Blast Processing

1. a fake term made up by sega to make the sega genesis sound more powerful than it actually was.
2. see propaganda
“yeah but the snes doesn’t have blast processing” said the sega freak.
when video game companies use made-up, exciting terms to describe the normal and mundane features of their consoles or games. sega used the term “blast processing” to describe their console’s capabilities in the nineties.
so heavy rain has a “dynamic scenario system.” does it have blast processing, too?
a well-hyped term of the 16-bit generation that actually did refer to a real technique, but was overblown by marketeers at sega corp, to become know as “blast processing”.

the technique simply refers to the genesis’s ability to do very fast dma transfers, most especially during the vertical refresh, which allowed the system to “blast” memory to the screen. this was notably used on the sonic games, which gave them the ability to have much faster horizontal movement than would otherwise be possible.
guy 1 : blast processing?

guy 2 : this is what happens when the marketing department talks to the programming department.
a buzzword sega coined in the 90’s to promote the fact that genesis’s 7.6 mhz processor was faster than the snes’s 3.6 mhz processor. however while their commercial stated “sega genesis has blast processing”, it made no mention of the actual 7.6 mhz processor itself. this oversight left the term blast processing seemingly founded on marketing strategy rather than technical merit, as outside of sega the term blast processing had no real technical meaning at all.
sega fanboy: blast processing makes the genesis better.

snes fanboy: how?

sega fanboy: um.. it just does, geez, watch the commercial.
a term used for marketing purposes to promote the sonic the hedgehog series on genesis. it worked.