Whats the most underutilized hardware in your opinion?

I think you have a winner.

Still can't figure out why handheld systems all have to have forward facing cameras these days. Nothing has ever used them yet they persist.

I think the 3ds has a infrared port.
Never used it once.

There's too many examples of games that didn't use all the hardware they could have back then.

But I'll throw my post in. VRC7. Was pretty much a music enhancer chip. But only two NES games had it. And only one actually used it.

PS2's firewire port.

Tear away is the only game i can think of
In the past 3 years

Devs figured out no one wants to see a mugshot of the average handheld player. Crisis adverted.

Based devs.

Didn't the Gamecube have a networking port you had to plug an adapter into? Did any games use that?

CPS2's networking capability. Only the Tournament Battle variant of SSF2 used it. Apparently Darkstalkers 1 had a similar mode planned since it has labels for 8 players, but it was scrapped.

n3DS uses it for facial tracking for 3D, which is nice.

AMD CPUs

At least with Ubisoft titles (and any other modern poorly-optimized-for-AMD-CPUs games)

Seriously, what are these cunts doing?

Bravely Second uses it very briefly in one specific are in the world.

Yes, Mario Kart, Kirby's Air Ride, and 1080 Snowboarding, used it for LAN networking (eg. 16 players across 4 TVs in one race for Mario Kart), and Phantasy Star Online used it for online play. Some Japan-exclusive game used it, too.

Some other obvious examples of underused hardware is the PS Vita's mystery port, expansion ports on the NES, SNES, N64 and one of the ports on the Gamecube.

The issue with the VRC chips was that Konami tried to not use them too much since they wouldn't work on the western NES. They used a different mapper in US Castlevania 3 but all other VRC games were Japan only.

PSO I think

I know. But why go through the effort of making a special chip. When you won't even use it much?

AMD CPUs are just shit.

The mystery port on the fat Vita.

The Sega Saturn's hardware was actually closer to the n64 than the PS1 in terms of power. Too bad we never really got to see it used to it's full potential.
Damn I didn't even know CPS2 had anything like that.

Wii.
Only 3 games use the hardware well enough to not look like a slightly upscaled PS2.

Thats bullshit. One the snes could play digital audio im not sure why you say its compressed when it wasnt it was just a low bit rate. It also handled large sprites like star ocean and tales. Now if you said it was under utlized in the west then yeah

PSO.

The main problem was because people found a exploit to run homebrew on GC. So Sega and Nintendo pretty much ditched the damn thing.

PSO which explains why I never could get through that game

AMD CPUs were literally 'allowed' to sustain enough success in order to continue being sold because intel would be considered a monopoly otherwise

>they wouldn't work on the western NES
This was only due to Nintendo's policies though. Nintendo refused to let any licensed game in the west use anything but their stock MMC chips, while in Japan they were allowed to go wild and devs could develop crazy powerful chips for themselves.

The VRC chips fully work in NES consoles, although the extra sound channels will be silent since Nintendo was dumb and removed the pins that allowed audio expansion chips to work.

It was used for the Circle Pad Pro and that was it.

Which ones?

The psx was based off of namco tekken board. I dont know how you can compare saturn and n64. Saturn was based on dual 6800 and wasnt until they found out of the psx being completely 3d did they incorporate the virtual fighter 3d board

The Neo Geo had something similair where they used headphone jacks to connect multiple MVS cartridges/systems to each other.

There were actually quite a few other sound enhancement chips made for late Famicom games. As for VRC7, wasn't that extremely late in the Famicom's lifespan? Lagrange Point was released when the Super Famicom was out for a year.

SMG1,SMG2, Zelda squidward.

I don't blame Nintendo for cutting corners on the NES hardware compared to the Famicom. Consider the situation Nintendo and the US gaming industry were in. I imagine the lower costs helped the NES succeed in the first place.

Yes. It was late. But that was I could think of off the top of my head.

>Damn I didn't even know CPS2 had anything like that.
The limitations of its transmissions speed meant you couldn't actually play against someone on another cabinet. Everyone involved in the tournament had to move cabinets each successive round. So it ended up being a rather awkward setup. Understandably it didn't do well commercially, so the networking capability went unused form then on.

So that's why my League Bowling has those ports.

That Ethernet port for the guitar hero 2 controller for 360

Actually, they repurposed the audio pins to work with the connection port on the bottom of the console. The one that went completely unused and was completely blocked off in later models.

Theoretically, someone could create a device that attached to the bottom port and allowed for extra sound channels in NES games, but nobody ever bothered.

what could have been...

It was supposed to be a slot for a pedal addon.
It just went unused tho.

I'd put Xenoblade and Dong Cunt Returns in there too.

the second vita port
>a peripheral for UMD support as an attachment was considered
>this would be one of the many uses planned but then dropped

and now we're working on using it for game loading and exploit shit since its basically the same as a usb port on the vita - which is incidentally just a USB port on the PSTV anyway
>in due time you can have a 2tb hdd of vita games plugged into your vita/pstv and play all of them on a whim
>sony wont acknowledge the port

Really? I had no idea.

Maybe they couldnt use these chips to process code because of a bandwidth issue? Can't imagine the game cart port being that great.

Yeah. The whole situation with the Famicom vs. NES design is pretty fucking weird and a lot of Nintendo's decisions don't make a lot of sense in retrospect.

Is this port phat only?

Does 3ds use it's port for anything but that second control stick thing?

Sony reeaaallly shit the bed with the Vita. And I say that as a Vita owner.

To be honest. I keep forgetting that was even there.

I always figured Sony meant to use it or something. Guess I was kinda right.

Pokemon also uses it.

At least they learned their lesson. It blew my mind when I learned I could cut those tabs to play SFC games on my US SNES.

There's 3 ports under there. One was for the GB player, one was for the network adapter and the last was unused I think.

that port is only on the fat model
slim models have the same shit built into their micro usb port. the slim has it easier since you cn use an OTG cable and call it done (once we have the ability to load from it)
PSTV just needs the ability to load from usb and its done
the hardest one to deal with is the fat vita.

i own 3 (if you count pstv)
i love each one but am saddened by lots of things
sd card adapter happening soon to while im at it

>they had like 7 things planned
>realized it was a security flaw and disabled all access to it
>then abandoned it
its literally just a USB port on the fucking thing

Oh, while I'm talking about the CPS2 networking: Apparently SSF2T also had a network mode planned. There are graphics related to it left in the ROM. Apparently it would have used a different ruleset from SSF2, changing form a single elimination setup to a round robin one.

Almost every Nintendo console before Wii had expansion ports underneath.
I think that was supposed to be for a hard drive.

>I think that was supposed to be for a hard drive.

Makes sense. The other two had HDDs and the shape of it would allow a cable to sneak out and connect to something.

>pic of NR reader
okay so these fucking things are really fucking rad let me mcfucking tell you

they
>look cool
>have region switches built in (US/JP)
>you can read NR discs (gamecube discs with different scramble key so they wont work on retail gamecubes - but NR readers can read retail gamecube discs)
>the drive/lens is the only special part about it other than thee switch
>also they are valuable

NPDP readers are literally gamecubes with cart readers that read these HDD-like carts.

nintendo did some weird shit for their systems

>AMD
>Underutilized
Not completely right. Modern AMD CPUs are sadly based on the disgustingly bad Bulldozer Archetecutre which has disgustingly bad single core performance.
Why that matters if you can compensate it with 8 or more cores?
Single core performance is, and always will be king in the long run, that's why.
Ubisoft games are an good example for this being the case.
Most, if not all, of their 360 era games have barely used 2 cores properly when they could have access to more.
Thing is tho that making stuff work on multiple cores is a fucking bitch to do, and many devs will tell you that they would prefer a 8GHz CPU over an 4-8 core everyday for those reasons.
Pretty much the main reason why so many Ubisoft games run like shit on AMD CPUs.
Not just because they're lazy to optimize further, but also because their games are highly 1-2 core bound.

Also this. Bulldozer really put AMD to the ground and they couldn't just change that quickly since it takes a ton of time and you can't just waste billions of research for nothing.

Both the Japanese and American versions of the beatmania IIDX controller have a port that lets you connect a foot pedal from a Drummania controller and use it as an alternate button for the scratch. Its real use, however, was to play the pedal charts in beatmania III, but that one never got any home ports.

They're in theory fixing that bullshit up with Zen, that is pretty much a copypaste of the intel CPUs in terms of general CPU configuration.

The ps3 was filled with shovelware and the only game that used the ps3's hardware to the limit was the last of us

It doesn't fix the old CPUs and they're 5 years late.
Then we'll have to wait to see intel's response to see if they've been holding back on us due to little competition or if we've just reached near the best we can do with x86 CPUs

Actually okami HD was probably the most impressive use of the ps3's hardware.
It outputted a downsampled 3840x2160p and runs in true 1080p

The AMD plan seems to be to attack intel with licensing, rather than rawpower.
Basically go full ARM and allow anyone to license the zen as a IPCore.

>The AMD plan seems to be to attack intel with licensing, rather than rawpower.
>Basically go full ARM and allow anyone to license the zen as a IPCore.
AMD can legally do this?

That's a great question.

I was looking into soundchips recently out of curiosity and found out that the Genesis basically just used a cheaper version of a Yamaha chip that Sega and a lot of other companies at the time used for arcade games. Only problem was that while the chip used in arcades could use samples, the Genesis soundchip could not.

Genesis could've had waaaaaaaaay better music if they used the arcade chip, probably would've made the system more expensive than they wanted to sell it for though.

Sega Menacer, the light gun for genesis. only used by pack in cart, terminator 2, 1 pal title and 5 sega cd titles
the sega cd had a lot of dead weight most of the time

genesis had better music than the snes though

Genesis had good music when someone knew what the fuck they were doing with it
Sadly that was very rare

Remember that the 32x like the Saturn was designed 2D in mind. Atleast, that's the only explanation to the dual CPU setup.

>genesis had better music than the snes though
lol no

Yes, in Theory. I hope to god they actually are fixing their shit by increasing not jsut their single core performance, but also implementing a SMT (Hyper Threading) like system as Intel has been for years.
Pretty ironic really...from what I've read AMD used to literally 1:1 copy paste Intel CPUs in the early ay and even got fined / throw to court for it.
The only serious thing AMD ever pulled seems to be early actual multi core CPUs and the x64 set which Intel has to buy off them to this day, and anyone else that wants to use it.

>Then we'll have to wait to see intel's response to see if they've been holding back on us due to little competition or if we've just reached near the best we can do with x86 CPUs
I'm not an expert on the matter but i highly doubt that Intel hasn't been holding back in the last years.
I seriously doubt it that all they were able to do in the last year were marginal improvements via increasing the default clock by 100 or 200mhz on their CPUs.
Well and improving on their iGPU HD chips i guess which was pretty much their main focus outside of being the best, and furthest in, company when it's about manufacuting chips (nanometer process).

>Basically go full ARM and allow anyone to license the zen as a IPCore.
As already asked, can they even do this on a legal base?
Wouldn't that mean that Intel has the x86 / PC market COMPLETELY in their hand, which has been EVERYONES (esp intels) biggest fear in the last decade??

That's just standard console fare, and since cartridge size is very limited compared to arcade boards, sample music wasn't really a thing in 1989.

The ps3. I remember devs not using it to its full potential because it was complicated as shit

arcades were multi cpu monsters, sample chips were generally fed by their own roms

the problem with the genesis sample playback is it unbuffered giving it that distinctive scratchy sound

the fucking cell cpu made it a nightmare for people to dev on the machine iirc
not to mention it was the reason why it was 699 at lauch

that's actual bullshit

the individual CPUs on the Saturn aren't as good as the MIPS in the PS1, and the Saturn's bus layout makes using both CPUs hard
the VDP1 was slow as fuck and kind of buggy (lots of overdraw slowing it down, it'd waste time writing pixels that were overwritten later on individual quads) -- only reason it competed in any category with the PS1 is because you drew a little more than half as many quads to make the same scene as on PS1, and you could avoid drawing a couple hundred quads by drawing a giant "mode-7" style plane with the VDP2 for the floor, making up for the complete lack of performance of the VDP1 by simply making it not have to draw as much

same with far backgrounds -- PS1 would draw a texture with scaled polygons or a skybox, Saturn used the VDP2 to draw big flat scrolling backgrounds

N64's whole issue was poor bus layout -- the individual components are actually all amazing, it's just they were bottlenecked. Really badly -- really late N64 games show off what the machine can really do.
The N64 CPU is in the same family as the PS1 CPU, but better and faster, like 3x better.
The N64's GPU is pretty much nothing like the Saturn or PS1's at all, and is in line with SGI's top-end workstation hardware. N64 doesn't have a sound chip, does it all in software, unlike Saturn and PS1 that use hardware sampler chips and a CD audio player. There's pretty much nothing architecturally similar about the N64 and Saturn, and the N64 is way out of its league in terms of performance (and the PS1 edges Saturn out).

the VRC7's sound is a relatively stock Yamaha FM chip, just with different factory preset patches (the same chip is used in the Sega Master System, it's a cost reduced version of the chip used in Adlib cards)

the rest of its features are advanced mapper features that pretty much all the really late NES releases used

literally none of this post is correct

>hey dude this game we made does not use a lot of vram because its rendered in black and white, maybe we can add more features or more colorful effects or particles.

>lmaoing at ur life, just increase the resolution or something haha, k thanks.

The chip has a direct DAC feed accessible from the processor. You can play pretty high quality sound samples with it -- but you'd need the space, and most Genesis sound drivers really sucked anyway (they'd get interrupted, making sound output stuttery, and this is avoidable).
Sample playback on the machine is in software, but the chip has an actual feature for making software playback of samples easy, instead of a hack (like any sample playback directly on Yamaha's OPL2).

>pitfall that actually halves the fucking frame rate.
The 32X has to do all drawing in software. There's no nice VDP chip to accelerate things. The only video acceleration on the 32X is a fast fill function.

on Genesis, you used the normal sprite and background hardware
on the 32X, if you wanted high-color background art, you had to draw all of it yourself by blitting to framebuffer memory

there's a reason Knuckles' Chaotix draws stage graphics on the Genesis, and uses the 32X for sprite drawing

pretty sure the N64's GPU ran on pure magic. I know Rare mastered it, but I don't think anyone has actually figured out the architecture of it, hence why their games tend to be a bitch to emulate. I could be wrong as I haven't paid attention to recent emulation updates, though

i love Cred Forums for threads like these where a random guy with like 25 years of experience working on some obscure technical field like console hardware architecture from the last 2 decades shows up

>pretty sure the N64's GPU ran on pure magic
>I know Rare mastered it, but I don't think anyone has actually figured out the architecture of it
So was Rare for N64 what Factor 5 was for the GameCube or what?

Cred Forums can be a magical place in times like now where most people are actually having a civilized conversation and not just half of it being pure shitposting of idiots that don't know a thing

The idiots should have used AAA batteries instead of stupid coin batteries

Factor 5's voice compression technology for the N64 was so good even Nintendo used it for the first Pokemon Stadium.

>Even nintendo used it
Kraut Space Magic i guess.
Had no idea those fucks were German before googling them up because i forgot theri name.
Shame the died because of a lot of bullshit..
Would have been great to have another BIG gaming company in this shitty country, and not just Crytek.

Didn't GC had programmable shaders or somehing?

I think that Only sega used more of this feature. shame that lack of disk space killed stuff fast for it.

Naughty Dog would be the PS1's equivalent of them too. they squeezed every last bit of juice out of the PS1's limited resources to create full 3D platformer games. they made use of untextured polygons to create a lot more depth than they otherwise would have had. they even resorted to using assembly to make the most efficient code they possibly could. mad respect for them.
>tfw I had a professor that created the Racket programming language that Naughty Dog uses for scripting in a lot of their games.

Are you currently working on an exploit, I'm always checking wololo for info but nothing ever new besides the cfw for the psp emulator.
I bought one at launch and its so sad to see the potential the system had just wasted.

>Even games that desperately needed it's extra grunt like Parodius still had big slowdowns with the chip that could solve it sitting there, doing nothing.
Maybe the chip wasn't all that powerful to begin with. The other Parodius ports were nice tho

>Naughty Dog would be the PS1's equivalent of them too
And PS3 i think? If not PS2 too.
4 can't be determinante yet since the console obv isn't at the end of it's cycle yet.
It's also not so weird thanks to the x86 AMD CPU inside of it so it's not as impressive.

>they even resorted to using assembly to make the most efficient code they possibly could.
Dayum I'm an idiot about coding but even i know that's impressive on such a big scale.

Honestly I'd have to say that Team Ico was the be all end all of "Let's push the Playstation 2 as far as it can go, and then maybe a little farther"

Shadow of the Colossus was so fucking big and I still can't quite comprehend how they shoved so much game into a PS2 DVD

kek, I was looking around the package search for Racket and found this beautiful gem

True, forgot about Ico since i never was much into Playstation sadly.

RIP Thread
Was fun while it lasted boys

back to shitposting then?