pouët.net

So what was "blast processing" for the megadrive/genesis? As a coder I feel I should know. Is it pure marketing or is it something like DMA?

iirc it was just marketing speak for having a (significantly) higher CPU clock than competing consoles

had never heard of it, so i went look it up. this video had some interesting insight:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvvL6S5Buiw

^---- this technique wasn't used back the day. It's a new technique by oerg866

in this movie,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Console_Wars_(film)

the guy who actually came up with that slogan and the entirely new advertisement strategy for sega USA in general, says, it was just a slogan.

Thanks, wertstahl!!

<ironic> and also - this guy here seems to have been involved in starting the demoscene in 1997. cool! now we know it began on the SNES! </ironic>

https://youtu.be/rvvL6S5Buiw?t=56

To be precise, others had the idea before but oerg866 was first to make it run stable on all mega drives (and possibly also first to publish it).

I don't understand why that technique was dubbed Blast Processing in that video since the graphics chip is doing most of the work, all the CPU does is ensuring that timing is correct

Oh sorry, i reposted the same video as psenough already had, again!

A bit of Googling leads to several articles crediting a Sega engineer called Marty Franz as the inventor of that technique. A bit more Googling shows that a Marty Franz was involved in programming several C64 games and a speeder cartridge before Genesis was launched. The kind of trick described in the video sounds very similar to the tricks used on Atari ST for fullscreen graphics and it is known that the inspiration for these techniques at least partially came from earlier similar experiments on C64. So although I don't have anything but the circumstantial evidence that I just mentioned I would guess that it's quite plausible that those Marty Franz-es are one and the same person and that he figured out that trick for Genesis based on experience from the C64, like Alyssa and TEX figured it out for the Atari ST.

hmmm... thanks, havoc!

Blast responsibly https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4KNXi-SWWc

^---- you make a compelling argument

Blast Processing was just bullshit marketing. The technique mentioned in the video was not used in any games. They even say in the video the supposed technique was never used in any games.

At the time Sonic scrolled faster than any game and the marketroids used that to claim it was doing something the SNES couldn't do (which is of course false, see uniracers as one example)

Sega dies what Nindendon't!

Sonic fast scroll: xpos += 8;