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/vr/ - Retro Games

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6001423 No.6001423 [Reply] [Original]

No really what was wrong with it?
Instead of terrible marketing, and price tag.
What was wrong with the console itself?

>> No.6001427

Most of the games were Japanese exclusives.
It was competing with the Sega32.

>> No.6001432

>>6001423
Become next PC Engine/PC FX successor.

>> No.6001434

>>6001423
Sega failed to provide useful C language libraries early in the consoles lifespan so many games needed to be coded in assembly, on an architecture that was needlessly complex and unknown to most developers. /vr/ doesn't give a fuck about programmers and technical specs so I won't get into the details on that further but basically, sony made it much easier to make games for the playstation, by comparison, by providing a full SDK at launch and charging much lower royalty costs than anyone else at the time. Also the great sega of japan/sega of America feud prevented any real changes or solutions from happening in a timely manner.

>> No.6001458

Nothing is wrong with it. It cost too much and had nogames, simple as that.

>> No.6001478

>>6001458
No games ? Im not a shmup expert but I heard their shmup library is really good.

>> No.6001498

>>6001434
I still just don't understand how this really went down after reading it in multiple places. And no only about this console.

Did Japanese companies send hardware to developers without instructions? Just "figure it out on your own"? How could they even begin to program for it if they didn't even know know what it could do?

>> No.6001505

>>6001478
Almost all of them are import only. And shoot em ups were absolutely not system sellers in 1995-6.

>> No.6001506
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6001506

>>6001434
I give a fuck about programmers and technical specs
Please elaborate? I'll be your best friend forever.

>> No.6001531

>>6001423
>What was wrong with the console itself?

Nothing is wrong with it. Its a fabulous piece of hardware. If you don't own one there is probably something wrong with your sexual preference.

>> No.6001541

>>6001506

assembly is low level machine code, you directly write (hitachi SH2) cpu instructions. C is much easier to write. And its much more widespread. Which is why the PSX was the home of the shovelware. assembly was the great filter preventing the saturn being swamped with shitty western C games.

>> No.6001546

>>6001498
Two things to keep in mind. The Saturn was conceptualized as a 2D gaming platform. Better 3D support was added later. Second, SoJ was experiencing some major ego bruising from the success of Mega Drive in foreign markets and its failure in Japan so they may well have more or less intentionally discriminated in non-Japanese versions of their SDK

>> No.6001547

>>6001423
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Gear
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_CD
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/32X
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GH7R2PEvzXo

tl;dr = mistakes were made

>> No.6001572

>>6001546
So idiotic. Money is money. Talk about shooting themselves in the foot.

>> No.6001583

>>6001572
Japanese game companies only really care about the domestic market.

>> No.6001593

>>6001423
overpriced/clusterfuck hardware
terribly mismanaged outside japan
worse third party support compared to the PS1
couldn't do 3D as good as PS1 or N64 which was all the rave at the time
died in less than 4 years which in turn made companies and consumers lose faith in sega and prefer sony systems

tl;dr it was the console that killed sega

>> No.6001608

>>6001423
>No really what was wrong with it?

1. too expensive to produce, only way they could curb the losses was by selling less units, which meant they sold less games, so less income.
2. VDP1 was 6x slower than the PSX and could only use maybe a third of its features at a given time due to stupid limitations.
3. SOJ thought they knew the American market better and axed the Genesis/SCD/32x so they can push the Saturn early. This alienated the customers and alienated the stores, so no one wanted the Saturn out of spite. Plus they had shit and limited marketing.
Killing the Genesis market also meant losing even more revenue.

>> No.6001630

Ugly 3D polygons and textures
Low RAM needing a 4MB expansion cart
Inferior architecture, transparencies were difficult, colored light transparencies were rarely seen even in 2D, difficult to program

>> No.6001631

>>6001498
It means that it took developers months of fiddling to figure out how to draw one polygon, let alone code a game engine.

It wasn't a C vs assembly thing, it just boiled down to shitty dev libraries. You got a barebones boiler plate example on how to access a cpu or the cd drive, a SH2 compiler (two I think), some 300 pages of pdfs on how the graphics chips worked and what the memory addresses were, and you had to start from there.

By 1996 they had a relatively fully featured dev library that abstracted the low level shit form you, so you could just call "draw_polygon(12, 11)" to draw a polygon instead of writing 0x00b10e0f0000cc64 to 0x05c01000. Problem was, Sony had that available before their console even launched.

Using C itself was not an issue, they had industry leading compilers available. The problem was that they had no development libraries initially, because Sega considered third parties as the competition, so they didn't exactly want to help them. They only supplied that basic boilerplate code.

>>6001546
>The Saturn was conceptualized as a 2D gaming platform. Better 3D support was added later.

Debunked horse shit. It was meant to run Virtua Fighter from day one, on top of the 2d power. But they didn't have anyone at the company available who knew how to design a 3d chip, so they had to make do with what they had, and that was hacking the arcade System 32 to be capable of drawing arbitrary polygons. And the issue ultimately wasn't that, but the fact that the VDP1 was stupid slow and had problematic interaction with the VDP2 that killed half its features.

Yes, Yu Suzuki was in there making the model 1-2 hardware, but they couldn't ask him to come design a console because he was busy designing the Model 1-2-3, which was the golden egg laying goose of the company. You couldn't even approach his office without stopping to pray on the 3rd, 7th and 11th step of the stairs on the way up, let alone ask him to make a 3d console chip for you.

>> No.6001635

>>6001630
>Low RAM needing a 4MB expansion cart

It had more RAM than the PSX, the 4mb expansion was there because Capcom and SNK wanted to port their fighting games which used a butt ton of animation.