Blast Processing
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Blast Processing was a marketing term coined by Sega in the 1990s to advertise the fact that the Sega Mega Drive/Genesis could calculate faster motion than the Super Nintendo Entertainment System and was generally taken by the public to refer to the main system processors.
The term first appeared in advertising materials for Sonic the Hedgehog 2 and was promoted aggressively. In the US an ad campaign featured a race between two vehicles - a Top Fuel Dragster and a broken down ice cream truck. The former had a Genesis with a modern TV set strapped to it, with clips from Sonic the Hedgehog 2, Ecco the Dolphin and Streets of Rage 2 playing when the Dragster car was screened. The ice cream truck had the SNES on its back, with a 50's TV set showing screens from Super Mario Kart. The comparison tried to persuade consumers that the Mega Drive/Genesis was the more powerful console whereas the Super NES was a not-so-powerful console plagued with slowdown, despite the fact that it also had its share of unique technical features, such as Mode 7.
Technically the term refers to a feature of the Mega Drive/Genesis that wasn't replicated on the SNES — the ability for the CPU to be working on one section of map while the graphics processor displays another[citation needed]. This feature means that the Mega Drive/Genesis can start preparing the next frame of animation as soon as the TV starts drawing the current frame whereas the SNES either has to wait until the brief period after the TV has finished displaying the current frame[citation needed] and has not yet started the next or deliberately factor in the current position of the electron gun in the TV. This gives the Mega Drive/Genesis more processing time for preparing the next frame, and therefore Sega argued that it can model more complicated motion[citation needed].
