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/vr/ - Retro Games

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9132285 No.9132285 [Reply] [Original]

I still can't understand what the fuck Sega was thinking with this thing
>let's make yet another tumor for the clearly already obsolete Genesis that costs over half of what the Saturn costs while being dramatically less powerful, which means we'll also have to divide up our resources supporting two concurrent 5th gen consoles instead of just fully backing one
????????????

>> No.9132325

>>9132285
They wanted us to have arcade perfect space harrier at home and they fucking delivered. Now go buy one and play an actual good game for once in your miserable life

>> No.9132327

>>9132325
I'll just stick with the sega ages version on saturn :)

>> No.9132332

>>9132285
They use the same processor, so it should be pretty easy for someone to port Chaotix to the Saturn and maybe make some improvements to it

>> No.9132342

>>9132285
32X did nothing wrong. It should have been Sega's 5th gen system until the Dreamcast came around, with Shiturn never existing.

>> No.9132352

>>9132285
SEga knew the genesis was going to be their high water mark so they milked it as hard as they could

>> No.9132353

Sega of America should have never existed. Think about it
>Naka doesn't have a place to run away to. If he leaves Sega for good, Naoto Oshima and Hirokazu Yasuhara get properly credited as the real fathers of classic Sonic. If he stays, they keep is ego issues in check.
>No bullshit fights between the two divisions
>No 32X
>No American shovelware

>> No.9132364

Daily (because these shitty bait threads are made that often) reminder that the 32x outsold the Saturn in America the one year they were both on market, and Sega CD had almost double the Saturns lifetime sales here and all your retarded coping that the two add-ons killed Sega is headcanon.

>> No.9132370

>>9132364
>shit sells a lot
>consumers realize it's shit and they've been scammed
>they don't but the next shit from the same company
I mean it's not that hard to understand

>> No.9132378

>>9132364
>it's le good that peripheral cannibalized the next gen console actually
>it outsold le saturn by liquidating all stock and selling for 20 dollars
Fucking kill yourself

>> No.9132387

>>9132285
If instead of making this sega made the saturn an addon to the genesis they would still be making consoles to this day

>> No.9132390

>>9132353
you know too much about squinty business man. this is like autistics and trains

>> No.9132393

>>9132342
this is true. I would have probably bought one instead occasionally renting it from blockbuster on weekends if I didnt know the saturn was coming and when the saturn did launch I was like meh I'll just wait for the playstation

>> No.9132396

>>9132387
They had the nerve to market the 32x + CD combo as a Saturn in some countries. Magazines would sperg out shit like
>If you already have a Megadrive and are planning to buy a Saturn, you can just buy the CD and 32X addons as a cheaper alternative, all Saturn games will be compatible.

>> No.9132434

>>9132285
They should've just put this hardware inside of the sega cd

>> No.9132478
File: 20 KB, 500x375, reeeeeu.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
9132478

>It's not a toomah!

>> No.9132583

>>9132396
No they didn’t.

>> No.9132591

>>9132583
>in some countries
Woah anon I'm impressed, how did you know what all of the world was doing in the mid 90s?

>> No.9132618

>>9132285
the idea was that they could do a generational jump for $200 while keeping the Genesis alive, because the Saturn originally cost $500 and nobody would have bought one.

SOJ then told them, after the 32x launched, to drop everything and launch the Saturn ASAP. So the 32x ended up as something with half a month of life and the Saturn launched in a huge rush, alienating both consumers and developers alike.

>> No.9132619

>>9132591
It's easy, there were only two countries back then (America and Japan)
t. 90s kid from Canada

>> No.9132627

>Fifth gen SoA vision
>We are going to have weaker hardware than both Nintendo and Sony
>We are even going to have less storage space than N64
For all the dumb things about Saturn, the 32X multiplies it.

>> No.9132630

>>9132285
>ohaiguise. what the fuck sega was thinking? am i fitting in yet?

>> No.9132650

Sega were afraid of the Jaguar.
No, really.

>> No.9132721

>>9132650
>Being afraid of what was basically bullshot hype
>When the 3DO already existed with roughly the same specs and performance

>> No.9132728

>>9132721
3DO was stupid expensive. Jaguar was very cost effective for what it was. 32x wanted to be a budget option too.

>> No.9132752

>>9132728
It had received repeated price cuts and was hovering around $300-something by that point. The Jaguar at $249 wasn't such a massive discount.
But I'm not talking about price, but rather capability. Sega already knew how far that kind of architecture could be pushed. And there was nothing to fear from it. They somehow self-convinced themselves it was a greater danger than it really was.

>> No.9132762

It would have been better if it didn't require extra power and video cable.

>> No.9132765

>>9132752
By early 1995 the Jaguar was price cut to $160, same price as a 32x despite being a standalone system. 3DOs at the time were about $300.

It's easy to look back and see these crude machines as clearly not being fit for the 5th gen, but that's with the benefit of hindsight.

>> No.9132772

>>9132765
>the Jaguar was price cut to $160
Yet still nobody bought it, because it didn't have any good games. And what games it had were either crap, or crap ports of titles running better on competitor hardware.
I think Atari should've just deleted that shit Motorola 68k altogether, forcing devs to run code directly from the GPU (as they had originally intended). Having the 68k made devs take a shit shortcut and run game code on it, even though its original purpose was merely as system management unit.
Despite being crazy expensive (at least initially), the 3DO (and its games) sold better.

>> No.9132778

>>9132285
Yeah, selling ~150$ cartridges with custom chips is a much more clever solution because NiNtEnDo DiD iT.

>> No.9132785

>>9132285
>for the clearly already obsolete Genesis
Lol what, when this was released the Genesis was still the best-selling console

>> No.9132789

>>9132772
Indeed, none of these stopgap consoles really caught on with consumers. Sega did see the Jaguar (and 3DO) as bigger problems than they actually were, but SoA also believed that the 32x would have extended the life of the Genesis. I don't believe the Genesis needed that. SNES didn't need hardware upgrades to play the DKC trilogy or Chrono Trigger.

>> No.9132790

>>9132387
>they would still be making consoles to this day
bullshit tbqh, they don't have the money to compete with the billion dollar corps, Microsoft probably would have bought them out

>> No.9132803

>>9132285
This was in theory pretty cool concept, instead of using more expensive cartridges to boost the capabilities of the system, you had to pay once for the system upgrade.

The only problem with x32 was a rushed start and a quick and of support by Sega. It was capable to run Doom flawlessly
https://youtu.be/CRUtrT2cZNk

>> No.9132808

>>9132778
Had the Genesis hardware been better designed, they could've released the SVP accelerator as a standalone passthrough for $99.
It would've extended the Genesis's life without resorting to cannibalizing their own 32-bit efforts.

>> No.9132809

>>9132803
The 32x was badly designed, it should have had a proper gpu instead of the second sh-2.

>> No.9132832

>>9132325
Why didn't they just release a space harrier with this mushroom tumor built into the cartridge?

>> No.9132882

>Extend the lifespan of a system released in 1988
This unhealthy obsession to extend the Genesis was ludicrous.
What games were they suppossed to bring out on the table by 1996.
N64 has SM64 and PS1 RE1.
They had their chance with Sega CD and they fucked up badly

>> No.9132886

>>9132882
In 1996 SNES had SMRPG, DKC3, Kirby Super Star, Megaman X3 and SFA2. Obviously it's not going to compete with the next gen offerings but the Genesis itself still had potential left in it.

>> No.9132894

>>9132886
SEGA CD was a more logical way to compete.
>Much larger storage space
>CD sound fixes all the lazy fucks with their GEMS obsession
>New CPU with improved rotation effects

>> No.9132919

>>9132894
32x definitely wouldn't have helped. Sega CD, eh maybe. I think the base hardware was able to hang on long enough.

>> No.9133004
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9133004

>>9132285
Virtua Fighter and Virtua Racer where great on it, I would bought one for VF alone but the PS1 was around the corner with Tekken and Ridge Racer, so yhea.
Not to mention there where a crap tons of great games being realease on current systems like the SNES an MegaDrive, so for me it would have been a hard pass.
Love those versions of VF and VR though.

>> No.9133191

>>9132894
Sonic 3 & Knuckles legit should have released on the Sega CD
Imagine bringing Michael Jackson to do your soundtrack and he has to deal with fucking metal fart noises

>> No.9133193

>>9132332
Except Chaotix mostly runs off the Genesis and the 32X is barely used aside from sprite effects and the special stages, so you'd have to rewrite most of the code for the Saturn.

>> No.9133195

>>9133193
Oh and the PWM samples, of course.

>> No.9133201

>>9132886
>>9132882
I think they believed if the Famicom could last an entire decade (and run alongside newer consoles for nearly half that time) the Mega Drive could too. But that wouldn't have worked simply because the technological gap between the technological gap between the Mega Drive and PS1 was much much bigger than the gap between the Famicom and Mega Drive.

>> No.9133204

>>9133201
That and mappers

>> No.9133207

>>9132832
In a sense they kind of did just that with Virtua Racing on the Genesis and the SVP chip it used, but it was too expensive to put on a standalone game and was only used with Virtua Racing (although funnily enough Sonic 3 was also initially developed to use the SVP chip as well, bur it wasn't going to be finished in time for release).

>> No.9133214

>>9133201
The SNES was obsolete on release and lasted long enough.

>> No.9133217

>>9133191
Not with how S3&K utilizes the Genesis; it's constantly loading and unloading assets from the cartridge and relies on the fact that loading is near instant. There'd have to be a lot of compromises if it was developed for the Sega CD, even with a lot of technical wizardry.

>> No.9133354

>>9133214
>obsolete
*TG-16

>> No.9133360

>>9133354
PCE was pretty good when it first launched in Japan, but the western launch was too late. SNES was outdated at launch in all regions.

>> No.9133869

>>9133207
They actually investigated whether they could use the SVP in a pass-through cartridge (that would only need to be purchased once), but they couldn't get it to work properly, due to the Genesis's various weaknesses.

>> No.9133874

Why are people so obsessed with this addon that no one bought and was forgotten within months of its release?

>> No.9133894

>>9133874
It plays into the common narrative that misunderstanding of the American console market led to Sega's eventual collapse. Not the fact that Sega of Japan was dumping billions of yen into arcade center/amusement park experiments in the 90s.

>> No.9133934

>>9132434
They couldn't have possibly included twin SH-2s in the Sega CD back in 1991 but what they absolutely should have done was added a better VDP. The Genesis architecture would have made it a bit of a pain to do but if the Sega CD could have pushed more colors then it would have absolutely crushed since that was the biggest limitation the Genesis had when stacked up against the SNES in screenshots.

Really the 32X wasn't terrible hardware though. It just was too little too late. Had it come out a year earlier and gotten more arcade ports it would have filled a nice niche. You could have gotten arcade perfect ports of Capcom fighting games, Neo Geo, Konami beatemups...

Imagine an arcade perfect TMNT and Turtles in Time on the 32X. Arcade perfect Simpsons. Arcade perfect Street Fighter Alpha 2. MKII on the 32X isn't arcade perfect but it's probably the best home port the game ever got and even that could have been better with a little more TLC since it was rather lazily based on the Genesis version. Really the 32X could have been what the Jaguar was hoping to be.

>> No.9133939

>>9133360
So was the NES. The base system is barely more powerful than a Colecovision.

>> No.9133943

>>9133874
there's a subset of weebs and shitposters who refuse to accept the Saturn killed Sega and make endless threads about how things could have been different, or what the actual problem was. Also 99.9% of them weren't even born when any of these products were on market and know nothing about public perception at the time.

>> No.9133974

>>9133939
The Famicom only released a year after the Colecovision. The western perception of the NES's capabilities is skewed by its release date and the fact that it only got big here when most games were using fancy mappers. We consider Zelda or Metroid "early" games but they're both FDS ports using MMC1.

>> No.9134084

>>9133974
>The Famicom only released a year after the Colecovision

The Colecovision technically came out in 1982 but it was using a chipset from the late 70s.

>> No.9134106

>>9134084
this is true but even so the peak years for Famicom were 85-88 while in the West it was more like 88-91. the NES was peaking here just as Japan was moving on to the PCE and SFC.

>> No.9134115

It's really moot anyway. The Atari was rudimentary even by 1977 standards. Up until only relatively recently console hardware was a constant exercise in tradeoffs to hit certain price targets or other priorities like battery life in the case of the Game Boy.

>> No.9134129

>>9134115
>The Atari was rudimentary even by 1977 standards
Actually the Atari 2600 was quite a bit slicker than contemporaries like the Fairchild Channel F and RCA Studio II which only had monochrome block graphics. It had fewer chips in it too and was cheaper to build.

>> No.9134134

>>9134115
>The Atari was rudimentary even by 1977 standards.
It was not. No one had more powerful home consumer electronics sitting around.

>> No.9134136

>>9134115
Those price targets are why it's silly to compare to other types of products like home computers when judging whether or not a console is rudimentary. The Genesis was cutting edge, for a console.

>> No.9134140

>>9134136
Genesis is cutting edge compared to macs and PCs of the time. And is a (albeit smaller) step up from the Amiga.

>> No.9134150

>>9134129
I'm talking about in comparison to computer tech of the era, not other consoles, which were also made on the cheap. Nobody was racing the beam on PC back then.

>> No.9134160

>>9134136
And it suffered for it early on. It wasn't until around 1991 after a price drop that it really started to pick up steam.

>> No.9134229

>>9132285
Because Sega was about blindly reacting to what competition did instead of having their own vision.

>> No.9134565 [SPOILER] 

>>9132618
>because the Saturn originally cost $500
$400, and was dropped to $300 soon thereafter

>> No.9134581

>>9134565
By the time it dropped people had already bought PlayStations.

>> No.9134595

>>9132325
Yeah boy

>> No.9134597

>>9134229
they only momentarily had success because Nintendo got complacent from the Famicom cash cow and were late to develop a next gen console

>> No.9134678

>>9132808
i'm curious as to the specific technical reason why they couldn't put the SVP in a separate cart

>> No.9134696

SVP was expensive not because of the production costs but R&D and licensing fees. Sega didn't make chips in-house, they bought the SVP from Samsung who could charge anything they felt like for it.

>> No.9134790

Sega just didn't properly anticipate what the public would think the jump to fifth gen would be. SoA thought they could keep the Genesis alive through 1998. With the Genesis' massive installer base, they thought people would've been people willing to skip a new gen entirely in favor of souping up their genesis for cheap. Cost effectiveness had been one of Sega's go-to marketing since the beginning.

And honestly? Historically speaking up until then, keeping Genesis alive and viable until '98 was totally within reason by examples set until then. Nintendo kept the NES around until 95. The Atari 2600 was only discontinued in '92. Its just that once the public saw the 3D consoles were capable of , a 2D focused console was all but unmarketable. There's a reason you can see early use of the term retro for sprite based games as early as the mid 90's.

>> No.9134806

>>9134790
To be fair to Sega, that belief didn't come out of thin air. The market was really settled in on the 16-bit consoles for a weirdly long time despite "better" technology being available since the early 90s. The Genesis and SNES were getting stomped on paper by several machines that tried to launch the next generation and each one fell like dominoes to Donkey Kong Country and Sonic 3. Even the PS1, while interesting to a lot of people, didn't immediately take off. It was a fairly slow burn at the start and one of the biggest selling points that got people on board was the timed exclusive of...Mortal Kombat 3. So it's not unreasonable for Sega to have decided that continued investment in the Genesis was the sensible choice. For all they knew the Saturn would have been another 3DO.

>> No.9134824 [DELETED] 
File: 18 KB, 598x628, 9347 - amerimutt ear mcdonalds mutt open_mouth soyjak stubble variant_impish_soyak_ears.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
9134824

>32X did nothing wrong. It should have been Sega's 5th gen system until the Dreamcast came around, with Shiturn never existing.

>> No.9134910

>>9132325
>They wanted us to have arcade perfect space harrier at home and they fucking delivered. Now go buy one and play an actual good game for once in your miserable life

The 32x has some pretty good Model 1 arcade ports.

Virtua Racing Deluxe was one of the best home ports of the game for quite a while. had extra tracks and cars. I actually prefer this one over the Saturn port. The Saturn game runs at a better framerate, but the handling feels different, The 32x game plays much closer to the arcade version, despite the 20+ fps. Two player split screen. Virtua Fighter has a lot less polygon detail than the Saturn game, but plays smooth, and in some ways is better than the Saturn port. Star Wars Arcade was not a bad rendition of the arcade game:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYxY0G8vl6E&t=298s

I kinda prefer the 32x version over the Saturn port. The Saturn port does still display more polygons on screen, and has more colours
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQPIqRNQu1E&t=305s

>> No.9134942

>>9134760
Virtua Racing carts seem to not be all that reliable. Often they just quit working. I wonder if it wasn't just a rushed design so Sega had some answer to the Super FX?

>> No.9134950

>>9132650
>Sega were afraid of the Jaguar.
>No, really.

Doom 32x vs Jaguar:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFCxbsmWiUg
(I think Jaguar wins overall)

Virtua Racing vs Checkered Flag:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2BRJiZVVHc
(Checkered Flag doesn't look too bad, but the framerate is worse.)

Fight for Life (Jaguar) (compare to 32x Viurtua Fighter above):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8gBIleEfbeM&t=143s

Primal Rage:
https://youtu.be/aKnR0b0KOYA?t=3

NBA Jam TE (Jaguar):
https://youtu.be/QESVsIXiFIU?t=32
NBA Jam TE (32x):
https://youtu.be/gFuIv-_nJJY?t=55

Supercross 3D (Jaguar):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xmqA1wths6c
Motocross Championship (32x):
https://youtu.be/rpvnjeTsXG0?t=600

CyberMorph (Jaguar):
https://youtu.be/8s_hpKskI1c?t=32
Stellar Assault (32x):
https://youtu.be/c2Bs1YCdNHA?t=122

Metal Head (32x):
https://youtu.be/vqY-037MJw8?t=843
Iron Soldier (Jaguar):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgn-wairgBQ&t=585s

Pitfall (Jaguar)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKxWPyiqUVw
Pitfall (32x):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWd6GArCWQQ&t=675s

>> No.9134959

Homebrew scene is starting to develop stuff for 32X, Tomb Raider port is insane

>> No.9135360

>>9134678
They technically could, it's just that, ultimately, they realized they wouldn't gain as much performance as the chip was theoretically capable of.
The main issue was that the Genesis was pretty bad when it came to expanding its capablities via add-ons.
The design was very centralized; neither the graphics/sound chips, nor their memory pools were directly linked to the cartridge port, so an add-on processor couldn't directly communicate with them. Everything had to go through the CPU, which added latency. Moreover, the CPU was too slow for both running system management for an add-on processor and game code simultaneously. That's why add-ons had beefy CPUs themselves, and the Genesis CPU was relegated to management (and it still was rather slow).
That expansion port was a glorified floppy drive connector; it had no interrupt, and needed to be constantly polled by the CPU for data. Yet another reason for that second 68K in the Sega CD, and the CPU-to-CPU memory buffer.
Lastly, the Genesis was not capable of double-buffered screen draw (128K mode). The instruction set is present, in almost all revisions, but, since the console only has one 64K bank of VRAM, it's unusable. 128K mode would've greatly sped up output (double write speed).

>> No.9135371

Sega fucked up by not consolidating the Megadrive, CD & 32x into one new console called the Saturn.

>> No.9135384

>>9135371
Wasn't that the plan with the Neptune, just without the CD? (though they could introduce a CD add-on later on down the line as CD technology got cheaper and read rates for loading times got better).

>> No.9135465
File: 24 KB, 168x186, 1583376840454.webm [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
9135465

>release the genesis, cd addon, 32x addon
>release a two in one genesis+cd
>plan to release a two in one genesis+32x but scrap it
>the thought never occurs to release an all in one genesis+cd+32x
>release an entirely new console with a cd drive and cartridge slot that isn't compatible with anything genesis related
>later on, release the fucking model 3 genesis that's a piece of shit and isn't compatible with any addons

I know it's a lost cause trying to apply logic to Sega but still

>> No.9135543

>>9135384
>>9135465
The Neptune was an afterthought for late 95. It boiled down to SoJ rushing the Saturn and SoA wanting to extend the life of the Megadrive. They should have designed the Saturn to extend the Megadrive and used the CD & 32x to bridge them. Apart from pissing off the retailers, the Saturn's big problem was no games when it was released. If it could play all the previous hardware's games it would have survived.

>> No.9135707

>>9135360
(Fake Edit) Oh, and, in addition to the above, they routinely fucked up the board componentry.
Most infamous example is the audio. In the Series 2 consoles, the discrete sound and video chips were merged into a single ASIC. However, on many revisions the pre-amp/filter stages weren't correctly redesigned to take this into account, so the chip that should have the clearest sound is actually fucking awful. They also replaced the original YM2612 circuitry in the combined ASIC with its immediate successor, the YM3438, which didn't help things, due to slight output differences.
Bonus, on some revisions they fucked up the video filters as well, so the image ended up shit.

>> No.9135956

>>9135360
The Genesis was juuuust a minute too early. It's obviously a machine built in the late 80s with 80s expectations like a potential floppy drive add-on that had to figure out in a roundabout way how to adapt to the new expectations of the 90s.

>> No.9135971

>>9135465
Saturn backwards compatibility was probably on the table for a bit until they realized what that would entail. You going to stick a Z80 in there? Though you have a point it was a bit a waste not to go the whole way considering how much hardware already overlapped between the Saturn and Genesis+32X.

>> No.9135987

>>9135956
indeed it is truly the last 80s console. that's why its games still tend to be based around the arcade model. the SNES is the first 90s console, its games feel like the start of the modern cinematic experience.

>> No.9136046
File: 3.54 MB, 3267x2043, Beep_jan89_46-47.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
9136046

>>9135956
Megadrive was designed as the latest entry in Sega's 80s console series, when they released the same hardware both as a console and a microcomputer (see SC-3000). That's why it had accessories that would turn it into a computer, such as keyboard, floppy drive, modem, mouse, even a graphic tablet. Most never got released.

>>9135971
Saturn design started right after they finished with the Mega CD, so late 1991. Given how difficult it was to get the Mega CD working right, they added a shitload of expansion potential on the Saturn (so much that it made the cart port broken). I imagine they never ever considered backwards compatibility, especially since the Megadrive was doing horrible in Japan. They wanted a clean break, a completely new system, and any backwards compatibility could be tucked in to the expansion ports.

>> No.9136061

>>9134942
>>9134678
Because the SVP sucked. Samsung suckered Sega, they dumped a whole bunch of unreliable, under performing chips on them. A Lock-on SVP cart was on the cards for a while, it is said they didn't bother due to the 32x, but perhaps they also had worse problems there and didn't want to do business with Samsung after that bad deal. They lost $30 million on that Samsung deal.

>Samsung was going to release a DSP around that time. They told us they could manufacture several hundred thousand units and were very eager for us to buy them. They said that the DSP was faster than anything from NEC, that it was extremely fast. And it was indeed fast. Why? Their way of making the semiconductor was, well, it was a bit messy. The wiring—how can I put this into words—the wiring was as dense as possible. The speed was fast because of that. But they made the insulating layer as thin as could be. So it was fast. But we had all kinds of trouble with it later on. We later asked Hitachi what was going wrong with the DSP, and they said that it was not manufactured properly. They said that if you make it that way, then it will break very easily. Such a way of manufacturing must be avoided, they said.
>Anyway, Samsung eagerly wanted us to adopt the DSP. We went to Korea, they had a kisaeng [traditional Korean courtesan] party for us, and we were totally exhausted after it all. We ended up with 200,000 or 300,000 units. And we had to throw them out. How much did it cost? It might have been something close to 10,000 [$100] yen per unit. About 3 billion yen [$30 million] in total.

https://www.sega-16.com/forum/showthread.php?34928-Info-on-the-SVP-(or-another-use-of-a-Samsung-DSP-)-from-Hideki-Sato

>> No.9136085

>>9136061
I'm trying to decode this. Is he saying the chip was too fast for the process used and it was prone to failing from electromigration? It also seems unusual that Sega wouldn't use a Japanese manufacturer but maybe everyone was booked up so they had to go to Korea to get chips.

>> No.9136091

>>9136046
>so much that it made the cart port broken
Can you elaborate on this? Broken how?

>> No.9136110

>>9136061
>I don't think they'd have been able to tell Hitachi any significant details about the manufacturing process under Hitachi were involved (since I'd imagine Samsung would impose confidentiality clauses in the contract that restrict to whom such stuff can be shared), and I somehow doubt Hitachi would be able to make a decent assessment without knowing that.

No they didn't have Samsung's schematics but they could have easily decapped an SVP and found out what was going on in there.

>> No.9136121

>>9136085
And immediately got suckered by Korean hookers to buy defective merchandise. Genius Koreans getting their revenge.

>> No.9136142

>>9136085
The chip ran too fast and too hot, that's about it.

>>9136091
>Can you elaborate on this? Broken how?
Too many pins in too little space, making it mechanically unreliable. It was the same physical size as the Genesis slot but had 5 times the pins.

>> No.9136170

ah I see. it's like the first Famicoms where the PPU ran hot enough to roast weenies over it so they actually had a heat spreader on them. Ricoh fixed this issue as they got the process down pat. I guess Samsung might have fixed it given enough time but the SVP wasn't produced long enough to debug the thing. They probably only did 1-2 runs of them.

>> No.9136207

>>9134678
That sounds better on paper than it would be in practice. Selling a dedicated enhancement chip cart like that would essentially make it a shitty, very limited add-on that would only create confusion. "Yes, it's technically a Genesis game but you need this other Genesis cart to attach it to so it will work." You're better off just building the chip into the games that need it and building the cost into the price.

>> No.9136238

>>9136061
>We ended up with 200,000 or 300,000 units. And we had to throw them out. How much did it cost? It might have been something close to 10,000 [$100] yen per unit. About 3 billion yen [$30 million] in total.

That seems literally impossible to charge $100 per chip, unless I'm reading that incorrectly. The entire chip package shouldn't be that much more than 200,000 transistors considering what's inside of it and on a 0.8 micron process node should yield about a 25mm2 piece of silicon. In theory Samsung could sell those at $10 per to Sega in bulk and still make a profit.

>> No.9136243

>>9136207
The SVP was probably too expensive for that to be an option worth considering. SNES expansion chips weren't as costly and there were several different ones, so putting one in each cart that needed it made sense.

>> No.9136354

>>9136243
it was practically arcade hardware so yes it would have been too pricey compared to Super FX

>> No.9136374

sounds like an FPGA SVP would be a dandy idea especially given the chip's known reliability issues

>> No.9136376

>>9132332
Chaotix uses the ym2612 for music, so a Saturn port would suck just like Sonic Jam.

>> No.9136398

>>9135971
The Saturn has almost zero hardware overlap with the Genesis. Making the Saturn backwards compatible with the Genesis would require pretty much grafting on an entire genesis.

>> No.9136426

>>9136398
inb4 muh 68ec000

>> No.9136507

The SVP ran internally at 23Mhz which was probably too much for the process used.

>> No.9136605

>>9133974
true but let's not pretend even some early famicom titles don't absolutely smoke pretty much any colecovision game

>> No.9136612

>>9136605
Which ones? NROM NES games max out around Super Mario Bros. No question the NES is still more powerful than the Colecovision but not extremely so.

>> No.9136616

>>9136612
Try Popeye on Colecovision and NES and get back to me.

>> No.9136660

>>9132325
>They wanted us to have arcade perfect space harrier at home and they fucking delivered
they wanted us to play 9 year old games?

>> No.9136674

>>9133201
>>9134806
Yeah I love shitting on Sega but hindsight is 20:20. Companies didn't really have the industry figured out then and Sega didn't realize the reputation of these failed add-ons would haunt their future consoles

>> No.9136681

>>9136660
why was it ok for NES to get port of Ms. Pac-Man and Galaga in 1989?

>> No.9136682

>>9133201
That was entirely SOA who had the idea that they could drag the Genesis out into 1998. SOJ wanted to move on.

>> No.9136686

>>9136681
>why was it ok for NES to get port of Ms. Pac-Man and Galaga in 1989?
Ms. Pac-Man was 7, Galaga was 8. Anyway, Nintindo wanted people to play SMB3 in 89

>> No.9136692

>>9136660
This was an issue with those ports, yeah. The gaming landscape moved so quickly that even excellent ports of those games weren't "big" enough for most people. Not a lot of interest in Star Wars Arcade at the time. It was too passe. Even Mortal Kombat II was old hat considering MK3 was out by then.

>> No.9136754

>>9136238
>That seems literally impossible to charge $100 per chip, unless I'm reading that incorrectly.

I'm sure you'd know better than Samsung, Hideki Sato and the IC engineers at Hitachi.

>>9136507
>The SVP ran internally at 23Mhz which was probably too much for the process used.

The SSP1601 spec sheet says it can run up to 25MHz. Of course we don't know what manufacturing issues they had early on. The one thing we know for sure is that the chip was meant to be ready in 1993 (Sonic 3 was meant to use it) but it was very late and only made it by 1994 (forcing Sonic 3 development to restart with a non-SVP version since they had to get something out by 1993 due to a marketing deal).

>> No.9137124

>>9136754
>I'm sure you'd know better than Samsung, Hideki Sato and the IC engineers at Hitachi.
I can make a ballpark estimate on its cost, yes. There is no way they spent $30 million on 2-300k chips. That's absurd. There's more to that story or Mr. Sato misremembered a quarter century after the fact.

>> No.9137156

>>9137124
OK, and what experience do you have of the semiconductor market and DSP chips circa 1993 in Korea and Japan, that you base your estimations on?

>> No.9137185

>>9136682
>That was entirely SOA who had the idea that they could drag the Genesis out into 1998. SOJ wanted to move on.

The genesis still had a lot of steam, enough to carry it that far. But at that point, The genesis was still viable as a budget machine. It was re-released in 1998 as the Genesis model 3 by majesco at a $50.00 price, but even genesis model 2's could be found liquidated at $50 .

>> No.9137261

>>9136692
Double Dragon was 6 years old when they did the Mega Drive port. It predated the console itself and looked hopelessly stiff and archaic against contemporary beat-em-ups like MK.

>> No.9137337

>>9136681
NROM games that barely cost anything to make and were guaranteed sellers.

>> No.9137387

>>9135360
>The instruction set is present
I think you mean that the VDP is capable of 128K mode, but there isn't VRAM for it. There's no instruction set because VDP isn't programmable.

The solution is reducing screen size, and double buffering that. But yes, you can't double buffer the entire screen at 60fps.
It might be possible to do it with a max of 30fps, interleaving the updates across two frames to half the amount of VRAM the second buffer costs. My engine does this, but the framebuffer is 256x144.

The trick is
- keep three half-frame-buffers in VRAM, we'll call them 1, 2, and 3. Initially, the background scroll will be set to show 1 and 2.
- render graphics via cpu or expansion cpu in the cart.
- on vsync for frame 1, copy the RAM framebuffer portion to half-framebuffer 3.
- on vsync for frame 2, copy the RAM framebuffer portion to half-framebuffer 2, and adjust the screen scroll to show framebuffer halves 2 and 3.

The copy to VRAM can be done while the cpu is busy rendering the next frame to RAM, as there is a second buffer in RAM.
I also disable the display above and below the framebuffer for more DMA bandwidth.

This limits you to a max of 30fps (which most games wouldn't exceed anyway), and means that you only need 1.5x the VRAM to double buffer. You still need 2 full framebuffers in CPU RAM though, unless you can split your rendering between screen halves perfectly.

>> No.9137393

>>9137387
looking at the numbers, it's unlikely you'd have enough VRAM in the typical game to do full 320x240 double buffering, even with my trick. DMA bandwidth is probably not fast enough to do even 20 fps also, especially since you wouldn't be able to get extra bandwidth by disabling the display.

>> No.9137514

>>9137387
>I think you mean that the VDP is capable of 128K mode, but there isn't VRAM for it.
It has slots to accommodate that extra 64k VRAM but they're not filled. Price was probably an issue in the late 80s but as time went on and the RAM got cheaper they could have added it to the console.

>> No.9137595

>>9137514
a Mega Drive is not a PC. you don't want to do that and break compatibility with existing consoles.

>> No.9137621

>>9136754
how hard was it to get 25Mhz using 1993 technology? couldn't be that bad. PCs by then had 33Mhz, 40Mhz, soon 66Mhz CPUs.

>> No.9137653

>>9137621
Yes but Intel also had a top-tier fab with the best technology and unholy amounts of R&D money. Samsung couldn't match their capabilities. Getting a chip to work reliably at 23Mhz was a challenge for them.

>> No.9137667

>>9137621
>>>9136754
>how hard was it to get 25Mhz using 1993 technology? couldn't be that bad. PCs by then had 33Mhz, 40Mhz, soon 66Mhz CPUs.

32bit CPU's like the 486 were hitting 66MHz or so in 1993. Moving to 32bit was a big jump for clock speeds and memory sizes. I generally think most 16bit CPU's were locked in to about 20-25MHz maximum.

>> No.9137681

>>9137514
>It has slots to accommodate that extra 64k VRAM but they're not filled.

Yep, if I understand correctly, there was a ram shortage around 1988/1989 which increased the prices to the point where 128k had to be scrapped.

>as time went on and the RAM got cheaper they could have added it to the console.
128KB mode would change timing of VRAM transfers, and definitely break compatibility with older games, since writes/reads to VRAM are split over both 64k banks in parallel.

>> No.9137702
File: 24 KB, 620x339, 8fb83020d1f16324b13a3ffe0d40f3c5--entertainment-system-indie.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
9137702

We have a product for those who can't afford next-gen cd gaming. The 32x.

>> No.9137709

>>9137681
>Yep, if I understand correctly, there was a ram shortage around 1988/1989 which increased the prices to the point where 128k had to be scrapped.
The mythical late 80s RAM shortage when TI and Micron the only US-based RAM manufacturers went and cried to Congress to demand tariffs against Japanese RAM so the price shot up 25% for a while.

>> No.9137787

>>9137709
Yeah I don't know why ram prices went up, just that they apparently did, which is why i said "If I understand correctly"

>> No.9137843

>>9137261
There were a few instances like that where games seemed out of place because progress moved way too fast in the 90s. Sonic 3D Blast is a pretty good game but when it released it felt "small" by the standards of the day. The levels were tiny and sparsely populated and the goal of collecting birds and dropping them off felt like a throwback to an earlier era of single screen arcade gaming where you would perform some menial task over and over rather than go on a large scale adventure. Kirby's Dream Land 3 felt like it took a step backward from both Super Star and Dream Land 2. Fighting games started to get hit with it bad which is why so many of them started adding other modes. It was a weird time.

>> No.9137856

>>9137621
Wasn't the revised Super FX 21Mhz? Seems like overkill trying to push past that for the Genesis.

>> No.9137878

>>9132285
I love Sega. They produced so many great games from the late 80's to 00's. They peaked during the Dreamcast in my opinion. That being said, they made a lot of baffling decisions. RIP Sega, you were a real one.

>> No.9138043

>>9137709
>>9137787
There was, apparently, a full-blown cartel thing going on at the time between the Japanese memory makers, which only ended when the whole economy imploded.

Memory cartels have appeared several times throughout history. They only truly stopped being a thing after the massive consolidation of the late '00s.

>> No.9138103

>>9132894
>better memory capacity
>better sound
>built-in graphical gimmicks
>same drab color palette limitations

ONE FUCKING JOB

>> No.9138162

>>9138103
That was an unfixable issue with the base console. The VDP didn't have a sufficiently large color memory pool, and there was no way to expand it via add-ons.

Which is why some people say they should've just released the Sega CD as a separate console. It already had a CPU, audio chip, and (half of) a render chip. All it needed was that ASIC combining the Genesis VDP/SDP plus some (extra) memory.

>> No.9138272

>>9132285
It was inspiration for the N64 next gen cartridge based and small library

>> No.9138421

>>9137681
128k ram is used via interleaving so it being present alone would break every single existing Megadrive game.

>> No.9138429

>>9135360
Don't be too harsh on the megadrive, it was basically a hot rodded colecovision.

>> No.9138449

>>9138103
A color pallet is overrated, pc98 with smooth scrolling is a dream machine

>> No.9138458

>>9138449
PC98's palette limitations are less damning because the resolution is so high. You don't need a blur filter for dithering to look nice there.

>> No.9138538

>>9137261
that was a shitty port made on a $20 budget. they had a 4 megabit ROM and not even a source port.

>> No.9138587

>>9138538
Even with a larger ROM it was still an outdated 6 year old arcade game. it was like Donkey Kong in 1988 when you'd wanted to play Street Fighter or Bad Dudes.

>> No.9138602

>>9136681
they ported Galaga to Famicom in 85 though

>> No.9138610 [DELETED] 

>>9134824
Who are you quoting, blue pedo swirl lover?

>> No.9138624

>>9137681
>128KB mode would change timing of VRAM transfers
No, there is no compatibility issue as 128K mode has to be enabled by setting a control register.

>> No.9138721

>>9138624
True, as per this guy you have to enable bit 7 of register 1: https://www.plutiedev.com/mirror/kabuto-hardware-notes#128k-abuse

Meaning that a Genesis 2 with 128K of VRAM would have been natively backwards compatible with existing games, since they didn't touch it (it would've caused garbled output on 64K models).
Guess they didn't do it because of potential customer confusion over Genesis 1 vs Genesis 2 compatible games.

>> No.9138749

yeah the VDP didn't come out to the cartridge slot but then no consoles did that other than NES and Neo Geo

>> No.9138805

>>9138162
It's not unfixable. The 32X "fixed" it. But it would have required a similar solution of mixing the video outs and nonsense like that. It would probably have made the Sega CD way too expensive at the time. It launched at like $300 as it was.

>> No.9138824

>>9136686
SMB3 was 2 years old when it got an international release. Industry insiders knew this and there were criticisms of it as being outdated for 1990 standards.

>> No.9138943

>>9138805
It's not so much a fix as a patch job; the Genesis GPU is delegated to running some background layers IIRC, which are then mixed into the image provided by the 32X.

>> No.9138949
File: 476 KB, 1200x1027, SEGA-Genesis-1-cd-1-32x-cables[1].jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
9138949

>>9138943
Yep, the video passthrough cable is an ugly hack.

>> No.9138963

>>9138949
Oh yeah, having all three combined is an absolute mess of cables, plus three separate power warts.
Though the Series 2 does away with the Sega CD audio mixing cable, due to its stereo main output.

>> No.9138998

>>9138943
>mixed into the image
Not even that; really all that's happening is that the Genesis renders everything on it's side and then sends the final frame to the 32X, which can only put it's layer of graphics in front of or behind the Genesis' layers. It's a very inflexible solution as a result, not very helpful.

>> No.9139006

>>9138998
True, it's both limited and limiting in terms of capability.

This is why I've always maintained that the Genesis, as designed, was poorly suited to performance expansion via add-on processors. Which makes the irony even more bitter, given that they've tried it twice.

>> No.9139014

>>9138624
You're right, I forgot about that.

>> No.9139026

>>9139006
This is why I think a SNES CD would have worked out much better. More processing power and RAM could have been added seamlessly and the video hardware was good enough not to bottleneck too much.

>> No.9139062

>>9139026
It's juut so frustrating that the Genesis could have been more than capable of using add-ons, had it been designed better, and specifically designed to be expanded, from the beginning.

>> No.9139105

>>9138998
It does help free up the Genesis to push more colors at once for the specific things being done on it's end since it's entire job is limited to a single background layer or something. MKII's backgrounds were done on the Genesis side and they look way better for it.

https://youtu.be/lAcknPOgzTM

>> No.9139145

>>9138998
The way the hardware had to interact was limited, yes, but that isn't all that important in the grand scheme. You're basically turning the Genesis into something akin to the way the Saturn's VDP1 would mix it's output with VDP2 before sending the combined image to the frame buffer. A perfectly serviceable version of Rayman could have been done on the 32X for sure.

>> No.9139209

>>9139145
>You're basically turning the Genesis into something akin to the way the Saturn's VDP1 would mix it's output with VDP2 before sending the combined image to the frame buffer.
I mean, that was a pain in the ass for Saturn games too.

>> No.9139295

>>9139062
The SNES wasn't really much better at it, it just benefitted more from the extra cpu grunt.

>> No.9139410

>>9132393
>>9132342
counter shiturn should've been japan exclusive while the rest of us got the 32x both would've at least done better than they did (32x would've sold much more since there'd be no saturn incoming and the genesis and cd audience was quite big and saturn would've at least sold the same amount as units barely sold outside of japan and its life may not have been cut short that way besides considering the 32x and saturn had similar internals at least a majority of games could release on both then genesis could probably say they outsold the snes by just staying relevant longer and by the time a theoretical dreamcast releases they'd be in less of a hole have more money and not have turned their own fans against them

>> No.9139424

>>9133934
the cds main flaw was just having way too much of its library be shitty fmvs instead of actual games

>> No.9139437

>>9133939
grante the colecovision got fucked over hard by releasing just before atari and mattel almost killed the home video market by being shit and having second consoles that were only a bit stronger than their former consoles and relasing ports of games people already had

>> No.9139448

>>9134134
atari was decent they just fucked up with the 5200 basically having mostly games that were already on the 2600 the intellivision on the otherhand

>> No.9139453

>>9134229
yeah and while they could kind of keep up with nintendo once sony came along and sega spent more time reacting to them they lost almost immediately

>> No.9139462

>>9132618
SoJ and SoAs fued really did a lot to destroy sega mainly on sojs part since they just fucking despised soa

>> No.9139473

>>9132627
both sides were run by complete idiots so much so that the dreamcasts own existence was because they were too stupid to quit and they got bailed out at the last second when their debt was forgiven because an important investor of sega died

>> No.9139482

>>9137702
Kek

>> No.9139486

>>9139473
Wasn't old man Ohkawa one of the original founders of Service Games, alongside Rosen?

>> No.9139496

>>9139486
yes thats who i was thinking of

>> No.9139513

>>9139462
this is a myth btw. SOJ didn't hate them in fact they were happy that the overseas divisions were making an actual profit which they weren't in Japan.

>> No.9139596

>>9139513
SoA only receiving a display case of the Sega CD, and having to piece together a functional prototype (which was ironically better than the release version, since it used an actual CD-ROM) kinda sours that point somewhat.

>> No.9139670

Look, I have a soft spot for the 32x, and I think that it had a few cool titles on it, but it REALLY did not have to exist. It’s ridiculous, wasn’t the Saturn already announced and unveiled? It’s like if Nintendo released some sort of hardware add on in 2010 for the Wii or some shit. It just did not need to exist, have the Saturn compete with the two big 32 and 64 but consoles coming out. Look to the future, not try and extend the fucking Genesis’ lifespan

>> No.9139678

>>9139670
I agree, they had the cart acceleration like in virtual racing, plus the cd format still had life coming out of the gimmick phase.

They could have CR the CD and gotten at least five more years from it.

>> No.9139687

>>9139670
Extending the Genesis's lifespan wasn't even a bad idea, it was just never going to happen as long as it depended on stupid addons.

>> No.9139710

>SOJ are horrified to discover warehouses full of mountains of unsold Mega Drives because SOA in 1995 kept ordering them at 1992 level of demand
>all the while SOA are neglecting to translate Saturn documentation into English

>> No.9139795

>>9139710
isn't it impressive how much of a slow motion train wreck Sega was?

>> No.9139920

>>9139710
Soa really did sabotage the saturn for no fucking reason

>> No.9140027

>>9139670
Is the 32X really any different than the Virtual Boy was? It's weird how both are recognized as failures but people hold the 32X against Sega way more than they hold the Virtual Boy against Nintendo.

>> No.9140321

Sega were always followers not leaders. reacting to the Famicom, reacting to the PC Engine, reacting to the PS1.

>> No.9140334

>>9140027
VB had Red Alarm

>> No.9140349

>>9140321
Nintendo were the same outside their handhelds. they reverse engineered a bunch of chips to make the NES and the SNES came out after the competition had next gen consoles. their post-SNES consoles didn't lead anything except maybe experimental controller designs.

>> No.9140350

>>9132434
honestly the sega cd may have had too much hardware when compared to the pc engine's cdrom add on, which was cheap af in comparison (in Japan, we all know how badly NEC fucked up in the US market). A lot of the sega cd's best titles barely use the sega cd's hardware beyond expanded ram to offset the amount of loads needing to occur. There's a reason that NEC transitioned to only cd titles for the last half of the system's lifetime while sega dropped the cd before the base genesis

>> No.9140364

>>9140349
No. There was no proper cartridge-based console in Japan before the Famicom, they were a whopping 7 years behind the US (the Fairchild Channel F came out in 1976). They also invented the home console game as more than just an arcade port. The N64 also defined the 3D platformer and made it a viable format. Sega did nothing of the sort, they were always trying to answer their competitors.

>> No.9140393

>>9140350
>A lot of the sega cd's best titles barely use the sega cd's hardware beyond expanded ram to offset the amount of loads needing to occur.

Not every game could find a use for the hardware scaling sprites and mode 7 playingfields. But yeah, there were quite a few Genesis/ MD to Sega/ Mega CD ports that are the same game + redbook audio. Sonic CD used the hardware well. Silpheed is a good example of using the Sega CD hardware:
https://youtu.be/Crjgu2aE1QE?t=638
Silpheed uses FMV backgrounds, it has some polygon enemies (low poly objects) , it does use the Sega CD scaling for some 2D objects in the game. Like for power-ups. The in-game audipo uses the 8-channel PCM chip. Starblade also makes good use of the hardware:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UdBd5EP-09o
Adventures of Batman and Robin:
https://youtu.be/u6jCuU5ay9o?t=143
Battlecorps:
https://youtu.be/Ysd-F-ti1ks?t=52
Final Fight CD is a great arcade port:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-Ly3ByTuUQ&t=552s
2D games on the Sega CD don't generally look much different from their Genesis/ MD counterparts. The CD format does allow for more tiles/ sprites/ objects, audio enhancements, etc.

>> No.9140412

Wild Woody is proof of why SOA should have never been allowed to make games.

>> No.9140441

>>9136681
You didn't need a fucking $160 dongle to play them.

>> No.9140715

>>9140393
>https://youtu.be/u6jCuU5ay9o?t=143
What is going on with the music during the FMV scenes? It sounds nothing like the show.

>> No.9140726

>>9140393
Scaling is possible in stock genesis, too bad they never did it back then

>> No.9140869

>>9140715
>What is going on with the music during the FMV scenes? It sounds nothing like the show.

I really don't know why. But Spencer Nielsen did the score for the animated cutscenes. maybe they couldn't use the show theme for reasons?

>>9140726
>Scaling is possible in stock genesis, too bad they never did it back then

maybe through some sort of software routines. But the Sega CD has an ASIC chip that can display multiple mode 7-like playing fields and also scale sprites through hardware.

https://youtu.be/w0NDUj3QBdA?t=58
https://youtu.be/rObi13jlNy4?t=2257
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-P-j51xLPE&t=413s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SITjIIUbjs
https://youtu.be/mZBmz3-JdX0?t=1178
https://youtu.be/T1jolV7IyHk?t=190
Though framerates seem to be limited to about 20fps in many cases.

>> No.9140912

>>9140869
>Though framerates seem to be limited to about 20fps in many cases.
I suspect (though somebody else can correct me) it's due to that lack of double buffered write (128K mode) I've mentioned earlier.

>> No.9141010

>>9140912
It's not so much a lack of double buffering as just that there isn't enough bandwidth. 128K mode would allow you to double buffer, sure, although some of these games might be doing that already depending on screensize, but it doubles the bandwidth.

>> No.9141145

>>9139424
It had gimmicks but there are good games in that library including the greatest fmv of all time.

>> No.9141146

>>9141010
It had too much baggage from its TI DNA.

>> No.9142090

>>9141145
I hope you're talking about Sewer Shark because that game is legitimately amazing.

>> No.9142185

>>9140912
>I suspect (though somebody else can correct me) it's due to that lack of double buffered write (128K mode) I've mentioned earlier.

128k VRAM mode does not allow double buffering, the memory is set up interleaved and both chips are always active. What it does help with is giving you double the bandwidth, which would've allowed for far larger framerates in any games that send bitmaps to display (rewriting a large amount of tiles per frame to display). Games like the 3D sections in Toy Story, Zero Tolerance, Ranger X cutscenes, every Mega CD scaling effect, even Virtua Racing would've ran at far higher framerates because they could've pumped new tiles into VRAM twice as fast.

>> No.9142205

>>9138805
I think he means doing something like upgrading the Genesis VDP with the extra features in a backwards compatible new console, instead of the add-on tomfoolery. Like, have the Genesis 2 which is basically a Genesis with a CD drive, native scaling, PCM sound, and twice the color count.

fun fact: the Genesis VDP can do 128 colors max, 64 using internal CRAM, plus 64 more using external CRAM. The external memory was never added.
They also had sprite scaling on the VDP initially, but it made the chip too large and had to be removed. They should've kept that in and instead have all CRAM be external, since it ate a large portion of the chip space.

>> No.9142224

>>9141146
So fucking true. Luv me tms, but byte banging video in the year of our lord 1988. What were they thinking.

>> No.9142229

>>9141146
yeah big deal all of Nintendo's 2D consoles had the same lineage from the TMS9918

>> No.9142260

>>9142185
Oh, I stand corrected, then.

>would've ran at far higher framerates because they could've pumped new tiles into VRAM twice as fast.
Which means that they could've had games using the SVP (or something like it) running at actually decent fps, instead of the slideshows they turned out to be, right?

>> No.9142743

We'd be having a different conversation had the 32X had a better library. Knuckles Chaotix is pretty bad and so is it's version of Doom and those are probably the two games most people played on the thing. Had there been a Sonic CD equivalent or a few Capcom fighting games or that Castlevania that got canceled, people would give it a little bit of credit as a nifty experiment rather than trash on it.

>> No.9142757

>>9142229
They did make them expandable and brought the video chip out to the cartridge slot though.

>> No.9142785

>>9142757
Nintendo had a great engineering philosophy. Sega wanted to shrink it's System 16 arcade board down to consumer levels and that was what they did. Nintendo recognized it was cheaping out in critical areas so made sure that they built expandability into the architecture and also that the areas where they were saving costs were judicious. For example they knew they could use a slower CPU because any additional horsepower could be offloaded to the cartridges that needed it. That's a lot tricker if you need to push more colors or something, so they made sure the PPUs were top notch.

>> No.9142830

>>9142785
What a load of yippety-yap. The Megadrive was designed to shift sprites and there's no denying it could do so better than the competition.

>> No.9142904

>>9142185
i'm not sure if you were trying to say it's not possible, but you definitely can use double buffering with either 64K or 128K mode, it just depends on how much RAM and VRAM you have available and how large your bitmap is.

>> No.9142906

>>9142830
not who you responded to, but stop posting on here and write some code, until then you're a larper

>> No.9142908

>>9142785
game designers *
most nintendo consoles were crap

>> No.9142910

>>9140869
Few more Sega Cd scaling showcases:
Batman Returns (menus and cutscenes use scaling sprites and rotational effects to nice use) https://youtu.be/ZMc0IDbkzCs?t=46
Jaguar XJ220:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2l5gvlXi4PU
Cliffhanger bonus stages (The game is still the same horrible Cliffhanger Genesis/ MD game, with some FMV cutscenes from the movie, a CD soundtrack and some neat bonus stages.) :
https://youtu.be/i5Sjh5xScdI?t=392
AfterBurner III:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMM-ZrVCIrE
https://youtu.be/i5Sjh5xScdI?t=392

I'm sure there are a few more that i can't think of, but that is about it for all the main titles. Sonic Cd used it as well for the bonus stages. The scaling and rotation features of the Sega CD were not fully ignored. But it is a shame that Sega didn't try something like OutRunners on the Sega CD, or some more super scaler games. Sega of America did invest more in the movie aspect of the console. Though, the last game they released was Adventures of Batman and Robin in 1995. Which was the last North American Sega CD game.

>> No.9142913

>>9142743
Chaotix is one of the best 16bit platformers, and he wasn't the reason 32x was a failure.

>> No.9142949

>>9142906
Proof's in the pudding.

>> No.9142976

>>9142785
Nintendo scoped the 65816 because they planned on back compat but dumped that idea late in the process.

>> No.9143070

>>9142785
>Nintendo had a great engineering philosophy
the NES couldn't even do R-Type due to its sprite limitations while ZX Spectrum master race had no issue with the game

>> No.9143087

>>9142949
Yes, go write some code for both systems and find out what's true first hand. There's your pudding.

>> No.9143094

>>9142910
interesting tidbit about jaguar xj220, it's actually all software rendered, because the developer did some benchmarks, made a mistake, and concluded that the 68k could scale graphics faster than the scaling chip. They recognized the mistake while working on soulstar, which has quite a few more effects going on.

>> No.9143394

>>9140364
The SG1000 was launched on the same day as famicom.

>> No.9143450

>>9140364
You're joking right? Atari had great unique home games like Adventure and Pitfall. Both of which nintendo ripped off.

>> No.9143493

>>9140364
Pretty sure the Atari VCS made it to Japan in the early 80s.

>> No.9143502

>>9132285
It's actually a smart thought but an example of "too soon junior." There were several chips that could have been used at the same cost had it been given more time. Trouble is, people only buy things once. On these terms.

>> No.9144136

>>9142906
Not who you coped to, but stop posting on here and write some code, until then you're a larper. What's good for the goose is good for the gander.

>> No.9144914

>>9143502
>people only buy things once.
That's why grandma's xmas present is always undies and socks, you filthy animal

>> No.9144984

Do you think Sega would've been crazy enough to have Saturn play Genesis games if 32X didn't happen?

>> No.9144992

>>9144984
Nah, Saturn shared nothing with Genesis architecturally and Japan hated MD.

>> No.9145283
File: 487 KB, 1600x1112, Multimega.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
9145283

>>9144992

Yeah that's where Sega went wrong. USA had the market but it needed the JP backing to do something like make pic related very cheap. For the tail end of the platform a cheap standard CD along with compilation CDs of games would have been a nice earner and kept brand loyalty. The 32x was a mistake it was obviously going to fail even at the time.

>> No.9145305

>>9132285
All Sega had to do was increase the color depth and gamut and put in a chip to handle transparencies, scaling and all the other FX to match the Super NES which should have been included in the Sega CD making the 32X not necessary with the Saturn in the pipeline.

>> No.9145626

>>9145305
The genesis is not graphically expandable. The only way to get more colors is to a complete graphics chip. At that point why even bother with an add on you have pretty much made an entire stand-alone console at that point.

>> No.9145631

>>9145305
Stock genesis is able to do all these things with good performance

>> No.9145907

>>9144136
i am writing code right now

>> No.9146080

>>9145907
But of course you are, sweatie

>> No.9146086

>>9132352
Basically this, Japan kind of just forced the Saturn on everyone regardless of whether or not we wanted it. It worked in Japan and no where else. A CDX or Neptune with more games would've been way more popular and would've seen more titles people in the west actually enjoy, like Sonic, Ecco, Streets of Rage etc.

I'll also go ahead and say this, Virtua Racing Deluxe and Virtua Fighter 1 are way better on 32X compared to the Saturn versions, despite the weaker hardware. The Genesis itself was also supported up until the end of the Saturn's lifespan with stuff like the Vectorman games and eventually Frogger.

>> No.9146656

>>9145907
Must be a lot of code. Looking forward to seeing is.

>> No.9147184

>>9136682
This is factually incorrect. Literally read a book. Japan wanted what became the 32X as a stopgap. Their concept was an even worse idea, when the US branch pushed back they agreed on an add-on for the Genesis instead. I don't remember all of the exact details but the Genesis (pun intended) of the product was entirely Japan's initiative. US didn't wanna do it.

>> No.9147206

>>9146086
It would still bomb. There was just no way you could keep milking the Genesis and its 1988 hardware and 7Mhz CPU when PS1 was a thing.

>> No.9147370

>>9147184
What was Japan's concept for the 32X? There's nothing inherently wrong with a stopgap. What was dumb was a stopgap combined with a rush to make the Saturn beat the PS1 to market. Genesis add-ons weren't the biggest problem here. It was that Sega of Japan felt the need to get into a footrace with Sony out of sheer panic that not being first would spell doom. But all that did was force the Saturn to sport a crude architecture, drive up costs, and limit the amount of quality software that would be available for launch. Nintendo delayed the N64 for an entire YEAR even after a heavy marketing blitz and still managed to nearly tie Sega in Japan and blow them out of the water overseas.

If Sega wanted a good strategy they should have released the 32X or some equivalent for 1994 and then let the Saturn cook for a fall 1995 launch. It's not like the PS1 was instantly dominating prior to 1996 anyway. Hell, the N64 delay probably hurt Nintendo a lot in that respect but Sega completely botched the Saturn entirely because they were so terribly afraid of Sony's mere existence that they self sabotaged.

The only reason I can think of for pushing the Saturn out the door that quickly is that they wanted to get Virtua Fighter in people's homes ASAP. But the 32X proves that could have been done without the Saturn. Leave VF1 for the Genesis add-on and launch Saturn in 1995 with Virtua Fighter 2.

>> No.9147449

>>9142913
Lol no it isn't. It's got great aesthetics (though that's subjective) but it's clearly an unfinished game that was rushed to make it onto the 32X before it was discontinued. If it weren't it's hard to say how the game would've turned out: the games main mechanic (the 2-player rubber banding) is such a detriment to the overall game design (it being the key reason levels are mostly large empty vertical hallways with near harmless enemies) that it would likely have needed a ton of refinement if not be outright scrapped had the dev team had more development time. And just by modifying that you'd then have to rethink a good portion of the game, which frankly could use a good re-working anyway.

Honestly if there's any game I'd like to see a real remake of (by a competent dev team) it's Chaotix, as the potential is there but the final implementation is just not very good.

>> No.9147470

>>9142205
>They also had sprite scaling on the VDP initially, but it made the chip too large and had to be removed. They should've kept that in and instead have all CRAM be external, since it ate a large portion of the chip space.

They couldn't have kept that in because they needed room on the VDP for hardware related to Master System backwards compatibility. The PSG chip is actually embeded in the VDP for some reason, so I wouldn't be surprised it was that that took up the space.

>> No.9147492

>>9147470
Did they have any other custom silicon in the Genesis? Console GPUs often have a grab bag of bespoke functionality simply because the rest of the console is off the shelf chips.

>> No.9147514

>>9147492
Aside from the VDP? No, everything is off the shelves (or a variant of an off the shelf component), so I suppose if you could cram what would be multiple chips into one it would help to lower manufacturing costs.

>> No.9147842

>>9147370
>There's nothing inherently wrong with a stopgap
t. consoomer

>> No.9148241

>>9147492
>>9147514
The original genesis appears to have 3 custom chips.

>> No.9148370

>>9135465
The Genesis 3 is the best one for cutting out all of the gay add-on support. Also, Majesco were the ones that released it under a license from Sega.
t. Genesis 3 owner

>> No.9149010

Genesis delivered 16-bit gaming to perfection. The CD was a great addon as evidenced by stunning games like Final Fight CD.

>> No.9151421

bump

>> No.9151536

>>9132325
The 32X port is only 30fps compared to the 60fps arcade version