Blast processing
From Sega Retro
Blast Processing was a marketing term coined by Sega to advertise the faster processing performance of the Mega Drive/Genesis. Sonic the Hedgehog 2 was the posterboy for this campaign, being faster than any other platform game at the time. The ad campaign featured commercials with races between two vehicles, with the SNES strapped to one and the Mega Drive strapped to the other.
The term was used to refer to two things that gave the Mega Drive/Genesis a faster performance:
- The fact that the main CPU processor was over two times faster than the one in its rival product, the SNES. Sega's Motorola 68000 processor was clocked at 7.67 MHz, compared to the 3.58 MHz clock speed of Nintendo's Ricoh 5A22 processor. However, this was slightly misleading. This idea of simply comparing CPU clock rates to determine performance, regardless of other characteristics, is commonly known as the "megahertz myth". While the 5A22 did run slower in clock cycles per second, it would put out more instructions per clock cycle, allowing it to match the MIPS performance of the Genesis. Also, it would have to freeze background and enemy animations while the game is moving at high speeds. The 68000 did have other advantages, however, such as its limited 32-bit capabilities and its wider use in arcade games allowing more accurate arcade ports on the Genesis.
- The fact that Sega's Yamaha VDP graphics chip had a DMA controller[1] that could handle DMA operations at a faster speed than Nintendo's Ricoh PPU graphics chipset. While the Mega Drive had a DMA transfer rate of 7.2 KB per frame (432 KB per second), the SNES had a DMA transfer rate of 5.72 KB per frame (343.2 KB per second).[2] This was what really gave the Genesis a performance advantage over the SNES.[1]
<mediaplayer>File:Blast Processing Commercial.flv</mediaplayer>
gamesTM - Gaming News '92 "Hogging the World Stage"
