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Re: Why don't they produce arcade hardware that is ahead of the PC anymore!
07/29/14 11:57 PM
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> The premise is incorrect. The better question is: Why did home console systems fall
> short of the technology found in Arcade machines for so many years?
Because no-one could afford $2000 to buy the console just to play half a dozen games which were released on it, then pay another $3000 for the next generation console for the newer games which can't run on the older hardware without being dumbed down or adapted to fit (hello Atari 2600 Pac-Man). Although, with vertical games, they didn't want kids tipping over the big, clunky, stereotypical 1970s woodgrain CRT TV (or a 50" plasma for that matter) onto its side and/or risking injury and/or damage to the TV, so they adapted them to fit a regular, horizontal TV screen - of course, this doesn't count on consoles which can change resolutions or zoom to fit, or modern (e.g. LCD) TVs which can be rotated to a vertical position..
Of course, other games were simply dumbed down to reduce costs. For example, Street Fighter II on the SNES could easily have been better/more closer to the arcade, had it been given a larger ROM - for example, the sprites are tiny, despite both arcade and console being 224p (it didn't need to be vertically resized, just squashed horizontally since both games were designed for 4:3 monitors regardless of pixel width), and the sound effects are much shorter as well, for example Ryu's move calls and Blanka's roar, and they sounded pretty low quality as well. The music samples are also very short, although I don't know if this was a limitation of the SNES sound hardware or not.
On some games though, the "They Just Didn't Care" trope is definitely the main reason, particularly for modern hardware like the PlayStation and beyond.
Also, on the flip side, there was the Neo-Geo AES, where the home console was the arcade hardware. Naturally, it came with a price tag well over its 16-bit rivals of its era (the Super Nintendo and Mega Drive/Genesis among others).
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