How the Dreamcast could've been saved

[Anonymous No.9675076]

PowerVR2 was too expensive. Introducing the i740 GPU. It was the first graphic accelerator card that accessed texture data from the main RAM through the AGP port instead of a dedicated VRAM, it's the same technology used in intel HD, AMD APU, laptops, and modern consoles. Thanks to the lack of onboard memory it was really cheap, costing around $100 less than it's cheapest competitors such as the Banshee, and in the Asian markets where intel was dumping their stocks it reportedly was sold for as low as $17. Performance sucked, but that's caused by how games in the late 90s started using multi layered textures, which the poor AGP memory bandwith and shared bus with the CPU couldn't handle. With small, single layered textures akin to the N64, the i740 might've had performed a lot better. Not too difficult to optimise for.

With this immense cost reduction, SEGA didn't have to bleed money manufacturing the Dreamcast. Sure, the graphical quality would have been worse, but there would be no downgrade in shading, post processing effects, and resolution, and it would cost approximately 50% less to produce the console units. It wouldn't compete against the PS2, but it would surely have been so much cheaper, while offering a very clear visual and performance upgrade from the N64.

[Anonymous No.9675079]

>>9675076
Dreamcast was fine
The rot was in Sega itself

[Anonymous No.9675083]

>>9675079
>Dreamcast was fine
Nope. There were production issues and the selling price was too low.

[Anonymous No.9675127]

>>9675083
>>9675079
Sega never knew how to make hardware. They got lucky sometimes. I don't know how fanboys see anything good in the company (other than specific games)

[Anonymous No.9675179]

>>9675127
>Sega never knew how to make hardware.

when their fail rates approach Sony or *gasp* MS, get back to us.

production issues is going to mean ability to deliver, not shoddy quality off the line.

>>9675079
this. the business was on a downward spiral and made several bad decisions, probably to do with japanese business culture in its selection of manufacturing partners.

[Anonymous No.9675198]

>>9675076
Wow. These "save sega" threads are always retarded but this is a new low.

[Anonymous No.9675205]

as a former i740 owner that GPU was horseshit

[Anonymous No.9675281]

>>9675205
It was pretty fucking horseshit yes

[Anonymous No.9675329]

>>9675076
Nah, they should've stopped being asshurt retards and launched the VoodooCast one year earlier (and padded their launch lineup with Glide ports). Their idiotic fight with 3dfx ultimately fucked over both companies.
>But the PowerVR2 was a better design than Voodoo 2.5
Power ain't everything.

[Anonymous No.9675340]

>>9675329
Retard, 3Dfx fucked over themselves. Sega didn't give them the idea to manufacture cards themselves. Or taking years to design a new chip.

[Anonymous No.9675348]

>>9675340
The idea to become an actual manufacturer (so direct competition with card makers) was amazingly fucktarded, I'll give you that, but they would've at least had an income lifeline. Remember that AMD only had the console contracts in 2012, and *all* their products were vastly shittier than their competitors' (well, okay, the Jaguar was slightly better than the Atom, but nobody in the laptop space gave a fuck). Their share price was under $3 in winter 2012-2013.

[Anonymous No.9675353]

>>9675083
>the selling price was too low.

When I got my Dreamcast, Sega was doing the SegaNET $100.00 rebate deal, and I remember getting two $100.00 rebates in the mail a day apart from each other, basically getting my Dreamcast for free. Forget about underselling, they gave it to me for free.

[Anonymous No.9675369]

>>9675205
>>9675281
Games were not optimized for i740. Also the point is saving money.

[Anonymous No.9676070]

>>9675198
I bet your idea is even worse.

[Anonymous No.9676108]

>>9676070
My idea is delay the Dreamcast to 1999 (for Japan), get the Geforce 256. Japan absolutely did not need the Dreamcast in 1998, and would alleviate stock issues.
Cut the modem. "But Isao Okawa personally sponsored the modem thus no modem cost-" well try to convince him to sponsor an Ethernet modem, or a DVD drive, or a bigger memory card, or a second controller. Nobody wanted that dial-up modem except sega cultists trying to convince people that the online was revolutionaires (it wasn't).

[Anonymous No.9676125]

>>9676108
>Japan absolutely did not need the Dreamcast in 1998
They stopped making the Saturn in 1997 because they kept losing money on each console sold, they absolutely needed the Dreamcast and have been planning on axing the Saturn basically as early as it came out.

>Ethernet modem
that wasn't a thing in 1998. The DC didn't even have a 56k modem in Japan because that wasn't a thing in 1998, it shipped with a 33k one and got the 56k for the US release.

>or a DVD drive,
they would've had to pay licensing to Sony and add extra hardware for DVD MPEG2 decoding (which was a huge thing in 1998, you could buy dedicated mpeg2 decoder cards for PCs at the time, those stopped being a thing circa 2001 due to cpus catching up, gpus getting hardware offloading, and faster-than-hardware encoders becoming available... I think TMPEGEnc was the first).

>or a bigger memory card,
But then they lose the money on the peripheral sales. If anything, the cards should've been smaller. Remember, the original Playstation cards only offered 15 saves max, and some games used all 15 blocks per save. Dreamcast VMU was fuckhuge compared to that.

[Anonymous No.9676139]

>>9675353
>they gave it to me for free.
Do you realize what this means?

[Anonymous No.9676182]

>>9676125
>because they kept losing money on each console sold
Well that's no news to anybody, because the Dreamcast was also losing money on each console sold. You know what did sell in Japan? Saturn software. You know what had no games? The Dreamcast in 1998.
As a bonus, Sega learned absolutely nothing from the Saturn western launch and pissed off Japanese developers with games in the pipeline for Saturn.
>VMU
Dreamcast memory cards have the same capacity as PS1 cards, and many games did wipe out that much space. And it looks pretty dumb next to the PS2 card, which had literally 64 times the capacity. The average person could store saves for every games they own, twice over, and still had space for more.

[Anonymous No.9676252]

>>9676108
>delay to 1999
And lose to the PS2. I think the dreamcast needed to be released in late 1997 to make it compete directly against the N64. Even a simple i740 dreamcast would screw the N64 over.
>Geforce 256
That thing was $259, sega would struggle selling the DC at a lower price than the PS2. Compare that to the $7 dumping price of i740 in taiwan.
>Ethernet modem
Nobody really used that before the original xbox.
>DVD drive
The hardware and licensing were still expensive. GD-ROM was alright, the transfer rate and access time were only slightly slower than DVD drives.
>bigger memory card
According to this forecast, the cost of a 1MB flash memory would be around $10 or more. It's not too economical yet.
https://smithsonianchips.si.edu/ice/cd/MEMORY97/SEC05.PDF

[Anonymous No.9676329]

Turok runs over 100 fps with the i740. Maybe because it's a N64 port. The i740 could run N64 games much faster than the native console and at a much lower cost because N64's RDRAM was truly expensive. Dreamcast could've been the N64 killer with this GPU.

[Anonymous No.9676330]

>>9675076
good bait

[Anonymous No.9676357]

Why didnt sega just take a celeron pc, paint it black and put a big green x onto it?

[Anonymous No.9676385]

>>9676357
Didn't Microsoft do just that in 2001?

[Anonymous No.9676387]

>>9676385
It's actually a Pentium 3 PC.

[Anonymous No.9676394]

>>9676387
I know it's based on Coppermine, but I remember that it was closer to a Celeron in layout and reduced cache.

[Anonymous No.9676398]

>>9676387
>>9676394
It's a hybrid
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Pentium_III_processors#Videogame_consoles

[Anonymous No.9676435]

>>9675329
>Power ain't everything.
PVR2 was also more efficient and cheaper. Really, it was perfect for a low power console. It's only fault was that it didn't have any "new" tech in it, it just maxed out DirectX6 as efficiently as possible. For 1998 it was a killer, it was only really outclassed by 2-3 years newer hardware.

PowerVR chips were good enough that they also powered the iPhone and the majority of smartphones even to this day, and also the PSP.

[Anonymous No.9676453]

>>9676182
Dreamcast was making money on console sales in Japan early on, and would have in the USA if they sold it for the intended $250 (Bernie fucked them over as a good bye gift by announcing it for $200). Saturn software still kept selling in 1998 in japan.

>Sega learned absolutely nothing from the Saturn western launch
the fuck you talking about, the DC launch was so big it made it into the Guinness Book of Records.

>it looks pretty dumb next to the PS2 card
are we criticizing a console for not including shit that became standard later? PS2 also looked dumb for not having internet connection when everything else did, Megadrive looked dumb for only having 3+1 buttons (even though that was the standard for 1988), Dreamcast was dumb for not having dual analog controller even though maybe two games existed at the time that used both analog sticks on the dualshock, 360 looked dumb for not having HDMI (which only started getting added to TVs a year ago) etc...

[Anonymous No.9676479]

>>9676329
Turok renders maybe one hundred polygons on the screen per frame unless you are standing two feet away of anything. It has so much fog that it makes Silent Hill look like a sunny summer town. A fucking Amiga could run it at playable speeds (up until enemies show up, anyway).

[Anonymous No.9676496]

>>9675369
Irrelevant points. That GPU is shit, and the Dreamcast manufacturing cost isn't what killed the Dreamcast. Hell it's confusing why you'd explicitly pick on the GPU, given that it was easily the most power:cost part of the Dreamcast. It's also confusing as to why you think the i740 was cheap. It wasn't. It was a card sold at low margins in order to push the AGP standard. The Dreamcast in no way pushes the AGP standard so they aren't going to get a discount from Intel.

Your idea is stupid and doesn't understand what's going on in the first place.

[Anonymous No.9676591]

>>9675076
The only possible for that GPU to be cost saving is if you're upgrading a GPU in your computer that you already own with RAM to use. Compared to that, consoles are sold as one unit, making any possible benefit of the i740 pointless.

[Anonymous No.9676754]

>>9675076
I don't think it was a hardware issue

My "Save Sega" strategy would entail

>Sega of Japan telling Sega of America to screw off with attachments like 32X
>Sega skipping bringing SegaCD to the US like Nintendo did with the Famicom Disk System
It made sense to have the SegaCD in Japan to compete with the PC Engine CD. Skipping the Disk System in the US was good advice from the US Nintendo division because carts caught up by then in tech, Sega of America gave the opposite bad advice
>More focus on bringing anime and Japanese games to the west for the Saturn
There was a killer selection for weebs that never made it out of Japan. Sega of America focused way too much on sport games but got destroyed when Microsoft came out with a console. This would give them another niche gaming base.
>not completely abandoning the Saturn in the US so console buyers still had something to work with, Nintendo still published games for older systems
>Main Sonic game for the Saturn, perhaps actually allowing Sonic Xtreme to be released
>Not abandoning the Dreamcast too soon like they did.
Plenty of games were still being made down the line, Sega just pulled right out of the Dreamcast even though they could have been fine supporting it for a few more years.

something like that

[Anonymous No.9676767]

>>9675076
The best thing about the dreamcast was it had an actual 3d gpu rather than a obsolete 2d triangle accelerator. Replacing the PowerVR2 would ruin it.

[Anonymous No.9676997]

>>9676070
My idea is perfect. Point and laugh, but never join a group of tween downies in a circle jerk.

[Anonymous No.9677102]

>>9676453
>Bernie fucked them over as a good bye gift by announcing it for $200
Guess where he learned the $200 price tag was probably OK. The Japanese definitely didn't drop the price to $200 before him.
>the fuck you talking about, the DC launch was so big it made it into the Guinness Book of Records.
Read the entire sentence, again.

[Anonymous No.9677130]

>>9675127
????
With all those genre-first arcade games? Really?

[Anonymous No.9677145]

>>9677130
Being first doesn't necessarily mean being right. The Atari 5200 had the first analog stick on consoles, do you see their name being trotted around when analog sticks are talked about?

[Anonymous No.9677167]

>>9676357
Because x86 was not cheap.

>>9676496
>that GPU was shit
For multitextured games that started to dominate the late 90s PC gaming. Look at how well it runs a N64 port of Turok compared to other cards at the time. Games could be optimized for i740.
>the Dreamcast manufacturing cost isn't what killed the Dreamcast
False. Sega was bleeding money selling the consoles and coping with the manufacturing problems over at NEC. Also it was released a year too late. With the i740 or RIVA 128, a 1997 release would've been possible and the DC could be the N64 killer instead of a poor man's PS2/gamecube.
>Hell it's confusing why you'd explicitly pick on the GPU, given that it was easily the most power:cost part of the Dreamcast.
That's quite false. The Neon 250 failed to compete with cheaper GPUs at the time like the TNT. It was more expensive and significantly slower. Sure games could be optimized for the PowerVR2/neon250, but they could also be optimized for the Riva 128, which used a different performance boosting and cost saving method (polygon mipmapping, quad texture mapping, AGP support), and at a much lower price than the videologic technology.
>It was a card sold at low margins in order to push the AGP standard.
The popular gpus like the banshee and the riva used the AGP port, so thats not the point of i740. It was cheap because it only carried a framebuffer VRAM.
>The Dreamcast in no way pushes the AGP standard so they aren't going to get a discount from Intel.
The DC would need an AGP port and no PCi port had it gone with thr i740, and so would its successors, so yes they were.

>>9676591
It would still be memory efficient and the CPU didn't have to perform texture and display list transfering from the main RAM to the VRAM. Plus the i740 could display better image quality using smaller textures.

>>9676479
The i740 was great at throwing geometry around actually, so the opposite happened. Turok's textures were really optimized for unified memory.

[Anonymous No.9677204]

>>9676435
>PowerVR chips were good enough that they also powered the iPhone and the majority of smartphones even to this day, and also the PSP.
Just because they're the most cost efficient now doesn't mean they were the most cost efficient back then. Modern GPU chips are fabricated for textured rendering but back then they were not.

>>9677130
Sega arcade games were aimed at the lowest common denominator. They had astonishing graphics for the time, but ultimately not much depth in gameplay. They didn't age well and certainly didn't save the arcade industry from collapsing.

[Anonymous No.9677219]

>>9675076
How many times are you fags going to say “more power is what the console needed”
It is demonstrably untrue
The problem has never been the hardware, it’s always been SEGA
Even now they make such shitty decisions with glimmers of good ones

[Anonymous No.9677262]

>>9677219
>more power is what the console needed
Exactly the opposite. I argued that the DC should've used cheaper parts.

[Anonymous No.9677392]

>>9677219
This. I have several DCs. The japan ones run off 100v. The youropoor ones need at least 220v. Euroshite is objectively worse, so clearly more power makes the system worse. Science!

[Anonymous No.9677462]

>>9675076
>>9676252
Ah yes, if only the Dreamcast had shittier hardware and came out even closer to the Saturn, it wouldn't have flopped... give me a break.

Consumers would not line up for a souped-up PlayStation knockoff that couldn't even play DVDs (not to mention all the other hype around the PS2 could supposedly do).

I personally loved the DC, but in the day, my friends gave me shit for owning one and deemed it the "Cheapcast" the minute the PS2 was released. Putting a garbage-tier i740 in it would have only made things worse overall.

desu I'm not sure there's anything they could have done to actually compete against Sony; they were fucked, even Xbox was a money pit for MS, Sega just couldn't afford to compete anymore.

[Anonymous No.9678678]

This is the Geforce 256 difference. This is what we have to strive for.

[Anonymous No.9678723]

>>9678678
The Savage 2000 was as fast as the non-DDR RAM Geforce? Huh, I had no idea, I thought it was some sort of meme card, given S3's previous attempts.
Also
>Uses Mendocino Celeron
>Doesn't use the famous 300 MHz one overclocked to 450 MHz
I am dissapoint.

[Anonymous No.9678841]

>>9676754
>There was a killer selection for weebs that never made it out of Japan.

weebs were a minimal subculture at that point, and it made no financial sense to focus on games for them. They didn't become more important until the turn of the millennium. Europe was more familiar with anime (a lot of european properties were turned into anime, plus the French were huge weebs since the 80s) and had a lot more weeb games coming through, and they made fuck all difference.

There's a reason Puyo Puyo had to be localized as a Kirby or a Sonic game.

[Anonymous No.9678857]

>>9677204
>Just because they're the most cost efficient now doesn't mean they were the most cost efficient back then.

Powervr was also cost efficient back then. it used deferred tiled rendering, so it could draw geometry that other cards needed an order of magnitude more fillrate to draw. It also did texture compression. This meant it could get away with cheaper/less memory than competitors while doing the same quality graphics.

The fact it could do all this is the reason it became so big on mobiles some generations later, not the other way around. It was an emerging market that the chip was uniquely suited for, and no one else offered legitimate competition.

[Anonymous No.9678873]

>>9678723
>The Savage 2000 was as fast as the non-DDR RAM Geforce? Huh, I had no idea, I thought it was some sort of meme card, given S3's previous attempts.

Quake and its sequels were about the only games the S3 cards could run right. For everything else, you had to deal with shit performance, a ton of driver issues, missing textures, missing effects, etc.

[Anonymous No.9680302]

>>9677462
The PS2 info was merely rumored in 1997, and officially announced in 1999. The DC would've 2 years to sell. Given how fast it was to port PC games into the system, Sega could purchase the rights to port many PC games coming out in 1994-1997 to be ported into the system in no time. The PowerVR2 took another year to develop, too late for Sega.

>>9678857
>it could draw geometry that other cards needed an order of magnitude more fillrate to draw
It was slower at calculating geometry actually. The advantage it had was that it could simply draw only the visible textures, so it didn't require a fast bus to transfer Z calculation data, there's some sort of display list created by the GPU for that.
The i740 didn't have a bus speed problem because it took over the whole memory bus during rendering, it was faster at geometry calculations but really bad at rendering large textures. It was great for early 3D games but bad for games with the new multitexturing technology. Because of its AGP connection, it also ate up CPU time during RAM access unfortunately, but apparently it was still substantially faster than the first Voodoo card, or the PCI version of i740.

[Anonymous No.9681480]

>>9680302
>It was slower at calculating geometry actually.
It had no T&L so it couldn't calculate geometry at all. It was a rasterizer. Idiot.