In what way is the SMS technically superior to the NES?

[5233]

I have seen many say that the graphics for SMS are superior, but it seems to merely use a brighter palette, because if I recall correctly, it can actually display less colors at once. In my opinion, the games often look like Commodore 64 graphics (slightly elongated pixels) colored with the MS Paint palette. Not very pleasant. Of course, that's not to say that some developers didn't effectively utilize the available features for fairly competant visuals. Then again, I realize that the SMS didn't have a large degree of third party support for most developers to demonstrate what it was truly capable of most of the time, but examples would be nice. The FM sound option is also interesting.

[Cornugon]

Personally I think it looks better and has more colors than C64 quality. 256x192 vs 160x200
But I never played one so I can only tell about screenshots comparison. Although the colors also look better than on the NES but that's maybe personal.

[Rusty Venture]

The SMS isn't going to win any awards for pasue button placement, that's for damn sure.

[Cornugon]

The SMS isn't going to win any awards for pasue button placement, that's for damn sure.

How do the pads play exactly? Except for the pause button they look similar to the NES-one.

[kool kitty89]

I like the D-pad more, but prefer the NES buttons a little, though some say the D-pad wears out.

SMS games tend to be more colorful than NES ones (larger color palette with some brighter colors -though both technicallt have 64-color palettes the NES reserves many for grays). I think the SMS also supports more colors in the sub-palettes, with 1 16-color palette for sprites and another 16-color one for the scroll layer. (not exactly sure on the NES's subpalette arrangement though)

Sonic 2 is a good example of the colorful envirnonments.

I think both can display a maximum of 8x 8x8 pixel sprites per scanline (without flicker), but I'm not positive. (there's also an upper limit of total sprites on screen, independent of the scanline limit, but I'm not sure on those either)

Anyway, one big point is the audio, with the SMS's being much simpler (well save for the FM in JP units). And the SMS has more onboard RAM (8 kB main, 16 kB video compared to 2 kB each for the NES), but the NES has a lot of on-cart expansion to make up for this and additional flexibility I beleive. (video expansion addressed to cart for either added VRAM or VROM -the latter being cheaper and more commonly used)

[Iron Lizard]

I always though the square d pad felt sort of sloppy. I think the graphics can be better on the SMS but the music is usually better on NES. I think this a good example.

[ApolloBoy]

I always though the square d pad felt sort of sloppy.

Agreed. I was playing R-Type earlier today and I can't tell you how many times I crashed because of the imprecise D-pad.

[Nunzio]

The only problem I have with the SMS controller is the cord coming out the right side. They fixed it but of course I don't own any of those controllers... Personally I find the d-pad is easier on the skin of the thumb, but less responsive.

[Rusty Venture]

How do the pads play exactly? Except for the pause button they look similar to the NES-one.

I too think its kinda sloppy compared to the NES.

However, the Light Phaser is a billion times better than the Zapper.

[Joe Redifer]

Both the NES and SMS d-pads suck ass (NES being much too stiff). The SNES d-pad is good and the Genesis d-pad was much better as well. Just use a Genesis controller for your SMS games. No more need to bitch!

[ApolloBoy]

Just use a Genesis controller for your SMS games. No more need to bitch!

I eventually switched to a 6-button controller after getting frustrated with the SMS controller. It's far better, but I wish it would work for Alien Syndrome or Wonder Boy in Monster Land.

[Alianger]

It definitely had a better color palette, and could display a few more colors on screen. Here's a great example of what you could do with it:




The sound chip is pretty weak as there's only the PSG and no drum samples involved (even the FM chip is pretty bad and usually sounds like the worst MD games). Road Rash and The Flash put it to good use though.

[tomaitheous]

I have seen many say that the graphics for SMS are superior, but it seems to merely use a brighter palette, because if I recall correctly, it can actually display less colors at once. In my opinion, the games often look like Commodore 64 graphics (slightly elongated pixels) colored with the MS Paint palette. Not very pleasant. Of course, that's not to say that some developers didn't effectively utilize the available features for fairly competant visuals. Then again, I realize that the SMS didn't have a large degree of third party support for most developers to demonstrate what it was truly capable of most of the time, but examples would be nice. The FM sound option is also interesting.

SMS: Palette is made from RGB values. 2bit per element.

NES: Palette is based on Luma/chroma. Some colors are better/blend better on the NES. Some on the NES. NES also has higher luma control. For each R/G/B element per screen. Technically, it's like a total of 400+ colors, but really ever used. Too bad that they didn't. So besides some redundant colors, you have around 52-56 on the NES. Less colors for the master palette, but better overall IMO.

Winner: Hmm..I'd say NES.


SMS: Can have up to sixteen colors in a single 8x8 tile and another 15 for a single 8x8/8x16 sprite.

NES: Has 4 colors per 16x16 metatile (a tile is 8x8, but color is fixed for a block of four). Sprites have 3 colors per 8x8 or 8x16. The NES gets around the problem by having four subpalettes of 4 colors for a tile to choose from. Sprites have their own four subpalettes of 4 colors, but the first color is always ignored/not shown. Max colors on screen for NES is 26. Max colors onscreen for SMS is 31. It looks close, but SMS can show more detail in color in a smaller space/area.

Winner: SMS clearly wins with its high color counter per tile/sprite cell.


SMS: Has tilemap screen size slightly larger than the screen. Somewhat limiting. Has tile flipping (saves some vram for some types of patterns).

NES: Has a tilemap 4 times the screen size. But there's only enough ram on the system for 1/2 that. Still larger than SMS. Makes for smoother and/or easier scrolling map routines. Carts were able to mirror (you can pick between horizontal or vertical mirroring) the missing map memory so that it "wraps" correctly, or the cart could include the extra needed VRAM to make use of all four tilemap sections. Through some exploit, MMC5 mapper was able to hack the tilemap in realtime to provide the NES with 8x8 palette blocking. It increased the tile graphics. I think only a few games took advantage of this.

Winner: NES is the definite winner.


SMS: Has 16k of vram. A nice chunk of vram until you realize that the tiles and sprites take up twice the memory on SMS vs NES. So it puts it the same.

NES: The real strength of the NES is that all video memory is on the cart. There is no VRAM for tiles or sprites on the system itself. So it be VRAM or it can be VROM. And since it's on the cart, you can mappers to quickly switch out vram or vrom. Depending on the mapper, you can do fine/small swapping to larger/whole banks, or in variable sized chunks. It can swap on/out up to all of vram in a matter of a handful of cycles. In comparison, the SMS has to slowly update it's small setup of vram. Hell, it can even swap in/out tiles/sprites faster than any of the 16bit systems. And it can do it mid screen too.

Winner: NES is the strong/clear winner here.


SMS: Sprite size is 8x8 or 8x16. Sprite table holds a max of 64 sprites. Can only show 8 sprites per scanline. Doesn't support horizontal and/or vertical "flipping". Has horizontal sprite zooming (double pixels), but it's broken and only works for the first 4 sprites. SMS has to manual update the sprite table.

NES: Sprite size is 8x8 or 8x16. Sprite table holds a max of 64 sprites. Can only show 8 sprites per scanline. Does support horizontal and/or vertical "flipping". NES has a fast sprite DMA that reads from on board ram to vram.

Winner. NES for the flipping options and sprite dma. Otherwise, no different for onscreen or per scanline (flicker/blankout). BUT.. if you count that the SMS can do software sprites much better than NES because of the high color count per cell, albeit choppy animation/movement, then the SMS clearly gets the win. Golden Axe on SMS being one example. SMS software sprites have a down side that they are choppy and take cpu resource to overlay, and can take several frames to update. They also consume more vram unique tiles which means less detail for the background.


SMS: Ram. Stock SMS has 8k of on board ram. This is decent but also necessary because 4bit tiles/sprites take up more space and need to be compressed (also decompressed to ram). More memory is also easier for map routines. More is mappable via external cart.

NES: Ram. Stock NES has only 2k of ram. That's pretty tight for things. A lot of games had expanded ram on the cart. Sometimes this was accompanied by a battery for also saving games.

Winner: SMS, but this becomes a null issue once ram is accompanied on the cart.


SMS: SMS has a register to keep a section of the tile map fixed for a "status window". Stock SMS also has horizontal interrupts. Can make some nice parallax effects out of the box.

NES: NES uses sprite 0 active method to achieve the same thing as the SMS's static status window. It's not as efficient and wastes some code as you having to poll the status register. A stock NES has not scanline interrupts. Later mappers added this though. MMC3 mapper is a popular one that supports it.

Winner: SMS for stock setup. Both are equal though, once an NES is setup with the correct mapper.


SMS: 8bit z80 processor running at 3.58mhz. Twice clock speed as the NES.

NES: 8bit 6502 processor running at 1.79mhz. Half the clock rate of the SMS. The devil is in the details, while half the speed, the instructions are much faster on the 6502. Not to mention some nice instructions and address modes that don't exist on the z80.

Winner: Hmm. I'd have to give this to the NES. Having coded for both, 6502 code tends to give better results with optimization. But the performance difference isn't huge relative to the different clock rates.


SMS: Sound. Stock system has 3 tones channels and 1 noise channel. The tone channels have a fixed waveform. Standard square. Basic as you can get. Noise channel is limited in setup. Standard volume at 4bit non linear. No other hardware features.

NES: Sound. Stock system has 2 lead channels, 1 triangle/bass channel, 1 noise channel, 1 sample channel. Both leads channel have be individually assigned 1 or 4 waveforms (variations of square waves). Triangle channel is used for bass lines, but has not volume control and frequency is 1/2 range of lead channels. Noise channel has volume control and 16 ranges of frequencies to pick. Sample channel is either DPCM at 1bit delta for a max of 6bit output or a direct write at 7bit raw PCM. Has no volume control. In DPCM mode, it feeds itself and after reading 4k will generate an interrupt for the CPU to change the bank (for longer samples). Very impressive for 1983. Almost no games take advantage of this channel pre SMB3 and not many afterwards. SMB3 steel drum sample uses this channel. NES also has hardware note length, hardware decay volume envelope, and hardware repeating sweep envelope.

Winner: For stock setup, clearly the NES. Japanese SMS has the (very limit) FM addon chip. But on the same token, Japanese FC had lots of mappers that added additional sound channels. Some as many as 8-10 more channels, including a game that used a FM addon chip similar to the SMS one.


Besides color count/detail, NES beats out the SMS in all other hardware. Strange considering the SMS came out 2 years later. The NES might require mappers in some instances, but the whole design of the original famicom included mapper integration. But judging from the games on both systems, especially the good ones, there isn't much real world difference. Heck, even with SMS's (choppy) software sprites - some games clearly look ahead of the NES. Space Harrier, R-Type, Golden Axe. I'm sure other can point out more examples. I personally don't care for the choppiness of the software sprites though. 60fps of real sprites is just better, not to mention 60fps gameplay.

[Cornugon]

How come the NES has such greyish/dull/plastic/artificial (by lack of better description) looking colors (just exactly like the C64, as in same greyishness/dullness), compared to the obviously more vibrant/lifelike colors of the SMS (and homecomputers like the Amstrad CPC, and later 16 bit consoles like both the SNES and Genesis ofcourse).
I'm wondering what causes that, since the C64 also has such colors (just look at the C64's pink or lightgreen display capabilities to see what I mean, yuck!)

[Zebbe]

Tech-specs aside, compare Final Fantasy to Phantasy Star (which were released around the same week) and you'll see.