[alexyoung]

I restored a PC Engine a year or two ago and I also became fascinated by the hardware. The HuC6270 VDC/HuC6260 VCE graphics system is actually very flexible for the kinds of games the system was designed to play. If I remember correctly, it has background tilemaps, sprites, scrolling, 64kb video RAM, and a 512 colour palette. The hardware sprites/scrolling is what makes it feel more arcadey a lot of the time.

Given the 8-bit CPU it feels a lot more like a 16-bit system to me. The dedicated sprites/scrolling hardware instead of a more bitmap/framebuffer focused design meant things like shooters and platform games played amazingly well.

Soldier Blade, R-Type, Air Zonk, Bonk, etc felt amazing. Given the formfactor and the cool card cartridge format I can see why it was so popular in Japan.

[wk_end]

These sorts of things - sprites and scrolling tilemaps - were pretty standard for consoles of the time. C.f. the NES, Master System, Game Boy...

OTOH if you're European, my impression is that micros were more popular in the 80s and early 90s than dedicated game consoles, and I guess those tended to lack robust sprite/scrolling support, and tended to be more frame buffer-y.

[unleaded]

It seems to me like there's a pattern with it in regards to differences between Japanese systems and those from everywhere else. Most Japanese arcade games in the early 1980s borrowed heavily from Galaxian's model of tilemap+sprites which pretty much became the standard. But a lot of American games (e.g. Williams' Defender, Robotron, etc. and Taito America's Qix, Zookeeper..) used a big framebuffer & blitter. Maybe memory was more expensive in Japan.

[christkv]

Amiga 500 was very popular in Europe which had those things. Framebuffer was definitely true for the Atari ST.

[tom_]

No tilemaps on the Amiga.