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In the history of computer and video games, the fourth generation (more commonly referred to as the 16-bit era) of games consoles began on October 30, 1987 with the Japanese release of Nippon Electric Company's (NEC) PC Engine (known as the TurboGrafx-16 in North America). Although NEC released the first fourth generation console, and was second to the SNES in Japan, this era's sales were mostly dominated by the rivalry between Nintendo and Sega's consoles in North America: the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (the Super Famicom in Japan) and the Mega Drive (named the Sega Genesis in North America due to trademark issues). Nintendo was able to capitalize on its previous success in the third generation and managed to win the largest worldwide market share in the fourth generation as well. Sega was extremely successful in this generation and began a new franchise, Sonic the Hedgehog, to compete with Nintendo's Mario series of games. Several other companies released consoles in this generation, but none of them were widely successful. Nevertheless, several other companies started to take notice of the maturing video game industry and began making plans to release consoles of their own in the future. This generation ended with the Super Nintendo Entertainment System's discontinuation in 1999 in North America, Australia and Europe. Some features that distinguished fourth generation consoles from third generation consoles include: * More powerful 16-bit microprocessors * Multi-button game controllers (3 to 8 buttons) * Complex parallax scrolling, multi-layer tilemap backgrounds, with pseudo-3D scaling & rotation * Large sprites (up to 64×64 or 16×512 pixels), scalable on-the-fly, with pseudo-3D scaling & rotation * Elaborate color, 64 to 4096 colors on screen, from palettes of 512 (9-bit) to 65,536 (16-bit) colors * Flat-shaded 3D polygon graphics * CD-ROM format, allowing larger storage space and full motion video playback * Stereo audio, with multiple channels and digital audio playback (PCM, ADPCM, streaming CD-DA audio) * Advanced music synthesis (FM synthesis and 'wavetable' sample-based synthesis) ==Home systems== 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Fourth generation of video game consoles」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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