate to get to see that era of gaming, where this was the case. This is also in addition to the often repeated fact about how insanely fast the technological development was like back in those days, how gaming would change completely in just a couple of years, and then it would change completely again, and then it would change completely again.
