[softfalcon]

As someone who owns a SNES and a TG-16, I think I disagree. The TG-16 graphics really pop compared to the SNES.

The SNES can only render 256 simultaneous colours. The TG-16 could do twice that at 512. Its video processor was also full 16-bit.

I’m not sure where you’re getting that the video was the weakness of the TG-16. At the time, that was the Turbografx’s whole claim to fame in that it was superior graphically to the SNES.

Source: Old enough to remember the commercials and bought both consoles to compare like nerds did back then

[wk_end]

The PC Engine could theoretically do more colours on screen (though things like colour math and mid-screen palette changes do complicate that a bit...), but only had 9-bit wide palette entries compared to the SFC's 15-bit colour depth, which allowed for a lot more subtlety and richness.

[LocalH]

That's the biggest Achilles' heel of the Genesis/MD, too. The lack of color resolution. I helped make the palette more accurate for that MD port of Super Mario Bros, and I made two palettes - one to simulate the composite PPU palette, and one to simulate the RGB PPU palette. The composite palette was closer, and what Mairtrus ended up shipping with (the RGB palette, no matter which "side" of mid-values I chose, wasn't quite right due to the lack of color bits)

[wmil]

Its big weakness is that they didn't realize how much multilayered backgrounds made things pop.

The sprites look really good, but the single background layer makes things look flat compared to the SNES / Genesis. Devs started working around that by updating some of the background tiles on each frame or using some of the sprites.

The SNES also could do layer blending effects. So while all of the input data could only be 256 colours, the PPU was spitting out a high colour signal after the effects were applied.