The next move in the console war made prudently company Sega, opening the fourth generation of video game consoles of its 16-bit Sega Mega Drive and having overtaken the nintendo for two years. Full 16-bit Motorola 68000 processor worked at 7.67 MHz (it can even overclock up to 25 Mhz!), there were 64 KB of RAM and the same VRAM memory cartridges support up to 4 Mb is a very solid performance for the year 1988. Video controller Video Display Processor could draw up to 1536 colors in 320 x 240 pixels. First appeared 8-bit audio controller with support for samples, so the sound finally became similar to the present special effects rather than monotonous squeaking and creaking. The Mega Drive also it was possible to buy a CD drive.
But, of course, the most important were games, not hardware stuffing. Growing franchise on Sonic the Hedgehog, which became a symbol of the company, Dune 2, Mortal Kombat games and many others were forced to move to a new generation of users ' consoles.
Nintendo did not hurry with the transition to the fourth generation, the NES sold and so nice. So only a year an updated 1990 Super Nintendo Entertainment System, or SNES. Ricoh 5A22 CPU, naturally, 16-bit, worked at 21.47 MHz (the frequency available Sega only after overclocking) with 128 Kb of memory, powerful graphics chip with 512 x 478 permissions and 32768 colors, as well as a large number of simulations of three-dimensional graphics, full 16-bit audio controller – it was all in his head faster than SEGA. Even in the "vlezalo" is cartridge 16 Mb – four times more than the Mega Drive. In addition, it was possible to accommodate additional processors and chips for "beautiful" games (among them even the first "real" 3D-simulation game Star Fox). Is a powerful reserve for the future, and hold out for the SNES on the market right up to the 2000 's.
(C) Nintendo Games have all been very well – to the cult series Super Mario obrastavšej, new extensions, joined the series Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, and Street Fighter.
Sales of the SNES and Mega Drive were going nose to nose: 39 million SEGA and Nintendo have 49 million. However, one cannot count a "loss" for SEGA's console in this round of the battle: the many millions the company lost sales due to the enormous flow of fakes.
As we can see the third and fourth generation consoles have the industry in its current form: a few big companies, big-budget games, powerful hardware, which allows devices to be relevant for many years. Crisis of the early 80 's rafiniroval this market, sparing it from the weak players and an endless stream of games-clone, so that a new century portable game console in the form of interesting and powerful products. On the fifth and sixth generation of the Sony PlayStation console, appeared for the first time, we'll talk about in a future release of our retrospectives.