/vr/ - Retro Games

>>2738368
>Though it is impressive that stock Genesis could produce polygons
You don't need much computing power to produce polygons, pic related. You need the graphics hardware for it though. To draw polygons, you need to be able to access invididual pixels. The SNES had no such mechanism, everything was done through tiles and sprites. Before the nitpickers come: yes, you can cover the screen in unique tiles (if your tile palette is big enough) and work on their tile data. The performance is abysmal though, as you're essentially working against the hardware. See Elite NES as example.
Starfox worked DESPITE the SNES. It basically did ALL graphics on the cart, and streamed the result back into the SNES. The SNES itself had no clue about the Starfox graphics, it just passed to the screen what ever the cart spit out.