Thread 11996724

Wtf is blast processing? Sounds like some kind of immigration loophole

>Marty Franz [Sega technical director] discovered that you could do this nifty trick with the display system by hooking the scan line interrupt and firing off a DMA at just the right time. The result was that you could effectively jam data onto the graphics chip while the scan line was being drawn – which meant you could drive the DAC's with 8 bits per pixel. Assuming you could get the timing just right you could draw 256 color static images. There were all kinds of subtleties to the timing and the trick didn't work reliably on all iterations of the hardware but you could do it and it was cool as heck.
>So during the runup to the western launch of Sega-CD the PR guys interviewed me about what made the platform interesting from a technical standpoint and somewhere in there I mentioned the fact that you could just "blast data into the DAC's" Well they loved the word 'blast' and the next thing I knew Blast Processing was born.

Broadly speaking, "blast processing" came to refer to the various hardware advantages the Mega Drive had over the SNES, including it's faster and more flexible DMA engine, and it's 3 times faster CPU, allowing for games with more and better animations, higher resolutions, and more objects and action on screen without slowdowns.

>>11996732
Quality post

>>11996732
What about this?
https://youtu.be/uieJmBubDgU?si=E28-Sy0W6XAXVlFt

>>11996732
I recall he said it was stupid and he kinda wished he hadn't said it, but marketers are gonna market, and blast processing ends up being a really swanky and roundabout way to say faster processor.

A big part of your target demographics are gonna be kids, so the real nitty gritty technical specs aren't gonna be particularly understood anyway, so just use a catchy phrase like that.

>>11996836
He should be proud, it's one of the most memorable and iconic marketing campaigns in video game history. Plus, it still makes tendies seethe to this day.

>>11996732
fpbp well put

>>11996724 (OP)
SNES is built like Commodore 64 for some reason, cutting edge colors and sound, but a cheap outdated slow processor.

Genesis on the other hand is just an Amiga CPU with all the other weird special hardware stripped away. You were getting a CPU comparable to a $700 PC in 1989 for $200. It was absurdly fast, had a 1500~ color palette, and most of the hardware limitations could be avoided via clever tricks that 80s PC game devs already knew how to do.

Blast Processing was brilliant as a marketing slogan because their console was not only physically faster, for a few years some of the brightest minds of the 80s Computer demoscene were using crazy tricks to make the hardware do things it shouldn't be able to do. And that let them make it seem like the console was more powerful than the SNES, because the main advantages SNES had over Genesis was on-screen colors and sound. Genesis always had the better resolution and processor.

>>11996732
fpbp