/vr/ - Retro Games

>>588219
Because why not, nigga?

>>432674
>Why in the world would a console go through so many hardware redesigns?

1. to make manufacturing simpler, faster (0th generation Saturns were insanely fucking oddly assembled for example)

2. cost reduction (better PCB designs, combining several ASICs into one, etc)

3. reusing old stock more efficiently (even if you make a new combined ASIC that is cheaper to use, you still have to sell your old stock)

4. separate board designs for USA, JPN, an PAL machines. Halfway throughout they made USA and JPN machines use the same boards with different jumpers and bios rom, though. PAL machines also skipped through some hardware generations.

5. a Saturn specific thing: motherboards of even generation numbers used SD RAM, while odd ones used SGRAM. So a lot of extra board types were made just because of that. VA6 and VA7 are identical except that VA6 uses SGRAM, VA7 uses SDRAM, and so on for all boards starting from VA2 and up.

There were 16 generations in total, labelled VA0 to VA15. VA12 and 14 were never released, either because SGRAM supplies dried up by the time, or because they were too costly, The final board was VA15, and it had a single dual core SH2 instead of two single ones.