“Blast Processing” was the most famous thing Sega of America said about the Genesis, and nobody could say what it was. In June 1993 a Sega Visions reader asked outright whether it was “real or is it made up?” The same month Nintendo Power put the question to Sega’s customer service and its PR firm and reported that they “didn’t have a well-defined answer”. The word does not appear in Sega’s developer manual. The man who supplied it later called it “that ghastly phrase”, and traced it to a real but temperamental graphics trick.
Fast facts
- What it was: a Sega of America advertising slogan for the Genesis, the North American Mega Drive, against the Super Nintendo.
- When: from the 1992 holiday season into 1993, in the run-up to and after the Sega CD’s American launch.
- Sega’s own definition: it “allows the Genesis to display one image while loading another into memory” (Sega Visions, June 1993).
- In the developer manual: nothing under that name.
- Where the word came from: Scot Bayless of Sega of America, describing a way to “blast data into the DACs”.
What Sega said it was
On its June 1993 letters page, Sega Visions gave the nearest thing to an official definition:
It’s real, and is already being used in a number of Sega games, such as Sonic, Ecco, Jurassic Park, and Kid Chameleon, among others. Without getting too technical, blast processing allows the Genesis to display one image while loading another into memory, something the SNES cannot do. Blast processing speeds up the action on the screen; without it, Sonic would move about as fast as Mario.
Nintendo’s magazine had a different answer that month. In its “Nintendo Power U.” column it reported that Sega’s people said Blast Processing “refers to programming techniques for fast processing used with respect to one of the microchips in the Genesis”, and concluded: “In essence, Blast Processing means that Sega’s programmers now know what they’re doing. Makes you wonder how long they were stuck in traffic.”
Where the word came from
In 2009 Scot Bayless, who had been on Sega of America’s technical staff, told Damien McFerran of Retro Gamer where it started. “Sadly I have to take responsibility for that ghastly phrase,” he said. A Sega programmer, Marty Franz, had found that “by hooking the scan line interrupt and firing off a Direct Memory Access at just the right time”, a program could “jam data onto the graphics chip while the scan line was being drawn”. Timed exactly, that drove the video chip’s digital-to-analogue converters with eight bits per pixel and produced 256-colour still pictures, though “the trick didn’t work reliably on all iterations of hardware”.
Then the publicity team came to him before the Mega-CD’s Western launch:
the PR guys interviewed me about what made the platform interesting from a technical standpoint and somewhere in there I mentioned the fact that you could just ‘blast data into the DACs’. They loved the word ‘blast’ and the next thing I knew ‘Blast Processing’ was born.
That is Bayless’s recollection, given about seventeen years later, and it is the only first-hand origin account in public sources. It fits Sega Visions’ definition in one respect: both describe moving data, not a faster processor.
What the hardware does
Read as a description of hardware, Sega’s definition matches the video chip’s direct memory access (DMA). Sega’s Genesis Software Manual says the VDP can move data from the main memory into video, colour and scroll memory “by taking the 68000 off the bus and doing DMA itself”. It also shows why games time their updates carefully. In the 40-column display mode, DMA moves 18 bytes into video memory per scanline while the picture is being drawn, but 205 bytes per line during the vertical blank, when nothing is being displayed. A Genesis game prepares the next picture while the current one is on screen and copies it in during the gap between frames. The manual documents all this without ever calling it blast processing.
The advertising
The term is best remembered from a US television commercial in which a Genesis strapped to a drag racer beats a Super NES on an old van, with the line “The Sega Genesis has blast processing. Super Nintendo doesn’t.” Tom Kalinske, who ran Sega of America, remembered the approach in 2013: “we had a smoky old rundown truck with a Super Nintendo on the back … We were the sleek Ferrari and that’s what the Genesis was in.” The commercials, he said, “all ended with the Sega screen and the ‘Welcome to the Next Level’ line”.
The advertising invited a comparison of clock speeds. The Genesis’s 68000 runs at 7.67 MHz on NTSC machines, which Sega Visions rounded to “7.5 MHz” in 1992, and the Super NES’s main processor is slower. Sega’s own definition says nothing about the clock, and the two machines differ in too many other ways for one number to settle anything: the Super NES has Mode 7, colour maths and a much larger palette, and the Genesis has a separate Z80 to run its sound.
“Genesis does what Nintendon’t”
Sega’s earlier slogan was about games, not hardware. “WHAT NINTENDON’T” already appears in the first issue of Sega Visions, in June 1990. That October the magazine trailed “our national advertising blitz”, in which “Genesis Does What Nintendon’t” would show off exclusive games such as Moonwalker, Joe Montana’s Football, Super Monaco GP and E-SWAT. The December 1990 advertisement ran the line under “There’s only one true 16-bit system”. By 1994 it was fronting feature lists: the Genesis Super Street Fighter II had “five degrees of game speed (the SNES has only four)” and an Expert mode “that lets you fight all 16 warriors”.
Sources
- Sega Visions, June 1993, “Yo Sega!” letters page: “Is Blast Processing real or is it made up?” and Sega’s answer.
- Nintendo Power issue 49, June 1993, “Nintendo Power U.”: “Does the Super NES have Blast Processing?”
- Damien McFerran, “Retroinspection: Mega-CD”, Retro Gamer issue 61 (2009), p. 84, reprinted in Retro Gamer Videogames Hardware Handbook (2009) and Retro Gamer Collection vol. 4 (2010): Scot Bayless on Marty Franz’s DMA trick and the origin of the term.
- Retro Gamer issue 117, August 2013, p. 91: Tom Kalinske on Sega’s commercials.
- Sega, Genesis Software Manual (© 1989 Sega of Japan): terminology section (DMA by the VDP); “DMA Transfer Capacity”, p. 34; the version register (7.67 MHz NTSC, 7.60 MHz PAL). The term “Blast Processing” does not appear.
- Sega Visions vol. 1 no. 9, August 1992, Sega CD preview: “a 68000 processor running at 7.5 MHz”.
- Sega Visions vol. 1 no. 1, June 1990; vol. 1 no. 2, October 1990, editorial; vol. 1 no. 3, December 1990, advertisement; June 1994, Super Street Fighter II advertisement: “Genesis does what Nintendon’t”.
- Sega Retro, “Blast processing” (web, secondary): the drag-race commercial and its line, and the campaign’s dates. https://segaretro.org/Blast_processing