>release the Virtua series>literally some of the most successful arcades on the planet>ok time to make a new console>should we make a 3D machine like our arcades? It's what the people want after all>nah 3D's just a fad>let's make a 2D machine insteadGenuinely what the fuck were they thinking
>>12771201They where thinking OP is faggot
>>12771201Sega was never smart, their only succes was the genesis and even they fucked tha up
>enormous tv/movie industries all over the world>gaming systems are finally able to utilise FMV>literally called "video" games>we can combine these markets and utilise decades of experience and investment>it will be like you are in the movie>this is the future
>>12771239But can't play DVDs :(
>>12771239Playstation won yes?
>>12771201>>nah 3D's just a fadSaid noone ever. Few could have predicted that 3D capibilities would have evolved so fast that by late '94 people would have consoles with 3D capibilities that surpass what computers that cost 10-15 times more could do.This is also partly why the Saturn with its 3D capabilities was sold at a loss.Without Sony in the picture the Saturn could have a great 2D platform for 3 years until Nintendo released their thing. Sony cut everyone's grass from under their foot.The real surprise in the entire story was Sony and the PlayStation; something hard to comprehend these days because for you Sony has always been around.
>>12771201>2D machine insteadon paper the Saturn could deliver higher polycount & fillrate than the PSX, but it was significantly harder to program for (multi-CPU + VDP2 specialization) so it very rarely manifested
>>12771201They didn't think 3d was a fad, they knew it was the future but they thought 2d was going to stick around for one more home console generation because 3d games at the time were still very rudimentary and experimental and the hardware was expensive. Even a lot of people developing for the PlayStation thought the same, but Sony went really heavy on marketing the 3d capabilities of the PlayStation so Sega had to make some last minute decisions with the Saturn.I might be wrong about this last part, but I believe that Nintendo thought the same thing and believed they could stick with the SNES hardware for a while longer by just putting special chips into the carts to make the games 3d. I'm just speculating about that part, but what I said about Sega is well documented.
>>12771401At least they didn't misread the market as poorly as NEC did with PC-FX. That thing couldn't do 3D at all and was really made for FMV games,something that were already fading in popularity at the time
They didn't want to hurt their arcade business by bringing the 3D experience home.
>>12771417>t. someone who's never heard of the STV
>>12771201In hindsight they were probably actually right since most fifth gen 3D games have aged like fucking shit. The technology wasn't as ready as it could have been at that time. Sega's mistake was in underestimating how ok consumers were with shitty 3D graphics as long as it was 3D.But even looking at some of the biggest games from fifth gen, a lot of them were some heavy mixture of 2D and 3D. For example: Final Fantasy, Resident Evil, a whole host of JRPGs, and arguably Metal Gear Solid's most memorable parts were the communications. Most other heavily 3D games that were popular at the time are headscratchers in hindsight. Like, how the fuck did we even tolerate how bad they actually were? 95% of that entire gen has aged like horse shit. Still some great games, but Sega wasn't entirely wrong either.
>>12771415I don't understand the PC-FX as a product. I'm not even sure if it's supposed to be a console or a PC, and if it's a PC then that's even more confusing since NEC made the PC-88 line and the PC-98 line which were both popular and successful, and this obviously wasn't supposed to replace either of those. Also NEC was very forward thinking in abandoning the console market to instead make custom chips for the other companies, so like... What is this shit?
>>12771429That's exactly why the Saturn's 3D architecture was an afterthought. They didn't want their arcade business to take a hit. They figured if players could get Virtua Fighter at home they wouldn't continue to pump yen into the arcade machines. As soon as they learned about what the Playstation was doing they threw some halfassed 3D tech into it and rushed a shitty VF port into production.
>>12771435Most games of that era are good actually but you couldn't know since you haven't played those games
>>12771305The real problem with the Saturn is that VDP1 is bad.
>>12771443I had all three systems by 1996 but go ahead and think that if it makes you feel better about not having an argument.
>>12771201VDP1 is literally a general purpose 3D accelerator.
>>12771454Not that anon but you're a dumb faggot. Some of the greatest video games of all time are from that generation.
>>12771435>Like, how the fuck did we even tolerate how bad they actually were? 95% of that entire gen has aged like horse shit. Still some great games, but Sega wasn't entirely wrong eitherIt's the Atari effect. People didn't care that it looked shitty, they just wanted to play Ridge Racer at home.
Could Steven Spielberg have saved the Saturn?
>>12771201Sega were full of smart nerds who could build hardware but they had zero idea what was the correct thing to build. They pretty much just threw shit at the walls until something stuck.
>>12771487No but Shyamalan could
>>12771201>Genuinely what the fuck were they thinkingSega Japan genuinely believed that 3D technology wouldn't advance so quickly. It was a mix of arrogance, complacency, and greed. Sega Engineers thought it would be another 5 to 10 years before home consoles became powerful enough to run 3D games. There's an interview somewhere where Sega Japan CEO said that 3D games would be exclusively for arcades, and 2D games would be for home consoles. Then Sony came and smashed Sega's plans.
>>12771467Doesn't negate my point. "Some" games standing the test of time (which I agree with) doesn't change the fact that the vast majority of games that people thought were the shit at the time have aged like actual shit because of the limitations of the technology, and the ones that aged well tend to not be fully 3D anyway.The only exception I can really think of is Tomb Raider.>inb4 some racing game autist lists games that no one but them plays anymore
>>12771501It could be worse. Sega of America thought that the idea of a new console was stupid and that they should just make an add-on for the Genesis.
>>12771470Can confirm. I played the hell out of that game and even beat the final boss race where you have to physically block him from passing you otherwise lol you lose, but playing it now it just isn't good.
>>12771512Every 3d game made today borrows ideas from games made in that gen. Every. Single. Game.
>>12771491Segata Sanshiro should have been Bruce Willis in disguise.
>>127715195th gen 3d games just aged horribly
>>12771525Yippie kay yay onore
>>12771519And every 16-bit game borrowed ideas from 8-bit games but most 8-bit games have still aged like shit, though everyone loved them at the time.Anyway, my only point is that Sega weren't entirely wrong about the 3D technology not being there yet. It had a wow factor that lowered people's standards for the gameplay but with that wow factor gone a huge percentage of that generation is just unplayable now. Meanwhile I could go back and play almost any PS2/GC/Xbox game and the graphics aren't super great now but it's not a hindrance either.
>>127715125G 3D game are on average better than in 6G less bloat and more focus
>>12771526Depends on the game. Some 5th gen games hold up today. And in some cases look better than most modern games.
>>12771573Games don't ageA good game is a good game ,human from the 90's knew the difference between good or bad,human of today aren't smarters
>>12771516The Sega CD was Sega Japan's idea. Learn your history.
>>12771584>Games don't ageWhy do we need a retro games board then
>>12771632Because the 7th gen is when everything went to shit thanks to the online stores. Games before that happened were fundamentally differently designed, and everything cancerous about the modern era started in the 7th gen
>>12771632>Why do we need a retro games board thenPhilosophy of game design and gaming economy has changed with 7th gen onward Games are very different now (for the worse imo)There is 4 major historic period in gaming history Before NES/super Mario bros: scoring era3G/4G: classic era5G/6G: experimental era7G onward: Casual era
Not sure what this thread is about, I love playing VF2 on my Saturn
>>12771648No you don't
>>12771649I... stopped liking it, suddenly.
>>12771435This is very well put
>>12771201There's nuance to this.>3D was still a very premium and expensive technology, primarily limited to arcades, requiring expensive hardware>Sega lacked the hardware capabilities of Sony, a large hardware in-house producer who could produce their own hardware rather than purchasing it>Sony had access to more cutting edge technology in generalAs you can see there is some nuance here. Sega should have been more forward thinking, but for reference, the Sega Model 2 hardware was veryu expensive and derived from military flight simulator technology. The Saturn and PS1 were in the planning stage probably around 1992. I would say Sega was at a distinct disadvantage but they absolutely did misread the market and future as well.
>>12771539>most 8-bit games have still aged like shitKill yourself
>>12772367List 500 that haven't (I'm being generous here), otherwise stfu.
>>12771415at least it had hentai games
>>12771487It was just one Freakazoid point and click game away from mass success
>>12771629The Sega CD released in 1991 and wasn't meant to replace any form of successor. Learn your history.
there's an interview online where a Sega higher up says it's because of all the in house talent having 2D expertise that they focused more on that for the MD successor. Sony didn't have any existing 2D devs to worry about when designing their console.At the end of the day tho we got awesome 2D and 3D games on both consoles. Two cakes
>>12772607Sega had 3D developers in the arcade division. But because of inter-department rivalries, the console division doesn't like asking the arcade division for help. This is common in Japanese businesses. They don't like sharing credit.>At the end of the day tho we got awesome 2D and 3D games on both consoles. Two cakesExcept Sega Saturn died because of its lack of 3D capacity and complicated rushed hardware. I think most people prefer that Sega survived and still exist today.
>>12772617>Except Sega Saturn died because of its lack of 3D capacity>countless 3D games released for it>beat N64 (3D first machine) in its home turf>was in manufacture for 5 yearsbut somehow it died
>>12772672Shitty games that suck ass don't count, Saturn has no answer to SM64, no answer to FF7, no answer to OoT, no answer to Metal Gear, no answer to anything
>>12772674umm sweaty that's subjective and you're moving the goalpost. You lied about Saturn dying, just own up to itThe Jaguar died. Virtual Boy died. Saturn? Thriving. No use parroting westoid memes
>>12771201the machine was designed in 1991 when Sega barely began experimenting with 3D, and the main goal was to outdo the SNES in 2d graphics.
>>12772617Yet another thing Gen x failed, the sega saturn. Leave it to us millennials to save the console, and look at that it now has a reputation equal to or greater than the n64. Saturn had the games all along! Gen X just didn't care because it didn't wow them from their MTV sessions. News flash: The Real World is gay and fake!
>>12771305>on paper the Saturn could deliver higher polycount & fillrate than the PSX,No, it couldn't do neither. The fillrate is a third lower in the absolute best theoretical demos due to lower clock speed and SDRAM cycle missing (PSX used VRAM, so no such problem), the SH2s even when maxed out couldn't beat the PSX GTE at polygon transforms (and you can't max them out because of bus contention), and even if you don't count either of those the VDP1 was like a generation behind in feature set and for every feature you turned on, you had to turn off two other ones.Outside of the Virtua Fighter games , there's almost no Saturn titles without slowdown. Even the Sonic ports from Genesis have slowdown.
>>12772672>countless 3D games released for itDid you see how Saturn struggled to run Daytona USA. A total glitchy mess with low frame rate. Not what I would call great 3D capacity
>>12771516No, they thought the idea of the Saturn was stupid, and they were right. Double right because they had market dominance, throwing that away for a machine that was expensive and had crap games and no Sonic was stupid. The 32X would not have been bad on paper, if the Saturn wasn't coming a year later.
>>12772709>The 32X would not have been bad on paper, if the Saturn wasn't coming a year later.Exactly. If you had been alive back then, you would realize that game studios were cautiously optimistic about 32x. They didn't like that it was another Sega add-on (after the failure of Sega CD), but they were willing to support 32x if Sega actually supported the 32x themselves. The game studios just wanted to know that Sega was actually committed to supporting the 32x long term and not as abandoning it after a short time. But the announcement of the Sega Saturn on the same day as the launch of the 32x of North America absolutely shattered what little confidence game studios still had about the 32x.
>>12771236Sega is confusing>sega saturnAbandon most successful genesis/megadrive series>dreamcastGenesis/megadrive series are back but abandon saturn series. Also no backwards compatibility fuck you
>>12771415The jerking machine
>>12772706That's why I said on paper.When measuring a non-T&L gpu polygon pushing capabilities (especially for marketing copy) you normally count already transformed flat-shaded untextured small polys.As for the potential fillrate, a fair chunk of it is tied to the VDP2 which is not a general purpose 3D processor, even though it can do some 3D effects (with perspective correction!, pretty neat), so it needs suitable games and programming.On top of that, the Saturn was far more Japan-centric than the PSX, and most jap devs were (and still are) pretty bad at engine programming.
>>12772617>Sega had 3D developers in the arcade division. But because of inter-department rivalries, the console division doesn't like asking the arcade division for help. This is common in Japanese businesses. They don't like sharing creditThe exact same thing happened at Atari. The arcade division loathed the consumer division and vice-versa.
>>12771438The PC Engine was a comfortable success in Japan, and the PC-FX is basically just a more powerful PC Engine.If it had been released in 1992 as originally planned and was competing with the SNES and the Mega Drive, I think it would also have been a comfortable success.Instead, they delayed it so long, it ended up releasing in the ass-end of 1994, AFTER the PlayStation and Saturn had already come out, and at that point the situation was essentially hopeless.
>>12772697Shut up bot
>>12774006Fuck off your generation ruined MTV!
>>12771201>Genuinely what the fuck were they thinkingHideki Sato, lead engineer of the Saturn explains it here
Retard the Thread. OP must die for its stupidity
>>12771201>Revolutionizes the entire gaming market with his early push for 3D polygonal games for arcades>Said games are huge successes for Sega as a whole, making it painfully obvious that 3D is the future, even Sony notices this and makes the PS1 3D focused after seeing Virtua Fighter>SoJ doesn't care and stubbornly their next console 2D focused insteadYu Suzuki and AM2 were unironically too good for the shit tier management at SoJ
>>127712013D destroyed gaming.
>>12774735Oh...MANY people in Sega of Japan definitely knew 3D was the future. They weren't blind. There are several interviews published after the fact where Sega Employees talk how they privately knew 3D was coming quickly. Sega Japan just didn't want to admit it openly for several reasons: 1. It would anger the top level Sega Executives. Japanese business culture doesn't allow for "lower level" employees to disagree with top Executives. Everyone must fall in line and follow their clan leader *cough cough* I mean...department head.2. It would prove Sega America and Tom Kalinske right. America had been saying that 3D was the future and Sega should partner with Sony for the next console to save costs (Sega Japan rejected the deal). Sega Japan was jealous of Sega America success. How dare a branch company be more successful than the head office! Lowly Americans should now and obey Japan.3. Sega Japan employed hundreds of workers in the console division who only knew how to work with 2D. Re-training them would be very costly and delay production on the console. 4. Sega Executives were hyper obsessed with winning the console market in Japan. Being a leader in arcades wasn't enough for Sega Japan. They had very deep "trauma" from never being able to beat Nintendo and the Japanese public rejecting Sega consoles. Sega had 4 failed consoles in Japan before Sega released the Sega Saturn. The hyper obsession was so bad that even after the Sega Saturn failed miserably and dragged the company to the edge of financial collapse, the Sega Japan CEO was on record saying to the board of directors he won't give up. That he believes Sega can still win the console war in Japan. That they just need 1 more Sega console to win. The Board of Directors strongly urged the CEO to stop. That Sega should withdraw from consoles and just focus on arcade machines and making video games instead. He refused and made Sega take billions of dollars worth of loans to make Dreamcast.
>>12774680>Hideki Sato, lead engineer of the Saturn explains it hereSo basically he quickly knew 3D was the future of consoles. But he was too timid and scared to change the Saturn to 3D. He doomed the company.
>>12775109Like he said, only Yu Suzuki and AM2 knew how to work with 3DTraining the rest of Sega's employees for 3D development seemed crazy, but it's what should have been done
>>12775109From what i've read about this era of Sega. It seems like no one at SoJ wanted to piss off the executives who were completely delusional and had no idea what they were doing. So they just sat there and let the company rot. The ironic thing is that it still worked. The Saturn was a success...only in Japan. Meanwhile SoA was on fire with thousands of Genesis, Game Gear, CD, 32X, and Saturns sitting in warehouses unsold because no one in the west respected Sega anymore and jumped ship to the PlayStation.
>>12771201>>12771273After all, initially, no one believed that 3D consoles were even possible back in the 90s. In the book Revolution at PlayStation, written by a member of the very first team that developed the SNES PlayStation and later the Sony PlayStation. it is recounted how, throughout 1993 and 1994, Ken Kutaragi toured Japanese developers to encourage them to create games for the PlayStation; he spoke to them about the console's 3D capabilities, yet no one believed it was feasible.> In 1993, Capcom developers even declared that console-based 3D was at least a decade away! And do you know what finally convinced the developers? The presentation of Virtua Fighter on the Saturn. That was the moment studios reached out to the console manufacturer that had been championing 3D all along... Sony and its PlayStation...
>>12775132>The Saturn was a success...only in Japan.This is vastly overstated by Sega fans. - N64 sold around 5.6 million units in Japan- Saturn sold around 5.8 million units in Japan. - Sony PlayStation sold around 21 million units in Japan. Saturn and N64 were basically tied more or less. But Playstation crushed them both. The worst part is that even though Saturn barely outsold N64, it didn't actually recoup enough money to pay for its budget. Sega Japan dumped hundreds of millions of dollars into an inefficient and outdated console. Estimates claim around $700 to $800 million dollars in total cost to make the Sega Saturn console.If we use a movie analogy....Saturn would be a big blockbuster movie. They spent $700 million dollars on the budget, and the movie only did modestly well in one country (Japan) but flopped everywhere else. That's essentially the Saturn's situation. The Saturn may have been relatively successful in Japan, but that doesn't make it a financial success for Sega.
>>12774680I don't believe what is quoted/implied in that interview. There has been miscommunication, a mangling of events. Adding the second SH2 was the last minute change in response to the reveal of the PSX, not adding 3d support in its entirety. This whole 3d at the last minute nonsense totally ignores the presence of the DSP. Its obvious that 3d support had been intended for a decent portion of the development of the Saturn. I think a big source of confusion is people think the PSX is the minimum threshold for 3d, when really the PSX was absurdly powerful almost a generation skip.
>>12775283Wrong. If they had intended to make a 3D console them they could have adapted the Sega Model 1 arcade hardware into a console form with some modifications. Similar to what they did with the Sega Mega Drive and the Sega System 16 hardware. It's clear Saturn was intended to be a 2D system from the start. An upgraded and enhanced Mega Drive.
>>12775405Dumbass haha
>>12775405The Model 1 lacked texture mapping.
>>12775418And? Complete your thought.
>>12775418Wrong. The Sega Model 1 does have texture mapping capability. It just wasn't used much by Sega developers, and no other game studio was making games for the Sega Model 1 except Sega themselves. Soon Sega soon abandoned Model 1 development after just 5 games and quickly moved on to the Sega Model 2.
>>12775471>The Sega Model 1 does have texture mapping capabilitynta, but I don't think that's the casedo you have a source?
>>12775471Debunked:No, Sega Model 1 arcade hardware does not have texture mapping.It was Sega’s first dedicated 3D polygon arcade board (released 1992, co-developed with General Electric Aerospace/Martin Marietta help). It rendered flat-shaded (or simply lit) polygons with features such as:Flat shadingDiffuse and specular reflectionAlpha blending/channelBackground scrolling layers
>>12775498>(released 1992, co-developed with General Electric Aerospace/Martin Marietta help)Wrong, Model 1 was all Sega internal hardware. They only added Lockheed Martin/Martin Marietta/GE Aerospace hardware with model 2 and 3. Well, mostly Model 3. Model 2 was mostly just Model 1 + texturing + more speed - it couldn't do alpha blending (used checkerboards instead), it couldn't do specular reflections, it couldn't even do any shading except flat shading.also>Background scrolling layersevery Sega hardware could do this since 1984.
>>12775418>>12775498I'm sure Sega could have modified Sega Model 1 board into something like a "Sega Model 1.5" used for a Saturn console. Sega was fully capable of doing that and adding some extra chips or hardware to handle texture mapping. Im shocked they didn't take this approach. It seems like common sense. It would have Sega a ton of money when it came to research, development, and manufacturing time. The Saturn probably could have been released a year earlier and cheaper.
>>12775803Yeah, I'm pretty sure >>12775498's LLM was just regurgitating the system16.com info.There's evidence of talks between General Electric (before they were bought by Martin Marietta) and Sega during the Model 1 prototyping days, but not actual development collaboration until Model 2.>We visited Sega in November of 1990. At that time, all Sega's arcade games were based on sprites. They happened to be developing their very first polygon-based graphics system, which they called Model One. Model One was pretty crude by today's standards, but at the time it was pretty good. By comparison, it looked a lot like the Compu-Scene systems from the Apollo Space Program days, except that it went into a $15K arcade games instead of a multi-million dollar simulator. We showed Sega our video tape which demonstrated real-time, trilinear texture filtering, shading, and a host of other 3D graphics features and they became very interested in the GE technology. https://assemblergames.org/viewtopic.php?t=11130As for the "specular" claims, I imagine you should be able to compute a per-face specular highlight term in the TGP, but can't think of any game that actually did.
>>12775926It's debated among Sega fans and the emulation scene. Some claim that Sega abandoned the hardware too quickly and never pushed Model 1 to its limits. Another issue is that Sega never published official documentation on the Model 1. All the information we have is from reverse engineering and testing. But even after 30 years, we still don't have all the chips on the board completely mapped out. There are numerous chips that we still have no idea what they do or what their function is.
>>12775926 (me)>As for the "specular" claims, I imagine you should be able to compute a per-face specular highlight term in the TGP, but can't think of any game that actually did.Correction, Dural in Virtua Figther does have per-face specular (timestamp 8:39):https://youtu.be/YvkEmdldCIU?t=519
>>12771201They were working with the paradigm of the industry before Sony shook it.The Genesis had better 3D than base SNES. The 3DO did it far better, and the Saturn was going to have a better processor.3D wasn't so big yet to dedicate the console and Sega did demand playable Virtua Fighter for launch Genesis 3D, only Virtua Racing uses an extra chip:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5GqgT_6mPMhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sscW-re9Uig
>>12775418>The Model 1 lacked texture mapping.Texture mapping wasn't a big deal in 1991 when the Saturn as first being designed. Just having any good 3D at all was an achievement. Virtua Fighter 1 was a smash hit.
>>12776413Had the Saturn launched without textures it would have failed even harder. Also the Saturn needed textures, since it needs them to support 2D games.
>>12776427>since it needs them to support 2D gamesYou must be joking. Of course the Sega Model 1 is capable of 2D gaming. It would not break a sweat running a 2D game. But it was intended for 3D. Running a 2D game is massive overkill for Sega Model 1.
>>12776463The Model 1 would have to use software rendering for the sprites. In console terms you would end up with what was basically a 32x, that thing would get frame rate drops when rendering a few large scaled sprites.
>>12771415I suspect Hudson were the real masterminds behind the PCE and NEC had convinced itself that the console was a success due to their manufacturing when in reality they didn't know what the fuck they were doing.
>>12771201The model for 3D rendering in consoles was not established by the time the Saturn was designed.
>>12776486Yeah, except Model 1 literally has dedicated 2D video hardware, including Sega’s 315-5292 tilemap generator, dedicated renderer chips, and dedicated video RAM. So “it would have to software-render the sprites” is nonsense. Using the Model 1 for 2D games is like using a Ferrari to pick up groceries from the store. It's overkill.
>>12777427tilemaps and sprites are not the same thing.
