>>11483552
>ohhh we have to do our jobs ohhh noooo thats so many jobs to do uoooooooh nintendo-sama please only develop for one console ooooooh its so hard to do my job im paid for in a cushy office uuuuuuuuuuugh
This is why miyamoto is a hack.

>>11483552
There was also a time when Nintendo was supporting SNES, N64, Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance at the same time (albeit briefly for GBA).

>>11483552
It's only a problem if you don't like Genesis, since most of those including SMS can be played on Genesis. Also they still do the last three, leaving only GG and Saturn

>>11483552
Very bad management. Sega Genesis absolutely fucking ruled and it made them shitloads of money, but they didn't invest it smartly and instead lost much of it.

>Sega CD
Wasn't a thundering success, but it sold ok, and Sega did this one because they saw that the Turbo-CD was a big hit in Japan, and they probably knew that Nintendo was working on a CD peripheral for the SNES with Sony.
There's a lot of garbage for this one, in large part owing to the FMV meme at the time, and a bunch of the titles are just re-releases with added CD music, but if you look through that library you'll also find some pretty damn good stuff too.

>32X
This one was a big fuckup, because not only did it cost them a lot of money and not give much of a return, they used a lot of hardware to make these which instead should have been used to build Sega Saturns, which then leads into the fact that while the Sega Saturn as a console was workable, it was catastrophically mismanaged in various ways, so they lost a lot of money on the Saturn as well.

The unfortunate reality then is that when Sega did basically all the right moves with the Dreamcast and made a good console which initially sold well and was received well, they were almost bankrupt by then and had to bail out. No more making new Dreamcasts, no more making new Dreamcast games or contracting devs to make them, and no more advertising the Dreamcast or its games.

>>11483587
Yes, but most of those were very well managed and made absurd riches for Nintendo, so they could afford to weather the N64 doing lukewarm business.

>>11483587
SNES and GBA never had overlap. Last SNES game was November 2000. Gameboy didn’t have any games past 1999 either.

>>11484669
This is of course not including their own add-ons such as as the FDS and 64DD, as well as the Virtual Boy which needs no introduction

>>11484673
Famicom, Super Famicom, and Game Boy consoles were both produced until 2003 and the last Game Boy games in Japan were both released in 2001.

>>11484669
FDS and 64DD made absurd riches?

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>>11485078
>>11485083
Why are you talking about the FDS and N64DD?
What I said was that Nintendo made absurd bank on NES, SNES, and Game Boy especially (Pokémania was fucking insane), which is why they could easily tolerate the N64 and GC not selling nearly as well, or the Virtual Boy being a complete flop.
For the N64DD, that wasn't a profit, but they realized during development that the juice really would not be worth the squeeze and so cut their losses with it, rather than going forward with spending money they knew wasn't gonna make enough of a return.

FDS probably DID make Nintendo some pretty good money during its short tenure, it's just that it grew obsolete during the Famicom's lifespan and they went back to carts, remember that it was made to reduce costs when chips were getting too expensive. Picture the FDS a bit like the console equivalent to old wood gas cars (just without the carbon monoxide hazard), they made sense for a certain time period.

Sega, meanwhile, had one seriously good success with the fabled Genesis, but then did a lot of stumbling and fumbling which had consequences they could not afford. They didn't have Nintendo-tier wealth to fall back on.

>>11483552
Maximum profit.

>>11483552
They didn't hire Bernie Stolar early enough

>>11485162
>Why are you talking about the FDS and N64DD?
This is literally "it's okay when Nintendo does it"

OP specifically mentioned SEGA CD and 32X despite not even being consoles

>>11485162
>FDS probably DID make Nintendo some pretty good money during its short tenure, it's just that it grew obsolete during the Famicom's lifespan and they went back to carts
More like it was always obsolete and never actually necessary, just like the 64DD

>>11485201
>More like it was always obsolete

Not true. The kind of things early FDS games did couldn't have been possible on cartridges. Cartridges matched that within a year though at which point it became a budget alternative for cheaper and usually smaller games.
Early 86 on FDS you had Zelda and Murasame Castle, while there was nothing comparable to that in scope and graphical detail in cartridge form until mid 86.

>>11485197
>"it's okay when Nintendo does it"
Maybe you should stop being such an autistic console warrior. I never once called the N64DD good, I also highlight how the N64 and Game Cube had pretty lukewarm market performance.
The point is that Nintendo were retard wealthy so they could afford to fuck up, while Sega was only mildly wealthy and could NOT afford their fuckups, which is why the Dreamcast eventually failed in spite of actually being a good console with good games and good marketing.

It's addressing OP's question, Sega's problem was that their leadership made errors they could not afford, and that's contrasted with Nintendo being able to afford the errors they made like it was nothing.

>>11485201
The issue the N64DD was trying to address was that N64 carts held fucking tiny amounts of data and got mogged by disc media (like on Playstation, Saturn, and PC). It was a very too little, too late kind of solution and they probably realized that.

The issue the FDS was meant to address was that market demand was outstripping supply and production for necessary chips to make Famicom cartridges, it got too expensive, so making games on much cheaper floppies was a way to try to address that, and it worked well enough (not flawlessly, certain parts are fragile), and served its purpose until prices came down again.

In terms of enduring legacy, they aren't maybe all that much to go back to, the best FDS games got ported to cartridges later, so you didn't even need that thing to play those, and N64DD remains little else but a footnote (Doshin The Giant is the most notable one and it got an enhanced port to GC).
Meanwhile, something like Sega CD actually has quite a lot of cool and neat games which make the library worth poking through, and it's probably my favorite console add-on ever.

>>11485234
Bro Sega was going bankrupt before the Dreamcast even launched. Their CEO had to sell his company shares to even get it out the door. The Dreamcast didn’t fail, Sega was already dead. They couldn’t even support it for 3 years.

>>11485234
>In terms of enduring legacy, they aren't maybe all that much to go back to, the best FDS games got ported to cartridges later,

This is kind of an exageration that I often see. You have a few games like Zelda, Castlevania or Bio Miracle Upa that got re-released but only in --1993--- or even 1994; probably only because Nintendo and Konami had some cartridges left in stock and at which point nobody cared about those versions and if you looked at recorded sales they're not even 10% of those games total sales.
In Japan, Zelda, Castlevania and Upa are still considered FDS games while the cart versions are rare bonus versions for collectors. Obviously they also don't care that Metroid, Zelda 2 or Jackal got cartridge versions on NES, those are still FDS games to them as well.

The only exception to this pattern is Doki Doki Panic / SMB USA which seems to have gained much more interest as a cartridge Mario game than it did on FDS

>>11485239
That's essentially what I mean, the Dreamcast was a genuinely good console which was felled by prior failures.
Sega threw in the towel with Dreamcast not because it was bad, because it wasn't, but because they couldn't afford to keep it going.

If Sega never made the 32X and actually scaled back Genesis production towards the end of 5th gen, and then better supported devs for the Saturn (and also marketed it), then the Dreamcast would certainly have rode out all of 6th gen and had a greater library.

>>11485247
>if if if
There is no if and this is not a Sega issue, but more like the general human issue. Sony made same shit after PS2, Microsoft made same shit after X360. It appears after huge success everyone become elated or something and start fucking around blowing it all. Easy come, easy go, as they say.

>>11485234
>brings up Nintendo out of nowhere
>s-s-stop being a console warrior!

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>>11485247
What if Saturn was the bad one and 32X was perfectly fine? What if they could've saved money by just releasing the Neptune (which was made from Genesis/Pico parts) with an actual Sonic game (like Chaotix and SRB2) instead?

Sega failed with the Saturn by their own admission. They were completely unprepared for the transition into 3D and the Saturn ended up being notoriously hard to develop for. However I really don’t think anything could have saved them from Sony who could simply outspend Sega. The only reason Nintendo barely survived is because Sega underperformed. The N64/Gamecube basically only had first party games, Nintendo’s handhelds did the heavy lifting and their subsequent consoles had to rely on gimmicks because it was impossible to compete with Sony on an even playing field.

>>11485338
32x just needed a good sonic game. It didn't even need to be 3d. Just a badass sonic 4 that left off where sonic and knuckles left off, but with all chaotic playable characters on top of the og trio. They really fucked up by not making the Saturn backwards compatible with genesis/32x/CD.

>>11485247
>If Sega never made the 32X and actually scaled back Genesis production towards the end of 5th gen, and then better supported devs for the Saturn (and also marketed it), then the Dreamcast would certainly have rode out all of 6th gen and had a greater library.

Stop it. First of all The Sega 32x isn't what really hurt Sega in the long run. The financial investment for the 32x wasn't that bad. Its the equivalent of Sega Mega Drive "Karaoke system" add-on that also failed. A failed experiment that hurt Sega's reputation more than its finances. Sega could move on from it.

The SEGA SATURN was what really crippled Sega FINANCIALLY. They spent hundreds of millions of dollars on making and promoting the Sega Saturn around the world. Keep in mind that Sega was only worth around $1 billion dollars in the 1990s. So they literally spent a huge chunk of the company's value trying to push the Sega Saturn. They even took the profits from the Arcade Division and diverted it to the Sega Saturn too. They bet everything on the Saturn hoping to beat Playstation. All their money. And All their reserve cash. Spent.

But Sega got back NOTHING in return. Sega lost everything they invested in the Saturn and took MASSIVE losses. There are interviews talking about how the Sega of Japan Board of Directors were so shocked at the financial losses from the Saturn... that they wanted to leave the console market immediately and turn into a 3rd Party Game publisher instead to save the company.

But the Sega of Japan CEO used all his political influence to push for one more system. But since Sega was so drained, they took out loans and used credit to pay for the Dreamcast. This was a bad idea. Dreamcast was a good system, but Sega literally couldn't afford to pay for it.

When it was all said and done, Sega was around $800 million to $1 Billion dollars in debt. Keep in mind that Sega was only worth $1 Billion dollars as a company. So they quite literally bet the whole company.

>>11485353
Nintendo survived the console war because the Nintendo 64 was not sold at a loss. So it didn't matter if they sold less consoles. Nintendo specifically used less powerful and cheaper components to keep costs low.

Nintendo does not sell their consoles at loss. They always use components that are a few levels below the best. Then sell for a profit.

>>11483552
I guess they were trying to figure out what would stick so basically shotguned the market with shit. I still love them but yeah it was pretty dumb to thin out resources like that. Had they stuck with a few core systems they'd probably still be making consoles.

I guess too, now that I think about it and recall that time, the market was rapidly moving along. We went from 8-bit to 16-bit in a decade, then to 32-bit in a few years and suddenly disc based systems were the next big thing. Suddenly, during the disc based shift full 3D games were being pushed out (Sony) so competition was fucking insane.

Remember, all of this shit happened in like 10 years. Look at console cycles now, there have been no real technological leaps in 20 years.

Sega

I wonder which one stands out. Hmmmmm....

SG-1000: console made on a modest budget. Grand daddy of Sega

Master System: console made on a modest budget. Shares hardware with arcades to save money.

Sega Genesis: console made on modest budget. Shares hardware with arcades to save money. Smash hit worldwide.

Sega Saturn: wtf bloated console made on a massive budget. Does not share any hardware with arcades. Saves zero money. Huge Failure.

Sega Dreamcast: 3D console made on a modest budget. Shares hardware with arcades to save money.

>>11485376
The Wii U and price cut 3ds were both sold at a loss.

The Saturn actually outsold the Playstation until 1996 and still strong until mid 1996. What truly killed the Saturn was the war between SoJ and SoA which ended up making the Saturn almost an exclusively JP console. There was virtually no dev support in the west and by 1997 tons of companies abandoned Saturn development to focus on Playstation.

>>11485376
>Nintendo specifically used less powerful and cheaper components to keep costs low.
Wasn't the N64 the most powerful out of the PS1/Saturn/N64 trio?

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>>11485445
>Sega Saturn: wtf bloated console made on a massive budget. Does not share any hardware with arcades. Saves zero money. Huge Failure.
To be fair, the Model 1 barely supported textures and the Model 2 was prohibitively expensive

>>11485470
>To be fair, the Model 1 barely supported textures
I'm sure they could have modified or enhanced the Model 1 hardware to add texture mapping. It still would have been cheaper than what they did with Saturn

>>11485367
I don't think you're getting it, when people say the 32x killed Sega/the Saturn, they don't mean that the add-on itself made them bleed money but rather ruined their reputation and took time & investiment from the Saturn's launch.
Objectively speaking, the 32x did less financial damage than the Saturn, but it also could never be as profitable as the latter under the right circumstances.

>>11485489
SEGA didn't make the model 1 though, it was GE Aerospace and SEGA have never been good at securing good license terms so even if they could somehow make a consolised model1 for cheap, GE would have expected a shitload of money per unit sold.
SEGA always licensed someone else's stuff and this has caused them no end of trouble. Whereas nintendo would often use 3rd parties to make stuff, but they'd force a very one-sided deal.

>>11485659
Wasn't it the Model 2 that Sega developed with GE Aerospace? I thought the Model 1 was designed in-house.

>>11483552
>What the fuck was their problem?

They were supporting too many platforms.

MS and GG had similar architecture, some arcade boards shared architecture with Sega consoles, so from a development standpoint it wasn't as taxing as you'd think.

But the answer is always: SoA and SoJ wanting Sega to be two entirely different things and spreading itself thin.

>>11485468
It was the most powerfull, but by skipping a CD drive they could still cut a lot of cost.
Real subpar (cheap) hardware started with the wii

>>11485590
You don't get it. Sega released a ton of hardware and add-ons failed. At least 1 to 2 dozen failed console related hardware that failed miserably. The 32x has nothing to do with Saturn failing.

You yelling about 32x holding Saturn back is like saying, "Sega Genesis could have sold more if Sega Game Gear didn't waste Sega resources! Imagine if Game Gear wasn't made and put all their resources into Genesis only! It was have crushed the Super Nintendo!"

The reality is that they were independent of eachother with their own Sega teams and their own funding. Sega had the resources to do both.

You need to let the 32x go. It made no difference to the Saturn failing.

>they don't mean that the add-on itself made them bleed money but rather ruined their reputation
I mentioned the reputation hit in my post. You skipped it.

>>11486061
The Saturn having a bad launch was literally a kneejerk reaction to the 32x flopping though.
I don't think the Saturn would've been a success without the 32x but denying it didn't negativily affected the Saturn is quite Bull.

>>11485931
>But the answer is always: SoA and SoJ wanting Sega to be two entirely different things and spreading itself thin.

The real answer is that Sega of America and Sega of Europe earned the majority of Sega's money and 100% deserved to have their suggestions for hardware taken seriously. And Not have their needs completely ignored by SoJ when it came to the Saturn and Dreamcast (such as project Black Belt).

Sega of Japan went crazy after the Sega Genesis era. They were *obsessed* with beating Sony Playstation in a head to head match. It was absolutely ridiculous for Sega of Japan to think that way. Sony was a hardware giant that easily worth 40x times more money than Sega. Without breaking a sweat, Sony could easily outspend Sega.

Even Nintendo stayed away from such nonsense and did their own thing. Nintendo just focused on making affordable hardware that they could sell for a profit, and made fun appealing games.

Imagine if Sega chose to do the same: make an affordable 3D console with modest hardware that could be sold for a profit, and focus on making sequels to their popular Genesis games. They would have won or at least stayed popular.

>>11485590
Dude. Sega of Japan released a ton of shitty hardware and accessories that never sold well.

Sega SG-1000 Mark 2
Sega SG-1000 Mark 3
Sega CD
Sega Mega Karaoke
Sega Mega PC
Sega Mega Jet
Sega Mega Teradrive PC
Sega Pico
Sega Pico Advanced
Sega Laser Active
Sega Nomad
Sega Game Gear
Sega Mega Terminal
Sega CDX
Sega Activator
Sega Mega Modem
Sega HiSaturn
Sega HiSaturn Navi
Sega Saturn Printer
Sega Saturn Karaoke
Sega JVC V-Saturn
Sega Skeleton Saturn
Sega PriFun
Sega Saturn Arcade Hotel

And like 15 other things I can't remember.

Your argument about 32x is invalid. Sega already had a crap reputation for releasing too much hardware and then abandoning them.

>>11486251
itt anon discovers SEGA makes more than just consoles

>>11486251
LaserActive isn't by SEGA lol. And the Pico Beena didn't come out until 2005

At this rate why not list the Toylet or their anime toys? And the Genesis Mini

>>11486251
Anon, the Saturn was hard to develop for, ir needed time and investiment to develop something for it and they had split those with 32x early on.

>>11486262
>they had split those with 32x early on.
They didn't have to "split" anything. Both the Saturn and 32x were well funded by Sega. What's next? You gonna blame the Sega CD for the Sega Genesis not selling a few more million units?

>>11486262
>the Saturn was hard to develop for, ir needed time and investiment to develop something
Stop treating the Sega Saturn like its a mentally underdeveloped baby that has special needs and needs extra attention from adults. It's pathetic.

>>11486256
Sega also make toys too but no one seems to want to talk about that either

>>11486262
LOL. Sega was already spending Hundreds of millions of $$$$ dollars pushing the Sega Saturn. No amount of extra funding was going to change the outcome of the Saturn. It was an expensive crappy system. The West didn't like it. A few extra TV advertisements wasn't going to change their mind.

>>11486287
>>11486305
He thinks if Sega Saturn just had a couple more million dollars in its budget then surely things would be different!

It's funny. The Sega Saturn is like a modern Kickstarter project where the main product is 500% funded and has 5x more than its goal but still ends up failing because it's simply a bad product.

>>11486259
Anon It's called branding and partnerships. If something has the Sega name and it fails then it hurts Sega's reputation in the minds of consumers.

>>11486293
Why are you getting so pent up over me stating the cluster fuck of hardware mess needed more time to get software than the average?
Again, i didn't say it'd be a success, i said it'd be better.
>>11486287
>>11486305
>>11486318
You all know i'm talking about GAMES, right?
No 32x means, no surprise launch which by extension means more launch titles that won't be rushed to reach the deadline + some of the games that would originally come out for the 32x would be on the Saturn, which isn't much but it's something.

>>11486508
>No 32x means = no surprise launch
The two things are not related at all

>>11486262
The issue was that Sega of Japan didn't CARE that it was harder to develop for. Despite protests from Sega of America and Sega of Europe (whom both hated the dual processor idea), SoJ moved forward with design ignoring them. In addition, Sega of Japan developed some pretty pathetic Saturn development kits, and there wasn't even enough of them either. Third party studios complained that the dev kits sucked and there wasn't enough of them. Sega of Japan's attitude was "Figure it out on your own. We expect a game in the same amount of time as before for Saturn. Make it work."

>>11486508
>No 32x means, no surprise launch which by extension means more launch titles

How?

Sega was always going to launch Saturn ahead of time because they wanted to beat Sony Playstation to market. The 32x not existing doesn't change that. They were still going to announce at E3 a rushed launch.

>>11486557
They are actually, the 32x was born for the purpose of holding off consumers before the Saturn came out, so they did the surprise launch when it failed to do its purpose.
Obviously, the ps1 being a week away from the original plan was also a big factor, but still.
>>11486574
Yes, but more time would also have helped.

>>11486601
Even if we are to believe that the 32x's failure was completely irrelevant to the decision of launching the Saturn earlier, no 32x still means that the games that would've gone for it would've become Saturn launch titles (or genesis games, but it's something i guess).

>>11486609

You seem to be misunderstanding something. It doesn't matter if the Sega 32x didn't exist or not. Why?

Because the Sega Saturn couldn't be launched earlier because it wasn't ready yet. The hardware wasn't ready. And the software development kits weren't ready yet to be sent to game studios. That means studios can't make games yet for Saturn. Not to mention that Sega of Japan kept changing the design of the Sega Saturn and tweaking it up until the last minute. They even had to remake the SDKs because of the hardware changes in the Saturn (adding an extra CPU). The earlier SDKs only could program for 1 processor. The Saturn can't come out sooner in your alternate timeline where 32x didn't exist.

The only option for Sega was for Saturn to be delayed it to 1996. And give 32x a solid 3 years of support. Basically launch around the same time Nintendo launched the N64.

>>11486639
This is somehow more pretentious fanficfagging than my previous posts, holy fuck.

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>>11486639
>letting the PS1 have absolutely no competition for 2 years
>Launch the new console in the same year of the N64's release that comes out with Mario 64 in a period where Naka wanted to fuck off with Sonic
This is even worse than the timeline we're in.

>>11485338
>what if sega released an underpowered piece of shit?
then we'd be having conversations on imageboards 30 years later about how the neptune killed sega

There are unironic 32xfags?

>>11486647
It's all truth. The development of Saturn was rife with delays and hardware changes.

>>11486670
This goes for other consoles as well.

>>11486670
Anon, you're assuming SoJ won't fuck up your fanfic console as well.

>>11486639
The 32x was announced a few months before the saturn released in japan. People already knew that buying a 32x was pointless when the saturn was about to release.
>umm just delay the japanese release
The 32x was not even in development until the same fucking year that the saturn launched in japan. Everyone already knew that the saturn was coming before the 32x was even greenlit as an actual project, there is no possible way to release the 32x before people know about the saturn, the timeline does not match up.

>>11486671
>This goes for other consoles as well.
No. The development of Playstation and Nintendo 64 was much smoother compared to the "disaster last minute rush and changes" of the Sega Saturn.

Unless you are comparing Saturn to the Atari Jaguar. In which case...no comment.

>>11486682

You missed anons point.

Even if delete 32x from existence, it does not speed up the creation of Sega Saturn.

In the early 1990s, Sega still misjudges the future of the gaming market. Sega of Japan still makes a 2D focused Saturn home console. Then Playstation and N64 are announced. Sega realizes their big screw up, makes a bunch of last minute changes, annoys Third party studios, and they mess up the launch of Saturn in America.

All you did by deleting 32x was give Genesis about 1 year to 18 months of extra time on the market. Which ironically...is what Sega of America and Sega of Europe originally wanted.

>>11486716
>Even if delete 32x from existence, it does not speed up the creation of Sega Saturn.
Literally nobody argued for that.

>>11486716
>Outdated misinfo
The Saturn was always going to have some 3D specs, but they were comparable to the 3DO than the PS1.

>>11486723
>Literally nobody argued for that.

Lmao. Reading compresention see >>11486508

>>11486732
The 3D power of the original Saturn was pretty weak and irrelevant. The main focus was always going to be 2D. The Lead designer of the Saturn even said he didn't believe Sega's own programmers (besides the arcade division) even knew how to make 3D games. Which is why the Saturn was focused on 2D.

Sega of Japan really believed that 2D was the future of home consoles in the 90s.

And that 3D was going to be a "premium experience" reserved only for Arcades with large expensive $10,000 to $20,000 dollar arcade machines.

>>11486743
Where is the post does it say that the Saturn would've released earlier?

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>>11486743
>That post
>>Reading compresention
ESL anon...

>>11486723
You had another anon saying removing 32x would make Saturn have more games and a faster and easier launch. None of those are true. Sega will still screw things up.

>>11486767
>Saturn have more games
This is true.
>and a faster
Nobody said this.

>Anon is genuinely seething and crying that people make the assumption that something like Star Wars acarde would've been a Saturn launch title if the 32x never existed
What's this mental illness?

>>11486772
>This is true.
How? Like others have said, the Saturn SDKs werent ready yet.

>>11486791
Anon, the 32x is literally a Saturn-lite with 1 GPU instead of 2.
Those games would've come out for the Saturn either on launch or a bit later if the 32x never existed.

>>11486772
There is no way Sega would have additional games ready. Japan barely got Virtua Fighter ready and that was only with the special help of the arcade department and Yu Suzuki stepping in and doing over time. You aren't getting Sega Star Wars for a Japan launch in 1994. Delusion.

>>11486804
OH MY FUCKING GOD
NOBODY WAS REFERING TO THE JAPANESE LAUNCH YOU RETARD

>>11486807
Lmao. Anon. Star Wars Arcade is a SEGA game made by a Japanese studio. It's not a Western made game. Japan made it. Learn your facts.

>>11486808
You just shot yourself in the foot, because if the 32x never saw the light of day then those devs would've been hire to develop for the Saturn instead anyway.

>>11486797
>Anon, the 32x is literally a Saturn-lite with 1 GPU instead of 2.

Uh no. 32x was used the Hitachi CPUs. No GPUs. It was lacking any form of hardware rendering. It was all done through software rendering with the CPU.

>Those games would've come out for the Saturn either on launch or a bit later if the 32x never existed.
>launch

Again. Stop sidestepping the question.

How can this be accomplished with a lack of SDKs and Saturn not ready yet? Saturn had 1 major launch game in Japan which was Virtua Fighter. The Western launch games weren't even ready for the early 1995 Western launch either.

>>11486819
Literally what game on the 32x would've taken too long to be developed on the Saturn for it to not have been released around the Saturn's release?

>>11485367
I refuse to believe this. How can you spend 1 billion promoting and developing Saturn and still have no games? Where were Square, or Capcom, or Konami, or Naughty Dog, or any dev that turned the tide for PS?

>>11486826
Again how? HOW? Tell us details. You can't just magically make games. You need SUPPORT and some hardware from the console manufacturers. Sega always struggled with this.

>>11486848
More like several hundred million for Saturn which failed badly and put them in deep debt. The another few hundred million for Dreamcast. Only Sega Genesis was profitable.

>>11486851
What was already known with the Dev kits would've been enough to get most of those 32x games in time.

>>11486906
And just how are game studios going to get these magical early Sega Saturn development kits your timeline?

>>11487017
Anon, every single game on the 32x, specially those before the Saturn launched in the USA, were either technically inferior to something like Astal and Panzer Dragoon, got ported to the Saturn down the line or had a sequel to them on the Saturn.

>>11487047
You aren't answering the question.

All you did was delete the 32x from existence. Nothing else changes about the timeline.

Sega is still frantically changing the Sega Saturn hardware last minute like before, and struggling to create game development kits for game studios.

>>11487085
Games still came out, with more people working on it earlier it'd get more games.

>>11485353
>and the Saturn ended up being notoriously hard to develop for
It really wasn't, the real issue is that everyone was used to developing on/with hardware that relied on a single processor and didn't know what to do with the extra firepower.

>>11487108
You are saying this 30 years later with the benefit of hindsight. At the time it was hard to develop for 2 processors (It still kinda is). No one knew how to program for 2 CPUs and the tools available to do it were laughable primitive.

Even with modern technology it's still a pain and takes extra time and money. Everyone has abandoned the idea of using 2 processors for gaming. Nvidia abandoned SLI (multiple GPU cards), and AMD abandoned Crossfire. Games had to be specifically programmed to use them, and game developers often didn't have the time or resources to do it. The few developers that did make games that supported multiple processors often delivered buggy results, or the updates were extremely slow to happen to fix any problems.

The industry has largely settled on one on one 1 CPU and 1 GPU as the standard.

>>11487106
>Games still came out, with more people working on it earlier it'd get more games.
Yeah but you can't work on a game without the Game Development kit and hardware provided by Sega. And Sega struggled manufacture dev kits and to get the these dev kits to Western studios in early 1995. So it doesn't really make any sense to say that 32x not existing would mean Sega Saturn would have more games. Sega just couldn't make the dev kits faster. Not unless you magically change the timeline to say that Sega just somehow is able to magically do better and make more dev kits sooner.

If anything...Sega Saturn should have been delayed by 6 months to a 1 year to allow Western Game studios to make Satur games and have Saturn have a true full roster of games for launch. And it would have allowed retailers to build up hype for the Sega Saturn and get the stores ready.

Playstation can go ahead and do their Launch, but Playstation didn't really pick up steam until 1997 when heavy hitters like Final Fantasy 7, Gran Turismo, etc came out.

It matters far more that Saturn launches come out swinging with a full roster of heavy hitting games. These games would be super polished. And potentially throw in a Sonic Game and now Sega is a serious contender against Sony.

>>11485457
>The Saturn actually outsold the Playstation until 1996 and still strong until mid 1996
where? even with months of advantage, the Saturn sold half of the units the PS1 did on its launch

>>11487306
>Yeah but you can't work on a game without the Game Development kit and hardware provided by Sega.
And yet games came out, most of the 32x games started devepment in 1993-1994, just like the early Saturn games, no reason to think it couldn't be done just like the games that actually came out for the system at the time.

>>11484654
sega's other problem was letting idea guys like naka & suzuki run free without tard wranglers to tell them no and burning away money in the process.

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70 KB JPG

>>11488193
The Sega 32x had software development kits for game studios to use.

>>11488364
And? Games still came out for the Saturn.

>>11486716
No one really misjudged anything, like it's been stated, What really killed the Saturn was retailer's refusing to carry in more products or even sell for it. Why because the marketers of SoA spent there whole time conditioning retailers to prepare for the 32x, and that the Saturn wouldn't come later. If the 32x never existed, they could have instead got the western market ready for the Saturn like they were suppose, the launch would have been rocky sure, but the support and willingness to work with the Saturn would have been there and they could have recovered from the rough start.

>>11488371
>And?

Sega Saturn development was plagued by last minute decisions, changes and delays. Including making delays in making dev kits.

Nothing changes even if you remove 32x.

Therefore you aren't getting Western Sega Saturn games sooner than May 1995.

>>11488495
Nope. Even before 32x, Sega already had a poor reputation for filling retail shelves with plastic and abandonware. Their reputation with Retailers was strained even before 32x. Retailers demanded Sega stop releasing products and accessories that are half-baked and never sell.

>>11488602
>Sega Saturn development was plagued by last minute
Game still came out, something like Tempo 1 would've been release on launch.

>>11488637
Are you admitting that you would change the timeline so that Sega would "somehow" made Saturn Software development kits sooner, and magically make the creation of Sega Saturn smooth with no issues?

If so, then this discussion is pointless. No need to discuss any further. You are in fairytale land now.
I'm only interested in discussions of what Sega could do with some realistic changes.

If you want to play Thanos with the Infinity Gauntlet, and change all of Sega reality then be my guest.

>>11488660
There's nothing absurd about a 2D game like Tempo being made a launch title the same way Astal was.

>>11488674
Oh wait, I meant Clockwork Knight.

>>11488637
>Tempo 1
??????

Isn't this a 2D game? Why would this be a Saturn launch title?

>>11488723
sega made a bunch of 2d games for the saturn including a sequel to tempo

>>11484673
>Last SNES game was November 2000

snes support dropped hard in japan after 96
it got some major releases here and there but 3rd party was mostly dead (asides from something like megaman and bass which was a lower budget asset flip)

I'm starting to think the Saturn is the most hilariously sad and funny console failure ever.

>>11488723
1995 was a year when you could get away with 2D games on your console and it launched on the 32x before the Saturn came to the west.

>>11489041
32x was supposed to be enhanced 2D games with improved 2D graphics and sound. And some 3D games. Basically a powered up Genesis. So 2D is acceptable.

Sega Saturn was supposed to be the "next generation" 3D machine. A 2D game as a launch title on Saturn is disappointing. All launch games need to be 3D.

>>11489616
>All launch games need to be 3D.
yeah the ps1 was a huge failure because of rayman

>>11487117
Modern consoles have 8 cpus. core = cpu

>>11489631
>yeah the ps1 was a huge failure because of rayman
Rayman is an Atari Jaguar game that was ported to PS1. Learn your history.

>>11488602
>Sega Saturn development was plagued by last minute decisions, changes and delays. Including making delays in making dev kits.
The 32X is no better in this regard. It was rushed out even faster with a lot of resources being dumped into it from both Sega of Japan and Sega of America. The reality is without the Saturn there is no 32X as it was designed and built off of the Saturn's design and shares components like the 2 SH-2s in a Master and Slave configuration.

>Nothing changes even if you remove 32x.
It comes down to resource management. If you take 32X out of the equation those SH-2 chips that went into making 32X systems and devkits can now go into making Saturn systems and devkits instead. For every 32X devkit that went into developers hands in 1994 could have instead been a Saturn devkit. Work that Sega was dumping into making and translating documentation and software libraries for 32X could have instead been going into Saturn documentation and software libraries.

On top of that, many 32X games were being made by Sega of Japan and some started as Saturn projects and were moved over to help pad the 32X library for the US. These games could have remained as Saturn games and other 32X launch titles could have instead been developed to be Saturn launch titles. If the Saturn's US launch title is still September of 1995 this also gives devs a lot more time to get these titles polished and ready for release.

32X split resources in a crucial time when they needed to be focusing all their resources on one next gen system, not two.

>>11490652
> The reality is without the Saturn there is no 32X
Lmao no. There were plenty of American companies that could have made chips for the 32x. Sega of America did NOT even want to work with Hitachi, but were forced to because of Sega of Japan.

>It comes down to resource management. If you take 32X out of the equation those SH-2 chips that went into making 32X systems and devkits can now go into making Saturn systems and devkits instead.

You are forgetting that Sega of Japan DID do this. Sega's original early developer kits they sent out were originally designed to only support 1 CPU. That's how Saturn was designed. But then Sega changed their minds regarding the amount of CPUs on the Saturn, and added a second CPU. This caused big delays with Sega scrambling last minute to remake and resend the developer kits and supporting hardware so the new SDKs could support a second CPU. Studios were upset with Sega not providing enough dev kits, or sometimes not getting any kits until much later than promised. It doesn't matter if you delete 32x because Sega of Japan was making all these last minute changes either way with Saturn.

>>11490751
>There were plenty of American companies that could have made chips for the 32x.
No, the SH-2 was designed new by Hitachi. Sega literally worked with Hitachi in designing the thing.

>Sega of America did NOT even want to work with Hitachi, but were forced to because of Sega of Japan.
The people who designed the 32X are on record saying they went with the dual SH-2s in the 32x because it was one aspect of the Saturn design they liked. The reality is that the SH-2 is the least controversial part of the Saturn's design. It's an exceptionally good CPU for the time and easily outperforms the MIPS CPU that was in the PS1 and was substantially cheaper than any 68020/30/40 based chip at the time.

> This caused big delays with Sega scrambling last minute to remake and resend the developer kits and supporting hardware so the new SDKs could support a second CPU.
And you know what also didn't help? Having to scramble to make 32X dev kits using the exact same CPUs at the same time. Every 32X system and devkit that was made during this time period could have been another Saturn system or devkit.

Also the second CPU was added to the design around September of 1993. We're talking about a time frame from January 1994 to September 1995. By this point the Sophia was the devkit being made and it was designed to support 2 CPUs.

>>11490781
>No, the SH-2 was designed new by Hitachi. Sega literally worked with Hitachi in designing the thing.
Wow you missed the point. We KNOW IT'S MADE BY HITACHI. That's NOT the point.

Any company could have made chips for the 32x. It did not NEED Hitachi chips specifically to do the job. IBM, Intel, or a bunch of other companies could have stepped up and done it. Just like how Sega was considering a dozen different chips for the Saturn before choosing Hitachi (due to shady and questionable reasoning).

And no, Sega of America CEO Tom Kalinske had said he was very eager to work with American companies and do partnerships, but was shut down every single time by Sega of Japan and forced to use Hitachi.

>Having to scramble to make 32X dev kits using the exact same CPUs at the same time. Every 32X system and devkit that was made during this time period could have been another Saturn system or devkit.

A dev kit is more than just some chips you dummy. It's a COMBINED kit of multiple pieces of hardware and software that is designed for developers to use to make games. Sega had always sucked at making them. Developers said Sega was notorious for providing bad and crappy dev kits and Sega were always slow in making them - even BEFORE Saturn and 32x were made.

>Also the second CPU was added to the design around September of 1993. We're talking about a time frame from January 1994

Which means Sega was delayed and had to spend time on remaking the dev kits and had to resend them out. More delays. The new dev kits were not immediately ready. The only game SoJ had ready for launch was Virtua Fighter which *barely* made it in time And Sega needed the arcade team to help the console team do it.

>By this point the Sophia was the devkit being made and it was designed to support 2 CPUs.

Do better research. The initial batches of Dev kits sent out by Sega of Japan did not support 2 CPUs. Which probably explains why many early Saturn launch titles used only 1 CPU.

>>11491012
The dual sh-2 setup for the 32x was a decision made by SoA because they liked it. I have no idea where the fuck you're getting the story of SoA wanting something different but being forced to use hitachi, because the actual designers of the 32x say otherwise.
https://www.nintendolife.com/features/hardware-classics-unpacking-the-32x-segas-most-catastrophic-console-failure
>Marty Franz – then Sega's Vice President of Technology – agrees. "We pushed really hard for the dual SH2 architecture," he says. "We really liked the Hitachi SH2 CPUs that the Saturn had and felt they were the star of the show. Putting two of them in a package with a good graphics buffer was a big advance at that time; it enabled software rendering tricks that were limited only by the imagination."

>>11490781
>No, the SH-2 was designed new by Hitachi. Sega literally worked with Hitachi in designing the thing.
Anon. He's not saying the SH2 chips were bad. He's saying there were other companies that could have supplied computer chips that could have also done the job for the Sega 32x.

Also, if the Sega 32x SH2 chips were in such short supply, then Sega of Japan would not have allowed them to be used for the Sega 32x. They would have saved them for the Saturn. The burden of proof is on your to prove that "The 32x SH2 chips affected the available supply of Saturn SH2 chips and caused a shortage."

>>11491120
>Also, if the Sega 32x SH2 chips were in such short supply, then Sega of Japan would not have allowed them to be used for the Sega 32x.
That's not the point you idiot.

>>11491012
>It did not NEED Hitachi chips
What other chip was available at the time of designing the 32X that would give same level of cost to performance?
> Just like how Sega was considering a dozen different chips for the Saturn before choosing Hitachi (due to shady and questionable reasoning).
What shady reasoning is that? We have interviews from both Hideki Sato (Saturn designer) and Hitachi's engineers that goes into detail about why the SH-2 was chosen. Hitachi wanted the chip to get used and noticed because they were confident in it, Sega liked the performance but wanted some additions and Hitachi was happy to work with them to make it suit their needs.
>Tom Kalinske had said he was very eager to work with American companies
If you mean the SGI chip, then there's a few things you need to realize here. By the time this was being proposed, Saturn was near final in it's design. The 2nd SH-2 was added around early September of 1993, Kalinske was proposing the SGI chip around late summer early fall of 1993. They needed Saturn to be ready by the end of 1994, SGI wasn't able to meet this deadline. On top of that the SGI chip that was shown to Sega and what ended up going in the N64 were two entirely different things. Nintendo ultimately requested a lot of changes to the chip to make it even viable and that wound up delaying the N64 to mid 1996, which wasn't acceptable for Sega.

>A dev kit is more than just some chips you dummy.

I'm aware, but the main thing thing they needed for the was the SH-2s. The SH-2 was a new chip that started mass production in June of 1994. Prior to that it was just small runs for testing and making early devkits. So yes splitting that small supply to go into 32X devkits and sample hardware was a pretty costly decision in early 1994 and probably did hold up getting devkits made.

>>11491012
>>11491126
>Which means Sega was delayed and had to spend time on remaking the dev kits and had to resend them out.
No. The Sophia devkits started shipping out in 1994. Before this point it was prototype units that were about the size of a small refrigerator according to some developer interviews. These were internal to Sega only and were not shipped out to third party developers. These were what would have needed to have been modified. Which there were maybe a handful of these in total.
>The initial batches of Dev kits sent out by Sega of Japan did not support 2 CPUs.
Show me a Sophia that can't support 2 CPUs. You're confusing the situation that the devkits usually only had 1 CPU Emulator for debugging instead of 2. This wasn't due to a shortage in most cases but due to cost, those units were stupid expensive. So to save money most would only order one of those and swap the emulator with the master and slave as they needed to debug. The other socket would just have a regular CPU.
>Which probably explains why many early Saturn launch titles used only 1 CPU.
Again most of these are very early titles that were internally developed by Sega.
>Do better research.
You first. You're just spouting bullshit that has been debunked for years now.

>>11491126
>That's not the point you idiot.
It is the point. You claimed the 32x affected the availability of SH2 chips available for the Saturn several posts up, but didn't provide proof.

>>11491120
>He's saying there were other companies that could have supplied computer chips that could have also done the job for the Sega 32x.
Like who? What chip would be readily available to use in January 1994 to build a system around to launch in November of 1994 that met the cost and performance of the SH-2?

>The burden of proof is on your to prove that "The 32x SH2 chips affected the available supply of Saturn SH2 chips and caused a shortage."
We know for a fact that they were so desperate for SH-2s in the 32X that they were using ones that weren't passing quality control in actual consumer systems. These had bugs with the interrupt handling that would result in high priority interrupts being overridden by low priority interrupts which could cause serious problems.

While these were rejected for Saturn consoles, they could have still been used in Saturn devkits since the CPUs in those devkits are interchangeable. So a developer could deal with the issue early on and then request a fixed CPU to swap in later.

>>11491131
>What shady reasoning is that? We have interviews from both Hideki Sato (Saturn designer) and Hitachi's engineers that goes into detail about why the SH-2 was chosen. Hitachi wanted the chip to get used and noticed because they were confident in it, Sega liked the performance but wanted some additions and Hitachi was happy to work with them to make it suit their needs.
I am not the anon you are responding to, but I've read almost all the available interviews regarding the development of the Saturn. Probably alot of the same ones you read. They give an overview of other companies that were being considered for the Saturn, talk about even using the Sega Model 1 arcade board and modifying it, and why the Saturn was designed with 2D in mind first because they thought 3D would mostly stay restricted to arcades. But none of the interviews specifically say why Hitachi was chosen over other chips. They don't say why the Hitachi chip was better or how Hitachi chips compared to the competition. It's completely glossed over. One paragraph Hitachi is about 1 of about 12 different companies being considered. And the next paragraph sudeldenly Hitachi is chosen with no solid explanation. Then the interviews just move on very quickly from that topic...

IIRC, several anons over the years in these Saturn threads said the Sega CEO at the time had a relationship to the Hitachi CEO at the time. Either they were distantly related (like Uncle and 2nd nephew or something like that) or they were friends who attended the same school and went golfing together often. Something like that. They were not strangers and had some sort of prior relationship that played a role in Hitachi being chosen...despite their Hitachi chips not substantially being better than the other options being considered. Personally, I think reusing and modifying Sega Model 1 arcade board would have been the best choice. It Saves money and reuses hardware. But that's a discussion for another time.

>>11491148
>You claimed the 32x affected the availability of SH2 chips available for the Saturn several posts up
I didn't

>Company has to do 2 things
>Do them poorly
>"But what if company only had to do one thing?"
>...
Is this seriously being discussed?

>>11491168
>But none of the interviews specifically say why Hitachi was chosen over other chips.
>IIRC, several anons over the years in these Saturn threads said the Sega CEO at the time had a relationship to the Hitachi CEO at the time
The Hideki Sato interview states that he had narrowed it down to an NEC chip and the Hitachi chip. The only input he got from Sega of America was a 68020 which he ruled out early on due to performance. He was looking at RISC CPUs for performance and the NEC and Hitachi ones he liked. He was more impressed with the Hitachi chip so he went with that.

From the Hitachi interview we know they were discussing it back and forth with Sega regularly. Sega was making requests to be made to the chip which Hitachi was more than happy to do for them. This also probably weighed heavily in why Sega went with Hitachi.

In both interviews there's no mention at all of either companies CEOs influencing the decision.

>>11491150
>Like who? What chip

Lets see. There's a bunch:

-NEC made the V810. Thar could have worked

-Motorola had the M68000 series Motorola 68040 and 68060

-Intel was another option with the Intel i960

-LSI Logic (now known as Broadcom) had their own chip series with the R3000 CPU series.

-SGI could have worked too. Everyone knows their story.

-Fujitsu was another option.

There are literally like 12 or 15 different CPU options available at the time. Possibly more if you really want to dig deep. The point is that Sega had plenty of options.

Where the fuck are people getting the idea that the sh-2 was bad? The big problem with the saturn the vdp1 was fucking shit and the vdp2's gimmick was useless for games that weren't specifically designed for it.

>>11491201
It's not mentioned in your interviews. Nor will it ever probably be mentioned publicly. Some anons looked it up and found out they was a relationship between Sega and Hitachi CEOs. Definitely shady business.

>>11491216
It's not that SH2 was bad. But one anon said that 32x affected the amount of Hitachi SH2 chips available for Saturn to use. Then another anon said that they didn't need to use SH2 and could have used other chips. Another anon disagreed and said Hitachi was the best choice. Others disagreed and offered alternatives. This is where the argument currently is.

>>11491227
Dumb argument because we already have an interview where they state that they liked the sh-2 and were responsible for it being used in the 32x. >>11491096

>>11491150
Intel i960, Hewlett Packard PA-7000, and other options from IBM and Motorola too.

>>11491209
>NEC made the V810. Thar could have worked
NEC was a competitor, anon.

>>11491229
Sega of America Tom Kalinske was not a fan of Hitachi hardware. He wanted a Sony partnership and even strongly suggested SGI. It's hard to say without seeing the contracts, but I highly suspect that Sega of Japan had already signed exclusive contracts with Hitachi to supply chips for their hardware (without input from Sega of America). And Sega of America were forced to use them.

It's very strange since Hitachi did supply CPUs for the Saturn, 32x, and Dreamcast. And we know for sure that Hitachi definitely was underpowered for the Dreamcast.

>>11491239
Your fanfiction doesn't take priority over direct quotes from the people who designed the 32x.

>>11491209
>-NEC made the V810. Thar could have worked
Which Sega did look at as well. They were more impressed with the SH-2.
>68040
>68060
These cost more than the entire Saturn did to produce in 1994.
> Intel i960
This cost even more than the 68040 and 68060. This is what the Model 2 Board used and that thing cost $15,000 in 1994.
>R3000
This is the only other viable option you've given so far as it's what the PS1 uses. However the SH-2 outperforms it in multiplication, division, code size, etc. Which for a system that's entirely software rendering with very little RAM, all of those are extremely important.
>SGI
This was way too late in the game and there were serious concerns about them being able to meet demand. And those concerns were warranted as SGI is why the N64 was delayed until 1996. Secondly this is a GPU, the actual CPU used in the N64 was a MIPS R4000 series.

>>11491230
>Hewlett Packard PA-7000
This is mentioned in the Hitachi SH-2 interview. Hitachi also made PA-RISC chips and Sega turned them down because the performance wasn't good enough.

So again, what other viable option is there other than the SH-2 at this point on such short notice?

>>11491236
>NEC was a competitor, anon.

*sigh*

This is why I hate arguing with uneducated fools.

They don't even know they are fools.

NEC was NOT a direct competitor.

NEC had already made CPUs for the Sega Master system, and several Sega arcade boards including the System 16 and Sega Model 2.

NEC even made the RAM used in the Sega Mega Drive, 32x, Saturn, Sega Model 3, Sega Naomi, and Sega Naomi 2..

But. Yes. Keep. Deluding. Yourself.

>>11491251
To be fair, there are no quotes that directly compare Hitachi to other chips. We only have quotes that just say Sega liked Hitachi's chip. What you are saying is supposition.

>>11491236
> He wanted a Sony partnership
This was actually discussed in Japan because Hideki Sato and Ken Kutaragi were friends. The reason it fell through was because Sega's CEO got frustrated with Sony's CEO because Sony's CEO wouldn't make any decisions on the matter and kept stringing them along. Sega's CEO would ask "So are we going to make consoles together or not?" and Sony's CEO would respond back talking about the weather or some shit. So Sega of Japan finally just gave up on the matter because Sony didn't seem serious about it.

Apparently during this discussion Sega showed Sony what they were working on with the Saturn, which probably wasn't smart on their part.
> I highly suspect that Sega of Japan had already signed exclusive contracts with Hitachi
By the time the SGI chip was suggested this could be possible? The decision was made to go with the SH-2 around late 1992. However Sega was using other CPUs and chips from other manufacturers like Motorolla, NEC, and Yamaha in the Saturn and Dreamcast as well. So it's unlikely that there was a true exclusivity contract.

>And we know for sure that Hitachi definitely was underpowered for the Dreamcast.
No it wasn't? The SH-4 is a pretty powerful little chip. The main issues you run into with the Dreamcast is the lack of hardware T&L and only half the main memory the PS2 has.

>>11491247
So is using Tom Kalinske as proof just pure fanfiction then?

>>11491262
So what is your explanation for the interview I linked? They're lying to cover up the conspiracy?

>>11491258
We do know the costs of these chips in 1994 though. And most of them cost far more than the Saturn itself cost. Others like the PA-RISC chips we know wasn't very good either from the Hitachi interview.

From a cost perspective the most viable ones are probably the SH-2, the NEC V810, and MIPS R3000. We know Sega liked the SH-2 more than the V810. We also know from doing comparisons with the PS1 R3000 that the SH-2 out performs it in things like multiplication, division, code size, etc.

>>11491262
Tom Kalinske's claims don't hold much water any more because they don't hold up to scrutiny most of the time.

>>11491251
>These cost more than the entire Saturn did to produce in 1994.

I call bullshit. Not in 1994. Prices had gone down.

>This is what the Model 2 Board used and that thing cost $15,000 in 1994.

LOL. The Model 2 was not expensive because of the Intel CPU. It's because of the cost of using multiple full size arcade boards, using 6 Fujitsu chips for the CPU, AND using Lockheed Martin's custom chip for textures and 3D which cost the most.

>>11491279
>6 Fujitsu chips for the CPU,
Oops. Meant For the GPU*.

>>11491279
>I call bullshit. Not in 1994. Prices had gone down.
We can look at the price of a 68040 in 1994 and see that it still cost close to $300. The Amiga 4000T came with either a 68040 or a 68060 and in 1996 that thing still cost about $1700. Those CPUs were in the $300+ range in 1994. They weren't viable for a console to use. Why do you think no console manufacturer was touching them?

The 486 came out in 1989 and cost about $900. By 1994 these cost about $200 or so. The i960 launched in 1989 at $2400. Even if it fell by the same percentage by 1994 it would still cost about $500 alone. That's almost the amount the entire Saturn cost to produce in 1994.

>>11491298
No anon. It's called the economies of scale. Larger orders means cheaper prices per unit. Larger Companies get far better deals than individual customers. Hitachi did the same for Sega. The SH2 definitely would not be as cheap if marketed to individual customers. You are also forgetting that Sega sold Saturn at a loss.

>>11491310
>Larger orders means cheaper prices per unit.
Those are the prices for large orders that PC Manufacturers were getting at the time. Again let's look at computers that used those chips in 1993/1994. The Mac Quadra 610 used a 25Mhz 68040 and cost $2520 in 1994 with the same amount of RAM as the Saturn had. You can't say Apple wasn't getting a good deal on those chips. The things were too expensive to be used in home gaming consoles. That's why no other console ever used them.

>Hitachi did the same for Sega.
Sure, but they were still substantially cheaper than the 68040 and 68060 in 1994.
> You are also forgetting that Sega sold Saturn at a loss.
Yes, it cost about $500 to produce and was sold at about $400 at launch in 1994. What you're suggesting would give us a Saturn that would cost $500 for just the CPU and RAM and nothing else. Unless you want a Saturn the cost more than the 3DO did in 1994 then you should be happy Sega went with the SH-2.

Also you're forgetting that this was originally talking about the 32X. That was an add-on that cost about $160 at launch. So at that target those other CPUs are definitely out of the question.

>>11491251
None of this is actual hardware comparisons or tests. Sega saying "We like Hitachi better" without elaborating is not proof the Hitachi SH2 is better than all other options. It could mean many things like Hitachi gave Sega a better financial deal or some other incentive. On paper, the Hitachi SH2 does not outperform the other cpus on that list

>>11491251
R3000 was the better CPU with

>SH-2 outperforms it in multiplication, division
Only when paired in two. They were like 900 transistors combined. PS1's CPU had around the same amount and it included an MMU, media engine, and motion decoder in the same die, which had to be handled by separate CPUs in the Saturn.
>code size
Because it used 16-bit instructions. The PS1 has 32-bit and some games used codes compiled from C++ which made development much faster.
>Which for a system that's entirely software rendering with very little RAM, all of those are extremely important.
Maybe if Sega used the cheaper EDO RAM instead of SDRAM they'd not run into that problem.

>>11491347
Most of them are eliminated on cost alone. The others like the R3000 we can do direct comparisons with the PS1 and see the SH-2 wins in performance for multiplication, division, code size, etc.

Others may have performed better but at substantially higher cost. Others like the R3000 that we can assume had a similar cost since the PS1 used it the SH-2 edges it out as stated above.

So yes, the SH-2 is a very good option on that list when it comes to cost and performance.

>>11491370
>Only when paired in two.
Wrong. Multiplication on the SH-2 takes 1-3 clock cycles to finish. On the R3000 used in the PS1 it takes 6-13 cycles. Both have a division unit that can run in parallel. SH-2s takes about 39 cycles to complete, R3000's takes about 36 cycles. However with fixed point numbers you can multiple by fractions so the faster SH-2 Multiplication allows it to win here as well.
> PS1's CPU had around the same amount and it included an MMU
The R3000 doesn't have an MMU. You're thinking of the R4000 used in the N64. If you mean DMA controllers then the SH-2 has those as well.
>MDEC
The software codecs commonly used on Saturn can be done on just one of the SH-2s with plenty of cycles to spare. And if you know what you're doing you can get comparable quality.
>Because it used 16-bit instructions.
And?
>The PS1 has 32-bit
Why is this a good thing when both systems have the same amount of RAM and you need all the space you can get?
>some games used codes compiled from C++ which made development much faster.
You mean C, C++ at this time wasn't really an option. And Saturn had C libraries and most games were written in C on it as well.
>Maybe if Sega used the cheaper EDO RAM instead of SDRAM they'd not run into that problem.
For Saturn Sega only used SDRAM/SGRAM for 1 memory bank and VRAM. So about 2.5MBs. The rest was all DRAM. PS1 only used EDO RAM for main ram, and SD/SGRAM for VRAM. So they probably balanced out in the end.

For 32X there's only 512KB of RAM in the entire thing. Main RAM is SDRAM, VRAM is DRAM. Since the thing is doing software rendering, you want that main RAM to be fast, so SDRAM is really your only viable option.

>>11491268
>Tom Kalinske's claims don't hold much water any more because they don't hold up to scrutiny most of the time.
He's the CEO of Sega of America!

>>11491251
>other chips cost too much
Was this something that was actually said by Sega, or is this your supposition and guessing?

The Intel option seems like a great idea. Intel was already mass producing them for the Model 2. And while the whole Model 2 might be too difficult to shrink down into a console during 1994, that doesn't mean they couldn't use the less expensive pieces of it like the Intel CPU. Similar to what they did with the Sega Genesis.

>>11491390
>You mean C, C++ at this time wasn't really an option. And Saturn had C libraries and most games were written in C on it as well.
No. Saturn often forced developers to work in assembly

>>11491390
>Wrong. Multiplication on the SH-2 takes 1-3 clock cycles to finish.
But not asynchronous because there's only 1 cache to be shared by the all the CPU components isn't there? Otherwise I doubt they'd need the second SH2.
>most games were written in C
Dreams and Sega Rally were largely assembly programmed weren't they?
>C++ at this time wasn't really an option
I guess. I know some modern devs do use it in small parts, but back in the 90s it wasn't popular enough.
>For Saturn Sega only used SDRAM/SGRAM for 1 memory bank and VRAM. So about 2.5MBs. The rest was all DRAM.
The rest was FPM RAM I think. Yeah pretty cheap, but at that quantity and in addition to the SDRAM I don't believe it's cheap.
>PS1 only used EDO RAM for main ram
Which makes up the largest chunk of the system.
>and SD/SGRAM for VRAM
Higher latency and lower bandwidth SD/SGRAM. Also dual ported for SDRAM and single ported for SGRAM. Did Saturn also transition to a cheaper single ported SGRAM?
>Since the thing is doing software rendering, you want that main RAM to be fast, so SDRAM is really your only viable option.
What a dumb system. At 2D games, Atari Jaguar did much better with a cheap single channel FPM DRAM by using object controller. Can't expect much from a system cobbled together in 8 months I guess. 2D 32X games didn't look much better than Genesis, they'd better use all FPM DRAM and do untextured flat shaded polygons straight on the VRAM.

>>11491251
>>11491457
i960 was definitely cheaper to manufacture. Same die size and process as SH1, but already comes with 4KB cache, FPU, MMU, and superscalar instructions which SuperH didn't have until SH-4. Plus it wasn't selling that well so Intel would've dared to sell it at a discount.

I love this thread

>tell me one other cpu chip that can match the Hitachi SH2!
>anons name 8 CPU chips
>NOOOO! NOT THOSE! THEY DON'T COUNT

Keep coping Sega fools. Your Saturn system is a cobbled together mess

>>11491457
>Was this something that was actually said by Sega, or is this your supposition and guessing?
It's from looking at the historical price data of how much that chip actually cost and looking at what the cost of the actual Saturn and 32X were. Sure it's a guess, but an educated one.

>The Intel option seems like a great idea. Intel was already mass producing them for the Model 2. And while the whole Model 2 might be too difficult to shrink down into a console during 1994, that doesn't mean they couldn't use the less expensive pieces of it like the Intel CPU. Similar to what they did with the Sega Genesis.

The 68000 was almost a decade old when the Genesis was being designed. That Intel chip was barely 4 years old when the Saturn was being designed and the decision to go with the SH-2 was made. It's not the same kind of comparison. Genesis was built on what was at the time old technology. The Saturn was being designed with relatively new tech so it could do 3D fast enough.

>>11491692
>Plus it wasn't selling that well so Intel would've dared to sell it at a discount.
It was the best selling RISC chip by 1994. They weren't going to give Sega any discount on it. The problem that quickly arose was that Intel themselves stopped caring about it so it quickly fell behind it's competition in performance. SuperH, MIPS, and ARM quickly rose up and curbstomped it.

>>11491609
>No. Saturn often forced developers to work in assembly
This is a meme. If a game was using SGL it was written in C. If a game was using SBL, it was written in C.

>>11491713
To be fair, those options aren't great. Except for R3000 and i960. R3000 was very well suited to be an SoC thus cheaper to manufacture. i960 had future proof features like superscalar and was a transistor efficient design. There's also AM29000 that boasted impressive features for its time like branch target buffer. With i960 or AM29000 Sega could probably get away with a single CPU design. These CPUs were precursors to Pentium and K5.

90% of Sega's games were 30 minutes to 1 hour long arcade games so it's probably not hard to have a bunch of them going at once in dev

>>11491771
How can you say the Hitachi SH2 is a better choice than the Intel i960? The SH2 was newer and therefore more expensive. Plus they needed two SH2 chips per Saturn to match the Playstation and Nintendo 64. This drove up costs for Saturn.

Meanwhile the Intel i960 was 3 ish years old. It was a proven chip that worked in the Model 2 and Sega already had experience working with it. By all the standards you mentioned, the i960 is the better choice. Proven. Reliable. Slightly older and cheaper. They've used it before.

>>11491670
>But not asynchronous because there's only 1 cache to be shared by the all the CPU components isn't there?
Why would it need to be asynchronous when it only takes 1-3 cycles tops? If you're multiplying two 16-bit values it will take 1 cycle. Multiplying 2 32-bit values will only take 2 cycles, 3 if you overflow into 64-bits. The SH-2 will be done with the multiplication before the PS1 has even started on it's 2nd cached instruction in most cases.
>Otherwise I doubt they'd need the second SH2.
The 2nd SH-2 was added because the SCU-DSP wasn't up to the task of being a fast 3D math coprocessor capable of competing with the PS1's GTE coprocessor.
>Dreams and Sega Rally were largely assembly programmed weren't they?
As far as I'm aware only Dreams was assembly. Rally I'm pretty sure was C using SBL.
> at that quantity and in addition to the SDRAM I don't believe it's cheap.
It was about half the system's RAM that was SDRAM and the other half that was DRAM. So it's a similar split to the PS1.
>Which makes up the largest chunk of the system.
It makes up about half of it.
> Did Saturn also transition to a cheaper single ported SGRAM?
No idea, but RAM prices also fell through the roof from 95-98. So without doing anything their cost would have lowered dramatically anyways. We actually saw this reflected with the rapid price cuts both systems got during this time period.
>Atari Jaguar
If it actually worked properly yes it would be a nice system. Sadly in actual practice the 32X is ironically the system Jaguar fans desperately want their system to be.

>>11491797
We have the manufacturing cost and price data for the SH-2 in 1994:

https://websrv.cecs.uci.edu/~papers/mpr/MPR/ARTICLES/080203.pdf

On page 3 it states that the SH7604 (the chip used in the Saturn and 32X) has an estimated manufacturing cost of $20 per chip. At quantities of 10,000 the price was $32. We know from the Hitachi interview that even though Sega was buying 2x the chips the profits weren't great on the deal. So Hitachi was probably selling the chips to Sega for less than $32 a piece.

So can you provide any data to prove that Intel was able to match that with the i960? We also know the PS1 cost almost the same as the Saturn to produce in 1994. considering how much more chips the Saturn has in it as well as both systems have the same amount of memory, I wouldn't be surprised if Sony's chips cost more per unit than Sega's for them both to cost about the same to produce.

The major issue with Saturn's design isn't the SH-2 or having two of them. It's the underwhelming VDP1 and the convoluted to use VDP2.

>>11491814


>The SH-2 will be done with the multiplication before the PS1 has even started on it's 2nd cached instruction in most cases.
>The 2nd SH-2 was added because the SCU-DSP wasn't up to the task of being a fast 3D math coprocessor capable of competing with the PS1's GTE coprocessor.
Isn't this self contradictory? If one SH2 CPU could do everything R3051+GTE needs asynchronous processing for, why would it need the SCU DSP?
>It was about half the system's RAM that was SDRAM and the other half that was DRAM.
>saturn
fast RAM: SDRAM 1MB
slow RAM: FPM 1MB
VRAM: SDRAM 1.5MB
sound RAM: FPM 512KB
CD buffer: FPM 512KB
clock: 32KB SRAM
total: 2.5MB fast RAM + 2MB slow RAM + 32KB SRAM

>PS1
main RAM: 2MB EDO
VRAM: 1MB SDRAM
sound: 512KB FPM RAM
CD buffer: 32KB SRAM
Total: 2MB rather fast RAM + 1MB fast RAM + 0.5MB slow RAM + 32KB SRAM

Dunno, PS1 looks cheaper. Not to mention its SDRAM is slower than Saturn's.
>RAM prices also fell through the roof from 95-98.
But not board costs. Multi channel RAM chips is always more expensive than unified RAM. PS1's cost savings and price cuts were the most aggressive.
>If it actually worked properly yes it would be a nice system.
It did work pretty good. But the single bus RAM shared with many chips and cheap in-house built RISC core wasn't programmer friendly, it needs more assembly to get around it.
It was a cheap console that's designed to be as cheap as possible, and the point is Sega spent more to achieve less.
>Sadly in actual practice the 32X is ironically the system Jaguar fans desperately want their system to be.
Jaguar's 2D games are smoother and have much better color depth than 32X's. The 3D games are slow but that's just because of the in-house RISC core and FPU not being as strong, lack of a second CPU to offload 3D calculations to (Jerry DSP was intended for music, not multi processing, and hogs the same CPU bus) and single channel memory.

>>11491814
>>11491873
I remember seeing a post before that posted the manufacture price of both consoles, managed to find it in the archive.
The Hideki Sato interview states they sold the Saturn at a 10,000 yen loss in Japan when it launched. It launched at 44,800 Yen:
https://mdshock.com/2020/06/16/hideki-sato-discussing-the-sega-saturn/
A Japanese interview with Sony engineers revealed that PS1 cost 50,000 Yen to manufacture at launch:
https://169.45.167.69/forum/showthread.php?35945-Japan-execs-were-upset-that-Kalinske-was-allowed-to-resign-w-o-taking-blame-for-32X&p=886374#post886374

2nd link is dead but its archived here https://web.archive.org/web/20231124192044/https://169.45.167.69/forum/showthread.php?35945-Japan-execs-were-upset-that-Kalinske-was-allowed-to-resign-w-o-taking-blame-for-32X

>>11491839
>So can you provide any data to prove that Intel was able to match that with the i960?

...Able to match? What kind of question is this?

Intel is hundred billion dollar company. Of course they can price match the much smaller chip manufacturing department of Hitachi. They could probably even offer a much better deal.

>>11491251
Several of these CPU chips were mentioned in a few interviews as possible options for the Sega Saturn and were under consideration. They made it to the final round of consideration. So your argument about cost disqualifying them is wrong.

It's really baffling why Sega chose Hitachi. Sega had a much better relationship with Intel, NEC and Fujitsu. Hitachi must have offered an absolutely amazing deal on the cost of chips and bent over backwards, or Hitachi used some sort of personal connection to get their chips chosen.

>>11491839
It's difficult to estimate the prices because none of the other CPUs were custom made for a gaming console. The other prices listed are for general purpose CPUs, they contain modules that a game console doesn't need. Like these R3000 and Am29000 based microcontrollers, they have raster interface, video controller, blitter, and other things a computer CPU will need but a CPU for a video game console won't. Save for the Hitachi CPU there that obviously looks like Saturn's CPU, and Sony's R3100 which is obviously PS1's CPU.
https://www.cecs.uci.edu/~papers/mpr/MPR/ARTICLES/071703.pdf

But it looks like R3000 wasn't expensive. Here's an ad for $30 R3051 from 1991.
https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_ComputerDe30N13199110_117221195/page/74/mode/2up?q=idt+r3051

>>11491990
If it's true SEGA got SH2's for dirt cheap, yet still managed to make a more expensive console than PS1 even if it's only 4800 yen more, that's embarrassing.

File: 1722149231864.jpg (97 KB, 1200x675)

97 KB JPG

https://mdshock.com/2020/06/16/the-story-of-the-hitachi-sh-2-and-the-sega-saturn/
There was tons of negotiations and even new features at sega's request before it was chosen, there was no conspiracy of supposedly better options being turned down because corruption. The saturn is a piece of shit but it has nothing to do with the sh-2.

Didn't both Sega of America CEOs Tom Kalinske AND Bernie Stolar say that the Saturn hardware wasn't very good? That it was overpriced, underpowered, and complicated to make games for? One CEO is questionable, but Two CEOs saying the same thing is not a coincidence.

>>11492050
But that link doesn't explain WHY Hitachi was chosen. Even Hitachi themselves were surprised at Sega choosing them. There's zero explaination as to what made Hitachi stand out among the competition.

>>11485078
>Game Boy games in Japan were both released in 2001.
Wrong… somewhat. If you’re just talking about native Game Boy games, then you could be correct (I can’t be fucked to fact check you). However, there were some Game Boy Color games with Game Boy compatibility released in 2003 in Japan.

>>11492050
Every dev on PS1 and Saturn d*sc*rd said GTE is much easier to work with than 2x SH2.
>there was no conspiracy of supposedly better options being turned down because corruption
Sega requested Hitachi to scale their shitty CPU nobody wanted to buy (PA-10) up, and they agreed to do this simply because they're both Japanese companies who probably had pride in national products. Hitachi could've adopted and customized more popular CPU architectures like MIPS instead of continuing their work on the inevitably dead SuperH series. They needed Sega to keep their CPU business (barely) afloat, and Sega needed them because they wanted the highest price to performance hardware no matter if it's harder to use or hurting a semiconductor company's potential profit. To me that sounds conspiracy-ish.

Seems to me it's a similar story as Atari Jaguar. Tramiel requested an in-house CPU to be designed instead of using an off-the-shelf CPU like everyone else. Coming from the legendary Commodore 8-bit era, he had a pride in producing the company's own hardware. Even if it meant nobody would make software for it.

Both Sega and Atari were too concerned about hardware and couldn't care less about software.

>>11492101
>Sega requested Hitachi to scale their shitty CPU nobody wanted
>they agreed to do this simply because they're both Japanese companies who probably had pride in national products.
>They needed Sega to keep their CPU business (barely) afloat, and Sega needed them because they wanted the highest price to performance hardware no matter if it's harder to use or hurting a semiconductor company's potential profit.
>To me that sounds conspiracy-

This 100%. But also I bet if you dug a lot deeper with a magical time machine, you would see Hitachi taking out Sega managers and Executives to expensive dinners, meetings, and offering them benefits. Happens all the time behind the scenes in these types of bhsiness "deal$". It's pretty crazy that Sega signed up to use Hitachi SEVEN seperate times for their hardware.

1. Sega Saturn
2. Sega 32x
3. Sega Dreamcast
4. Sega Naomi Arcade boards
5. Sega Naomi 2 Arcade boards
6. Sega Hikaru Arcade board
7. Sega System SP

There is absolutely no way Hitachi beat the competition 7 times when it came to their chips. Hitachi wasn't even the best choice for the Dreamcast.

Intel and NEC probably didn't offer enough bribe money to grease the wheels in their favor. And Hitachi must have s*cked off Sega really good to get this kind of deal.

>>11491873
>If one SH2 CPU could do everything R3051+GTE needs asynchronous processing for, why would it need the SCU DSP?
Thats not what was said. I said the SH-2 out performs the R3000, not that it out performs the GTE. Having a math coprocessor for 3D was pretty much required in this time frame. Sega originally thought 1 SH-2 + the SCU DSP would be enough to handle this, but the GTE blew the SCU DSP out of the water so much that the advantage the SH-2 had over the R3000 wasn't enough. So Sega added another SH-2 to level the playing field.
>But not board costs.
And Sega made dramatic changes to their boards from 1994-1997. Saturn went from being multiple boards to just one board very quickly. The 2 SH-2s were consolidated to one chip, the CD-ROM block was consolidated from 3 chips down to 1. The SCSP and M68k were also consolidated down to one chip. That combined with the RAM prices falling dramatically made a huge impact on the Saturn's price. And we see this reflected in it's retail price as well as the internal documents that leaked from Sega.
>PS1's cost savings and price cuts were the most aggressive.
No they weren't. PS1's Mother board barely changes from 1994-1997. The most dramatic change Sony made in this time was removing the RCA jacks. They don't even start consolidating down chips until around 1998-1999.
>>11492002
>Of course they can price match the much smaller chip manufacturing department of Hitachi. They could probably even offer a much better deal.
But would they? Again the i960 was the best selling RISC chip in 1994, they had no reason to sell it cheap to Sega. There's also fact that Sega ditched the i960 for a PowerPC 603e when they made the Model 3.

>>11483552
Honestly I don't blame them. Who even knew where gaming would go? They were arguably at the forefront of it and were trying to keep the momentum of an entire industry going.

>>11483572
No luck at the interview, huh?

>>11492019
>Several of these CPU chips were mentioned in a few interviews as possible options for the Sega Saturn and were under consideration. They made it to the final round of consideration.
The only one that made it to the final round was the NEC chip.
>So your argument about cost disqualifying them is wrong.

Then if cost wasn't a factor and those chips were just as affordable why didn't Sega use the SH-2 in the Model 2 or Model 3 boards? The reason is obvious. An arcade board doesn't have to be under $500 so they could spend more for a beefier CPU.

> Hitachi must have offered an absolutely amazing deal on the cost of chips and bent over backwards
They did give Sega an amazing deal. They flat out said they weren't really making much money if any on the deal.

Again the SH-2 was chosen because the cost of it combined with it's performance made it one of the best options available to Sega. The SH-2 is the least controversial part of the Sega Saturn's design.

>>11492032
Sure, I said it was probably one of the more viable options of the ones people have pointed out. But as stated the SH-2 out performs it.

>>11492101
>Every dev on PS1 and Saturn d*sc*rd said GTE is much easier to work with than 2x SH2.
So you haven't actually spoken to devs then. The complaint most Saturn devs have isn't the SH-2s. Those are straight forward and easy to use. The parts where it becomes a massive headache are VDP1 and VDP2.

>Sega requested Hitachi to scale their shitty CPU nobody wanted to buy (PA-10) up, and they agreed to do this simply because they're both Japanese companies who probably had pride in national products. Hitachi could've adopted and customized more popular CPU architectures like MIPS instead of continuing their work on the inevitably dead SuperH series. They needed Sega to keep their CPU business (barely) afloat, and Sega needed them because they wanted the highest price to performance hardware no matter if it's harder to use or hurting a semiconductor company's potential profit. To me that sounds conspiracy-ish.

Ah yes, the SuperH architecture and instruction set was so bad that ARM took parts of the design and instruction set and worked it into their architecture as THUMB. You're seeing a conspiracy because you want to see a conspiracy. The reality is that Hitachi gave Sega a good deal on a really good CPU. The CPU was never the issue with Saturn's design nor was it the difficult part to use. Even with two of them. The complicated part is VDP1 and VDP2.

>There is absolutely no way Hitachi beat the competition 7 times when it came to their chips.
Again, parts of the SuperH Architecture have been worked into the competition such as ARM. When your competitors are taking parts of your design, you know you made something good.

>>11493387
>why didn't Sega use the SH-2 in the Model 2 or Model 3 boards?
Because Sega Model 2 went into production in 1991 and released in 1992. This was way before the SH2 was even made. And the SH2 was too weak and old for the Sega Model 3.

>>11493407
>Because Sega Model 2 went into production in 1991 and released in 1992.
Model 2 was released in August of 1993. The SH-2 was decided on in 1992. It's more likely that the CPU that was a good choice for a $15,000 Arcade board wasn't a good fit for $400 consumer hardware.
>And the SH2 was too weak and old for the Sega Model 3.
Yet Sega used the SH-4 in Dreamcast and NAOMI because they felt the PowerPC 603e based Blackbelt wasn't as good.

>>11493432
>Model 2 was released in August of 1993.
Just because it was released in 1993 doesn't mean it was *designed* in 1993. These arcade boards are designed a year in advance, and they are showcased to prospective buyers months before they are available for sale.

In the case of the Model 2, it was designed in 1992. Which means they had to choose parts that were readily available in 1992. The SH2 was not readily available and not under consideration for Model 2.

>Yet Sega used the SH-4 in Dreamcast and NAOMI

They used the SH4 in Naomi because Sega was under extreme financial strain and needed to cut costs. Sega couldn't afford to splurge and buy chips from many different suppliers like they did in the past. Thus Sega used the same chips between Naomi and Dreamcast to save money. And Hitachi was able to offer them a great deal.

There was a lot of overlap for Nintendo too, between the long tails of both the NES and the SNES + the GameBoy + the GBC. and the 64 in the middle there. and the virtual boy.

anyway in segas case
>barely supported the 32x (still a waste of any time at all, for sure)
>barely supported the Sega CD (same as above)
>barely supported the Master System once the Genesis picked up Steam
>I was the only person on earth who had the Pico (I had the winnie the pooh game)
>arcades
arcades were the main squeeze though on either side of the Genesis. Plus that has always been a different department at Sega.

>>11493461
>Just because it was released in 1993 doesn't mean it was *designed* in 1993.
I didn't say it was designed in 1993. And you were the one that said it released in 1992. I was pointing out that you had your dates wrong and most likely confused it with the Model 1.
>In the case of the Model 2, it was designed in 1992. Which means they had to choose parts that were readily available in 1992.
The SH-2 was chosen for the Saturn in 1992.
>They used the SH4 in Naomi because Sega was under extreme financial strain and needed to cut costs.
Yet that cheaper hardware was able to perform on par with the Model 3.
>Sega couldn't afford to splurge and buy chips from many different suppliers like they did in the past.
Dreamcast has chips from NEC, Yamaha, and Hitachi. Saturn had chips from Hitachi, Yamaha, and Motorolla. There's just as many different suppliers in there.

The point is the SH-2 was powerful and cheap. There's no conspiracy for why it was chosen, it was chosen based on it's own merits.

>>11493471
>The SH-2 was chosen for the Saturn in 1992.
And? SH2 wasn't readily available in 1992. Do you not understand what *readily available* means?

It doesn't mean first announced or the "first early prototypes available" in 1992. Arcade boards are designed produced almost a year in advance of their official release. They need chips that are tested, proven, mass produced, and ready to go NOW at the time of design. SH2 was none of those things.

>Yet that cheaper hardware was able to perform on par with the Model 3.
Irrelevant. Naomi (even if it was a budget board) was an entire generation newer than Sega Model 3. Newer GPU and other newer technology.

>Dreamcast has chips from NEC, Yamaha, and Hitachi. Saturn had chips from Hitachi, Yamaha, and Motorolla. There's just as many different suppliers in there.

2. With Dreamcast/Naomi there were far less quantity of chips and less expensive chips used (compared to past designs) . Like the Sega Model 2 which used multiple main boards 7 seperate CPU chips compared to past designs and military grad hardware.

It's clear your knowledge is limited when it comes to arcade boards. Otherwise you would know tiny Naomi boards are compared to the physically massive the Sega Model arcade series boards and how expensive they were. Naomi was tiny in comparison.

We have interviews that specifically state that Naomi and Dreamcast were systems designed on a budget. The arcade industry was shrinking and Sega was hurting bad after the failure of Saturn. Arcade profits couldn't be relied on to bail Sega out anymore.

>>11493493
>And? SH2 wasn't readily available in 1992. Do you not understand what *readily available* means?
Yes I do. But for Saturn they chose a chip that wasn't readily available, and it's target release was only a year after the Model 2. My point was that for Model 2 the price point is radically different so splurging on a more expensive CPU wasn't as big of a concern as it was with the Saturn. That's far more likely the real reason the Model 2 uses the i960 and the Saturn and 32X went with the SH-2.

>Arcade boards are designed produced almost a year in advance of their official release
The same is true for consoles. Saturn's design was finalized around late 1993 and it wouldn't release until a year later.

>2. With Dreamcast/Naomi there were far less quantity of chips and less expensive chips used (compared to past designs) . Like the Sega Model 2 which used multiple main boards 7 seperate CPU chips compared to past designs and military grad hardware.

The comparison was being made against Saturn, which also had an arcade equivalent with the ST-V Titan.

You seem to be really missing the point being discussed here. The discussion wasn't arcade vs console directly. The discussion was why did Sega go with the SH-2 in the Saturn? And the reality is that the SH-2 gave Sega the best bang for their buck. Model 2 and Model 3 were only being brought into the discussion because people were trying to claim Sega could have used the CPUs those boards used in the 32X and still had it cost under $160 which is complete nonsense.

The entire point here was that it was 2 different markets at the time. One had a price point of around $15,000, the other around $400. A CPU that fits for one wont necessarily be a good fit for the other. The fact that Sega went to the SH-4 when they needed to get arcade board costs down again shows that cost was a major factor in why some of those other CPUs weren't chosen.

>>11493513
>ST-V Titan
Not that anon but this is just a Sega Saturn shoved in an arcade cabinet.

>>11493513
>That's far more likely the real reason the Model 2 uses the i960 and the Saturn and 32X went with the SH-2.
1. This is extreme reaching that is several levels removed from direct evidence.

2. You keep saying "it must be cost" as the only reason! When in reality it could be any number of reasons.

3. The SH2 wasn't readily available in 1992 for mass production. It took Hitachi a while to even mass produce enough chips for Saturn's Japanese launch in 1994. Model 2 came and went by then. Console design and manufacture process was much slower.

>The same is true for consoles. Saturn's design was finalized around late 1993 and it wouldn't release until a year later.
Irrelevant. It's not related to arcade boards which have a much faster production time. Around 1 year from design to release.

>The discussion was why did Sega go with the SH-2 in the Saturn?

Well it was not because of outstanding performance that surpassed the competition.

>The fact that Sega went to the SH-4 when they needed to get arcade board costs down again shows that cost was a major factor in why some of those other CPUs weren't chosen.

Well by that logic, Sega needed bring down costs even further, when the arcade market crashed in the early 2000s. After Naomi, they chose to use Intel chips that saved even more money according to Sega.

>>11488225
t. Seething furfag. You’ll NEVER get a Saturn Sonic game.

>>11493513
>My point was that for Model 2 the price point is radically different so splurging on a more expensive CPU wasn't as big of a concern as it was with the Saturn.
The Sega arcade team chooses the best chip they can get regardless of cost. They only care about performance. If the Intel i960 costs the same as the Hitachi SH2 but the Intel i960 is 15% better than they will go with the Intel i960. Conversely if the Intel chip is cheaper, then they will still go with the Intel i960. They only cared about performance. Then the arcade division budget was cut when Naomi was created. So they had to use whatever fit their budget.

>>11493378
>Thats not what was said. I said the SH-2 out performs the R3000, not that it out performs the GTE.
Well the the GTE is part of the PS1 CPU. The R3000 core is useless without the system control and GTE modules. It's designed to be a modular chip from the get go. So it's an inherently asynchronous chip.
Also while single value multiplication was slow the GTE probably did better with matrix calculations. SH2 would need to perform multiple calculations to get the same value. SCU DSP was designed to do matrix calculations fast but the chip itself is slow and got overpowered by the second SH-2.
>Saturn went from being multiple boards to just one board very quickly.
>PS1's Mother board barely changes from 1994-1997. The most dramatic change Sony made in this time was removing the RCA jacks.
I was saying that PS1's use of board space was efficient from the get go. Saturn was so laughably huge that it needed to put most of its RAM under the motherboard until the very last revision. Hitachi and NEC engineers did a lot of work to consolidate multiple Saturn chips into one while Sony was enjoying the low manufacturing cost of PS1.

>>11493387
>But as stated the SH-2 out performs it.
In raw math maybe. If Saturn went with a MIPS R3000, they'd be able to pair the CPU with the DSP in a single chip and not make it run at half clock for sharing the bus with the SCU's connected components. And as seen there the R3000 was cheap, and MIPS was a fabless company so Sega could've requested Hitachi to fab some for them. It was cheap and very popular for graphics workstation computers, so it was dumb to go with a general purpose microcontroller.

>>11493397
>The complaint most Saturn devs have isn't the SH-2s. Those are straight forward and easy to use.
Straight forward maybe, but it does need more work from the programmer to do the same thing as the GTE. Like no matrix transformation. Having more cache does give it an edge though, but MIPS having scratchpad made shifting easier.
>Ah yes, the SuperH architecture and instruction set was so bad that ARM took parts of the design and instruction set and worked it into their architecture as THUMB.
SuperH was designed from the start to run 16-bit instructions. That's pretty much all it's good for. Thumb is superior because it's able to mix 16-bit and 32-bit instructions. I think SuperH never even got 32-bit instructions until SH-5.
>The reality is that Hitachi gave Sega a good deal on a really good CPU. The CPU was never the issue with Saturn's design nor was it the difficult part to use.
The reality is Sega artificially boosted SuperH chip production. They went from almost no purchases to the second most produced RISC chip in existence thanks to Sega. It wasn't selling well to other customers even with the low price tag. SH6 never came to fruition and Hitachi ended up licensing their 16-bit instruction set patents to other chip designers.
>The CPU was never the issue with Saturn's design nor was it the difficult part to use.
It wasn't difficult to get working, yet many PS1 ports used only 1 SH2. More work to do the same thing. Plus high manufacturing cost.

>>11485445
>Shares hardware
entirely different hardware with way less capabilities to the arcade boards they were based on. i bet you're the kind of fucking faggot that thinks an amiga could run neo geo games with no modification because they both have a motorola 68000 in it.

>>11494254
>entirely different hardware
Not true.

>>11494254
An Amiga definitely could play downscaled ports of Neo Geo games. And the similar processor would make things easier on the programmers.

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>>11494325
100% true. here's what the sega genesis is based on.. the system 16. it far more advanced than a genesis. what are you smoking?

>>11494345
>An Amiga definitely could play downscaled ports of Neo Geo games.
downscaled to the point of being unplayable. the amiga doesn't support tiles, it only knows bitplanes, and bitplanes still take a lot of time to move around even with its independent co-processor (copper). this is why a lot of arcade conversions to amiga are poorly done. they cannot match the performance as graphics chips using tiles. if the amiga supported tile graphics and tile spirtes from the beginning then it probably would have had much more accurate ports.

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>>11494357
>downscaled to the point of being unplayable.
Not unplayable

>>11493469
>barely supported the 32x (still a waste of any time at all, for sure)
Yes but SEGA was in a chaotic state at that point, SOJ wanted the next console, SOA conceived the 32x as a counterpoint to Nintendo's increasing use of special chips, SOA wanted it to help empty existing Genesis stocks, SOJ wanted to move on, that brings the first problem, dissociation between soj and soa, other than that it was released even more expensive than the already blown MSRP, bare, not even a launch title showing off the abilities of the machine, so it was badly marketed too, and since SOJ wanted to move on instead of working with SOA they starty hyping the Saturn.
>barely supported the Sega CD (same as above)
I guess they realized it didn't really fix anything it was supposed to fix and at that point they weren't competing with the NEC's TG16CD.
>barely supported the Master System once the Genesis picked up Steam
Sure, but SEGA barely had a market back then.
>arcades were a different department
Which is weird asf looking back because SEGA was actually super competitive in that portion, AND the notion of just bringing arcade hardware to homes was dead on and working well IMO.
System8>>Master System
System16>>Megadrive

>>11493609
>shenmue's development was a money pit that played a role in sega dropping out of the console market.
>naka's post-dreamcast body of work was a series of flops that culminated in garten of ban ban and him getting arrested for embezzlement.
>"y-you're just a seething furfag"
okay retard. you got me.

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>SoA turned the Genesis into a runaway success worldwide
>SoJ made shitty consoles and arcade machines that bled money, conspired with hitachi, and hired an actual criminal
Expanding to Japan was a mistake.

>>11485367
>Stop it. First of all The Sega 32x isn't what really hurt Sega in the long run. The financial investment for the 32x wasn't that bad.

There are so many people whose parents decided to drop Sega altogether in 1995 after they launched new system after new gimmick every half year, and got a Playstation instead of a Saturn. You know why Saturn games cost $500 nowadays? Because all those kids grew up and wanted to re-play that one mythical console they have been missing out on.

The 32x is directly responsible for ruining Sega's reputation with consumers.

>>11485445
>Does not share any hardware with arcades.

Saturn VDPs were directly based off of the System 32, and the SCSP was used in practically all their arcade boards after 94.

>>11486574
The problem is that for Sega of Japan, their hardware platforms only existed so they can sell their own games on it. Making it popular for third parties was an afterthought. They even used licensing deals that cost publishers the same amount as for Nintendo, they were that arrogant about it.

Also they did not look at what direction the industry was going, they only asked their own internal teams what kind of hardware they want. When Saturn development started in 1991, every team inside Sega except one said that they wanted better 2D. Yu Suzuki was the only one who said 3D. And nobody in the company other than him knew how to design 3D. So the Saturn ended up getting a fucked design.

Playstation meanwhile was designed from the start to be a Model 2 in a console, and designed from the start for third parties to develop for it.

>>11486639
>The earlier SDKs only could program for 1 processor.

Do you have a link to those early SDKs or are you just talking out of your ass?
Saturn design was already fixed by early 94. They added a small speed tweak to the video chip in, like, 1994 February.

>>11487306
>Playstation can go ahead and do their Launch, but Playstation didn't really pick up steam until 1997 when heavy hitters like Final Fantasy 7, Gran Turismo, etc came out.

Playstation was outselling Saturn ten to one by 1996. Saturn would have completely dropped out of the race in 1997 even if there was no FF7 or GT, since they almost completely stopped manufacturing it outside Japan.

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>>11491254
>This is why I hate arguing with uneducated fools.

And yet here you are arguing anyway.

Holy Wall of larping and fanfiction Bathman!
If any fag out there is interested in learning the actual history of wtf sega needs but to reasearch from reputable sources
https://segaretro.org/History_of_the_Sega_32X
https://segaretro.org/History_of_the_Sega_Saturn
https://segaretro.org/History_of_the_Sega_Dreamcast

then look for interviews from the actors back then, Sato<->Irimajiri, Nakayama, and of course, Kalinske, then draw your own conclusions because fuck me the levels of retardness I had to read on this thread

>>11483552
>the Pico
omg such hard work.

>>11494442
Yeah the reason PS1 went with MIPS is third parties were already familiar with it. It was used in graphics workstations including Sony's own NEWS computer. R3051 was cheap enough to be used in a gaming console ($30 by 1991) and could be easily used with a custom co-processor integrated into a single chip.

Sega didn't care about any of that and went with the brand new SH2, a powerful microcontroller nobody had bought and didn't prepare a sufficient dev tool for it. In the process of designing the console, Sony listened to third party devs demands, while Sega only listened to Hitachi's and their own internal engineers and managers demands. Sega treated Saturn like it was an arcade machine. Naturally in 1993 they were caught with their pants down.

>>11494415
>>SoA turned the Genesis into a runaway success worldwide
that never happened. it was sega's arcade division that turned sega into a success. stop smoking on fentanyl.

>>11494586
>sega's arcade division that turned sega into a success.
At first maybe, until the arcade industry started drying and yet the arcade team kept coming up with insanely expensive machines. The arcade dept was bleeding money. In the console market, Sony was ready to eat them alive. It was clear the only way they could've survived was by making budget console, repeating the success of genesis. 32X and Sega Genesis oversupply was blamed on SoA, but they did all those because they had no faith in Saturn, and rightfully so, although their solution was wrong.

>>11494586
>that never happened
only, it did, until soa cooked a proper mascot and an aggressive marketing campaign the megadrive wasn't big neither in japan and america
>sega's arcade division
it was separate from the console division, if anything it refused to work with the rest of the company proper to sega's own corporate culture.
facts anon, historical facts.

>>11494561
>and didn't prepare a sufficient dev tool for it.

They had a sufficient dev tool for the SH2. What they didn't have was enough of them.
Nor did they have a sufficient software development kit for 3d games that people can just drop an existing 3d engine into and have polygons come out on the screen.

>>11494619
>32X and Sega Genesis oversupply was blamed on SoA, but they did all those because they had no faith in Saturn, and rightfully so, although their solution was wrong.

Genesis oversupply was how you normally operate in America. 32x was because they saw that the console was retarded and wanted something easier to sell, unfortunately with the Saturn also coming, nobody was interested in the weaker design. IF there was no Saturn, the 32x (and Neptune) could have sold well. Likewise if there was no 32x, the Saturn would have done much better. Neither would have saved them against Sony, but it would have saved their dignity.

>>11494619
>The arcade dept was bleeding money.

I doubt that. According to Yu Suzuki, the revenue from the Virtua Fighter games alone was enough to cover the costs for Shenmue. And you have tons of other successes on top of that, including the best selling arcade game of all time (Daytona).

>>11494513
Wiki pages are not reliable sources since they are controlled by anal wiki editors who hate anyone editing "their" articles. And Half of those "sources" on the bottom of the page were stolen from here. One article even stole the same picture posted here first. They even left the transparent watermark anon used when anon first posted it. They didn't even bother to delete it. Lmao.

>>11494586
>that never happened. it was sega's arcade division that turned sega into a success. stop smoking on fentanyl

The arcade division was very profitable (until the late 90s when the arcade market crashed). But we are talking about the console department specifically.

SoA and SoE sold 35 million Sega Genesis worldwide. It is the only profitable console that Sega ever made.

Sega of Japan leadership just can't accept it. They can't accept that their beloved Japanese people rejected them, and secretly hate that only the foreigners liked their console....but SoJ will still begrudgingly take foreigner money.

>>11494739
The arcade market crashed in the late 1990s. Before that, all the profits from Arcade machine sales were being funneled by Sega leadership towards manufacturing, marketing, and over promoting the Sega Saturn. Sega spent way, way, way more money than they should have on the Sega Saturn. It was not a budget console like the Master System or Sega Genesis. Saturn was an expensive bloated beast. Sega of Japan leadership were not wise with their money.

>>11494714
>They had a sufficient dev tool for the SH2. What they didn't have was enough of them.
No the early Ssurn dev kits sucked. They didn't support multiple CPUs, and even the later improved revisions just werent as good as the dev kits made by Nintendo and Sony. Sega didn't listen to developer feedback.

>>11494426
>Saturn VDPs were directly based off of the System 32, and the SCSP was used in practically all their arcade boards after 94.

Sega System 32 was old technology by then, and focused purely on 2D. It's almost 5 years old at the time of Saturn's release. That's ancient in the arcade world.

Saturn SHOULD have incorporated technology from the Sega Model 1 or Sega Model 2 boards. Those were the most modern boards of that era of gaming. Sega invested tens of millions of dollars making those arcade Model boards, and it's financially much wiser to recycle what you can for them in a console.

>>11494718
>Likewise if there was no 32x, the Saturn would have done much better.
I doubt it'd really help. In Japan where there's no 32X, PS1 was outselling Saturn 4 to 1, and in North America and Europe combined, the homes of most PS1 devs, PS1 sold 80 million combined. Sega managed to only produce 800K and sell 665K of 32X systems, not even a blip in the radar, not enough to disrupt Saturn's poor sales. Most of 32X games were very low budget, it's not going to sell the good exclusives from Saturn.
>Neither would have saved them against Sony
They didn't need to win against Sony, they only needed to not bleed money. A cartridge system like 32X and Jaguar had no place in the 5th gen era. N64 was barely hanging despite Nintendo's brand recognition. And you're pretty much helpless without a huge 3rd party support.

>>11495184
Even a good dev kit wouldn't have been enough. They needed to promote their dev kit to third party devs and listen to their feedback waaaay before the console's launch. Without their feedback it can't be a good dev kit.

That's why Sony made a good decision to use an old, readily available CPU. It's a downscaled Sony NEWS workstation and other old graphics workstation used that CPU too. Ideally, Sega should've beaten Sony to that 3rd party courting process, Sony only started researching their hardware in 1992 when they had severed their ties with Nintendo.

Sega could've started much earlier. The R3000 was a mass produced chip from a fabless company, it was easy to know it's going to be the ideal CPU for a game console. It was Sega who should've approached SGI and other early adopters of MIPS CPUs for 3D rasterization in the late 80s, not the other way.

>>11495247

Diff anon here.

The core problem is that Sega of Japan is a very nationalistic and prideful company. More than Sega of America and Europe. More than even Nintendo.

Sega of Japan wanted to prove they could do everything themselves and not need any partnerships.

That was their downfall.

Pride.

>>11485234
Dude the Dreamcast was not a good console and did not have a great library compared to its competitors. It was hilariously underpowered, and was yet another example of Sega's boneheaded obsession with making all their consoles about "The authentic arcade experience" when the last generation had already decisively proved that console gamers did not want games made with arcade sensibilities, much less games that literally were just arcade game roms complete with the insert coin text still flashing on screen. Hell even with the Genesis/MegaDrive where "The authentic arcade experience" was arguably still a winning strategy their biggest hit had been Sonic the Hedgehog, a game made with a console, not arcade, design philosophy. When your consoles best selling game is Crazy Taxi you know you fucked up bad.

>>11495505
>were just arcade game roms complete with the insert coin text still flashing on screen
This bugged the fuck out of me when I bought Soul Calibur.

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>>11483552
>another day
>another SEGA "What if?" thread
Don't you ever get tired of talking about this? Years and years of running over these same platitudes... Yeah, I know the OP isn't explicitly addressing this issue, but it's implied. It's what it always boils down to.
>dude, like, imagine if SEGA hadn't spent their time and money on THIS thing... imagine, if, like... it was OTHER thing...
SEGA's hardware division died a cuckold death because the entire company was a ponzi scheme that lured fat, misinformed boomer suits with 0 knowledge of the industry into throwing money at "new product", regardless of how shit or retarded it was. Like all ponzi schemes, it eventually petered out; the gig was up, the money stopped flowing. It took the good will of a dying Japanese man with poorly-allocated samurai sensibilities to fund the company with his life savings to keep it afloat, just so it could persist as the hollow husk it remains today. The company was retarded from day one, and an entire subsect of gen X and early millennials was tricked into worshipping this company for slapping them in the face with a limp cock for 10 years. It's time to let go. Please, stop.

>>11486657
Sakura looks horrifying here

>>11485234
>The point is that Nintendo were retard wealthy so they could afford to fuck up, while Sega was only mildly wealthy and could NOT afford their fuckups, which is why the Dreamcast eventually failed in spite of actually being a good console with good games and good marketing.


Sega blew their entire arcade fortune on the Saturn. It's pretty wild reading interviews and gaming history books about the subject. Even other Japanese companies like Namco and SNK were surprised at how much money Sega was spending on Saturn. The Executives at Namco said that Sega's spending during that era was "reckless and financially unsustainable"

>>11484654
>his one was a big fuckup, because not only did it cost them a lot of money and not give much of a return,

It didn't really cost Sega that much money. It's an add on that recycles chips they were already using. The add-on hurt Sega's reputation with customers more than it hurt Sega's wallet.

>they used a lot of hardware to make these which instead should have been used to build Sega Saturns

Anon...they made around 800,000 32 units, and only sold around 600,000 Sega 32x units worldwide.

Sega Saturn sold around 9 million units worldwide.

Playstation sold over 100 MILLION units.

Even if every single Sega 32x sale was transferred to Sega Saturn, it would no difference. It's a drop in the bucket compared to the Playstation.

>>11495192
>Saturn SHOULD have incorporated technology from the Sega Model 1 or Sega Model 2 boards.

Model 1/2 were extremely complex (something like 5+ CPUs to handle 3D calculations), used an expensive Intel i960 unsuitable for a home console, and the chipsets weren't even complete when the Saturn development started. Virtua Racing was released in 1992, Virtua Fighter in 1993, Saturn development started in mid 1991 after the Mega CD completed.

>>11495531
So what you're saying is that Nintendo are the real ones.

>>11498261
Hmm...Model 2 probably wasnt possible to make a console version. It was too new and expensive. Model 1 was definitely possible though. A few years had passed and prices had gone down on its conponents.

It doesn't matter because when AI gets good enough we're going to generate hundreds of new Saturn and Dreamcast arcade-esque games with prompts and then the Sega GODS will rise to the top once more

>>11498261
>used an expensive Intel i960 unsuitable for a home console
AMD Am29000 was a similar CPU but much cheaper. Just like i960 it could perform multitasking with superscalar registers.

I think multiprocessing would be a bad idea for the 90s regardless though. Barely anyone knew how to program the sharturn. Don't even start with the "b-b-b-buh it's ez...". Most games had to be ported from PS1 to sharturd because sharturd had literally no games, and devs would need to rewrite lots of parts of the engine because both systems differed a ton. Otherwise it'd be bottlenecked by 1 CPU like most sharturd games were. No matter how easy it would be, Saturn and PS1 simply had wildly different architectures in both the CPU and GPU, and with the lack of good dev tool, it was work.

>>11498359
Sega 32X already achieved Model 1 graphics for much 1/4 the manufacturing cost. Sharturd wasn't needed.

>>11498449
>Sega 32X already achieved Model 1 graphics for much 1/4 the manufacturing cost
new schizo just dropped

>>11498359
>Model 1 was definitely possible though.
A Model 1 adaptation was indeed possible and even considered according to the people involved in the saturn development phase.

>>11498454
Sega should have started from the console and worked backwards to the arcade hardware like the namco system 11, if it meant losing a little fidelity who gives a fuck

>>11485338
saturn was the biggest success sega ever had in japan

>>11498935
yeah, and it amounted to outselling nintendo for a single month.

>>11498935
how much bigger of a success would the neptune have been tho

>>11498359
>Model 1 was definitely possible though.

Model 1 used a $600 CPU with an MMU and FPU inside, five DSPs each one as strong as the SH2 in the Saturn, five VDPs (4 for polygons and 1 for tilemaps) and 50+ memory chips. This is not counting sound and i/o.

If they put that into the Saturn it would've cost $2000 and it would still be worse than the Playstation.

>>11499398
No. It had been out for a few years and the price of Model 1 had dropped drastically. Especially after Model 2 came out. Arcade technology moved incredibly fast in the 80s and 90s. Old tech got tossed out rapidly.

>>11498935
>gets outsold by PS Vita
kwab

>>11499398
>Model 1 used a $600 CPU
At launch maybe, but it wasn't that price a few years afterward

>>11498453
It most possibly was. It was going to be sold at $149 at first but was increased to $159 because they didn't want to lose money over it. Shit probably cost $120 to produce, they had to take distribution costs into consideration. Sharturd? 56000 yen, or $560.

>>11499398
>Model 1 expensive
The Sega Genesis was based on the System16 arcade, were they 1:1 spec wise or did they cost the same?
>>11499418
And would've come down further in a hundreds of thousands home consoles production run, not just a few thousands arcade machines.

>>11498582
Who knows, maybe they were afraid of eating into their arcade division's income, imo the bigger fuck up was refusing to deal with SGI, SoJ even sent engineers to US to meet with SGI only to reject on petty excuses what eventually became the N64.
Lotsa more stories feed credibility into the SoJ vs SoA feud, which is weird as fuck given how SEGA itself was started by a westerner.

>>11499471
Genesis was a very cut down system 16 that had far less colors, far worse audio, and no sprite scaling (the chip designer wanted to add scaling, but it made the genesis vdp too expensive to produce). It was good enough that they could put an arcade cab of Altered Beast next to the Genesis version at the japanese launch and people marveled at how close the two were. But at the same you can also put a model 1 cab next to Saturn VF and they'll also look very close to each other.

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>>11499538
>>11499471
>The Sega Genesis was based on the System16 arcade, were they 1:1 spec wise or did they cost the same?
Yes it based on System 16 arcade. It's not an exact clone. Sega made some cut backs. This is not because it wasn't technically possible or that Sega couldn't afford it, but because Sega Genesis was infamous for being made on an very cheap budget in the 1980s.

Sega absolutely COULD have made Sega Genesis closer to System 16, but they didn't invest much money into it. It was a super budget console and Sega made it for cheap (even by console standards). Believe me, 1980s Sega ABSOLUTELY could afford to put a full System 16 hardware into Genesis. 1980s Sega was the richest they've ever been with that arcade money. They were swimming in cash. Japan was still in the bubble economy. Sega was making pic related in the 1980s for fun and somehow turning a profit. Arcades were buying new machines up everyday.

In the end, Sega lucked out with their cheap Sega Genesis because it became their best selling console in history.

>>11499538
>Genesis was a very cut down system 16
Not very, besides the vdp cuts due to cost, most of the hardware is shared between both platforms and it still had outstanding arcade ports that helped the console take off.
>>11499568
>Yes it based on System 16 arcade. It's not an exact clone
Never said it was, and sega's purpose was keeping overall costs down bringing established arcade hardware to the home market, it was not a bad scheme by any means and not me nor the other anons have said sega should've just crammed a model1 board inside a saturn case, btw.

>>11499429
no it wasn't you retard

>>11499975
It's literally just 2 RISC chips (which sega got for dirt cheap) and 2 tiny RAM chips. It doesn't even need a display controller. It's like $70 without the assembly and other components. Shit maybe it's even like $100. SoA won.

>>11485468
It was, but the pitiful amount of data cartridges hold compared to disks meant that the PS1 could stuff their games with music, voices, CG cutscenes, and pre-rendered backgrounds. The latter two of which could do a lot to "cover up" the difference in specs. Make no mistake, that opening CG cutscene of Midgar in Final Fantasy 7 absolutely sold consoles in record numbers and made the N64 look "weak", because 14 year olds in 1997 didn't understand hardware specs minutia or the fact that pre-recorded out-of-engine cutscenes aren't actually part of the game. They just saw this mind-blowing cityscape and then it zooms in on the train an it's all "Wam!" "Kablamo!"

>>11485468
>Wasn't the N64 the most powerful out of the PS1/Saturn/N64 trio?
It has the most powerful hardware, but also the slowest and most bottlenecked memory. Unlike PS1 and Saturn which had different RAM buses for CPU, GPU, sound, and CD buffer. N64 had one memory bus for literally every component. And it's a small crowded bus, it's got 9-bit RAM with very high latency. Even Atari Jaguar had 64-bit RAM with lower latency. That's why N64 games almost universally ran so bad. The bus contention severely bottlenecks the system. Nintendo prioritized graphics over framerate.

>>11495181
They also spent retarded amounts of money on amusement centers. And those made even fewer profits than home consoles.

>>11500356
Great point.

In the 1980s, Namco focused on making arcade machines and running arcade businesses. Nothing else. They didn't make consoles.

Sega wanted to beat Namco started dumping huge amounts to copy and surpass Namco. So they opened their own arcades and even tried to make them bigger than Namco Arcades.

If Namco would do something, then Sega would copy and try to make it bigger. Namco makes a racing game? Sega makes their own. Namco makes a big arcade machine? Sega makes their own and makes it even bigger. This back and forth battle between companies went on for 15 years.

The one problem was that Sega was splitting their money between making arcade machines, creating arcade businesses, and creating home consoles. This was crazy excessive even for the Golden Era of the 1980s of gaming.

Namco Executives said they were shocked at the amount of money that Sega was spending, and said it was too reckless. And Sega got a bad reputation for burning through cash and not being careful with money.

The reputation still exists to today. Sega mismanaged their funds and had to sell off their arcade business. They blamed the Pandemic for losing money. The only problem with that excuse was that other companies like Namco and Taito were just fine. They have their own Arcade business and they didnt need to sell them because of the Pandemic.

>>11500354
>Nintendo prioritized profits over everything else.
You are right, it wasn't even the carts although that contributed, it was the damn cheap ass scarce unified bus.
>>11500436
>blamed the Pandemic for losing money
>pandemic with a capital P in the middle of a phrase as if it was a religion or an institution
definitely ngmi

>>11500451
>You are right, it wasn't even the carts although that contributed, it was the damn cheap ass scarce unified bus.

You don't understand. Lowering the cost of the Nintendo 64 allowed Nintendo to sell the console at a profit from the very start. Every N64 was sold at a small profit. This allowed them to survive against tidal wave of the Sony Playstation, and big spenders like Sega.

seganoggers only have sanic
no other games worth playing
to be fair sanic is good

>>11500464
You don't like ecco the dolphint

>>11494561
Experience does not really matter with simple cpus such as the sh2 or mips. Had the Saturn used mips with no other changes it would not have made any difference to its failure. The cpus are fine, its the other parts of the system that are the real issue.

>>11502661
Many interviews have said programming for dual cpus on consoles was a headache for Saturn. Only the Arcade division at Sega had any experience doing it, and no one else at Sega. 3rd party game studios complained about it too

>>11485468
>Wasn't the N64 the most powerful out of the PS1/Saturn/N64 trio?

It had the most advanced 3d renderer but it wasn't that much more powerful due to a lot of bottlenecks in the system. But it was the most powerful per manufacturing costs by far.

>>11500202
32x has 2 SH2s, two large QFPs and one small QFP (I'm guessing memory controller and framebuffer controller), 2 DRAM chips, 1 SDRAM chip, a complex two part PCB design held together by a web of bodge wires and two ribbon cables, a cartridge connector, an RGB image mixer, and a plethora of capacitors and other discrete components to guarantee that the shit signal from the various different Genesis consoles don't cause any interference.

It mustn't have been very cheap. There's a reason they wanted to integrate it into a stand alone console in the form of the Neptune.
Hell, they should've just released the Neptune from the start, no expansion unit whatsoever. Shift all Genesis production to Neptune production. Now the console gets support simply from being the Genesis replacement, and you have the bonus of 100% backwards compatibility.

>>11502691
Not what I was arguing, of course having 2 cpus was not ideal. I was arguing that the sh2 is fine, not specifically that having 2 of them is fine.

>>11485468
If you consider having potato textures to be powerful.

>>11483572
He did NOT say that.

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>>11485338
>SRB2
Nah, I want 3D Blast 2.

>>11495539
It's Boruto Sakura, what do you expect?

>>11502813
>I was arguing that the sh2 is fine
Except it wasn't enough Sega said that it didn't have enough power for next gen 3D game. That's why they needed 2 chips.

Hitachi could have redesigned the chip for higher performance (similar to the SH-2A revised version that came out later), but Sega was obsessed with hitting the 1994 release date for Saturn in Japan. They refused to push the release date back to 1995.

If Sega had waited then they could even use the Hitachi SH-3 which came out in 1995. Then release Saturn in late 1995 or even early 1996 to compete with Nintendo 64 which came out around the same time.

>>11502863
>If Sega had waited then they could even use the Hitachi SH-3 which came out in 1995.

That's a catch 22. SH-3 would have never been released if Hitachi could not sell a million SH2s to Sega.

>>11502958
Nah. The SH2 ended up being fairly popular. It was used by Mitsubishi, Mazda and I think a few other Japanese car Manufacturers in their cars. Also used in higher end Japanese stereo systems. So I think bare minimum Hitachi was going to make the Sh-3 either way.

>>11502971
>The SH2 ended up being fairly popular.
Not really. It was briefly used by many because saturn was cancelled so there was a huge stock of them, just like sh4 when dreamcast ceased production. They were dirt cheap.

>>11503003
The Saturn had a great life in Japan. It's literally the only country on Earth where it sold decent. Saturn lasted until 2000 in Japan. That's a 6 year lifespan.

>>11500462
>Every N64 was sold at a small profit.
All Nintendo home consoles were sold at a profit, except GC and Wii U (and VB, but that one doesn't really count). They're famous for being the only console maker who doesn't like to use the razor & blades/printer & ink model.

>>11503023
Sega advertised a shit ton in japan. Sales still weren't great at all compared to PS1 though, PS1 sold like 4 times as much.

>>11503083
Wii U's internal hardware is cheap and obsolete as shit. They're still using PowerPC 750 based CPU. It didn't sell at a profit because the gimmick Nintendo wanted was expensive. I think it didn't sell at a loss either though.
>They're famous for being the only console maker who doesn't like to use the razor & blades/printer & ink model.
They don't even design their own consoles anymore. They haven't since the SNES, maybe except for the gameboy.

>>11503083
The Gamecube was not sold at a loss. However Nintendo was very disappointed in GC overall sales despite all the effort they put into marketing the GC. Shigeru Miyamoto felt the Gamecube was too similar to the Playstation and Xbox. And was very critical of Nintendo's approach during this generation. He felt like that Nintendo was trying too hard chase hardware performance instead of focusing on the of quality games, and making sure fans enjoy games.


However you are right about the Wii U being sold at a loss. This was confirmed directly by Nintendo Executives. Nintendo said they would initially make money by customers buying Wii U accessories and game sales. The same way Wii made money, except the Wii used cheaper hardware. Basically Nintendo got cocky after the smash success of the Wii.

>>11503023
>The Saturn had a great life in Japan.
Because it came with Virtua Fighter, which was a ridiculously popular game at the time.

>Saturn lasted until 2000 in Japan. That's a 6 year lifespan.
It got dropped completely in 1998. That's 4 years. The only noteworthy game after that was Alpha 3.

>>11503124
GC was a loss. Nintendo had just made a billion dollar contract with IBM and an undisclosed amount with ATI for the Gekko chip. Granted, this chip was used for 3 gens because Nintendo hates spending money.

It's hard to compare the GC to the PS2. GC had expensive CPU and GPU but cheap RAM, while PS2 had expensive RAM but cheap CPU/GPU. GC had more compact motherboard though so it's probably slightly cheaper.

>>11502863
>Sega was obsessed with hitting the 1994 release date for Saturn in Japan.
What happened was that sega caught glimpse of both the psx and the n64 and realized how inadequate their new console was gonna be. Redesigning it around a 3d processing unit was going to be costlier and a lot slower than just slapping a second cpu and hoping for the best. In hindsight obviously not the best decision.
>>11503092
>>11503142
No actually Japan was the only country where the Saturn sold amazingly well up until the psx gained traction, co-incidentally at that point sega itself was losing steam in all fronts too.

>>11503206
>No actually Japan was the only country where the Saturn sold amazingly
Yes, because of Virtua Fighter at launch and VF2 in 1995.

>well up until the psx gained traction
Yes, so from 1996 and onwards when it outsold Saturn ten to one.

Stop romanticizing it. Saturn sold like shit, and the only reason it was popular in Japan was VF. After that well ran dry, it was outsold massively even in Japan.

>>11503208
Nobody is romanticizing it, retard, it's also false to state it didn't sell well in Japan. Give it up, it won't help the ps1 sell one more unit.

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>>11503206
>sold amazingly well up until the psx gained traction
Saturn sold 500K while PS1 sold 300K in the first year. I wouldn't say that's "amazingly well". I guess 1995 was the best year for Saturn in Japan, with 2.2 million overall sales according to Sega themselves, but the figure for PS1 was 2 million according to this graph so it's not far behind. 1996 onwards was Sega's humiliation ritual worldwide.

>>11503142
>It got dropped completely in 1998. That's 4 years. The only noteworthy game after that was Alpha 3.
Nope. Saturn's were sold by Sega until 2000.

>>11503153
Nope. The only confirmed Nintendo console that was sold at a loss was the Wii U. And the Nintendo Executives said it was the first time they ever had to sell a a console at a loss calling a "shift in strategy".

>>11503003
Pretty sure Mitsubishi and Mazda don't care. They used the SH2 in their cars because it was low cost and effective. Mazda doesn't care about Sega.

>>11483552
We've been over this. Their yakuza investors wanted a bigger piece of the bigger revenue, so the Japanese office chose to sabotage the business rather than smarten up the Americans at the risk of international criminal charges.

>>11503260
>Saturn sold 500K while PS1 sold 300K in the first year.
anon, during its entire run in japan it sold 5-6 million units, that's about half the units sold in the entire world, just in Japan, looks outstanding to me.
https://vgsales.fandom.com/wiki/Sega_Saturn
>I wouldn't say that's "amazingly well".
Perhaps I shouldn't have used the word amazingly, or perhaps I should've specified better I was referring to the entire console run.
It does not matter, in all scenarios Sony still wins Sega was already in shambles while Sony was balls deep playing to win.
>>11503971
Yes, it was finally discontinued in 2000, not before.

>>11503971
>>11504249
Sega stopped producing Saturn hardware by the end of 1998 and Saturn software in 1999.

>>11504456
Again you are wrong. How many times must you be told this you Zoomer?

In JAPAN, Sega continued production of the Sega Saturn to 2000. I don't care about other countries or areas like the US or Europe. We are talking about Japan.

J-A-P-A-N

Understand?

>>11504167
Same as everyone else. It was cheap because there was a glut. There was a glut because Sega lost.

>>11504491
You need to realize that Hitachi didn't exclusively make chips for Sega. The Hitachi chip factory served many customers.

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>>11485338
>What if they could've saved money by just releasing the Neptune (which was made from Genesis/Pico parts) with an actual Sonic game

That would have been the logical move but they already blew their next-gen Sonic wad with Sonic CD. Which is why you don't release multiple add-ons in a single console generation, you just end up stepping on your own toes and you're either failing to support one of the add-ons or essentially doubling the amount of games you have to develop.

It's easy to say this is hindsight and Sega had to be the crash test dummy so everyone else knew what not to do but some of this shit just made no sense even at the time. There's no logic to releasing a *second* add-on for your dying console when the first already had a poor adoption rate and you're about to commit all your efforts to another new console that will render it moot anyway. That was just greed and hubris.

>>11504520
Sega was at war with itself.

Sega of Japan was hyper nationalistic and filled with engineers who loved to tinker and release a bunch of half baked Japanese products every single year. Just look at the exclusive "Japanese only" products SoJ released on the wiki pages. Dozens and dozens of half baked ideas. It's an absolute mess!

Meanwhile Sega of America and Sega of Europe had completely different ideas (and better ideas) on how to run a business. SoJ should have sold them off and allowed them to be their own companies.

Similar to what Sega of Japan did today. They sold off their international offices years ago. "Sega of America" and Sega International are independent companies. They make their own products, but pay Sega of Japan a yearly license fee to be allowed to use the Sega name and put the Sega name on products. Sega of Japan has no other control over them. SoA and SI make their own arcade machines and could even make their own seperate consoles if they truly wanted to.

This is how it should have been in the 1990s. Give Tom Kalinske the freedom to whatever he wants as long as he pays a yearly tax to Japan.

>>11504476
>In JAPAN, Sega continued production of the Sega Saturn to 2000.
The last game released for Saturn was in 2000 but Saturn hardware production ended in 1998 in Japan/EU and 1999 for North America. That was my first post in the thread btw schizoid.

>>11504509
The SH CPUs were general purpose microcontrollers. They could be used by anyone. They were just inferior to other options at the time like NEC V810 which was cheaper and capable of multitasking. But SH2 eventually got really cheap and others started buying it.

>>11504542
It's not that simple. SoJ did a lot of self-destructive things but SoA was really no better. It was SoA's Bernie Stolar who pushed for Sega to abandon the Saturn and instead focus on the Dreamcast, which ended up pissing off every developer and most consumers and fucked over Sega big time.

Ironically it was also Bernie Stolar who made Sony do a lot of dumb shit when the Playstation first came out and they ended up being a lot better off when he jumped ship to Sega. Stolar is the reason why many early 2D Playstation titles never made it to NA and also why a lot of Saturn games never made it stateside.

>>11483552
It's called supply and command

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>>11504542
Yeah the whole thing is a classic "left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing" scenario. But I'm just shocked that the massive success of the Genesis didn't lead to some sort of definitive heirarchy being established. Most companies fracture like this because of failures and financial stress pitting everyone against each other for survival. Sega ate itself alive in the midst of its greatest success. They really should have been able to make this work , because it was already working

>>11504563
Don't take his post as gospel, it's basically bullshit. SoJ and SoA worked very closely together and while there was corporate friction the downfall of Sega was not because of "left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing".

It mostly came down to Sega Saturn designers being completely unfamilar with 3D by their own admission and stumbling out of the gate by making a console that was too complicated for its own good, expensive to make games for and also had poor support for game devs until late 1995. Then on the business side of things Sega got horribly misled by Bernie Stolar into a failing strategy which ended up locking 80% of the Saturn's library in Japan, gave NA/EU an entire fucking year of no game releases and then unceremoniously abandoned Saturn developers and players by switching to the Dreamcast and trying to "get the jump" on Sony by releasing a new console first (fucking stupid).

The Saturn in Japan was successful. It had hardware sales better than the Playstation until 1996 and even sold more software than the Playstation until 1997. The Saturn had strong worldwide sales up until mid-1996. Saturn's complete failure in NA and EU comes down entirely to SoA's business strategy when Bernie Stolar was hired in 1996.

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>>11504576
All valid points but I think you're kind of downplaying the extent to which they poisoned the well for the Saturn with their Genesis add-on fuckery. Two consecutive underwhelming hardware releases took the piss right out of the Genesis hype and the 32X especially left a bad taste in everyone's mouth. People would have been more patient with the Saturn if they weren't already irritated with Sega's previous half-assed releases

>>11504602
>but I think you're kind of downplaying the extent to which they poisoned the well for the Saturn with their Genesis add-on fuckery.
It drained them of money but it didn't make developers or consumers shy away from Sega. That's readily apparent in the size of the Saturn library and the great sales they had up until 1997. In fact Sega had so much good will from developers that not even Saturn's disastrous first year and a half without proper development kits made third parties fully abandon them. What actually finally pissed off bother developers and consumers is when Sega dropped support for the Saturn. It made EA cancel their Diablo Saturn port and then also refuse to make any games for the Dreamcast.