16-Bit was such a magical era. Thank you for this video.

The older I get the more I believe 16bit was the "golden age."

Ooh...this is the 16 bit wars! I'm reliving my childhood

I bought my SNES specifically to play SF2, and it delivered a damned satisfying experience. My roommates and I had endless drunken tournaments huddled around my little 13 inch TV, beating the crap out of each other for hours in end. Despite my display being fairly small, I did take advantage of the stereo-out audio on the SNES and had the sound running through my 100+ watt component stereo system and its two big, 80s-style tower speakers. Having grown up with the simple beeps and boops of the Pong sound effects (as well as games that had no sound whatsoever), I’d never really taken much notice of video game console sound…until I got my SNES. I remember plugging in Super Star Wars for the first time and being totally blown away by the rich, symphonic soundtrack, it seemed so realistic for the time and I was sure it represented the final and definitive achievement of video-game technology. I mean, where could you go from there, right? ;)

Looking back on that time, the SNES was the better console for me, but I'm happy to have experienced the Genesis. So many good memories of Sonic the Hedgehog... I still hum tunes from the various games to this day. Shining Force was another one I adored. Gunstar Heroes was a balls to the wall blast. Rocket Knight Adventures was packed. But again, looking back, the library on the SNES had more favorites for me. Donkey Kong Country, Chrono Trigger, Earthbound, Secret of Mana, Yoshi's Island, Starfox, UN Squadron. One of Sega's strengths in the US was the sports games, but I was never a fan of that genre. In any case, it was an interesting time, full of fun and arguments about one's console of choice. But... I'm old now. And one thing I realize as I get ever older, is that I was fortunate to simply have all these choices to experience. The SNES, the Genesis, and yeah even the Turbo Grafx 16 (PC Engine), all provided unique games, strengths, weaknesses, and ultimately a unique experience. I look back at it all now, fondly.

The PC Engine was simply amazing considering that it was meant to compete with the NES and not true 16 bit systems.

I was mainly a PC gamer in the 16-bit era. I only ended up with a SNES, because my next door neighbor REALLY wanted a my old sound card for his PC. He wanted to trade me the system for the card. We both got something nice out of the deal. His computer games no longer sounded like digital nails across a chalk board, and I had something I could play a GOOD port of Street Fighter II on.

Awesome vid as usual. The color limitation actually kind of fits for Comix Zone, since comic books were colored using combinations of halftone dots which historically gave the colorist only 64 colors to work with (although by the 1990s I think this had been increased to 128).

You'd be lucky to have either console back in the 90's. I was able to enjoy mega drive and my friend lent me his SNES and it blew me away how much better the experience of those consoles were when compared to my older amstrad CPC 464 with the slow tape loading. I remember being a sega fanboy but in my heart I always wished my parents had bought me a SNES too!

Imagine if you could go back in time, and give yourself a $100 handheld console that has every game from both systems, and a rechargeable battery that lasts for days. The future is not-so-bad, sometimes.

The Genesis did lack in color and sound capabilities compared to the SNES on top of Mode 7 and Super FX capabilities, but thanks to the highlight/shadow mode and the Z80 and 68000 working in tandem, the Genesis can brute force something like Toy Story or Star Cruiser or the OST of Streets of Rage in the right hands, without enhancement chips no less.

I grew up with both the Sega Mega Drive, the NES and Game Boy with the Mega Drive being the first console followed by the GB and the NES & SNES was what friends had, and we enjoyed all gaming systems! Still loved the Nintendo vs. Sega ;-D. Made things a lot more interesting back then. "Genesis Does' What Nintendon't" Well, in sales numbers the SNES was the winner on paper in total. It won the North American market and the Asian market. However, when it comes down to Europe Australia and South America, the Sega MEGA DRIVE (Genesis in the N.A) was more or less the winner. Some wider and some smaller. Smaller would be Europe where the Mega Drive first like in North America had the lead but in the end the SNES caught up and won several European country markets, but some would still remain a "Mega Drive country". That was not for the lack of great games as we all know the SNES had arguably more of them BUT more down to economics and local support. The MD was cheaper ($50 less) and so was the games ($5 less) for it then SNES and its games and that had a big impact in many countries game cultures. Heck, Nintendo distributors in Europe like Scandinavian Bergsala AB for example where caught with fixing prices and had to pay some great fines for there illegal monopoly practices, but that did not help the customers getting better prices.

18:47 - Minor correction, Sega Genesis could do sound samples as well. See Toy Story on the Sega Genesis, which does 4 channel multiplexing of samples in addition to the sound hardware that was with the Sega console. See GameHut's video on how they implemented this back in the 90s.

This one is a no brainer, they both win. Two amazing consoles, both with amazing games.

best console generation of all time!!! Three completely different architectures , each one with its pros and cons...each version showing differences in colors, paralaxx, sounds... a golden age ! I bought a PC Engine Duo R just in 2015... wonderful console as MD and Snes. Since PS4 XOne gen, the games has the same " identity" because architecture X86 became the new standart. Very helpful to developers, but i felt the games lost identity, maninly on XboX Series and PS5. Sorry for my poor english level. Greetings from Brazil.

First console I ever owned was a megadrive, having previously just had a zx spectrum, seemed like a quantum leap. Eventually swapped it for something with my brother and bought a snes. The snese always seemed like the best choice, partially due to capabilities but mainly because the cream of the world's top developers were releasing classic after classic that were not appearing on the megadrive. This was a time when a Nintendo console could be your only console, not a bonus console you bought for Nintendo titles alone

I never appreciated the megadrive musical capabilities until I was in my 40's and I started using emulators to revisit my 16-bit youth.

I had both the Genesis and Snes. Snes was better by miles, the library of classics is simply unbeatable. There's nothing on Genesis that can touch a hair of Chrono Trigger, Donkey Kong Country trilogy, Super Metroid, for example. But it doesn't mean that the Genesis was totally useless, lots of great games there too, Streets of Rage is by far my favorite series on Genesis. We have one or other game on Genesis that runs faster than the Snes version of the same game, but people always ignore that, while it's a little faster, it lacks colors, details, paralax, and usually, has much worse sounds too. The screen size become something that matter today, but back in the day, with the 480p televisions, with both Genesis and Snes stretching the image to fill the screen, no one noticed a few lines more on Genesis. Anyways, I believe it's totally acceptable to prefer the Genesis, since Sega itself made great games for the system too, specially if you were an arcade lover.

The major limitation with the SNES’s sampled sounds is that they could only be sampled at one pitch and then played back at varying speeds to get multiple pitches. Without “multi-sampling” (such as you’d find on professional keyboards of the era, and ever after) the further you get away from the original sampling pitch, the more artificial the sound. This is why the best SNES soundtracks tend to have instruments playing tunes within a very short musical range.

I have a soft spot for the Turbografx-16/PC engine. Comes out 2 years before the others. First console to introduce CD media. Less third party support, still has an excellent library.

Snes sold 49.1 million worldwide. Genesis only sold 35.25 million. 🙂

So, what you're saying here, is the SNES curbstomps the others. Of course, we all already knew that since we were kids.

There’s something I’m not clear about. The Genesis has varying sprite sizes (up to 32x32) but also rectangles like 8x16. Is an 8x16 sprite using up twice the resources of an 8x8 sprite or not? Also, of the 16 available sprite sizes (8x24, 32x8 etc), you can use all 16 at once. Whereas the SNES only offers four sizes - 8x8, 16x16, 32x32 or 64x64 of which you can have only 2 on screen at once. I looked at the sprite tables on Sega Retro and the SNES can do 128 8x8 or 16x16 sprites but only 69 sprites at 32x32. Whereas Genesis handles 80 sprites up to 32x32. Then per scanline SNES does 32 8x8 sprites but only 17 16x16 sprites. Genesis does 20 16x16 sprites per scanline. So it seems the SNES can handle a greater number of smaller sprites but less larger sprites. Then of course, dies adding more sprites slow the game down? I suppose that is a matter if game logic having to plot the paths of all the moving sprites rather than the PPU not being able to move then smoothly at the same time. Then you have unique sprites. SNES can have 128 8x8 or 16x16 but only 32, 32x32. The Genesis can do 80 up to 32x32 unique sprites. So if you consider how often games are using 8x8 or 16x16 sprites in a number greater than 80, it might be the case that the SNES is actually *less* good with sprites. Especially if you use sprites which are larger than 16x16. It’s kind of confusing. But I think 80 sprites of 32x32 pixels = 100 sprites of 16x32. But 80 is the hard limit regardless of size. But you could have 80, 8x32 sprites whereas the SNES would need four times the 8x8 sprites (lined up, 4 in a row) which would be 320 sprites, way above the 128 limit.

5:42 Most people don't know this, but the SNES' Direct Colour mode actually allows for 255-2040 visible colours on BG1 alone, plus the other 120 visible colours for BG2 and another 120 visible colour for sprites again. This means that in normal use in some of SNES' regular background modes it can display more total on-screen colours than the PC Engine during full gameplay. In total, SNES can display anywhere from 496-2288 colours on-screen in Direct Colour mode as standard, even before any also standard colour math and HDMA backdrop colour gradients are applied. So, if it's just about max colours, the SNES can have way more on-screen. It wasn't really used, but it's not a cheat or anything, just an almost entirely ignored feature of the SNES, largely because the normal modes with less colours can actually look nicer due to the way the palettes work. The SNES also has a standard 8bpp mode, which allows for 256 colours per tile (64 visible per tile), whereas the PC Engine only has a 4bpp mode that allows for 16 colours per tile. The SNES also has a master palette 0f 32,768 colours, which is a whopping 64x larger than the PC Engine's 512 colour master palette. And that actually makes far more of a difference here between the two consoles in terms of the colours you see on-screen. Point being, when it comes to colours, the PC Engines higher number on-screen on paper is pretty much only that. In every meaningful way, the SNES beats the PC Engine when it comes to colours. And the Genesis isn't even in the running in that regard. The SNES' Colour Blasting capabilities really can work wonders when it comes to anything related to the colours.

The CPU comparisons actually depend on the genre of the game. The 6502 is have a bigger instruction throughput, but the 68000 have more complex instructions that would require several 6502 instructions to emulate, and then there's the multiply and divide can of worms, where the 68000 has it, the snes can offer multiply with the video chip and you have to deal with it yourself on the PC Engine. In games where you perform a buttload of simple instructions like filling a sprite table with many, many, many sprites like space shooters, the PC Engine will win. But if you have something like an heavy AI or data management, or the game is doing 3D or heavy physics math, the mega drive will come on top.

the old 68k processors were a joy to work with, and I'd say the best. But the snes co processors are something else.

Here's the honest truth I've learned over the last couple of years diving deeply into the capabilities of each console: 1. The stock PC Engine only really competes on a technical level [with the SNES mostly] if a game is stuck with one background layer, which is not as many games as you think with games not made for it specifically, because then its sprites are roughly on par with SNES. It can't match the Genesis in terms of sprites. And it simply cannot compete if a game is properly using more than one full background layer, as then it has to sacrifice sprites to fake the extra background layers, which puts it at a big disadvantage compared to the two other systems, and especially next to the SNES. 2. The stock Genesis has superior sprites capabilities to both the PC Engine and SNES, despite what some of the common on-paper specs might suggest, to the point that it can often use sprites to make up for the lack of background capabilities when compared to SNES and even do some things simply better there than the SNES, like put more larger sprites on-screen and per scanline before flicker and animate more sprites before requiring forced-blank black bars at the top and bottom of the screen, etc. The sprites on Genesis are easily the most versatile and the best of the three consoles when taken full advantage of. SNES can still have nicer colours on the sprites and use proper multi-coloured transparency with them though, so they can always look prettier. 3. The stock SNES has vastly superior background capabilities to the PC Engine and handily beats the Genesis across the board there too other than how much of the horizontal view you can see. It can can actually show both nicer and more colours than PC Engine [despite what some people might believe based on an unawareness of the full facts there] and way more and nicer colours than Genesis too, up to four times as many backgrounds as PC Engine and up to twice as many as Genesis, can have proper multi-coloured transparency effects on them, can have full-screen 60fps background scaling and rotation during full gameplay, can do superior column scrolling to the Genesis, can mix and match background modes down the screen, can show more beautiful static images, can use 8bpp and Direct Colour background visuals during actual gameplay, has a higher max resolution, etc. I just want to be clear that those are not just my opinions but all facts of the respective technical capabilities and limitations of each system. Stock audio is a bit more debatable, but I'd personally say it goes SNES > Genesis > PC Engine. Again personally, when all systems are being used properly there, I actually don't think the PC Engine and Genesis can really compete with the SNES' more realistic sampled sounds and its ability to even support Dolby Surround sound. But I'm sure many PC Engine and Genesis fans would debate me on that. Overall, depending on what you're after, I'd say it goes like this in terms of technical capabilities: SNES ≈ Genesis > PC Engine. In terms of stock controllers, we can pretend counting the Genesis 6-button controller isn't a cheat (and you could just as easily cheat and buy some vastly superior arcade stick on SNES and probably PC engine too if that's the case), or just admit that it clearly goes SNES > Genesis > PC Engine. In terms of games, that's for each person to decide on a personal level (at least in terms of which you prefer and think are better, as SNES wipes the floor with the other two systems when it comes down to the size of the library). They each have some truly brilliant titles and are stronger than the others in certain categories, so take your pick. I personally put them like this though: SNES > Genesis > PC engine.

Of course the SNES would win. It had newer hardware. The MD/Genesis was 2 years older when the SNES came out. I have both but I played more on my Genesis. I still play on my Genesis until now. My SNES has been collecting dust for almost 20 years.

I spent a lot of money supporting all 3 back in the 90’s. Glad it was back then and not now because I’d have a fraction of my collection. Genesis first console bought with my own money followed by TG-16 then SNES. There was something to love about all 3. Genesis had great games early and again late in its lifespan when developers did all sorts of graphical trickery & special effects in software that the Genesis lacked in hardware. TG-16 was the little “engine” that could produce fantastic games released at a trickle as it just didn’t have the support from Japan which had a ton of games but they just couldn’t figure out what to bring to the US. SNES took a while and although it’s the only console that I personally noticed a good amount of games with slowdown (with my collection of games) it had best colors, sound FX and it pretty much shined throughout its lifespan. Loved all three so ultimately we were all winners to be able to play them

I see all this console rilvary thing as a purely American phenomenom, most likely due to the Sega commercials. When I was a kid, we didn't argue which console was superior in school, we just thought videogames were awesome Got a Super Nintendo? Awesome! Got a Mega Drive? Lemme play it, please!

I will say that the SNES was two years newer than the Mega Drive/Genesis. With that said, SNES was a slow machine with a low resolution and needed assistant chips to run decently. What this video doesn't mention is that games which included enhancement chips cost as much as $74.95! No, those chips weren't free. SNES might seem better when you're comparing a 4 meg Ghouls N Ghosts to a two years newer Super Ghouls N Ghosts that's 8 megs. When it comes to multi-platform games like Street Fighter II, the Genesis and PC-Engine were held back by the SNES as the assets from Super Nintendo were recycled for for Genesis and PC-Engine. There's lots of arguments that can be made. The Genesis was simply more capable than some of the software (released at the time) suggests and without enhancement chips.

The trouble with super Nintendo sound is that all those samples ate up cartridge space and often required huge cuts to game content except on the highest end games that could command $70 price tags and 32 MB cartridges

The genises was very forward thinking, fought the good long fight despite being released 2 years prior to the SNES.

Each system lent itself to certain art styles, both graphically, and audially. The SNES overuses very short sound samples which sound very warbly and grating to my ears, however poorly coded MD/SG FM music is even worse with its high pitched, ear-piercing screeches. PC Engine is a scrappy little system that, as you said, with its CD add-on, opens up a buffet of really amazing, larger, much better sounding games.

31:56 "Blast Processing" is mostly just used as a way for Genesis to display static images with more colours than it normally can by "blasting" extra colours to the screen as the image is being drawn, and it wasn't really used in any commercial Genesis games back in the day, being only recently properly figured out to actually work as originally evangelised. Those "Blast Processed" images on Genesis also take up all of the CPU resources and even stall the sound chip too, which is why it's really only good for static images. The SNES' Colour Blasting has that beat regardless, as its standard 8bpp images can still look noticeably superior both in terms of colours and resolution, as Genesis has to have double wide pixels horizontally in order to display "Blast Processed" images like this. And, not only that, but the SNES can display a gorgeous 8bpp image on one of the backgrounds even during full standard gameplay if desired. SNES also has the Direct Colour mode that technically allows it to show from around 500 to more than 2200 total colours on-screen during actual gameplay too. It doesn't end up looking as good as the 8bpp examples just because of the more limited 11-bit colour range there on the Direct Colour background layer, but it's a higher number on paper if that's important to some people. So, really, the Genesis' "Blast Processing" is absolutely trounced by the SNES' Colour Blasting in that regard.

What i remember to this day from the first time i saw a snes in a shop is the sound. when maro entered the cave area and the soundtrack got the underground echo

The 68000 is just such an iconic CPU and was used heavily in the arcades which was Sega's identity at the time. It was a no brainer for them.

With the hardware specs so close to each other the choice can only be down to what system specific games you must have. Sonic and Streets of Rage made the decision for me.

25:40 I've long wondered what if the consoles stayed 8-bit and just got faster and faster. What if there was some fantastical 200MHz version of the 6502? What would the consoles have been built like, and what would the games be like?

The debate all comes down to the lack of a precise criteria of what exactly defines "better". They both had strengths & weaknesses over the other.

The SNES really had a hard time moving around stuff, and games are riddled with slowdowns, despite its lower resolution. The maximum sprite number is most probably never reached. Any BTA has less enemies at once than what we see in SoR2 for example. Same applies to shmups. This also applies to the possible number of colors or resolution. You have hypothetical maximum values that can never be reached all at once. The MegaDrive was a much more balanced system meant to maximize its capabilities, just like the Master System. The MegaDrive processor is simply way ahead the other two, and you can see it in games with how capable the console is to move around and animate huge sprites all at once. All great consoles of course, but raw numbers are not exactly the same as what was actually achievable in real life. But they looked good as marketing arguments on the boxes, without a doubt.

I will admit I was a flag waver for the snes back in the day. I unfortunately did not know how underhanded Nintendo was with 3rd party developers.

Note: In your Street Fighter II comparison 1:36 you've actually shown the games incorrectly relative to the other versions. As far as I'm aware, all versions of this game specifically use art that was drawn pre-squished to look proportionally correct when stretched to a 4:3 display, and they're all based on the SNES assets. It's rare that this is the case on SNES especially, where a game actually takes the 4:3 stretch into account, and similarly where the Genesis version is based on SNES resolution and such, but it is the case here. So, really, the only correct way to view all three versions is in 4:3, where the overall screen should be displayed at the exact same size and proportions for each, not in some version of a modern pixel perfect view specific to each console. Just a small but important thing there.

If you look at tech demos you can see how amazing both devices are when pushed to the limit and this without special chips.

I've always thought that Sega should have included 4 more sub-palettes so that developers had 4 for backgrounds and another 4 for sprites. It definitely would make a difference in 1 on 1 fighting games like Mortal Kombat. You use up half of your palettes just for each combatant. That leaves you only 2 more for everything else on the screen. This situation clearly shows how big of a difference it would have made to have 4 sub-palettes for backgrounds and another 4 for sprites. It's a relatively minor change but it could have made a huge difference. Especially later on when people were drawing more comparisons between the two systems with games that appeared on both. I'd really like to see the MiSTer's Genesis core get an option to make this a reality as then hackers could make improvement patches to Genesis games giving them a color boost.

In the US it was SNES, Genesis, Turbo Grafx-16 but in Japan it was a different story with Super Famicom, PC Engine, and Mega Drive. Either way, my top is PCE/Turbo. Loved my SNES, had fun with the Genesis, but the PCE library of games was unique, the quality of crossover titles was for the most part very solid, and the hardware did amazing things considering it’s limitations.

Best layperson friendly comparison I’ve come across.

Very enjoyable video. Imo 1 thing should have been mentioned in this line up, and that is how these systems fare in their afterlife. Homebrew and even still nowadays how the support in this is per system.

honestly if your including the enhancement chips id argue the includements of both the turbo cd and the geneis's addons since they're also adding tech to the system.

The SNES sound chip would evolve into the PS1 SPU and the PS2 SPU2. Ken Kutaragi the father of the PlayStation created the SNES sounchip. The PS1 has 24 sound channels with 512KB of RAM, PS2 has 48 channels with 2MB of RAM. With the PS3 and PS4 Sony stopped using dedicated hardware for sound. Luckily with the PS5 Sony has the Tempest Engine for sound.

I know you're trying to do your best and part of that is reading the comments to get feedback and making adjustments. BUT... You can't let us trolls get to you so much man. You're doing a fine job producing a free product and nothing we say can change it or you in any significant way. It's all just the opinions of assholes. Take what's useful and chalk the rest up to us being idiots. Thanks, man and call the systems whatever you want... You mentioned it like 15 times seriously we don't matter that much, we're all wrong about everything all the time. Even now as I type this...

You (most people for that matter) are not taking the timeline into account. In a time when graphics performance was close to doubling every 2-3 years, that is an important factor that needs to be talked about. PC Engine = 1987 Mega Drive = 1988 SNES = 1990 So even though these consoles are considered the same generation, there's a three year gap between them. When comparing the MD to the SNES with its two year gap, it's like comparing a RTX2060 to a RTX3060 and saying the 3060 is faster. In my opinion, the PCE and MD actually do surprisingly well considering their age. The gap between the PCE and NES (4 years) is not that different to the gap between it and the SNES (3 years).

Spot on! Great video man! I never owned a TG16 but I have emulated it for years and can appreciate it as a decent "3rd place console." However I grew up a Sega fan and have always been aware of the snes. The battle between the two was extremely close. Racing, shmups, and sports games usually play better on the Genesis, but more games look and sound better on the snes. I own both now and can see the advantages of each. Some publishers really chose a side. EA for example chose Sega. There are more EA games on the genesis/megadrive, and games like Madden play better on sega also. If someone is really into RPGs, then the snes is an easy choice. There are high quality choices and more of them on snes. Overall it just varies what you want to play.

Great video, is PC Engine CD vs Sega CD next?

Looking back I find it remarkable SNES ended up with the DSP it did. It had full wavetable mixing, obviously limited by memory size per sample (which they got around to some effect in Earthbound music, and plenty more), but wavetable mixing didnt come to pc for literally 10 years (sans the little-used niche Amiga add in for the nerds that wanna argue), which is why the pc version of FF7 and 8 had midi instead of mp3. PC was reliant on CD audio for HQ music generally until this era, which was 1998! Snes could do it the whole time.

The 68000 is absolutely the best processor in these. It's not even close. The slowdown in the snes is due to its extremely underpowered cpu. The snes won due to its very advanced graphics hardware... but in any game that required cpu crunch like Another World and Flashback the SNES gets housed.

Actually, the only plus on SNES is the color palette, I still have both consoles. SEGA kept the promise of delivering arcades at home. Shooters that had almost no slow-downs. Beat em ups that had more than 4 sprites on screen. Arcade resolution that you could port arcade titles. At the end is personal taste though, great video as always.

Having made graphics for homebrew games for both the PCE and MD, I must say, all of those extra palettes on the PCE *Reeeeeally* come in handy... And I also personally find the PCE's wavetable synth MUCH easier to work with than the MD's FM synth, it's really not that hard to get the PCE to sound awesome despite the fewer sound channels! (Also the PCE's stereo is way better than the MD's) I do love all three systems though, but I having said all that, the SNES is my favourite, and by a reasonably wide margin... Never worked on anything for it though, but without the kind of tools the MD and PCE have for homebrew it must be a pain... Oh well, I can't code anyway, I just do the graphics, and occasionally sound and music...

Great video, even as a Mega Drive fan I still think your points are very fair. You missed a beneficial hardware feature of the Mega-Drive, backwards compatibility. Okay, useless nowadays but at release in the US Super Nintendo faced severe criticisms for not having backwards compatibility with the NES, while the Mega Drive required a cartridge adapter to allow it to play the Master System cartridges and cards. I think the SNES, technologically speaking, was amazing and a better way to approach things at the time, such clever engineering. Something I wonder is: if a Mega-Drive game ran at the lower 256 x 224 like the SNES, would it have additional processing power overhead available to do more impressive things, like scaling, than compared to when running at the normal 25% higher pixel count of 320 x 224?

Since the SNES uses sound samples a developer can theoretically sample the Megadrive or TG sounds and come out with something close it them, although at a lower bit rate.

SNES sprites per scanline: 8x8/32 16x16/17 32x32/8 64x64/4 (272 pixel limit) MEGADRIVE sprites per scanline: 8x8/20 16x16/20 32x32/10 64x64/5 (320 pixel limit) Plus, the SNES can only display 2 sizes of sprites at any one time, while the MEGADRIVE can mix and match at it's leisure. Imagine building a house out of LEGO with just two types of blocks, and how limiting that would be?

I think the TG16's larger number of simultaneous colors onscreen gave its games a distinct look and really set the visuals apart from the Genesis or even the SNES. I could even identify which version of Street Fighter II shown in this video was running on TG16, based on the colors alone... well, the colors and the fact that the onscreen prompt mentions the "run button" I guess. Anyway, I always thought that TG16 games tended to look more vibrant and colorful than either of the other 16 bit consoles, which is odd when you consider that the SNES had a pallette 32,768. A lot of the time though, I think the extended color palette of the SNES just resulted in developers choosing a lot of weird hideous pastels and other offbeat shades for the colors, whereas the TG16's palette was expanded just enough to provide a noticeably wider range of colors and could show nearly twice as many onscreen at once as the SNES.

I totally agree, that why I have chosen the SNES as the platform to port some of my favorite arcade games that were never ported to any system👌

Instead of talking about the power of enhancement chips vs cd expansion type stuff I'd say a more useful comparison be expandability as a concept. Just how well the system was able to play with extra hardware.

Dont care who won commercially. These are both top tier consoles. That said overall Megadrive was better unless you're a jrpg nut.

I think you'll find it's called the Seg Amiga Drive.

You can say that "only" a few games used enhancement chips on the SNES, but the tech was there if developers wanted it and common enough. It included ARM chips that were 4-5x the clock speed of the main CPU on the Megadrive/PCEngine, so it's really hard to have those systems come out on top. Like with the NES before it, developers were comfortable adding in additional on that hardware, and it was done more often enough that the chips were a little cheaper. The Sega chip just cost too much and it never got the widespread use of the SNES's offerings, so it was never going to be a good option. The SNES also used a lot of custom hardware in the console itself. Sega mostly used off the shelf parts from a few years earlier, so it ends up being able to do less and cost more to assemble. And addon after addon did not do Sega any favors either.

My personal opinion on what should call the consoles: either Super Famicom or Super Nintendo are fine, good enough names; TurboGrafx 16 and PC Engine are both bad names for a console, but I prefer TGX16 desspite it being harder to pronounce, because the console isn't a "PC" nor an "Engine"; Between Mega Drive and Genesis, I definitely chose the first, becausse MD sounds like the name of an actual console, and "Genesis" to me is the name of a 70s prog rock band.

I have been looking at oscilloscope views of the systems various sound chips. I'm a massive nerd and I accept that. I may be wrong but it looks like the Snes can kind of do 10 channels in hardware as it has 2 echo channels that play independently. They are echo's or wave distortions of another sound effect or sample but I think they can kind of be used as extra channels albeit less versatile ones. The megadrive can make one of the FM channels ( i think channel 3 ) split into 3 Fm channels. The caveat being you must use any of 8 pre-programed waveforms that were built into the YM 2612. So I think technically the Sega can do 12 channels of sound but many of them are quite limited. I may be wrong and I apologize if I am. Otherwise I think its quite interesting :)

The best console generation in my opinion, each system have an impressive catalogue of great games. My choice goes to the Sega Genesis for all those wonderful action games...contra hard corps, gunstar heroes, Shinobi 3, adventures of Batman and Robin, rocket knight adventure, streets of rage, thunder force IV, musha aleste, battle mania 2 and so many more. Not to mention the latest releases like xeno crisis.

I think of the Madden football games as the Rosetta Stone to understanding the differences in practice. The SNES versions had brighter colors, and each player had his correct skin tone, but in most cases they ran like they were trying (poorly) to imitate the Genesis versions, which ran more smoothly, but all players had the same skin tone (the Genesis' color count), and behind the end zone was mostly a sad abyss with sub-8-bit-looking fans unnaturally far away from the field, as opposed to the SNES where the fans behind the end zone looked great in the stands, properly placed and human-looking, even displaying fan-made signs personalized for each team (like "team of the 90s" at San Francisco's Candlestick Park, etc.).

In the background comparison, it should said that the Megadrive was able to simulate the mode 7 with software programming. There were actually various things it can do this way. About the sound capabilities comparaison, well if you wanted to be fair, you would have give each console the same amount of time for displaying what it can offer. For example you could have played a bit of Street of Rage themes, that has some of the best soundtrack of the Megadrive.

Great video, I've owned/own all three of the devices over the decades, recently reduced myself to the PCE Mini though to streamline my focus though. I think calling them comparable is a little misleading, yet not, it's odd, because realistically raw clock speed of the Gen/MD aside, the SNES slammed them largely otherwise. What really got me was saying the PCE struggled, in its home market it throttled the Famicom out of first for a few years and Sega was laughable there, they never stood a chance against the other two. The PCE is a wonderbox hybrid, sure it's partly 8bit yet the system could do better visuals, better color(and more color), better audio, just overall performance OVER the Genesis, and it was a good year older hardware. The fact it could keep up better in lush visuals with the SNES than the Genesis speaks volumes. I really enjoyed your technical breakdown, it's why I continue to watch your stuff, you're fair, don't spit out sad reruns for clicks, and contribute some value in a sea of attention seekers. I do enjoy the care on audio, it is subjective, so much it almost deserves exceptions, but you can't go there either really. SNES had this near technically CD quality 33khz sampled audio output, it would utterly blow you away when someone put the right effort into the work, it was a generation ahead almost in that respect. The other two, chip tune generators basically, traditional audio with arcade style roots, but strangely again, once more the Sega unit was so watered down compared to their own comparable arcade hardware it went into this oddly usually tinny, buzzing, muffled mess in most the titles...yet then you have the PCE audio which largely just smeared Sega into the mud, amazing clean audio that didn't get into those defects. PCE was peak chiptune for that generation of home consoles, just amazing work.

Sound certainly is a personal preference. At the time, reviewers almost always choose the SNES audio. But a decade or three later, SNES games almost all sound like they've been recorded over an analogue phone line, and can't match the clarity of the top Mega Drive soundtracks. Although somehow the SNES game Plok seems to sound amazing. Apart from that though, I'd choose Amiga sound over both of them, and that's a machine from 1985! The decision to be a cheapskate over the Mega Drive's graphics memory is so frustrating though, considering how so many other aspects weren't compromised, like the backwards compatibility, high resolution and volume control. And then it bit the Mega CD in the butt as well, because you can't just add colours from the data storage side of things. I heard the the Mega Drive was mainly one person's design, rather than the product of a team. So even with all that arcade hardware expertise, it seems likely that no-one pointed out that games might soon benefit from pastel colours, smooth gradients, digitisation and CG.

The PC engine was out in Japan 3 years before the the super famicom at which point it was competing against the famicom or NES, and did quite well so you can't really say it's the distant third

"If we're going to allow enhancement chips, the advantage of the genesis disappear", kinda a biased statement to make, considering the Genesis had even more powerful enhancement chips available... Even if not widely used (I'll never forget paying $90 for Virtua Racing... and people complain about $70 games today).

When it comes to music, I much prefer the Mega Drive. The SNES usually had too much reverb, making it sound muffled in comparison.

I think you were a bit off the mark with this one, sorry. You didn't give enough weight to the SNES's awkward sprite arrangement and the fact the graphics were planar (like the Amiga) and not chunky like the MD. Harder to manipulate, harder to decompress (carts like SFA2 had chips just to convert stored chunky into planar). And having written assembly for all of M68K, 6502 and 65816, I can tell you it's not as close as you've implied. If you're writing assembly, two of the biggest factors that make your life easier (and grander ideas feasible) are big and plentiful registers, and a good memory map layout. The MD has both of those things (many 32-bit registers, all work RAM and ROM available at optimum speed without banking), and the SNES has neither (fewer smaller registers, heavily reliant on banking for RAM and ROM, ROM access usually a bottleneck). SNES games get around it's underpowered CPU setup by surreptitiously doing less than comparable MD games - simpler logic, fewer active entities. 25% less screen area (in pixels) means you can do 25% less of everything and achieve the same density of 'life' in a game. The fact is a lot of SNES software isn't that ambitious in terms of processing complexity - not that much more going on than in top-end NES games. The graphics chip does all the heavy lifting in making it look 'next gen'. Sonic's game engine has been thoroughly dissected and it's a proper generational leap in ambition above something like Super Mario World, which only really has a mild 16-bit audio/graphics facade to elevate it above what the NES could do.

My preference is the mega drive. I prefer it sound while I do like this Nintendo it’s audio hasn’t aged nearly as well as the mega drives in my opinion and I’m talking about Japanese developed games pacifically that aged very well for the mega drive.

people say that movies are 60% audio. star wars would end up feeling like a B movie if it didn't have its epic score for example. SNES focusing on the sampling, which would essentially be how most music is made till this day, is honestly probably the biggest deciding factor for many. likewise, people that love how FM synthsesis sounds is probably why they choose Genesis over SNES.

Parasol Stars and Rainbow Islands are two of the best games on the TG16. It always seemed to me that the TG16 was similar in many ways to the NES, just with more colors. Frankly, cartridge size held back all 3 of these systems far more than their hardware. Sega's DSP was far too expensive to put into cartridges. Virtua Racing ( a ONE HUNDRED Dollar cartridge) got away with it because it was a 1 Dollar arcade machine. Virtua Racing could really munch money. I remember I was with a couple of friends in a mall when Virtua Racing was brand new in the arcade and we each blew like 20 bucks in a few minutes on this machine. MAYBE they could have got the price down by continuing to use it and ramp up production numbers. But we will never know.

Most technically advanced for 2D gaming back in that era was SNES???? Neo Geo clears its throat. I rest my case.

So are we basing this off the PAL region or the NTSC region with the specs? I'm assuming NTSC.

I actually had to stop your video to make this comment. The snes has more abilities then you know with sound. The snes can actually play pcm unimpressed audio. The problem is the no game cart at the time could hold 700mb to 4gigs of audio back in the 1990s without it being way to expensive for each game. If you was to patch a msu1 mod to a game and put that patched rom on an everdrive the snes will be able to play all the pcm files no problem. The snes is also able to play fmv video files. Both the pcm and fmv abilities were built in the snes because of the cd add on that was in development with Sony. But because the cd add on wasn't used both features just sat dormant unit some random person found out the snes could do both those things. Ppl have made some msu1 mods for some games that have both the pcm audio and fmv video files for said game. One of those games is zelda a link to the past. The great thing about it being able to read pcm files means it can read any type of music that you stream now say on Spotify just so long as you put it in the pcm format. And for those that might not pcm file have zero compression it's one of the reasons why some msu1 mods hit 4 gigs because that said game has so much different songs in it and each one is in its purist form it can be in. This is just a little secret about the snes that most don't know about. And thanks to the modding community that has started this project they are trying to make msu1 mods for every snes game.

Nintendo didn't beat Sega ...Sega beat Sega simple as that!!

As far as I'm concerned, you can say that everything was better with the SNES than with the MegaDrive. But when it comes to the sound: no, nobody convinces me. That usually just sounded awful with the original SNES. Nintendo already knew why they didn't install a headphone output like Sega. Sadly i never tested a real PcEngine so i can't say anything about the soundsystem there. But SEGA, as sayed in the video, have bin the most clevered of the area. Using two very well known cpu's at the time, using a common resolution of other M68K based Systems, using a very well known Soundchip of the time. This made it very easy vor developers to port there games to and from the megadrive to other systems.

Genesis had a better processor and resolution than SNES, but SNES's much larger color palette meant that most games looked better on it. Though some Genesis developers did very well within its limitations.

At age 44 the sega genesis will always be a remembers piece of videogame entertainment system

Pretty good until you starting blathering on about snes at end.

I don't care about the hardware, it's all about the library. And that was won by the SNES! : D

In the end it only comes down to the games you can only really compare based on the games, and the fact is it was far more common to find fast, smooth playing shoot'em up games on the PC engine and the Genesis, so no the SNES is not the clear cut winner in all regards, if anything Nintendo went with underpowered hardware considering the rapid advancement of computer technology and the console was released a few years after the other two

I found your channel recently and have enjoyed it immensely. May I ask about the meaning of your channel’s name? On the face of it, the name simply means “Shar’s city.” Is there more to it?

When i was 12 years old i didn’t matter if i would get a genesis or a snes aslong i would get a 16bit system,also since i consider those differences between those systems to be minor,but i had to deal with what i had for years to come with my 8bit nes,so no 16bit for me, But then in 2001 i was finally able to get my secondhand snes from the gameshop while in the meantimes i was getting overhyped by it’s specs such as “digital stereo sound,32768 colors,mode 7,4 background layers and 512 resolution,so was to my amement sooo convinced that the snes was way more powerful then the genesis and that all games always fully utelized the snes capabilities,BUT then soon or later over the years i would slowly find out that the supernintendo was not so supernintendo as i did tout because, 1,the snes couldn’t do everything atonce,it was one or the other thing(hence those 8 restriction modes, 2,most snes games only uses 90 colors rather 256 colors and in most cases uses mode 1 for 3 backgrounds, 3,most snes games uses 256x240 resolution to allow extra options at certain modes, 4,most snes games uses cut down & stretched samples to save on memory space and to fit all those samples and instructions into that sake 64K audio ram,not only that but most games just uses those muffled samples from the sample pack dev-kit (hence those trumpets in many tunes from games aladdin or teris attack or street fighter 2 etc,,,) And also many sound effects were just digitized fm or psg sounds,so it wasn’t in all cases fully real digital, 5,most snes games uses lorom wich not only causes slowdown and input lag but it also could not fully benefit from the already slow snes cpu speed(heck even fx games shamefulky didn’t use hirom and fastram no), 6,the snes could only DMA graphics at 200x160 pixels at 30fps(what a misleading letdown from nintendo since screenshots from starfox were shown at full screen in magazines and in the box art of the game itself) 7,the snes could not do sprite scaling wich is a shame because even nintendo’s 8bit arcade machine such as radar scope from 1979 could do sprite scaling and also could view 128 sprites on screen, But still, there are many hardware tricks to get around these limitations,so consider this,the pc engine cpu is only 8bit but it’s sram and 7,9mhz makes up for it while the snes cpu despite being 16bit only uses an 8bit bus,dram and it only runs at 3,5mhz while it’s data bus is only 8bits,now while the genesis cpu is 16bit with a speed of 7,9mhz along with sram,BUT it requires 2 cycles to execute an instruction,so it really doesn’t that matter that much the type of cpu since they are almost equel to each other in performances, Or how about this the genesis can only view 64 colors atonce but with shadow lightning or color HAM trich more colors can be displayed to come closer to the snes & pc engine etc,,, Also not only are there many hardware tricks to get around these limitations but atleast those cpu chip from those systems are close in performances to each other, So from my conclusions i can say that both hardware systems do have minor differences in cpu performances to each oher and/or they bring those ppu & apu more in line with each other to also make them looks & sound more closer to each other , BUT it eventually comes down to all the games wich also only do have minor differences to each other in terms of performances in most cases but they have to be fun to play and that’s what only should actually matters,and while it is true that i was not so happy that the supernintendo turned out to be not so super as i tout to be,BUT i still do like those games and i do get font memories of it,more then on any other 4th gen system and that’s what really matters.

the video was nice and very informative, but I'm not sure about the direct comparatives, I mean: pc engine came out in 87, mega drive in 88 and the super famicom in 90... 2-3 years of technology time is a big factor I think... the same would be like comparing the nes (83) with the pc engine or the mega-drive: they share 2-3 years of "market time" but the technology difference wouldn't be fair... Imagine that the time distance between pc engine and snes is almost like the distance between snes and ps1 (94)...

35:29 Considering they got this game running on a base Gameboy, this is an optimization issue. Not a power issue.

2:40 SNES parallax scrolling in front of the plane.

Gonna have to hard disagree with you on this one. Especially considering that people who currently make software for these machines seem to almost universally prefur the megadrive/genesis due to the more powerful raw performance on the base machine. Leading to the MD/G having a massive homebrew scene with new full games still coming out on a regular basis Honestly comparisons like this always seem to be stacked in favour on the snes do to the snes being built like a box of tricks being able to out do other machines at any specific task once at a time. But when you're actually making software for these machines (which I've been learning to do recently), on the snes you constantly have to pick and choose what tools you want to use and you're limited on how many you can use compaired to the MD/G you usually have access to the full power of the machine at any given time That being said there are still some advantages to making games for the snes. Due to having more on screen colors you have the option for more realistic color gradiants compaired to the more stylistic gradiants of the MD/G. Then there's the very different sound hardware which is completly subjective but important for kind of atmosphere you would want for your game and then there's the specific tricks the snes can do such mode 7 which the MD/G can do in software (search "mega drive mode 7" on youtube ) but just not as well as the snes's hardware Also not sure why you didnt include the neogeo as it could easily wipe the floor with any of these machines. It's biggest problem being it's price

Not comparing apples with apples. Megadrive was out well before snes. In fact over two years.

18:12 You could achieve a similar trasparency effect by using the highlight mode of the MD.

One thing about the audio I've heard, though I don't know how much of it is true, is that supposedly the Megadrive was harder to work with than the SNES in that aspect. I could definitely believe that, another saying about Megadrive soundtracks is that they fall into one of two categories: Absolute classic or absolute trash.