HardwareSpec

This task is unfinished This is a wiki task that requires more thought or peer review. An important issue that needs to be solved, which will appear at the top of Sega Retro:Todo until this message is removed.

See: Talk:Sega Master System/Hardware comparison

thinking out loud

• console
• name (e.g. CPU)
  • sub-name? (e.g. CPU clock rate?)
  • will this idea break down when we try and document graphics modes?
• notes?
• reference (which is awkward to do - maybe we need pdf and pdfpage... but we might want more than one reference?)

Things:

• should really be using these to help define a specification for the hardware. I think benchmarks need to be treated differently, even "official" ones (e.g. there's no point in saying something can render 532480324 polygons a second because it will be relying on software implementations... but we do want to keep a record of when Sega says their consoles can do things).

• I'd quite like to document marketing lies. When Sega of Japan say the Saturn is a 64-bit machine we might want to be able to reference the same CPU info above, hopefully pointing to some data sheets.

• Still don't know if every meaningful integrated circuit should have its own page on Sega Retro. We have photos and should have data sheets on Retro CDN. Perhaps information for say, a Zilog Z80 should live there and be passed down to the technical specifications pages first.

-Black Squirrel (talk) 17:28, 2 May 2019 (EDT)

I slept on this - we'll want ICs to be documented separately, because, for example, the Master System and Mega Drive both have Z80s... and there's little point in describing what a Z80 is more than once.

So in this case, the Z80 page needs to have a technical specifications section describing the properties of all Z80 processors (preferably with data sheets as references). Details on specific clock rates or memory maps would be a console-specific thing. Rinse and repeat for all shared logic chips.

Still not entirely sure how it'll all work, but I think that's a good starting point -Black Squirrel (talk) 06:06, 3 May 2019 (EDT)