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This is a normal post And even then you could argue that the Mario Bros. 3 sprite isn't truly 8 bit
As they had additional hardware on the cartridge to push the NES beyond what it was capable of doing (see also the SuperFX chip built into the SNES Starwing / Starfox cartridge to process polygons).

Oh yeah, pretty good vid as well I guess...
 (I helped save b3ta! H.B.Mupps, Thu 12 Jan 2017, 17:04, , Reply)
This is a normal post And Stunt Race FX...
that takes me back.
 (robneymcplum spiced up his life on, Thu 12 Jan 2017, 17:13, , Reply)
This is a normal post Yep, those crafty Argonaut boys making a chip to fill polygons on the SNES
in the same way the MegaDrive could do natively, and the ST and Amiga was doing five years earlier.

I guess with Stunt Race FX they just wanted to bring the shitty frame rate techniques they developed in Starglider II to the masses.
 (I helped save b3ta! joefish It's hard for thee to kick against the pricks, Thu 12 Jan 2017, 18:45, , Reply)
This is a normal post
I had both systems, but why did virtua racing on the MD need the extra stuff?
 (robneymcplum spiced up his life on, Thu 12 Jan 2017, 20:45, , Reply)
This is a normal post Hell of a lot more polygons.
It's the landscape and wheels on the cars that eat them up. Count the polygons in something zippy like No Second Prize on the ST compared to Virtua Racing.

Set things in space with some triangular ships, or flying over flat ground, or a single-colour roadway and your poly count is way lower. F-117 on the MegaDrive is roughly the same as something on the ST/Amiga. They all had Motorola 68000 CPUs.

There is a YouTube demo around of a stock MegaDrive/Genesis doing a near-perfect copy of StarWing/StarFox all on its own.

The SNES's CPU was a shitty little Ricoh 5A22 which does have 16-bit operations, but only an 8-bit data transfer bus - this despite the rest of the machine having advanced sprites and scrolling hardware. But none of that's able to do the maths and graphics manipulation required for filling shapes.

The MegaDrive had to simulate a hi-res screen by laying out scenery tiles on a map, just like a level of Sonic the Hedgehog (although without the scrolling), then re-drawing those tiles live, treating each one as a little window of the overall screen.

Now the SNES couldn't do that fast enough on its own. What the FX chip did was store its own hi-res bitmap screen, draw polygons on it one-by-one, then very quickly dump the finished screen in little pieces into the SNES's screen tiles memory, so the SNES could then display those tiles as a finished screen.
 (I helped save b3ta! joefish It's hard for thee to kick against the pricks, Fri 13 Jan 2017, 12:45, , Reply)