[derefr]

> Using the 65c816 keeps the 8-bit vibe

Given that a 65c816 is what’s in the SNES, I’d say it has a distinctly 16-but vibe.

Don’t get me wrong; 16-bit is my favorite! Far too few retro projects targeting early-90s era tech, or its portable early-2000s mirror.

(Imagine if you will: a plug-and-play with extended GBA-clone hardware, with a tile-and-sprite PPU that could push 1080p@60 with tons of layered graphics colour-math + windowing + DMA effects, but which explicitly didn’t offer a bitmap mode, let alone 3D acceleration; and tack on both Flash storage and Ethernet APIs, exposed through simple MMIO hardware registers to the games, with all the complexity shunted to a Wii-like IO coprocessor running its own RTOS. It’d be the perfect modern platform for retro-modern 2D JRPGs to be released on. A WonderSwan+++, per se. A PlayStation Zero.)

[TeaDude]

Don't forget the hardware divider and the DS's sound capabilities!

I don't think retro 3D is a bad idea though. Just do what the DS does (keeping it separate from 2D in the process) and I think it would probably be the greatest console ever made.

[derefr]

It’s not that 3D is un-retro; it’s just a tempting crutch. Give people “free” 3D, even a little, and they’ll use it to the exclusion of interesting 2D effects. You’ll get FF7 instead of Terranigma / Symphony of the Night — still retro, but 1. the wrong era, and 2. not taking any advantage of the distinctive cool stuff the hardware can do, instead looking like every other low-poly 3D game.

Same with bitmap modes: people will use them as a crutch by combining them with software rendering.

(Maybe this could be fixed by putting a hard cap on the 3D frame rate. Maybe even make it so low that all 3D must be precomputed, baked down into a tile map and used through sprites! Under that restriction, it could look arbitrarily good, but the results would still look more SMRPG than Goldeneye.)

And same for sufficiently-good PCM sound. The ideal early-90s sound chip would be something like 128-voice polyphonic MIDI with a huge wavetable (but banked — no playing PCM by walking wavetable samples), passed through an arbitrary FM synth module, with the whole thing being bytecode that can do loops and branching.