the SNES was deliberately designed to grab the Megadrive's (Genesis to the yanks) market, that's why it deliberately pinpoints the megadrive's weak points. Not only that, but aren't you forgetting that it took 2 YEARS for nintendo to bring out the SNES after the megadrive first came on the scene? how impressive. In the interim 2 years, what did nintendo have to compete with the megadrive? the nintendo entertainment system. 'Nuff said.
Finally, surely it's about the games? Fair enough, bomberman (one of my favourites) had tons of games released for the various nintendo platforms, including 5 for the super nintendo and only one for the megadrive, but now you can even get bomberman for the playstation. It's moot. Sonic was on the megadrive and so was alex kidd, and a whole other lot of stuff. Even things that came out for both, just seemed to be less twee and sugary on the megadrive.
I don't know, it's up to preference, but in my mind, nintendo were always the catchers up during that era.
and re: emulators in linux, get fucked, there's tons. There's hardly a comprehensive choice for windows either, is there? there's only one emulator for the Atari Lynx, and only one of any consequence for the PCEngine/Turbografx16. There's not even an emulator for the SEGA Saturn yet (1 machine i'm glad i still have), or one that works for the SEGA 32X.
Anyway, Microsoft makes a grand total of NO emulators for consoles in windows so it's totally pointless to say how much better windows is than linux because most of those emulators are hobby projects written in, for example, C or C++ (unix languages originally) and could easily be ported, source code availability permitting.
[ May 01, 2002: Message edited by: Calum ]