Smartest console design?

>>4174083
>1988
>61 colors (4x15+1)

No.

Even worse, the VPD itself actually supports color expansion, but Sega didn't connect the VDP expansion lines to the cart slot or expansion slot.

>>4174105
Compared to other console's weaknesses 61 colors is pretty minor, especially considering the other consoles that could theoretically display many more colors rarely ever did in game.

>>4174083
The Genesis would have definitely have been one of the smartest console designs ever had its expansion capabilities been thought through better. But I agree with your general points. The fact that the 1988 Genesis can equal or exceed the 1990 SNES in terms of power was a very significant achievement.

That being said, when defining what is 'smart' console design you need to establish some parameters since each console may have been designed with different goals in mind. For example, by the relative raw-performance-per-manufacturing-dollar metric the N64 would be the smartest console design of all time. But that design came at a cost of programmer-friendliness and storage medium space. And so on.

>>4174083
the color limitation was dumb though, the console could have been almost a fucking Sharp X68k or CPS-1 if it had more colors

You're in vr and everyone here is tech iliterates who have never written line of code in life.

>>4174246

A CPS-1 system cost many times more than a Genesis.

>>4174239
IIRC the lead engineer of Genesis said there was only enough die space in the VDP for more colors or Master System video modes but not both. He made the decision to go with the Master System video modes as the color count was considered sufficient for purpose, and Sega at that time prioritised backwards compatibility.

Honestly the worst design mistake for the base system Genesis was the way they configured the Z80's timer and bus which meant that driving good quality PCM streams out of the FM chip was extremely difficult.

>>4174251

Yes, but you lack reading comprehension.

Also were there any other consoles that had true 3 button controllers (meaning not mode select buttons?) as the standard? Something with laugh at today but at the time that was notable. Also a headphone jack was a nice little bonus that I used the hell out of us as kid (late night playing plus it actually sounded better on my headphones than through my mono TV speaker).

Powerful maybe, but not smart. Each revision of the console has flaws, even the early Gen 1 models. The Gen 1 models have great sound, but you need to modify the system to actually get top-quality stereo output. The sound amp/mixer serves double duty with another signal. You can take the easy way out and just run a splitter out of the headphone jack, but the audio is a bit distorted in my experience. And thanks to a poorly designed motherboard, you will be getting jailbars, ringing, rainbow banding, and other video problems even with RGB. You can fix that, by severing the subcarrier line out of the VDP, and running a shielded wire to the encoder, but you'll still have slightly fuzzy video. You need to put in your own RGB encoder just to get it flawless.

I love the Genesis, but damn it has design flaws.

>>4174271
I think OP was talking about the general system architecture as opposed to the nitty gritty motherboard configuration. Most of those issues you describe would have been caused by cost cutting on the manufacturing components more than anything.

Personally I find the SNES vertical bar issue to be more annoying than any of the things you listed.

>>4174271
No one gave a shit nor noticed any of those things in 1988. Hell 99.9% have still never noticed them. Only when we all started going full neck beard with trying to get "perfect" RGB signals on BVM monitors did any of this shit start being noticed.

Neo Geo was essentially the same thing, only better in every way spec-wise.

>>4174439
and released 2 years later at several times the price

>>4174249
Just because you don't know shit doesn't mean none of us do.

>>4174439
Apart from both having a 68k and a z80 they were quite different, the NeoGeo was designed to be able to pull ROM data as easy as RAM into its video and audio subsystems (take into account that NeoGeo carts were huge) also AFAIR the VDP of the NeoGeo brute forced a lot of stuff (treating most of the visual elements as sprites and using RAM to modify stuff) instead of using many background layers and having effects like line scroll. Again, both the console and the carts were very expensive and the system had very different goals compared with the Genesis

blast processin