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).WaveRacer wrote: ↑Fri Apr 13, 2018 7:40 amHe 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,
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.