Never thought of the 65816 as a supercharged 8-bit CPU but looking at it, that's really not far from the mark.
> bitmap addressable blitter supported hardware that was out there on more advanced systems.
In 1991 when the SNES hit the states you had the Genesis, which was also sprite based, and I think the TurboGrafx-16, which was also sprite based. All of your arcade games of the time had those insane CPS-2 like sprite engine. Maybe CDI was out by then, but I don't think that thing had any graphic acceleration.
I've done plenty of 816 programming and it is basically just a 6502 with a couple 16 bit registers and ALU (accessible only by switching register modes, quite awkward) and a 24-bit address bus bolted on with a page register. Program counter, etc. wraps at 64 boundary, stack can only exist in the bottom 64k, etc. It's really a supercharged 8 bit CPU, yes. They probably made the right choice with it, though, it makes some sense for a game CPU because interrupt responsiveness and cycle efficiency is primary there, and the 6502 series is king for that.
I really wanted to say you're wrong ...
but if you look at a 65816 pinout, it does only have 8 data lines and 16 address lines.
Furthermore each instruction is only 8 bits wide,
And if you do look at this SNES schematic https://wiki.superfamicom.org/uploads/snes_schematic_color.p... I'm seeing 8 data lines and 24 address lines.
Never thought of the 65816 as a supercharged 8-bit CPU but looking at it, that's really not far from the mark.
> bitmap addressable blitter supported hardware that was out there on more advanced systems.
In 1991 when the SNES hit the states you had the Genesis, which was also sprite based, and I think the TurboGrafx-16, which was also sprite based. All of your arcade games of the time had those insane CPS-2 like sprite engine. Maybe CDI was out by then, but I don't think that thing had any graphic acceleration.