Give me an Atari Lynx with its relatively small library of mostly high quality games over the technologically laughable Nintendo Game Boy with Tetris and erm...

For me its a mix of both.

Without good hardware it's hard to make good games, this is why machines like the NES have hundreds of terrible games. Because the hardware is awful and just not up to it.

The Jaguar has amazing hardware that was ruined by the lack of a decent dev kit, making games very hard to program for it causing delays in release or no release at all, as evidenced by the 100 odd unreleased games.

The Lynx is my favourite machine because the hardware is just mind blowing for its time AND the machine has a very strong games library.

As I was about to post, Laird said what I was going to. It's a mix of both. I obviously want good quality hardware which is up to running games at a decent speed. I also want decent games to push the hardware but remain fun to play. If the hardware breaks the software is useless anyway, and if there is no decent software then the hardware is useless.

However, the Speccy proved that it was possible to have some of the best games of its generation on so-called weaker hardware.

That said, the ZX Spectrum is commonly referred to as 'the not so humble Speccy' for very good reason. It may not have had some of the extra hardware-based features of the likes of the Commodore 64 had but it was a far less restrictive system with a markedly faster CPU. In the right hands, read: a truly talented games dev, it was possible to work wonders as was proved time and again with all the great games it had.

So, for that reason among others, I think the premise of this thread is near enough a moot point. Hardware is important and software is important. They're not mutually exclusive. The mentioning of emulation is a red herring because an emulator is emulating the hardware without which there would be no software.

The hardware is no more important than paint and canvas is to an artist. Of course it has to exist. Hardware is the medium - but it's a means to an end - the software is that end. Actually it isn't even the software - it is the game itself that is the end.

I buy a console because it has a game I want to play - I don't buy hardware for its own sake no matter who made it. Every console has bad and good games no matter what the spec. It all comes down to the creative process that produces a game that makes the most of the platform on which it runs - nothing else really matters,

As hardware has improved - certain aspects of games have improved - but better hardware as we all know too well - is no guarantee of better games.

It is a mix of both for me.  Though great hardware doesn't warrant good software, but good hardware at least offers the potential for good software. 

I buy a console because it has a game I want to play - I don't buy hardware for its own sake

If you didn't already own any consoles and there was a multi-platform game that you were desperate to own whereby it was much better on console 'x' than it was on console 'y' then surely, all things remaining equal, you'd buy console 'x'?

I'd personally say you need combination of BOTH as no good having uber designed hardware without software to back it, but it's NOT as simple as 1 or the other.

Take for example, the GB, i own 1 and on the 1 hand it's a marvel of engineering design.Small enough to be true portable, fantastic battery life, yet crippled by the screen, which is SO bad i find it renders games unplayable. software wise? lot of coders performed minor miricles on it, but wasted on me as i'm not buying games which i cannot even view properly.

Then theres the PS2:On paper, dwarfs the dreamcast, but a NIGHTMARE to code for and crippled by limited Ram, poor texture memory, bottlenecks etc.Only via talented coders and MIDDLEWARE software did it do well to deliver the games it did.

You need well designed hardware with people coding on it that will be using hardware to best of it's abilities and also have VISION, not ahh fuck this, you cannot do this on the hardware, there's no hardware support, coders who view hardware restrictions as a a challenge are the most important to any platform (so I'd say Software is the most important out of the 2), look at what treasure, E.A etc did with a stock MD.

I buy a console because it has a game I want to play - I don't buy hardware for its own sake

If you didn't already own any consoles and there was a multi-platform game that you were desperate to own whereby it was much better on console 'x' than it was on console 'y' then surely, all things remaining equal, you'd buy console 'x'?

In those circumstances then, probably yes - though it would depend on what the overall library would be like.

The thing about being faced with that choice is that you are faced with picking a game that is either created for the platform or a port. Porting is the main reason why one version is better than another - not really got to do with the platform.

I buy a console because it has a game I want to play - I don't buy hardware for its own sake

If you didn't already own any consoles and there was a multi-platform game that you were desperate to own whereby it was much better on console 'x' than it was on console 'y' then surely, all things remaining equal, you'd buy console 'x'?

In those circumstances then, probably yes - though it would depend on what the overall library would be like.

The thing about being faced with that choice is that you are faced with picking a game that is either created for the platform or a port. Porting is the main reason why one version is better than another - not really got to do with the platform.

That's more so with the current console generation, sure. Things were quite different back in the 8-bit days of course. (Amstrad CPC excepted!)

Software wins by a landslide.

Take a look at NES and how it slaughtered a graphically superior system in the Sega Master System. Case closed.

Software wins by a landslide.

Take a look at NES and how it slaughtered a graphically superior system in the Sega Master System. Case closed.

I take it you're American then...

Software wins by a landslide.

Take a look at NES and how it slaughtered a graphically superior system in the Sega Master System. Case closed.

In the US maybe, the Master System destroyed the NES over here.

Hardware helped the GameBoy destroy the Lynx. Before anyone says what!

Ask yourself, what did the Nintendo GB have on the hardware side that outperformed every other handheld cart based system.