Blast Processing
Marketing meets hardware
Blast Processing was Sega of America's 1992-93 marketing term for the Genesis. Sega's own magazine defined it as displaying one image while loading another; the developer manual never names it; the word came from a Mega-CD interview.
Blast Processing was a Sega of America marketing term from the 1992-93 Genesis campaign. It named no feature in Sega’s own developer documentation. Sega’s consumer magazine defined it once, in answer to a reader who asked whether it was made up; the man who supplied the word says it came from an interview about the Mega-CD.
Fast facts
- Coined by: Sega of America marketing, in the run-up to the Sega CD’s late-1992 launch by the one account held here.
- Sega’s definition: “allows the Genesis to display one image while loading another into memory” (Sega Visions, June 1993).
- In the developer manual: nothing under that name.
- Related slogan: “Genesis does what Nintendon’t” — earlier (autumn 1990) and about the games, not the hardware.
What Sega said it was
In the June 1993 Sega Visions letters page a reader asked outright: “Is Blast Processing real or is it made up?” Sega’s reply is the closest 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.
Read as a description of hardware, that is the VDP’s DMA: the video chip can move tile and map data into video memory while the display is running, and does so fastest during the vertical blank. The Genesis Software Manual documents the DMA, and gives the 68000’s clock as 7.67 MHz on NTSC machines. Neither is called blast processing there, and the manual predates the campaign.
Where the word came from
Scot Bayless, on Sega of America’s technical staff during the Mega-CD’s Western launch, told Retro Gamer in 2010 that the Mega-CD could be made to write pixel data straight into its digital-to-analogue converters, drawing 256-colour still images if the timing was right. Asked by the PR team what made the platform interesting, he “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 a recollection seventeen years after the event, and the only origin account held here; it does at least agree with the Sega Visions definition in describing a data-movement trick rather than a faster processor.
The comparison it was made for
The term is usually paired with a clock-speed argument: the Genesis 68000 at 7.67 MHz (Sega’s own magazine rounded it to “7.5 MHz” in 1992) against the slower main CPU of the Super Nintendo. Sega’s definition does not mention the clock, and the machines differ in too many other places — the SNES’s Mode 7 and colour maths, its larger palette, the Genesis’s separate Z80 for sound — for a single number to settle anything. The debate has outlived the campaign.
“Genesis does what Nintendon’t”
The slogan is older than Blast Processing and was not a hardware claim. Sega Visions trailed it in October 1990 as “our national advertising blitz”, listing the exclusive games it would show — Moonwalker, Joe Montana’s Football, Super Monaco GP, E-SWAT — and the December 1990 advertisement ran it under “There’s only one true 16-bit system”. By 1994 the same line was fronting feature comparisons: the Genesis Super Street Fighter II “has five degrees of game speed (the SNES has only four)” and “an Expert mode that lets you fight all 16 warriors”.