Console hardware autism

Tell us about your favourite console hardware, user. Modern consoles may be shit but they used to have interesting hardware before the Xbone and PS4 became boring x86 PCs and the Switch was given a fucking phone processor and GPU.
Here's a 666-page Cell programming guide if you're curious: redbooks.ibm.com/redbooks/pdfs/sg247575.pdf

THIS IS THE PROGRAMING OF THE DEVIL!

I like the original Gameboy.
The Nintendo logo at the start is stored in the Gameboy's ROM and in the cartridge. The cart version is displayed, and then checked with the ROM version. If they match, the game plays.
There's two reasons for it. The first is that if the cart isn't in the Gameboy properly the logo will be garbled, and the Gameboy will know something's wrong. The second is that if you made an unauthorized cart for the Gameboy, you'd need to infringe Nintendo's trademark to get it to run. If you did that, they could sue you.

So how do you get around this? The way that works on the original Gameboy is to have two logos in the cart. The logo you want to display and Nintendo's own logo. The cart gives the custom logo at first, but swaps the custom logo for Nintendo's logo as the Gameboy checks it to match it with the ROM.
The way that works on the Gameboy Colour is to realize that the console only checks the top of the logo on the Colour. You can slightly edit the logo to say something like "Nivtende", which should save you from Nintendo's legal team.

Sega did this as well with the Master System. They actually sued over it and lost, so by precedent you wouldn't be sued over having an unauthorized cart that uses the Nintendo logo to start.

The Dreamcast
First time I played Arcade ports that were the same as their counterparts at the same time since the Saturn was pretty much unheard of where I lived.

It was amazing

I want to hold hands with Xbox-chan.

The original xbox-chan.

I like the Nintendo 64, despite of its limited storage space most games looked better than on the PS1 and less jaggied.

...

The Sega Saturn is such a weird system, but I love how it works, the way the games look on it, and knowing the techniques involved. It's really wild. It's capable of so much and was liberally expanded by Sega and had a few peripherals planned that would have made it an alternative to a desktop computer. The hardware is even capable of 640x480 progressive scan video, but achieving this requires slight hardware modification and it only works as a proof of concept in a demo. I imagine games which have 480i modes could be forced to a progressive mode, but due to the complexity of the video output on the saturn (with different layers often being handled by different processors at certain times) this seems really unfeasible.

I wonder how Wii-U would interact with Switch dog.

My favourite design is the PS2 slim. It's just so sleek, compact, sexy and stands up well today. I regret not buying several when they were on clearance a decade ago.


That's an understatement. The thing has around 5? separate processors, several of which were bolted on late in development as management were scared the competition were more powerful.
That, combined with the fact that it used quads instead of industry standard triangles as the rendering primitive meant that the thing was probably harder to code for than the PS3's Cell.

8 separate processors, and hardware wasn't revised to respond to playstation or anything, that's an old rumor. It was designed to fit the arcade spec for current and some future hardware. There was no industry standard, so Sega compromised with the hardware and relied on the scaling/rotation functionality to process 3D, essentially. Working with multiple processors was nothing different for designers at the time, most systems had at least 3, the SNES and NES were propped up by having dozens of different processors in the cartridges themselves. The Saturn was a notable step up but the way it works is much simpler than people give it credit for. People usually just mention the number of processors and leave it at that, but in reality they are set up adequately for different tasks and are quite flexible on their own.

I mostly just love how small and portable it is. Nowadays "portable" devices are getting so big you can't fit them in your pocket anymore. I also never realized the backwards compatibility for GB(C) was activated by a switch inside the GBA. I always wondered why the carts had different ridges near the connectors. In the GBA Micro/DS the switch is just solid plastic to prevent you from inserting GB cartridges due to them lacking the Z80 architecture that the GB runs on. (The GBA onward uses 32-bit ARM. I always thought it was 16-bit due to similarities with the SNES.)
I really wish they were smarter about their accessories regarding port placement though. You can't use a wireless adapter or Gamecube cable while charging because when the cable clicks in it blocks the charging port. I have a 3rd party adapter that extends out the link and charging ports while also adding in a headphone jack, so it couldn't have been too hard to move some of the ports around on an official accessory to prevent them from being blocked. (Or just move the link/charging ports over for a headphone jack space and not worry about having the cable click in. It's not like normal link cables used them anyway.)

I loved the SP but the lack of a headphone jack kinda sucked.

GBC

64DD

If you still have your GBC get a glass screen for it. The difference is amazing.

I love that the Wii U has a built-in Wii which has a built-in Gamecube and as such a hacked Wii U plays 6 generations of nintendo games plus most handhelds. Most underutilized hardware ever made. The Wii U was in need of a TWEWY sequel or a trauma center with wii and nds controls or something.

It also fucking blows my mind that the N64 had 4MB of ram and the NDS also has only 4MB of ram. When you think of the better looking games (eg conker's bad fur day / jet force gemini, or spirit tracks / okamiden / prime hunters), and the larger in game worlds with shit going on in them (majora's mask, or the nds kingdom hearts game / gta chinatown wars / ni no kuni), all these games run on hardware with 4MB of ram. I guess majora's mask and conker's use 8MB but still.

It also blows my mind how pokemon red is 512KB. How the fuck do you even fit all the data for all the notes for all the songs in that, let alone all the sprites and world and text. How do you even fit all the text into 512KB.

I know less about the ps2 but on a lot of dev commentaries the shit they did on playstation 2s was insane too, such as the ratchet and clank devs putting clumps of data on the dvd physically closer to each other if one was to be loaded soon after the other, so that level loading times were shorter as the laser reading the disk wouldn't have to spin the disk as much to find the next bit of data.

Do modern devs even try?

Not entirely wrong but it's a pretty retarded way of describing it, sounds like something a dumb high schooler would say.

Not really that surprising when these consoles use cartridges / solid state media, making it possible for them to stream data in real time. The N64 in particular, would never be able to run these games with only 4 MB of ram had it used optical media.

There's nothing too impressive about that and it's far from being a feat exclusive to the R&C devs, they're fucking charlatans if that's how they presented this solution. Plenty of devs were doing that since the Sega CD / Turbo Duo days. It was particularly ubiquitous during 7th gen, since the optical media on X360 / PS3 was particularly slow for the amount of data they needed to read.
Even some PC games had this.

You’re basically a retard and have outed your total lack of programming knowledge.

The audio format is mainly a series of commands to the sound chip there's no sample based (at-least as far as I know, there might be games who did have sample based music but those weren't the majority) straight up streams of audio, no reason for it to take much space.
The downside to doing things that way is that you either have a dedicated audio processor to make the audio or you steal cycles from the main CPU (bad idea most of the time see Ms Pacman on the 2600)

I don't even understand what you meant from this pure ad hominem shitpost. Do you think I'm a retard because I partially agreed with him, or because I disagree?
I know the Wii U cpu is basically a 3-core overclocked Wii cpu which is an overclocked GC cpu, they also share gpu architecture, and therefore is able to run Wii and GC games (only with a modded Wii U in GC's case afaik).
But claiming the Wii U has a "built in Wii which has a built in GC" sounds like something someone with no technical knowledge would say.
If 3dff7a were talking about how the fat PS3 has a built-in PS2 it would be okay since that's technically correct.

Feels pretty bad, my man.