/vr/ - Retro Games

I love the Dreamcast controller it's the comfiest thing I've ever held, but the system really was held back by a lack of buttons. I get that dual analogue was a new concept so I see why it only had one stick, but the 3D controller for the Saturn had more buttons than this... What gives?

>>9726590
>The Dreamcast was good in design, and actually had a pretty good start for a library, but Sega was going broke so it didn't matter, which is why it did well to begin with, then went into a freefall. I was gonna say to wind back time and then go shoot whoever was suggesting the 32X, but the Saturn itself could have used changes on the planning stage, like developing better documentation and resources and providing them for devs to use, and hardware which was better suited towards rendering 3D, together with translucency.

It's funny, because the majority of hardware decisions on the Dreamcast were specifically made to address issues that developers had with the Saturn:

> A single, powerful, straightforward, well documented CPU instead of a complicated multi processor setup
> 16MB of RAM (8x the PS1/Saturn)
> 8MB of VRAM and hardware AA (which meant textures could be incredibly crisp and AA was essentially "free" in terms of performance)
> 4 controller ports and a modem that shipped with the console instead of being addons (addons traditionally have poor sales, so supporting them is a risk for devs)
> Support for either using Katana (the DC's development software, which had excellent performance) or Windows CE (which made porting games from the PC significantly easier)

The Dreamcast did almost everything right, but by then it was just too late.

The biggest hardware issue I think it had was with the controller. They shifted from a 3x2 arcade style face button layout to a 2x2 diamond layout, which would have made it easy to have the same control scheme for multiplatform games on the PS1 and PS2, but then they went with a single stick. A single stick would have been better with a 3x2 layout would have been best for arcade ports since it would replicate a standalone arcade stick, but two sticks and a 2x2 diamond layout would have made more sense for a home console. It was like they went with this weird mishmash of arcade and console style controllers.