/vr/ - Retro Games

>>7406067
I agree with you on price, but I believe it could have been beefed up at a relatively minor cost increase over what would have been the actual Neptune. For example, it used a dual SH-2 setup where generally one was used as the CPU and the other acted as the GPU. The 32x's VDP has fuckall inside it so most graphical effects are done in software (line rasterization, texture mapping, blitter-like effects, etc). Replace the 32x VDP with the Saturn's VDP1 (which actually had less pins on its IC!) and you can eliminate one of the SH-2s and gain more graphical horsepower. I'm not sure how much VDP1 cost to manufacture, but I'm guessing in the $15-20 range, probably at least twice what 32x's did. Or keep the 2nd SH-2 and use it as the Saturn did crunching math to feed the VDP1's polygon rasterizer. And as for work RAM, it doesn't have to go to 1MB like I stated. You could throw in one more 128kx16 SDRAM chip (512k total work RAM instead of 256) and now you've doubled the amount of bandwidth that the CPUs can transfer data through, fully 32-bit, as well as increasing the amount of texturing and sound storage.

The additional cost for the RAM chip and change in VDP is, say, around $15 for what should be a massive computational, graphical, and sound increase. Those 2D games on the 32x which were running at 30fps when not relying on the Genesis' background layer should easily be bumped up to a smooth 60 along with much better looking 3D games.