Originally Posted by
Az
Honest question: did anything contemporary at the time claim that the SMS was more powerful?
I never saw any press or advertising from Sega/Tonka that said it did. Sure, carts were labeled as "the mega cartridge" or "two-mega cartridge" but those were just buzzwords with no meaning to people. Might as well say "low calorie" or "high energy". I never really heard even the press mention megabit size until Strider came along.
Although I didn't read PC mags, console mags like GamePro and EGM never touted the SMS as more powerful than the NES. Screenshots might have looked a bit more colorful but even that wasn't capitalized on as a system selling point. As far as I can recall, nobody really knew or cared about exact system specs until the next generation of systems came out and suddenly thrust a whole new terminology and hardware accentuation on customers.