Dreamcast history rectifiction

[Evil_Cloud]

Dreamcast was doomed even before it was released, thank Sega's ex-management for that. Everything went wrong with Saturn, if they wouldn't have screwed Saturn up, there would still be a Sega.

It wasn't the saturns fault .

Get history right


It was the sega cd / 32x fiasco that went wrong. Thus having sega in a bad spot with the saturn.

If they never put out the 32x things would have gone much better .


Esp since they made a hand full of games and then dumped it . The saturn had a steady amount of good quality games for 3-4 years . Some of the 2d games being leaps and bounds above the psx even with out the 4 meg upgrade

What I meant was that they could've corrected their 32X/Sega CD errors with Saturn, and because they didn't, everything went from bad to worse.

 

[jvd]

With the saturn they just went the wrong way .

They thought the industry was staying with 2d games at the home with a few 3d games .

That is why the saturn at the time was such a 2d power house .


They really messed up with the 32x though and it made alot of people skip the saturn and go the psx

 

[PC-Engine]

What about the obvious Gouraud shading artefacts on DC SC?
To me that detracts a whole lot from overall impressiveness.

It's not really obvious for the majority of the characters. The only characters where it's obvious is Taki and Seung Mina. In the case of Taki, it's because her costume is completely single color with almost no textures at all. As for Seung Mina, her skimpy costume shows a lot of skin which is also mostly single color. Even SCII on GCN you can see Gouraud shading artefacts. It's usually visible in dimly lit stages on both versions. It's less visible in the GCN version probably because the character models probably use just a little bit more polygons. Of course this is a comparison between SCI on DC to SCII on GCN. I'm positive SCII on DC would've narrowed the gap even more by using more polygons on the characters. The textures in SCII for GCN are pretty blurry on some characters and especially blurry on some of the stages like Cervantes'.

Anyway looking at the best stages in the DC version just makes you wonder how SCII would've turned out. Stages like Maxi's Harbor of Souls and Siegfried's City of Water are just beautiful. With more development time and better tools, Namco would've been able to improve over SCI for DC I'm sure of it. And then there was NAOMI 2. Imagine what Namco could've pulled off with that piece of kit.

 

[Megadrive1988]

I agree it really was not the Saturn that F'd up Sega. it was the Sega CD in the U.S. (not so much the Mega CD in Japan) and the 32X.


Saturn was a very sucessful console for Sega, in Japan. something of an exception to Sega usually struggling badly in that country.

 

[Evil_Cloud]

Saturn was a very sucessful console for Sega, in Japan. something of an exception to Sega usually struggling badly in that country.

They were market leader for like two - three years on end? Sadly they didn't have the same succes in de US and Europe, although they did have a few sucesses like NiGHTS.

 

[VNZ]

It's time to break the myth that Saturn was "such a 2D powerhouse". It sure had some great BG-plane features, but didn't really excel otherwise. The PlayStation crushes it easily in a real-life sprite battle, especially if you consider the visual impression of transparencies.

 

[Reznor007]

It's time to break the myth that Saturn was "such a 2D powerhouse". It sure had some great BG-plane features, but didn't really excel otherwise. The PlayStation crushes it easily in a real-life sprite battle, especially if you consider the visual impression of transparencies.

Umm...Saturn totally beats the PS1 in 2d.

VDP 1 : 32-bit video display processor : sprite and polygon, dual 256KB frame buffers for rotation and scaling effects, Texture Mapping, Goraud Shading, 512KB cache for textures
VDP 2 : 32-bit background and scroll plane video display processor, 2 Windows for special calculations, transparency, shadowing, background engine, 5 simulataneous scrolling backgrounds, 2 simultaneous rotating playfields, up to 60 frames per second animation

Also, for what it's worth, MAME developers all agree that STV(arcade Saturn) is the most powerful 2d hardware ever made(and this is coming from people who have emulated almost every 2d arcade platform).

 

[Megadrive1988]

I have never heard of a 2d machine stronger than Saturn / STV.

you'd think modern 3D platforms, from Dreamcast to PS2-Cube-Xbox and PC, would be able to out-do the Saturn / STV in 2D.

I've heard that the Saturn is better at 2D than Dreamcast... how can this be ? other than the fact that Saturn was built for 2D unlike the DC....

expert insight needed.

 

[PC-Engine]

Why wouldn't the DC be able to beat Saturn's 2D capabilites? DC uses a TBDR chip. You can have a 2D game that has 50 layers and it still wouldn't matter to the PVRDC. Not only that you can have 24-bit transparencies, perfect scaling and rotation too.

 

[wazoo]

Why wouldn't the DC be able to beat Saturn's 2D capabilites?

Urban legend ??

 

[Crazyace]

Umm...Saturn totally beats the PS1 in 2d.

Not totally - the biggest advantage tended to be memory - with the better 2D games using the extra 4M ram...

Also, for what it's worth, MAME developers all agree that STV(arcade Saturn) is the most powerful 2d hardware ever made(and this is coming from people who have emulated almost every 2d arcade platform).

I'd say that the PC is the strongest 2D hardware ever made

 

[Evil_Cloud]

Neo Geo AES anyone?

 

[Megadrive1988]

Saturn / STV poops all over NeoGeo MVS/AES.

CPUs

NeoGeo: 12.5 Mhz 68000 + 4 Mhz Z80
Saturn: 2x 28 Mhz Hitachi SH2s


sprites

NeoGeo: 380
Saturn/STV: many many thousands

colors

NeoGeo: 4096 on-screen out of 65,536
Saturn: at least 32,768 on-screen out of 16 million

the NeoGeo's only advantage is the massive ROM carts.


NeoGeo doesn't even have hardware rotation, iirc.

 

[Evil_Cloud]

Isn't overal performance of Neo Geo hardware slightly better?

 

[Clashman]

Although hindsight is always 20/20, I think DC also could have done better if it had launched in the U.S. first. Waiting until 9/9/99 gave Sony the opportunity hype up PS2, which really took the wind out of DC's sails, (sales), in the U.S., (and in turn, worldwide). If they'd have had that extra year of time to themselves in the U.S, I think they might have had the numbers by the time PS2 came out to remain competitive, at least for a longer period of time.

 

[Megadrive1988]

Isn't overal performance of Neo Geo hardware slightly better?

I don't think so.

could NeoGeo do 2D shmups like Rayforce/Layer Section ?

 

[Reznor007]

Why wouldn't the DC be able to beat Saturn's 2D capabilites? DC uses a TBDR chip. You can have a 2D game that has 50 layers and it still wouldn't matter to the PVRDC. Not only that you can have 24-bit transparencies, perfect scaling and rotation too.

It could do a better 2d game, but it would do so via flat polygons, not a traditional sprite/tile setup.

 

[Reznor007]

Isn't overal performance of Neo Geo hardware slightly better?

NeoGeo: 68000@12MHz, Z80@8MHz(sound system)=2 CPU's plus YM2610 sound chip
Saturn: 2xSH2@28MHz, SH1@?, 68000@12MHz(sound), SCSP DSP, SCU DSP, SMPC microcontroller=7 CPU's+YMF292-F sound chip

As said before, the only thing going for NeoGeo was the huge ROM carts(up to around 90MB).

 

[jvd]

heh saturn was more capable than th ps1 in 2d games even with out the 4 meg cart .

Just look at all the 2d fighters on both systems . Xmen vs street fighter even with out the cart stil llooks better on saturn than ps1 . With the cart forget about it .

There was another game not sure of the name which on the ps1 didn't allow you switching team mates but on the saturn it did. With out the 4 meg cart.

 

[notAFanB]

heh saturn was more capable than th ps1 in 2d games even with out the 4 meg cart .

I am curious as to this, obviously this is the case. But is this due to memory advatage over the PS1?

Just look at all the 2d fighters on both systems . Xmen vs street fighter even with out the cart stil llooks better on saturn than ps1 . With the cart forget about it .

sounds like memory capacity ( and disk read speed?) where the cheif parties responsible for this part.


can anyone elaborate on actual features which were superior to the competition at the time?