Atari Pogostick

I said the SNES couldn't do scaling, I only mentioned Mode-7 as one of the reasons Nintendo didn't bother to try and add it. Mode-7 was more than what other consoles did at the time so it had enough wow-factor alone to get people to buy an SNES. I mentioned that the Neo-Geo couldn't do it, however the Neo-Geo could Zoom sprites in and out, a common trick they used to fake scaling for their fighting games among others.

Carmack trying to max out the Jaguar version and the 3DO version (originally intended to be an enhanced extended version of the original game) disagree with this statement, and nether could run PC doom despite being "polygonal machines" and that's ignoring the 3DO version that was released, guys have tried to get the regular game to run a few levels on the 3Do and they can't get it to run like the PC version without compromises just like the Jaguar. All I'm saying it that consoles likely were not ready for 3D until around 1998 or so. Which is also around the time 3D compatible chips and software dropped down in price. What we had before that were games running often sub-30fps with weak central processing and heavy fog use.

Not saying it's not impressive but "blows away" might be a bit much. NES color advantage is the strength in screenshots but homebrew MSX/CV versions of SMB exist and shows the game can run on those consoles. In japan however SMB was clearly better than the competition over there by miles. Which is funny considering the SG-1000 was basically a Sega branded Colecovision (minus the bios).

It's likely SMB if not some other game around the same time. 7800 was equal to second generation of NES chips with native hardware so that List of games where there was no chips would make the famicom vastly weaker than the 7800. So imagine how the SMS would look. (or in japan the TG16.)

There seems to be a decent amount on Ebay, but you have to look for it across two different categories as some N-gages are sold as phones instead of video games. I do believe the 3 million is likely world wide. Don't think the NGP sold 3 million units. As for your other points, I can see where your coming from. I do have to disagree on common core though, the Nokia N-gage ran Symbian and a lt of phones were using Symbian at the time, in fact, Symbian was the biggest OStat the time the N-gage came out. I don't think Nokia could have done anything better than that in 2003. So before anything else, please keep in mind that Smartphones existed at this time. Primarily led by Blackberry followed by Windows and palm pda clones, however you are correct in that the N-gage was not considered a smartphone at the time.. for some reason. With that said, you are right, looking at the Specs of the N-gage as well as other portable multi-media devices, the N-gage was likely the best you were going to get when it came out in terms of portable gaming. Yeah I think the QD model should have released first and the original N-gage had some issues, but if you were an ethusiast that was your only option unfortunately. Now as for the Gizmondo, i wouldn't really compare the two as the N-gage actually sold to people, had features people used everyday (Mp3 etc.) and had software. I'd say the Nuon maybe.

Gamecubes Mascot is Nintendos mascot, so yeah Mario is the mascot. As a Mascot game Sunshine wasn't reallty that good to many people. So in this case you would choose one of the other three options.

Jak sold 6 million copies. Master Chief was the mascot of Xbox and still is why are you guys changing the definition of mascot? Mascot doesn't always mean furry animal at the soccer game. Jak was advertised as a mascot for part of the PS2's life, Ratchet never was, also Jak 1 sold over 4-5 million copies. R&C didn't take off until the third game in: Up your arsenal.

SNK games couldn't zoom out, they could shrink and grow the same picture. So what they usually did was start with the sprites pre-shrunk half-way so that the camera can create an illusion of sprites zooming in and out. Scaling games were more taxing and harder to make because when that space ship got closer you had to add significantly more detail. When that ship got close up in view you had to see the crew on the ship, the weapons, the windows, etc, and then they would shrink and grow those sprites. SNK used a cheaper short-cut of doing something a bit similar but no where near the same thing. Art of Fighting is a great example of an SNK game using the "zoom" trick. but SNk didn't have the tech or resources for actual scaling on the Neo-geo. This is a myth. The Lynx has better scaling than the SNES so the tech was there. I think the real reasons home consoles had limited to zero scaling ability was because they wanted to cut costs. The SNES was cheap hardware with a lot of cut corners, and was designed to make that up with cartridge enhancements. The Genesis was released 3(?) years before the SNES in NA and 2 years before in Japan so there was no way that nor the TG16 were going to have the tech in them even if they wanted to. The Neo-Geo and the SNES were the only consoles that could have pulled scaling off, however everybody else was so far away that the SNES mode-7 was seen as a wow factor so Nintendo had no reason to spend money on that. Neo-Geo was already a money sink and it was not an open platform, it was one of the most restrictive, so uou could only use what SNK had in their architecture. The Neo-Geo had hardware for mode-7 like games and the "Zoom trick" I mentioned above but not much in hardware scaling. The Neo-Geo had powerful processors but scaling or 3D was completely out of the question due to how the hardware was built. As for 3D, 3D was already in arcades way before 93. 2D games just generally were easier to produce and had more success in general until the mid 90's. Saturn and jaguar were the first pieces of tech where it was possible to have scaling games at Home, why Sega never brought more over (theres or third parties) to pad out its library even before they reacted to Sony, i have no idea. Atari did kind of have an excuse, they were flat broke and the Jaguar's 2D tools were garbage. I'm surprised we even got Super Burn-out. While Super Burn-out was more than one the SNES could do it still wasn't anywhere near the arcade motorycle games. It doesn't even touch A.B. cop and that was an 80's game.

What did you think of the QD model? You think if it launched with that one it may have made a difference?

Say what? Anyway while not that amazing SMB is still a good accomplishment with stock hardware.

Devshad nearly 3 years with the system and produced the same results. The user above says SMB was around the best the machine could do. If true that would explain why that happened.

Oh really? Can you post a link to that interview when you can? If that's true that SMB is around the peak of what the hardware can do, then that means it's more powerful than an CV/MSX, but only slightly, with stock hardware. That would imply those chips really made a HUGE difference to that systems longetivity. Quite interesting.

Huh? The Famicom basically produced similar with stock hardware until they made chip add-ons more frequent. If the stock NES with ppu was as capable as it says on paper there would have to be a reason why developers didn't push it more and instead went with the short cut of adding extended hardware. Look at Antartic Adventure and Battle City, those games came out later in 1985, the CV can run both those games, in fact AA is on the CV!

Service plan and data plan are not the same thing. Most parents were not buying their kids data plans back then, it was usually for themself.

On paper this looks like it would produce more than what we got with the early famicom releases. I wonder if there's a bottleneck that was only circumvented after chips were added?

I don't see the confusion. Stock just means the hardware that was released in 1983. The first few years of games released on the famicom mostly only used the stock hardware for the most part. I'm wondering how capable that hardware was. Was it slightly more powerful than the early 80's consoles or was that around the extent of it's power without enhancements?

It had a decent amount earlier but they dropped the bar hard in the later half of it's run I agree. They had good packaging to, all the GBA game boxes were cheap cardboard. Yuck.

Psp was late 2004. I get your other points but data plans were not packaged back then so all the parents would have to do is not buy a data package. This would prevent the bill, and razrs had subs so I'm sure if Nokia got more carriers selling it for $99, or free with contract it may have done a bit better. Maybe.

I remember buying 4 Dreamcasts due to issues and all of them broke by either the drive failing or power issues. Oddly the 5Th DC I got, the black sports one, works to this day, and that's with years of bootleg discs too. Since then I got 5 more white DCs between 2004-2009, all of those broke by 2014. My friend got two black ones and two white ones at the same time and one of his blacks ones is the only one of the 4 still workimg. Today. Curious.

By Stock I mean without any additional graphical chips in the cartridges. I'm curious because this is a topic seldom discussed, people bring up games like SMB3 or Startropics as NES graphical achievements even though the system can't run those games without out the box. Now, surely the original NES is still a capable machine. It is clearly able to stand with other early 80's machines like the ColecoVision, but not quite as powerful as a 7800. What I'm curious about is, is the stock famicom still slightly more capable than the pre-crash consoles or are games like antartic adventure among the best it can produce with stock hardware? I know the Ppu the Famicom uses helps with the chips, but does it make much of a difference with stock hardware for drawing graphics? Also did the stock famicom have the Yamaha audio at launch or was that later added-in?

Honestly I can't blame Sega, even after launch of the Saturn. High-fidelity 3D wasn't really available for consoles in 94 unless you wanted a $600 console. But Sega likely thought Sony got some secret tech to get the "textures" in their games. Which ended up being false. If you look at 3DO games from 94-96 and psx/sat games from 94-96 the games mostly seem like they were from the same machine. In hindsight, I think Segas reaction to Sony was silly. Yeah, PSX had demoed games with textures. But those games ended up running like shit. They really had nothing to worry about ironically. In the end the only significant hardware advantage Sony had over the 3DO was memory for textures. I always felt the first part of that gen was in stasis because you barely saw improvements until 1998 and by then the DC was out.

Plus, N64 was even worse. It had cleaner polygons, but ran them at 12fps.

But what was so bad about it to make you say this though? I had one and the only issues I could think of was the taco and the way you inserted games. The games played well, at least the ones I had.

I actually believe they should have went for broke and released the promised 7800 in 1984. They could have took out a corporate loan if they really needed to. The original 7800 was a beast of a machine that was upgradable. Would have sailed through the crash with ease. I'd agree with op if the 5200 was alone, but the ColecoVision was huge and more powerful. It's was also the reason we got the NES, 7800, and SMS in the first place. Also the ColecoVision got the licenses like B.C., Flintstones, and Dukes of Hazzard. I would also like to stress that the 5200 also made the CV controllers seem "good" by comparison, which is quite the feat given how bad the CV controllers are.

PC and Atari got all the devs that would end up big successes and would end up on consoles years later when the Xbox original launched. Most the developers that made C64 or Amiga games went bankrupt or were brought out because they didn't produce many games with lasting appeal. They may get a head start on the SNES but people didn't mind paying $100 for N64 games when Saturn games were $40, so just assuming that cheaper games would help Commodore compete against the Mega Drive and the SNES is silly.