Re: Massive Console History update

Well, I have a few suggestions.

First, you mention the max pps count of PS1 as being 180,00. While this
is true as far as official spec sheets are concerned, it was surpassed
in game according to the developers of "Iron and Blood", a fighting
game based on the dungeons and dragons universe. On the back of the
case, it mentions the pps rate as being 225,000. Furthermore, in an old
Gamefan magazine interview, I recall them stating that each character
was composed of around 3,700 gouraud shaded polygons, which at 30
frames comes to about 225,000 pps. On a side note, they also discussed
the fabled M2 version, which according to the developers, would feature
models built with over 10,000 polygons! So I think the fact that PS1
surpassed the original theoretical limit should be mentioned.

My second suggestion concerns your Snes history page. You fail to
mention one of the Snes's most significant hardware features.
Transparency. It was a distinct advantage that the Snes had over
Genesis (which had no hardware support for it). Even the much vaunted
Neo Geo lacked this feature in hardware. Like the Genesis, it had to be
faked with "meshes" on Neo Geo.

Tons of Snes games used it to create all kinds of neat special effects
(especially water effects). Games such as Chrono Trigger, Final
Fantasy, Secret of Mana, Killer Instinct, Doky Kong Country, and even
unpopular titles like Indiana Jones Trilogy, all used it to great
extent. One game in particular, EarthWorm Jim, had beautiful lens flare
on the first level that was produced using this effect. But it was
completely absent from the Genesis version. This feature was also used
to artificially increase color counts and simulate light sourcing
(example, Fulgore's stage in Killer Instinct. There is a swinging lamp
with a translucent sprite that "lights" up fighters and projectiles). I
think this should be mentioned.

Third, corcerns your claim that Sonic 2 has 7 or more background
planes. I don't think this is accurate. I remember reading somewhere
that most of the "planes" in Sonic were created using raster effects,
but I can't remember where I read it unfortunately. However, using a
feature in Snes9x that allows you to turn on or off the four snes
background planes, I think I found information that supports the idea
of Sonic 2 not being a background scrolling beast, at least
technically, though visually it is. In Mortal Kombat 1 for Snes, there
appears to be 5 background layers in the first stage, which exceeds the
official specs, BUT, after turning on and off the four background
layers with the 1,2,3,4 keys, I discovered that it is using only three,
with the third being the health bar and statistics. There also appears
to be, at least visually, 5 background layers in the Pit stage. Three
of these scrolling "backgrounds" are cloud layers, and by turning off
background 2, all three disappear. This points to some other 16-Bit
hardware effect that's capable of artificially increasing the visual
parallax scroll. Perhaps the raster hardware is responsible for this
neat effect.

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