Why were arcade machines much more powerful than home video game consoles and personal computers back in the day?
In: Technology
Today’s arcade machines are just PCs, but back the old days they were essentially very expensive versions of home consoles and thus more powerful.
They operated on the same principle which was in most cases dedicated hardware to do sprite and tile scanline rendering which was much faster for most games than the generic bitmap video display used in home computers. Bitmap displays were ultimately much more flexible in what they could show but required a lot of CPU power and memory bandwidth to manipulate compared to console style rendering. With dedicated sprite and tile hardware you could simply scale up the number of sprites and the color depth supported giving you a very powerful system.
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