The Bitwars.


Overlooked factoids about the 8 and 16 "Bit War" era.

  • The Hard Drivin' port for the NES(!) was worked on, and apparently a working demo was shown off to reviewers.
  • The Turbografx-16 wasn't technically a 16-bit machine, instead it used two custom variants of the venerable 6502. In reality, the Turbografx could pump out twice as many instructions as the "blast processing" Sega Genesis. I know you don't believe me, so read this.
  • The Supergrafx was basically a Turbografx with an extra video processing unit to allow it an extra scrolling background, more sprites, and scaling/rotation. It is still claimed that the hardware couldn't handle this "upgrade" and was one of the reasons it failed - which is untrue. The reason the system failed is because there was no interest in it.
  • Developers of CD games for the Turbografx were prone to being very messy or sneaky with what they put in the final product. Rayxanber III, for instance, has graphics and the title screen for "Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego". The Urusei Yatsura game CD has several digitized pictures of a young Japanese woman. Gradius II has an image of a lizard and a Ford Bronco (?). Some of the games even contain hidden messages by the programmers.
  • NEC, the company behind the Turbografx, was the first approached by Midway for a home port of Mortal Kombat. NEC felt fighting games were a dying fad, and turned down Midway. Back in the 60's, Decca had the same idea about guitar bands when they turned four youths from Liverpool away. Take a wild guess on that one.
  • SNK America bought several pages in EGM as part of an ad campaign for the Neo-Geo. This campaign advertised the 68000 (16-bit) and Z-80 (8-bit) hardware in the machine as being "24-bit". Oddly enough, they ignored the fact that the Sega Genesis also has a 68000 and a Z-80 underneath the hood, or the fact that the Super NES had a 16-bit CPU and a custom Sony 8-bit processor.
  • In the same paid advertisement, SNK derided the SNES's Mode 7 abilities (scaling, rotation, mosaic) as cheap software tricks and only the Neo-Geo offered true hardware effects.
  • There was much made of how many "megs" a game was. An "8-Meg" game, for instance, was 1 megabyte. Again, in the same advertisement, SNK claimed their "330 Mega Pro-Spec" games were measured in megabytes, not megabits. This is false.
  • Raiden was the first 6-megabit game for the Turbografx, Parodius was the first 8-megabit game. This was big news at the time. The largest Turbografx cartridge was Street Fighter II: CE, which was 20 megabits.
  • SNK wasn't the only console producer to embellish their console's computational abilities. The Atari Jaguar, in the strictest technological definition, is a 16-bit machine.
  • When the Atari Jaguar failed, rebranded machines found their way into dentist's offices (but not to play games)
  • The US Army used custom Super Nintendo software and hardware for indoor targeting simulations.
  • The Super Scope was the Super Nintendo's answer to the NES' light gun. The only kind of television it will operate correctly with is CRT. If you have a TFT, you're SOL.
  • The 3DO received the most accurate port of Capcom's Super Street Fighter II.
  • A group of high school students visited Square USA's headquarters in Washington when they were still pals with Nintendo. One of the programmers there made a quick demo of a panda graphic, burned it to cartridge, and gave it to a student. I bet that cart is worth a hell of a lot of money now.


Back to Main.