You know what would be awesome? SLI CONSOLES

[desura]

get excited! Jump on the table! SLI XBOXOXOXOXOXOXO

 

[ImpulsE69]

HEAT HEAT HEAT RINGS OF DEATH DEATH DEATH!

say it with me now....

I will say always baffles me all the people complaining about "fan noise". They are the reason people can't have actual decent consoles anymore and we end up with half assed attempts at DVRs that play phone games.

 

[exdeath]

No.

Consoles have already become too much like PCs for my liking.

Ill play console games on my consoles and PC games on my PC thank you very much.

 

[artemicion]

HEAT HEAT HEAT RINGS OF DEATH DEATH DEATH!

say it with me now....

I will say always baffles me all the people complaining about "fan noise". They are the reason people can't have actual decent consoles anymore and we end up with half assed attempts at DVRs that play phone games.

Yes the reason why there isn't more expensive hardware in consoles is fan noise and not anything like, I don't know, COSTS.

 

[desura]

HEAT HEAT HEAT RINGS OF DEATH DEATH DEATH!

say it with me now....

I will say always baffles me all the people complaining about "fan noise". They are the reason people can't have actual decent consoles anymore and we end up with half assed attempts at DVRs that play phone games.

Does not compute.

Seriously.

Each console should heat up as much as it had before.

But with two running at once, you could say, power a 4k TV.

 

[exdeath]

Does not compute.

Seriously.

Each console should heat up as much as it had before.

But with four+ running at once, you could say, power a 4k TV.

Fixed.

 

[dguy6789]

You'd need more than two to run games natively at 4K at playable frame rates

Edit: beaten to it

 

[exdeath]

You'd need more than two to run games natively at 4K at playable frame rates

Edit: beaten to it

And the games would still suck.




But ZOMG THE GRAPHUCKS!!!!!!! GUNZ LOOK SO REALITSCIC!!!1!

 

[smackababy]

This is exactly what we need! Let's inflate the costs of games even more by having some require additional processing power and including the expansion chips on the carts!

Just imagine if we were still in the SNES days and out games came with custom coprocessors to make them even more better in graphics! Omg!!!

 

[SaurusX]

Just imagine if we were still in the SNES days and out games came with custom coprocessors to make them even more better in graphics! Omg!!!

The horror.

 

[exdeath]

SNES chips didn't improve graphics. Most chips were decompression engines and math co processors.

Apparently a 3.58 MHz 16 bit BCD processor can't do floating point calculations, who knew!

 

[ImpulsE69]

Does not compute.

Seriously.

Each console should heat up as much as it had before.

But with two running at once, you could say, power a 4k TV.

Maybe you need to upgrade your brain to SLI?

What I said makes perfect sense, additional hardware (especially graphics processors) produces more heat, meaning more fans/ventilation. Have you not seen all the omg bitching about how awfully loud consoles are due to discs and fans? (btw, as a person who never lacks fans and doesn't mind the noise I find it humorous)

 

[smackababy]

SNES chips didn't improve graphics. Most chips were decompression engines and math co processors.

Apparently a 3.58 MHz 16 bit BCD processor can't do floating point calculations, who knew!

I was under the impressed Super FX was intended to work as a graphics accelerator. I can't remember what Capcom's chip did, but I know they had one. There were quite a few others.

 

[Sohaltang]

market segmentation would kill the idea. Look at Sega CD, or Sega 32X. You ended up with just a few games because developers code for the least common demonitor

 

[SaurusX]

I was under the impressed Super FX was intended to work as a graphics accelerator. I can't remember what Capcom's chip did, but I know they had one. There were quite a few others.

Without the Super FX chip Yoshi's Island wouldn't have had the huge bosses that scale and deform the way that they do. There were also lots of other visual effects made possible such as the 3D falling doors and some background scrolling stuff.

The Capcom chip just did some wireframe effects for Mega Man X2 and X3. Totally unnecessary and not worth the bang for the buck.

 

[artemicion]

Maybe you need to upgrade your brain to SLI?

What I said makes perfect sense, additional hardware (especially graphics processors) produces more heat, meaning more fans/ventilation. Have you not seen all the omg bitching about how awfully loud consoles are due to discs and fans? (btw, as a person who never lacks fans and doesn't mind the noise I find it humorous)

I think maybe he was under the impression that SLI consoles meant that you would have two complete consoles (i.e., two physical Xbox Ones) sitting next to each other with some kind of connection between them to enable SLI. Inwhich case, both would produce (and dissapate) heat in the same manner as one console, and there would be no increased chance of RROD.

 

[BoberFett]

What a ridiculous concept. What's the bandwidth between the two consoles? Standard ethernet speeds or do you plan on adding a highspeed backplane?

 

[ImpulsE69]

What a ridiculous concept. What's the bandwidth between the two consoles? Standard ethernet speeds or do you plan on adding a highspeed backplane?

Neither, it all happens in the cloud!!!

 

[exdeath]

I was under the impressed Super FX was intended to work as a graphics accelerator. I can't remember what Capcom's chip did, but I know they had one. There were quite a few others.

They all used the SNES graphics chip in mode 7, the only planar non tiled bitmapped framebuffer drawing mode. The SNES CPU wasn't fast enough to do the calculations, much less software rasterize individual pixels into a linear framebuffer.

SuperFX was more a math DSP than a graphics chip, though it is "typically programmed to act as a graphics accelerator".

In Yoshis Island its used for doing per pixel per scanline transform calculations to modify the SNES OAM registers during HDMA. SNES has 128 hardware sprites that must be composited to produce large objects. Simple X Y objects like Street Fighter II are trivial, but doing even pseudo 3D calcs for 128 individual sprites relative to one another for very large seamless composite objects is beyond the main CPUs ability to perform in 1/60th a second.

It didn't increase the number of sprites or colors or anything like that. Its just a 32 bit 21 MHz RISC CPU, its no more a 3D or graphics processor than writing a software 3D engine on the Gameboy Advances 16 MHz ARM CPU is. Everything you see is still provided by the SNES PPU.

 

[SaurusX]

So you're saying it makes the graphics better?

 

[exdeath]

So you're saying it makes the graphics better?

Graphics capabilities not changed. Still 256 x 224 with 256 colors and 128 sprites. No way around that.

Personally I think attempting to do 3D on SNES looks like trash, not better.

Chrono Trigger, Bahamut Lagoon, Tales of Phantasia

VS

Star Fox, Doom


??

LOL

IIRC Star Fox even ran at 15 fps because despite the increased power of the SFX, it still had to DMA the framebuffer to the SNES at the 2.58 MHz external bus speed.

 

[smackababy]

Didn't Tales of Phantasia include extra memory on the cartridge with the coprocessor? I know it was one of the larger SNES games.

 

[exdeath]

Didn't Tales of Phantasia include extra memory on the cartridge with the coprocessor? I know it was one of the larger SNES games.

No coprocessor. Tales is just a straight 48 MBit ROM (two chips 4 MB and 2 MB). SNES can address up to 96+ mbit with no modifications, coprocessor, or mapper.

Star Ocean was also 48 mbit but employed the SDD1 decompression ASIC so the game is actually much larger. Translated and uncompressed is 96 mbit (vs 48 mbit compressed as shipped) and thus can run on a real SNES on a flash cart without the SDD-1 chip. SNES can access and run the flat 96 mbit ROM off a flash cart, and until SDD1 firmware is written for the SD2SNES FPGA, this is the only way to play ENG Star Ocean on a real SNES. At the time the SDD1 codec chip and 48 mbit must have been cheaper than 96 mbit of mask ROM.

Tales and Star Ocean are the largest and only two games at 48 mbit. Star Ocean was actually the largest SNES game as it was 48 mbit of heavily compressed data using the SDD1 for real time decompression. I don't think it was 2x like the translated ROM as its customary when translating to append your new fonts and strings to the end and leave the original ROM alone else you screw up all the offsets and relative addresses trying to change the ROM. But yeah Star Ocean is probably 64-80 mbit without the SDD1 decompression ASIC.

More trivia, Street Fighter Alpha 2 SNES was the only other SDD1 game, allowing it to fit on a single 32 mbit mask ROM.

 

[ImpulsE69]

Both such great games and a shame they never made it here at the time.

Bit of trivia - I am mentioned by name in the original TOP translation!

 

[exdeath]

Left to the imagination what old school Square could have done with 96 mbit of physical mask ROM AND SDD1. 200 mbit SNES game, take that Neo Geo!

Not sure about that. If SDD1 works like I think it does , its just a mapper where the SNES "sees" a virtual 96 mbit of ROM but there is only 48 hidden behind the SDD1 that translates and decompresses real time as the data is accessed. Not positive though. Could also use bank switching and built in RAM to decompress to and present that to SNES. Haven't really looked at it.