/vr/ - Retro Games

[Anonymous No.8065032]

Let's imagine an alternate universe where Sony ultimately declines entering the console industry. Saturn releases as normal, still a bitch to program & overpriced, but it enjoys 2 years as the market leader while Nintendo takes things easy, convinced of an easy victory following the N64 launch in 1996. What changes? would momentum be enough for the Saturn? who wins the gen? would developers like Squaresoft flock to it? would 3DO & Jaguar ever make a dent in Sega's marketshare and be a respectable 3rd option? What do YOU think would happen in this scenario?

[Anonymous No.8065040]

>>8065032
Sony didn’t kill Sega. Sega lost retail and consumer confidence. There is no redemption for Sega.

[Anonymous No.8065041]

Do we have to do this every week?

[Anonymous No.8065043]

Sega was run horribly, remember. Sure we would get 2 more years of games and get Valkyrie Profile on a better console to show off it's beautiful graphics and sound, and all the Shining Force discs. The thing is we would still get fucked and it'll be mismanaged.

If the DC was pushed up 2 years it would be much improved and last well in to the late 00s and get many more arcade like games like it had and what made it AWESOME.

[Anonymous No.8065045]

>>8065041
do we need another DOOM thread?

[Anonymous No.8065048]

>>8065041
Do we need another Mario thread every 20 seconds?

[Anonymous No.8065058]

>>8065032
Can you imagine a universe where SEGA hadnt rushed the console and treated their devs with a little bit of decency? We would have had a good sonic game on the system. Alternatively this would be the same universe where Nintendo decided to release the 64 with optical media as its default format. We the consumers would have won.

[Anonymous No.8065771]

>>8065032
>Dr. Strange analysed all outcomes for the Saturn in every universe.

It fails in all of them.

[Anonymous No.8065779]

>>8065040
I'd argue they might not have lost retail confidence without the early launch - which was to combat the PS1. And maybe with the right hits consumer confidence could have been restored.

[Anonymous No.8065810]

>>8065032
I'd rather a scenario where Sega releases an actually good console that isn't hard to develop on, costs so much to manufacture, and is fairly competent at handling 3D, which then ends up beating the PSX, forcing Sony to exit the market. That'd feel more rewarding.

[Anonymous No.8065818]

>>8065032
Saturn being the only viable 3D Console with CDs gets Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, Resident Evil, Metal Gear Solid, and more and therefore ends up winning. Using CDs also makes them the more profitable system that's cheaper to develop for and attracts more 3rd parties.

[Anonymous No.8065823]

>>8065818
Shitturn is too weak for those games

[Anonymous No.8065840]

>>8065032
The saturn would have won easily....IF and ONLY if the world had been given the japanese version of the saturn and not that shitty pile of crap black one.

Thd white saturn was superior with higher quality made plastic, better capacitors and had games that came with the mb cartridges like the kof, street fighter vs x men, Darkstalkers 3 and many others.

Even with sony around I still see the n64 in last place because it really is just a kiddy console

[Anonymous No.8065847]

>>8065840
The white model wasn't even the first one, the first one was the grey one. Also the white one yellows like crazy

[Anonymous No.8065864]

>>8065823
No it's not. Final Fantasy and Resident Evil is mostly just drawing low poly models over pre-rendered 2D backgrounds. That's literally what Saturn is designed to do with VDP1 and VDP2. The battles in Final Fantasy are capped at 15fps and VDP2 could be used for the floor layer greatly reducing the amount of polygons needed. Metal Gear Solid again could use VDP2 for floors reducing the amount of polygons needed. The tough part would be the transparencies.

The developers would go for the system with CDs. They'd make changes where necessary to make the games work before they'd go with cartridges on the N64 where their profits would be lower. There's a reason why in Japan the Saturn got more third party support than the N64. Even if the overall numbers of games sold was lower, it was more profitable due to lower development costs and lower production costs for CDs.

[Anonymous No.8065897]

Imagine a world where Microsoft became the Sony of the gaming world.

[Anonymous No.8065926]

>>8065032
Saturn goes in strong because it has no real competition. Everyone develops for Saturn because there are no other options. N64 launch happens, Sega gets to tout their CD abilities (and the Saturn has relatively fast disc loads since it has an entire SH-1 CPU dedicated to handling the CD subsystem), and the N64 gets to tout less grainy graphics and hilariously blurry textures because Nintendo still decides that you need to draw textures by managing a tiny 4kB space
like, VDP1 is super slow and Saturn games massively benefit from you drawing tiny-ass textures
but the N64 is a system that would massively benefit from being able to draw higher resolution textures in one go, it has the actual graphical power to take advantage of a larger texture RAM space

Nintendo still comes out really fucking strong. Mario 64 is still revolutionary. The smoother graphics of the N64 are the hot new in-thing, even if textures are blurry as shit, people of the time were tired of chunky pixels.
I don't know if they win, if just because the Saturn has a massive advantage.

also, it is widely mentioned that Sega beefed up the Saturn a little bit in response to the PS1 -- Sega was initially worried that the 3DO wasn't going to bomb (you can laugh now, but people expected it to succeed back in the day, and all the 3DO unit manufacturers were Japanese companies, so it was making waves back home there)
if the Saturn is still only looking to beat out the 3DO, the N64 might have more of an edge vs the machines that exist as we know them

3DO still eats shit -- the cost and business model just don't work, and the Saturn is faster, only devs who were salty that the 3DO lost so badly will say otherwise. Compare NFS on 3DO to NFS on Saturn for a clear-cut example.
Jaguar still eats shit. Atari is a retarded, dying company.

[Anonymous No.8065950]

>>8065926
Namco eats a lot of shit -- they flocked to Sony because they weren't going to be supporting their closest rival at home while they competed in the arcade. Tekken is likely released as a System 22 game, because the System 11 hardware is literally just a Playstation in a cab. Alternatively, Tekken doesn't even exist, because half the point is that it was meant to be a cheap competitor to Virtua Fighter, which released on Sega's top-of-the-line and very expensive boards, while Namco can vastly undercut Sega on price and get the game to more arcades and deliver a perfect home experience at the same time.
Namco might go side with Nintendo when the N64 releases. Ridge Racer on N64, and not the shitty one we got.

FF7 releases on Saturn. Sony's big marketing push doesn't exist, and it's doubtful that Sega will push quite as hard as Sony does with it, so it probably isn't as much of a big deal... but FF7 is still a very good game made by a very well liked RPG developer.

there's a bunch of far-reaching changes here, and I'm too tired to keep thinking about it

[Anonymous No.8065957]

>>8065032
Jaguar wins because it has a cute spinning jaguar picture when you start it up

[Anonymous No.8065973]

>>8065847
White ones only yellow if ur stupid and keep yours out were sunlight gets to it. This is the same for the dreamcast, the snes, white model ps3 and ps2.

Any white console will turn yellow if it's not protected from sunlight

[Anonymous No.8065981]

>>8065957
SOLD!

[Anonymous No.8066013]

>>8065926
>>8065950
Does the 32x still exist in this timeline? It was primarily made in response to the Jaguar, IIRC. No matter how you look at it, I think trying to launch two 32-bit consoles in such a short amount of time is likely to reduce consumer confidence, and probably even retailer confidence when they're stuck with 32x's warming the shelves.

[Anonymous No.8066031]

lets imagine an alternate universe where I have a gf and sex

[Anonymous No.8066052]

>>8065041
At least 2-3 times. Zoom zooms can't play games so don't want to talk about them. They just want to fantasize about autistic shit.

[Anonymous No.8066054]

>>8066013
32X does complicate things, but I suspect it just ends up as Sega's Virtual Boy in this scenario -- it flops, miserably, and is quietly shoved under the table.

The 32X's biggest negative impacts are
>retailers are annoyed that they need to clear out this trash at firesale prices
>developer time that could have been spent on Saturn games is wasted on 32X
>some consumers got burned, probably started looking forward to the N64

but the N64 is still ages away in this timeline, and assuming Nintendo remains as unfriendly to third-parties as they did in this one, Sega still wasn't going to eat shit from it

oh yeah, and I think the one big thing that might still fuck up Sega
if for whatever reason, they do the early release (not likely because no PS1 as a threat, and Sega is comfortably ahead of the 3DO which was in freefall come 1995), everything is lost
Sega couldn't get enough machines into peoples' hands, they lost all their pre-launch hype by releasing their load too early, there weren't any games, other developers are pissed that they don't have that nice launch window sales boost

in fact, to make the Saturn not a total failure, you literally only just need to release it on-time instead of early, you don't need to 100% remove Sony
sure, it was never beating the PS1, but it wasn't going to be a black hole money sink that killed consumer, developer, and retail confidence in Sega to the point where Sega was bleeding money despite having the most successful launch in all of videogames at the time with the DC and ride out the sales drop from their main competition launching their new machine

[Anonymous No.8066060]

>>8065045
>>8065048
BAAAASED

[Anonymous No.8066078]

>>8065957
>cute spinning jaguar picture
It's a jank picture mapped to each face of a cube. Pass.

[Anonymous No.8066081]

>>8066078
is cute, relax

[Anonymous No.8066250]

>>8065950
>Virtua Fighter 2
It's crazy how that game ends up not looking as pretty as later Tekken entries on the PSX when the PSX is the cheap budget machine.

[Anonymous No.8066258]

>>8065032
Matsushita/Panasonic would probably feel more compelled to continue investing in the 3DO/M2, and ultimately fill the same role as the PSX.

[Anonymous No.8066387]

>>8065032
saturn is so pretty. that shit is slick. like my hair

[Anonymous No.8066853]

>>8065032
Disclaimer: when anons in this thread say "SEGA" they actually mean Sega of America.

[Anonymous No.8066902]

>>8066258
but it would've been released way too late

[Anonymous No.8066915]

>>8066250
Woooosh

[Anonymous No.8066936]

>>8065032
Maybe the Panasonic M2 would have come out then and been the third major competitor?

[Anonymous No.8067146]

>>8066052
Basado

[Anonymous No.8067550]

>>8065864
Problem is most developers couldn't figure out the two processors and just used one most of the time. Of course the most memorable games used both.

[Anonymous No.8067585]

>>8067550
bad

[Anonymous No.8067614]

Sega would have had no reason to drop the price if there was no Playstation.

The world market would've said fuck you even more at the $450 it launched at in Japan. The 3DO was the canary in the coalmine about that.

It would've been just as deep a nail in the coffin of Sega as a company, they would have interpreted its success in Japan as proof of their superior business accumen and the supremacy of the more desirable Japanese consumer market, the more the system struggled everywhere else.

[Anonymous No.8067625]

>>8066250
There's basically only Tekken 3 that you could maybe say looks better, except that was also released after Virtua Fighter 3.
At home, T3 has to completely drop the 3D backgrounds in favor of a cube map, and in the arcade, it runs on beefed up hardware vs a stock PS1 and has the advantage of the last 4 years of knowledge about the PS1 architecture behind it.
Tekken 2 is still ugly as shit, and Namco's own Soul Blade runs at 30fps.

The one major advantage the PS1 has over the Model 2 graphically is that it supports smooth shading, because otherwise, the Model 2 is still going to be able to push out more polygons with higher resolution textures.

>>8067550
There is a natural separation you can do, handling 3D calculations on one SH-2, and then doing the main game logic on the other, but in the mid 90s, pretty much no one was doing serious symmetric multi-processor programming anywhere outside of server shit, so it was hard.

[Anonymous No.8067669]

>>8067614
The 3DO had launched at upwards of $600, and pricing was still north of $500 for a while.
3DO units also had the issue where they couldn't just drop the price and take a loss where they make it up on software -- you could get a 3DO for $299 later in its life, but the company was taking upwards of a $50 loss per unit... and even if they sold software to make up for that, they weren't getting a cut on all 3DO software.
In contrast, Sega totally fucking can eat the cost if they have to, they're getting a cut of all Saturn software sold.

The failure of the 3DO is largely that the business model was entirely unsustainable and would crumple under any and all pressure.

[Anonymous No.8067697]

>>8065041
I would be perfectly fine with never having to see another thread about the Saturn ever again.

[Anonymous No.8067868]

>>8067697

<--- there's the door.

[Anonymous No.8067964]

>>8065032
i've thought about this before and i'm pretty sure the industry would have just crashed if sony didn't enter. and i mean an actual crash, not the meme 1983 "crash."
take the ps1 away and the saturn would still be a hardware clusterfuck weighed down by sega's dysfunction. the n64 would still be a disaster because of nintendo's greed (not to mention the two years of delays stifling any momentum it could have built up). all of the other alternatives were a joke - nobody would have bought a jaguar even if it was the only console on the market.
sony was successful right away because they offered a stable platform, a respected brand name, and a fair deal for third parties all at the same time, something that nobody else in that era was willing/able to do (or else they would have done it themselves).

[Anonymous No.8067973]

>>8067868
no, that's a crudely drawn zoomer

[Anonymous No.8068000]

>>8067964
Industry wouldn't have crashed at all lmao, people were desperate to play 3D games at home. The hype for 3D was what brought millions of new costumers that weren't there before, not just Sony's marketing.

[Anonymous No.8068102]

>>8065032
>durr hard to develop for
Not an argument. PS2 and PS3 are also that way.
>durr N64 competition
Also hard to develop for, but with the retarded cartriges, giving Sega a massive advantage.

[Anonymous No.8068216]

>>8065032
The real problem is Sega lost their identity. The Genesis and everything before it were original and great. The Saturn was Segas take on the 3do. The Dreamcast was Segas take on the N64. Both sucked because they were knock-offs.

[Anonymous No.8068231]

>>8068102
>Not an argument. PS2 and PS3 are also that way.
And PS3 lost to the Xbox 360 and Wii and was widely mocked as a nogames machine. It was essentially Sony's Saturn.

[Anonymous No.8068240]

>>8068231
It had the best and most numerous exclusives, especially the AAA caliber, out of all 3 (Wii was a joke when it came to serious games), and it outsold 360 by the end of the gen for that reason -- it was an overall better experience and console even if it had a lot of bad third party ports in the first few years.

[Anonymous No.8068423]

>>8067868
Why does that DualShock 4 look like a wireless Duke?

[Anonymous No.8068563]

In a world without the PS1, Saturn still beefs it.

SEGA planned on making the Saturn a 2D powerhouse with 3D as an afterthought. The industry just plain wasn't going that way, the N64 would still make them eat crow. Combine that with Naka playing Primadonna and refusing to both let anyone else make a 3D Sonic game and to deliver said game, Saturn remains without a killer app in the west.

You can debate it, but Sonic sold systems in the west and other games were just an afterthought.

That said, even though SEGA would eat crow, I don't think they'd be so devestated that the Dreamcast is their swansong. I imagine they battle it out to at least the Dreamcast successor and Microsoft entering the market. What happens after that, who knows?

[Anonymous No.8069726]

>>8068563
That's a good point. The 3D aspect of Saturn was never an afterthought, but it's capabilities were nonetheless beefed up with the addition of another SH-2 processor after details of the PSX hardware specs were found out. Without Sony you have a Saturn that is capable, but at an even larger disadvantage to the N64 in terms of hardware than what it ended up being.

I agree with others that many third party developers, especially Japanese ones, would have jumped ship to Sega because of its CD format. This may be an unpopular opinion, but I think without Sony the 3DO might have gotten a lot of these Japanese developers, too, and would have given Sega a run for its money for at least a couple of years. As for the Sega/Nintendo hardware split, I think it would have been something like:
JAP: 65/35
NA: 30/70
EUR: 60/40
Less fifth-gen consoles sold overall, though. I think Sega would have lost market share in NA especially because no early Sonic games like you said and because the 64 performed extremely well here even against Sony.

[Anonymous No.8070014]

>>8065043
>was
They still are run horribly.

[Anonymous No.8070134]

>>8065032
Saturn has outsold N64 in Japan regardless so yeah 100% Saturn.

[Anonymous No.8070201]

So in this hypothetical, does Sony just not exist as a company or some shit? Cause if the PS1 never came out, then the CD add-on talks with Nintendo would probably just have continued, the SNES gets a late CD add-on, N64 gets released either using discs only or maybe does some kind of typical Nintendo wackiness and pulls a Saturn with games sold as bundles of disc + cart so as to take advantage of both media working together, or they go all fucking in with the Disk drive instead of CDs at an earlier date. Point is, Sony/PS1 would still "exist" in the gaming market, just now its in the form of disc capable N64/SNES.

Only advantage would be an early head start release, but then you have to compete with Nintendo brand name recognition globally and you have companies already in bed with Nintendo since the 80s now with no excuse to jump ship if their 32bit machine is going to use CDs, so maybe if anything the Saturn gets LESS games coming out on it. Even in Japan, with how suckys the Mega Drive did, why would customers/devs go all in on the Saturn in this possible outcome instead of Nintendo's hardware which dominated the fuck out of everything else at the time?

It would just be the same story as the 16bit era probably, Sega gets a head start, but then Nintendo quickly catches up when their hardware gets out and you would probably get more gimmicky, still figuring out what the fuck to do with CD type games in the Saturn early years, while the Nintendo Ultra 64 CD would have much more time for devs to work on titles for it, like Final Fantasy 7, though maybe you would get some companies like Naughty Dog doing Crash for the Saturn instead, but probably all the big name publishers would stick with Nintendo. A CD capable N64 would just be the PS1 more or less. Nintendo got just as fucked in their plans by the PS1 as Sega did, so removing it would just repeat the 8 and 16 bit rivalry between them, Sega in early, Nintendo pulling ahead later.

[Anonymous No.8070212]

>>8069726
I feel like if that 3D0 2 system had gotten out instead of the PS1, it would have become the Xbox of the 90s, except Japs seemed to actually like the 3D0 a bit, so you may have actually gotten them more doing stuff for it.

What were the strengths of their unreleased system? More of a focus on 3D or would it have been capable of doing strong 2D/arcade ports like the Saturn?

[Anonymous No.8070287]

>>8065040
japan was on board with the saturn until the ps1 pushed it out of the way. it would have enjoyed more success in japan which ultimately would have allowed them to make a better push in north america and europe

[Anonymous No.8070401]

If sega enjoyed the NA money coming in, but like >>8069726 pointed out about the revision of the design in response to psx, they would basically have missed the boat on 3d.

and nobody really in this thread is remembering that DirectX was just becoming a thing and that PC gaming was most definitely going 3d accelerated graphics rapidly. Why bother with a 3d0 either when you're just a few hundred dollars away from having a productivity computer with more 3-d power?

[Anonymous No.8071276]

>>8065897
ALTERNATIVELY...

[Anonymous No.8071383]

>>8071276

[Anonymous No.8071431]

>>8071383
Anon, no PSX = odds are evened out - and the Jauguar is forever irrelevant

[Anonymous No.8072386]

>>8071276
>let's release a mac with no hardware accelerated video and pretend it's a game system
lol

>>8069726
https://archive.org/details/NEXT_Generation_02/page/n37/mode/2up
god, reading the article they have on the Saturn here, page 38 onwards

>early in the Saturn's lifespan, they wanted to use one CPU, but a single SH-2 didn't seem fast enough so they threw in another
>there were plans to release a cartridge only Saturn
>they added another video chip in response to the PS1, and from the sound of it, it seems like that chip might have been VDP2 lmao
>every single decision Sega made regarding the Saturn seems to be minute panicking if the article writer wasn't making shit up (I have very little faith in games journalism lol)
as an aside, if the Saturn had only VDP1, it would basically be right on par with the 3DO, which would be depressing vs the Saturn we ended up getting
man, having VDP1 alone is funny, imagine how much fillrate you lose just drawing backgrounds

I remember reading somewhere else that they wanted to use the V60 like in the Model 1, but the V60 is only offered in 16MHz, which was way too slow, the Model 1's power is in just throwing more DSP chips at a problem until it's solved, which didn't scale at all to home hardware.

it's also hilarious reading Yu Suzuki's quotes in the article, where he's as close to outright dismissal as he can be without saying it
like, it's really his own fault for not being involved with the Saturn project -- even at this point in time, Sega would have listened to any god damn word he said and obeyed because he was a megastar who had catapult Sega into the sky with megahits like Hang-On, OutRun and After Burner and absolutely knew his way around hardware, even if he would have likely still used a big pile of chips like the Saturn we got
after reading this, a Saturn without the PS1 sounds like Sega would make a bunch of absolutely fuck-retarded decisions anyway and manage to bungle themselves into oblivion, holy shit

[Anonymous No.8072448]

>>8072386
>as an aside, if the Saturn had only VDP1, it would basically be right on par with the 3DO, which would be depressing vs the Saturn we ended up getting
True, but in a situation without Sony it's alright for Sega because their only competition until '96 will be 3DO and Atari in the next-gen market. I didn't know about one of the VDP chips being added in as well; I thought it was just the SH-2. That being the case, Sega's design choices actually seem okay. Take out the SH-2 (~$20), VDP2 (~$20-25, probably many more transistors than the SH) and 512k sdram ($13) along with less traces on the motherboard and you finally have a reasonably priced, in terms of production, console for the consumer market. To me that seems like a 35,000yen '94 launch and a $299 '95 Western launch. Not too shabby. VDP1 with its 16 bit source and destination sdrams should offer a slightly higher fillrate than the 3DO while also not causing any contention with work RAM for it's already more than twice as fast CPU. Still issues with overdraw and some with transparencies, but manageable. I honestly think the cut-down version from their original vision would have been better.

[Anonymous No.8072523]

>>8072448
honestly, that does sound more reasonable
I doubt they'd take out the second CPU though -- it seems like Sega had decided on it long before the PS1.
the reduced costs from VDP2 and its RAM do seem attractive in a world without a PS1

had a few things I was going to nitpick, but I did some research and found out I was wrong -- the 68k used for sound was cheap as balls, and an '030 compares unfavorably in terms of MIPS vs a single SH-2 even when clocked 50MHz vs the SH-2's 28MHz -- and even the cheap 040 is very expensive; I'm pretty sure these prices fell a decent bit heading into 1994, but even still
https://techmonitor.ai/techonology/motorola_disables_features_to_do_cheap_68000_line

one thing that I found was apparently the use of dual SH-2s was in response to Nintendo's upcoming machine (which was again, not supposed to be released quite so late), rather than the Playstation, according to this translation
https://www.sega-16.com/forum/showthread.php?33527-The-Story-of-the-Hitachi-SH-2-and-the-Sega-Saturn
man, it kinda seems like Hitachi made out like a bandit, Sega single-handedly saved the Super-H architecture from being a total flop

[Anonymous No.8072596]

>>8072523
>I doubt they'd take out the second CPU though
Even better. I don't have a problem with the second CPU in the Saturn and its fast-ish multiplier and onboard divider makes it easier to use than the provided DSP. If a developer doesn't like it or can't handle it, simply don't use it; No harm, no foul.

>man, it kinda seems like Hitachi made out like a bandit, Sega single-handedly saved the Super-H architecture from being a total flop
Yeah, 100% agree. Is there a full list of parts on the Saturn that Hitachi provided? At least 2x SH-2, SH-1, VDP1, peripheral controller, optional MPEG decoder chip, and one of the suppliers of the sdram chips. It seems as though a third of the production costs were going straight to Hitachi.

But yeah, no Sony and Sega's Saturn should have looked like:
2x SH-2 28.6mhz on 2MB sdram
VDP1 with 512k source and 2x 256k destination sdram
Soundchip + 68k on 512k slow-ram
SCU, I/O, and cd controller, probably doesn't even need SH-1 if we're being honest

Reasonable performance that stood out against competition, reasonable production cost and MSRP for customers, and still reasonably versatile considering N64's technical deficiencies and software medium's issues.

[Anonymous No.8072616]

>>8072596
Oh, and by the time larger N64 ROM chips were coming into play by '98 and '99, as well as developers overcoming the N64's system performance issues, Sega could have been prepping the launch of the Dreamcast anyway. Even a global 9/9/99 launch to give them an extra year of hardware development time (maybe add a DVD player if manageable or cheap enough) and Sega would have been sitting pretty. Obviously the Dreamcast's elegant design came from what they had learned in the 32-bit era from their absolute thrashing by Sony.

[Anonymous No.8072635]

>>8065043
Why do anime posters always talk like their (terrible) opinions are absolute?

[Anonymous No.8073053]

>>8072635
Trannyme. I trust no further explanation is necessary.

[Anonymous No.8073062]

>>8065045
yes, because the /doom/ people aren't a bunch of autists.

[Anonymous No.8073520]

>>8073053
>he says this on a site literally built around anime
It isn't, not from you at least.

[Anonymous No.8073956]

>>8072596
>It seems as though a third of the production costs were going straight to Hitachi.
This was a problem for Sega that was acknowledged.
https://www.sega-16.com/forum/showthread.php?33506-Hideki-Sato-on-the-Sega-Saturn-(incredible-new-interview)
Sony had annual sales of 3 trillion yen. They made their own CD-ROM drives. They had their own semiconductor factories. Once when I was talking with Ken Kutaragi [the creator of the PlayStation], he said “Hideki-chan”—he refers to me using the “chan” diminutive—“Hideki-chan, there’s no way you can beat me. Where are you buying your processors? From Hitachi. From Yamaha. What about your CD-ROM drives? You’re buying everything. By buying from Hitachi, Hitachi is profiting. You can’t make anything yourselves. We can make everything ourselves, including custom parts. We have our own factories.” Near Nakashinden, they had a huge factory where they made audio equipment that they were using for the PlayStation. Their cost structure was completely different.

[Anonymous No.8073978]

>>8073062
you fucking liar.

[Anonymous No.8073985]

>>8065032
The Japanese Saturn looked so shit, it looked like a goddamn Fischer-Price toy with the colored buttons, not a game console. Everything about it just screams babyshit, the Dreamcast did the whole white aesthetic way better.

[Anonymous No.8073993]

>>8073985
shut up

[Anonymous No.8074000]

>>8073985
1/10

[Anonymous No.8074031]

>>8073985
take meds Aussie-kun

[Anonymous No.8074035]

>>8074031
I hate that grey saturn so much. The laser is shit on model 1s. Got some fucker advertising one as "guaranteed to work". Guess what it didn't do?

Now I'm mad just looking at yours.

[Anonymous No.8074042]

>>8074035
>The laser is shit on model 1
Citation needed. My JP Model 1 is on its first laser. The machine was imported in late 1995.
As for taste; that's subjective. Can't really criticize you for that.

[Anonymous No.8074050]

>>8074042
I don't know man the laser was dead and nothing worked and I Googled it and people said Model 1 dies easily compared to the second and so I'm going to regurgitate that here because my model 1 is dead and it makes me want to fucking cry

[Anonymous No.8074058]

>>8074050
That's unfortunate, but at least the replacement is easy on all models.

[Anonymous No.8074063]

>>8074058
I botched that up too and now its even more worthless ;_;

[Anonymous No.8074104]

>>8074063
Sucks. Give it to someone with proficiency in electronics. Or a retro console repair service...if you got something like that near you.

[Anonymous No.8074138]

If sony does not do the playstation then 3DO is semi-successful. EA achieves dominance far earlier than they would have. 3DO 2 is conceptualized and gets the sports games and Sega still folds because at the core they are a coin-op company that unfortunately found themselves making home computers.

[Anonymous No.8074232]

>>8074138
I'm still wondering how the 3DO makes money.
No one wanted it because it was expensive as balls (Trip Hawkins is on record having said that it didn't sell at $699, but it definitely sold at more than $500), and you can't sell the machine without a healthy profit margin because the manufacturer doesn't make up that profit on games.
Sega is in an absurdly strong position against the 3DO, the Saturn is both cheaper and faster (the machine was EXPLICITLY designed to beat out the 3DO) and the machine is from an established player who also doesn't have to contend with a retarded profit scheme and can easily undercut 3DO if they have to.

[Anonymous No.8074312]

>>8074232
Software and simply running out the clock. Without any competition from Sony (Whose first foray into games comes with the Phillips CDI [and where a lot of the management of the 3DO team comes from]) it would probably limp around to a second generation and then at that point who knows what happens.

[Anonymous No.8074441]

>>8072523
>man, it kinda seems like Hitachi made out like a bandit, Sega single-handedly saved the Super-H architecture from being a total flop

seems like this is where 'buy only japanese' talks started dominating the sega culture. the SH-1 line wasn't exactly a high circulation architecture.

That line of thinking persisted to the DC

[Anonymous No.8074465]

>>8074441
the cpu was good

[Anonymous No.8074690]

>>8074441
SH architecture was fast.

[Anonymous No.8075481]

>>8074465
>>8074690

yeah, not saying it wasn't quality. But it was anything but prolific.

Since most video game development was pretty close to machine level up until the PSX, you need a pool of developers familiar with the platform. the 68000 was in fucking everything, and once you understood the rest of the board it was implemented on, someone could get up and running quickly with minimal intervention.

the SH1 was used in next to nothing outside of Japan and was basically brand new with no foothold by comparison. The pool of ready to go developers was tiny, and the lack of dev/workkit by comparison to what the PSX offered meant it would take longer still to adapt.

There were other chips available at the time that weren't japanese. Same thing with the DC.

[Anonymous No.8075509]

>>8075481
Out of curiosity, what CPU would you use for an alternative Saturn design? I like the SH-2 from what I've read of it, but I'm not attached to it to any large degree. Personally, I think the 68030 may have been decent, especially the 40mhz EC version, since it was an established and popular design which many developers worldwide would have been very familiar with. A version of the MIPS would have been decent, too, and was obviously successful in both the PSX and N64.

[Anonymous No.8075627]

>>8075509
Saturn's SH-2 outperform the 68030@40, even when paired with an expensive 68882 FPU.

It has to be one of the RISC options of the time due to cost, power consumption, heat loss etc.

MIPS was proven and fast, but it being used by a competitor rules it probably out.

DEC's Alpha was an option, powerful and expensive, but lineups with cheaper processors for embedded and entry level applications existed at the time.

Sun's SPARC was always server and workstation centric, no idea if they had a line for that kind of application.

Motorola's PowerPC was available at the time and successfully used in some machines and on arcade boards. Also expensive.

[Anonymous No.8075635]

>>8075509
Botj of Saturn's SH-2 outperform the 68030@40, even when paired with an expensive 68882 FPU.

It has to be one of the RISC options of the time due to cost, power consumption, heat loss etc.

MIPS was proven and fast, but it being used by a competitor rules it probably out.

DEC's Alpha was an option, powerful and expensive, but lineups with cheaper processors for embedded and entry level applications existed at the time.

Sun's SPARC was always server and workstation centric, no idea if they had a line for that kind of application.

Motorola/IBM PowerPC was available at the time and successfully used in some machines and on arcade boards. Also expensive.

[Anonymous No.8075667]

>>8075509

Both of Saturn's SH-2 outperform the 68030@40, even when paired with an expensive 68882 FPU.

It has to be one of the RISC options of the time due to cost, power consumption, heat loss etc.

MIPS was proven and fast, but it being used by a competitor rules it probably out.

DEC's Alpha was an option, powerful and expensive, but lineups with cheaper processors for embedded and entry level applications existed at the time.

Sun's SPARC was always server and workstation centric, no idea if they had a line for that kind of application.

Motorola/IBM PowerPC was available at the time and successfully used in some machines and on arcade boards. Also expensive.

[Anonymous No.8075727]

>>8073520
Pic only slightly related. Can't be assed to find one of an seething cosplay transfurry+++

[Anonymous No.8075743]

>>8075509
the SH-2 at 28MHz was a faster part than the 68030 at 40MHz
the 040 would have been faster IIRC, but also a lot more expensive, there's a price list on >>8072523 from 1991 that'd show you how things might have looked when Sega was shopping around for what to do with their next machine, it was more than $100 a chip to use the budget model 040

>>8074312
it doesn't make money on software, which is the problem
seriously, go read up on the 3DO business model, it licenses the design to manufacturers who don't get a cut of software sales and thus have to release the system at a really high price to try to get any profit

>>8075667
it'd be interesting to see a PPC-based Saturn, but I'd need to see the costs (which were probably quite high)

[Anonymous No.8075758]

>>8075743
>it'd be interesting to see a PPC-based Saturn, but I'd need to see the costs (which were probably quite high)
Not that this is relevant to the conversation, but apparently the American hardware development team for Sega considered the PPC for a successor to the Saturn, but Sega was already deadset on using the SH-4. Not that it was a bad call since the SH-4 evidently had a pretty powerful FPU on-die.

[Anonymous No.8075783]

>>8075758
I constantly wish Yu Suzuki wasn't busy doing arcade shit during this time period, he and his team knew what was up. The Model 3 gets a PPC 603e (clocked at 66, 100, or 166 depending on the board revision). Probably expensive, but certainly fast.

[Anonymous No.8075893]

>>8075509

The final superscaler arcade games were kinda reaching their limits on how to implement the effects they were using; i feel like Rad Mobile while cool is kind of where the dead-end lay. 3-d modeling was inevitable.

And even though we had the model1 and model2, the things i've read suggest they were too expensive for consumer market, leaning heavily into the aerospace development to kinda amortize the expenses.

hmmm. I'dve probably gone down the same road as you. If i was trying to globally maximize the number of experienced programmers, I'd probably have stuck with some 68000 family setup, maybe something like Namco System2, or Sega Y board. And then added a math chip/fpu of some kind, like the SVP or another 6888X. Hindsight being 20/20 i might've even looked at the SGI Iris 2 or 3 series, or what Amiga had with the 3000 as a basis for a system designed to get the most already-experienced developers going.

But, everything that was >advancing was going to end up Pentium or RISC at the time. Since nothing home console went Pentium, i can only imagine that using an x86 or Intel as a company were highly undesirable. If i didn't have my head up my ass like a japanese exec, and saw what Apple was doing with the Mac, and the state of personal computing in Japan, I would have strongly considered powerPC. There was a reason that later on, the DC was supposed to have one later. Otherwise, probably should have looked at ARM more seriously too, like 3do did.

[Anonymous No.8075937]

... the more i look at how old the genesis was, and how much more stuff they put into the segaCD than just a controller and cd-rom, I wonder what you could do with all the stuff you ended up with if you improved its layout, and added a couple things to make your nextgen system, and keep backwards compatibility.

It would just need a graphics improvement in color bit-depth, an improved video codec, more ram, and the faster CD drive, maybe improve some of the bus along the way. With no PSX to compare to, it would seem much greater than it actually was especially if they came in at a hard pricepoint.

[Anonymous No.8075943]

>>8074063
Get an ode