/vr/ - Retro Games

>>2484743
Let's go through the list...

>>2472172
The big difference between the two systems really boils down to the amount of memory available and what graphic and audio support chips are connected.

Given enough memory and time, an ancient CPU such as the 65816 could compute anything that a Core i7 could. Some major differences between different CPUs are the available instructions, and how wide the data and address buses are. However missing instructions can be emulated, wider data buses can be emulated serially, and wider address spaces can be emulated with a memory subsystem. The point is both are Turing complete machines, meaning that given enough resources, they can both evaluate any computable function (albeit the Core i7 many thousands of times faster!)

So that leaves the graphical and audio support chips. Through fast, specialized, commodity hardware, modern systems' graphics and audio models have converged to the simplest representation for the programmer, limiting them to only their imagination (and what's computable!). Video is more or less represented as an array of RGB values somewhere in your graphics hardware that is updated every 60Hz+, above which does not benefit the human eye. Audio is produced through your speakers by specifying the diaphragm amplitudes at 44kHz+, above which does not benefit the human ear.

Older hardware in contrast had to be cheap and powerful. Designers had to work within semiconductor fabrication limits of the day. For instance, the 65816 ran at ~3-4MHz+ over an 8-bit data bus, whereas modern Core i7s run at ~3-4GHz+ over a 64-bit+ data bus. Cheap hardware wasn't quite to the point where the modern simplicity could be realized in real time, so different compression schemes had to be invented to work with the limited time and space resources. For systems like the SNES, this involved a tiling architecture where graphics are divided up into square characters and drawn to the screen using an array called a tilemap.