Posted April 09, 2018
hedwards: The equipment affected by this sort of thing has to have AC at least as far as the point where the clock is powered.
Makes sense. I like to think that most electrical devices run on DC, but then again motors and other things work fine in AC. If they are built based on the timing of the AC... hmmm THAT could be interesting... hedwards: Theoretically, this is something that should be handled in hardware in some respect. I saw a video of somebody reviewing a retro console that was made for the EU market in the US and it behaved kind of funny because it wasn't the right frequency.
I was watching a side by side comparison of Sonic 2... hedwards: In general though, consoles tend to base a lot of the timing on what the expected output is for historical reasons. Although, that's unlikely to be true in recent systems. The newer systems are basically just computers that can handle different refresh rates without caring as they're likely variable rate.
Yep. Back with older consoles you had to cycle count how long the instructions took so you could fit everything you wanted before the next scanline hit. This actually was talked about in detail in Once Upon Atari, i think it was like 72 cycles...
Today, a lot of overhead/fluff/framework means efficiency is lower, but the machines are a lot more powerful. And then there's the whole programming for variable FPS, which while it works, the overhead in extra calculations in delta time vs fixed FPS there's quite a bit there.
There's upsides and downsides... I think most of the downsides are with the corporations, and less with the hardware/frameworks...