Category talk:Technical specifications

Accuracy

As with the Hardware Comparisons pages these pages are equally inaccurate. They again stretch the truth, embellish the truth, misrepresent hardware, or just flat out make things up. In many cases certain parts of the hardware are listed multiple times as different parts that just make things confusing and nonsensical. In many cases this seems to be done to try and make it easier to compare the systems to other systems for console war purposes.

A good example of this is the Sega Saturn page. The SH-2s are listed multiple times, once as the CPU, another time as the Geometry engine, another time as DSPs. When in reality they are just the 2 main CPUs. What they are used for is entirely up to the programmer. They shouldn't be listed multiple times as different parts of the hardware. In other parts of that page features are attributed to hardware but it's not actually backed up. For example polygons per second is given for VDP2, when it flat out has no ability to draw polygons. It is a background chip that can do scrolling and scaling background layers, and rotating planes. It cannot draw sprites or polygons, that's VDP1. The source for this links to a document that says nothing even close to backing this claim up. And this is really just the tip of the iceberg. Digging into the pages for the individual chips themselves (CPUs, VDPs, Sound Chips, etc.) is equally bad and full of misinformation.

As stated in the Comparisons page discussion, developers look at these pages and want to know what hardware these pages are describing because it's certainly not any hardware Sega ever made. It's again a source of tons of misinformation on the internet and needs serious reworking.

Unlike the hardware comparison pages these pages do have a purpose and a place here. However I would recommend deleting them and replacing them with just the straight up factual specs that Sega themselves released, and leaving the console war comparisons up to the readers to do on their own.