Change one thing?

[outdated_gamer]

I think the differences were a little more than that.

No, that's pretty much it as far as the graphics hardware went. Mind you, we are talking a heck of a lot more sprites and colours. It's about as far ahead of the MD in that respect as the latter is over the Master System.

He did'nt just say Graphics hardware though, he said that was all the difference between them. I disagree, there are far more differences.Even if the Megadrive could output more sprites and colours, there is the issue with the CPU speed, on board ram, the ability to store more information etc.
Its not as simple as just saying if the megadrive had more colours and more sprites. The memory needed to store and display the full animation on games like King of fighters would be miles beyond the ability of the megadrive, even with a few tweaks.
Even the Saturn needed a memory card to have the sort of animation in fighting games that the NEO Geo had,

I didn't say this was the only difference, obviously there were more things like much bigger cartridges (which explains the ridiculous prices they were selling at - not like SNES and MD games weren't super expensive already, there's sort of a reason why ROM cartridges were dropped after the N64), higher CPU clock, more RAM, etc. But base hardware design is actually quite similar, as Matt_B already explained, what made that big difference was the superior graphics hardware in the Neo - way more colours, way bigger sprites without flicker, way more sprites, sprite scaling, etc. Nowadays, we take high colour counts for granted and infact there were no such debates ever since the Sega Dreamcast (which used a 24-bit depth which most people's eyes won't differ from anything higher) and the 3dfx Voodoo 3 (which used a "22-bit" depth which led to interesting debates on the PC graphics card scenes back then), but this wasn't so in the 80s and also early 90s, these things weren't granted and the system that could display more colours usually also was considered to have better graphics (of course that wasn't the only factor but anyway).

As for MD outputing more colours, yeah, that would have been nice, but it seems the design prioritized "hacks" like the shadow/highlight modes which not everyone was able to use as masterfully as Sega's own programmers, which explains why for example the Sonic games look so much more colorful and vibrant compared to some 3rd party games on the system. Also, on a CRT screen with composite, the extra blur makes the visuals seem better than a razor sharp LCD screen with some RGB connection. Personally, I like PCE's design which could output more colours and although it didn't support sprite scaling in hardware, several games still managed to output such effects.

[davyK]

RGB SCART on N64.

Dreamcast - battery the same as Saturn.

I recently tried my N64 out on my flatscreen through composite and it was virtually unplayable (Wave Race was an absolute travesty). It really came as a surprise that a console from the mid-late 90s could be as CRT-dependant as an Atari 2600.

Why would you want to do away with the VMU on the Dreamcast (one of the coolest features of the system) for a lithium battery that keeps failing and takes all your game saves with it?

Didn't mean the VMU - meant the battery in the console itself that keeps the date and time.

[The Laird]

Constantly replacing the batteries in the Saturn and Dreamcast is/were really annoying. I suppose there weren't many other options back then though.

It's a shame the DC didn't have internal memory too like the Saturn as I always thought VMUs, while a cool design, were really annoying and impractical.

[joefish]

My top gripe with the Spectrum is that the 128K really should have had the option of the extra graphics mode that Timex added to their Spectrum variant, with 8x1 colour attributes instead of 8x8. It costs very little to implement in the ULA as it just re-uses the pixel address counter for colours (with a single bit offset) instead of the separate attribute address counter. But it was overlooked in the rush to complete for the Spanish market.

Being able to switch between two display screens on the 128K Spectrum was a welcome addition, but not being able to page the other screen in for writing at the usual screen address made it next to useless, practically.

The other thing I'd change about the Spectrum is to ditch the 'Flash' bit in the attribute byte and have proper four independent bits for INK and PAPER.

It would be neat if it could have had a RGGB 4-bit colour scheme or an alternate palette (including brown, orange, pink etc.) instead of the vague bright/dim 8-colour scheme, but that would have been more costly to implement.

[davyK]

Constantly replacing the batteries in the Saturn and Dreamcast is/were really annoying. I suppose there weren't many other options back then though.

It's a shame the DC didn't have internal memory too like the Saturn as I always thought VMUs, while a cool design, were really annoying and impractical.

It's not so bad with the Saturn - the battery lasts a quite a while. But the DC's system battery will only keep time if the console is on regularly. When it was new it might have lasted a week if you were lucky. My DC batteries are more or less dead now - even if I play every day it won't keep time. The Saturn's lasts at least a year, maybe two. It's odd that Sega didn't make it user replaceable the way they did with Saturn.