AWJ wrote:AirRaidX wrote:thankyou AWJ, for that information comparing Sega's X Board to the Y Board. I've always wanted to know the differences. btw, do you have any idea if the more powerful Y Board that runs GFII G-LOC and PD, if it can do more than 256 sprites, or is it the same amount as the X Board?
The Y-Board's sprite hardware is entirely fillrate-bound--there isn't really a "maximum number of sprites". There's enough RAM to store the coordinates of thousands of sprites (unlike the X-Board, where the limit of 256 is a RAM limit), but the hardware could never draw them all in one frame.
Note that the X-Board is also fillrate-bound--it can't draw 256 maximum-sized sprites, some of them will be dropped. You can bet that any hardware that has both a large maximum number of sprites and a large maximum sprite size can't reach both of those limits at the same time. The Y-board fillrate is significantly higher than the X-Board (possibly several times higher--I don't know the exact specs), and the hardware is smart enough not to waste time drawing pixels that will be offscreen after rotation, so you can place a large sprite halfway off the screen and the offscreen portion won't count against the fillrate limit (this is not the case with the X-Board)
whoa, you are really knowledgable about the
'After Burner Hardware' ~ 'X Board'
and ' Galaxy Force Hardware' ~ 'Y Board'
would you say that the 32-bit System32 board that powered
Rad Mobile / Gale Racer , Golden Axe: Revenge of Death Adder,
Air Rescue, Alien 3 The Gun, F1 Exhaust Note, F1 Super Lap, etc, was a huge leap beyond the 'Y Board' that powered Galaxy Force II ?
System32 was meant to be capable of around 8,000 sprites (memory limits again?) and display 16,384 colors on screen.
And the Saturn was another leap beyond System32. I wonder why it was so hard to get arcade-quality ports of System Y and System32 games on Saturn ? the arcade-based Saturn, STV ~ Titan, saw ports to the Saturn without much trouble.
