JP Morgan report on Xbox 2
- Thread starter Megadrive1988
- Start date
cthellis42:
We know MS's design philosophy doesn't require specific hardware partners, so why should we assume it does? Also, we know of specific technologies (with relevant licensing popularity) from that time and about their performance.
Who knows what Microsoft would've actually chosen in this 'What if?' scenario, but I can see that your assumption of lower overall performance and less RAM wouldn't necessarily be true.
No, someone suggested a hypothetical, so the relevant possibilities must be pursued to properly consider it.
I've kept things straight and simple, without ignoring the actualities of this specific example like you're advocating I should've done.
We know MS's design philosophy doesn't require specific hardware partners, so why should we assume it does? Also, we know of specific technologies (with relevant licensing popularity) from that time and about their performance.
Who knows what Microsoft would've actually chosen in this 'What if?' scenario, but I can see that your assumption of lower overall performance and less RAM wouldn't necessarily be true.
Lazy8s said:
Hmm, I might be misunderstanding the discussion topics here but all consoles are very cost sensitive so just plopping down an Elan into an XBox is quite a hefty price. Just because Elan existed doesn't mean it could be turned into a console so cheaply and easily.
IT had to put off the PC series 2 boards for many months just to get Dreamcast out the door. That likely means they were tapped out in terms of necessary resources (understandably so!). Perhaps this worried MS?
Lazy8s said:
Well historically speaking, I thought IT PC cards were fairly clock sensitive. That is, they weren't that easy to overclock. Didn't the series two card come out just a bit underclocked? I could easily be mistaken.
Anyhow this is MS here. They're not exactly a stupid company. Sure they make mistakes but by and large, they are extremely good at what they do (global domination
). So I'm sure they had their reasons NOT to go PVR.Ty said:Lazy8s said:Anyhow this is MS here. They're not exactly a stupid company. Sure they make mistakes but by and large, they are extremely good at what they do (global domination
I don't know where this notion comes from.
MS is remarkably bad at anything outside of desktop and office software contract negotions with OEMs. Almost every product that hasn't been able to leverage their core monopoly products has been anywhere from a wash to a massive failure.
Just go back and read some of the interviews and talks MS execs have given about the console market over the past two to three years to get a good indication of just how stupid many of the key execs at MS are.
Teasy said:
Iirc sony announced last january that they
shipped 70 millions PS2 Worldwide.
http://www.the-magicbox.com/game011404.shtml
And if i remember my economics courses right
there won't be more than 3 millions (at max...) ps2 in the retailers 's stocks (worldwide)
so we can say that the sale of the ps2 are around the 65~67M
Nothing would "necessarily" be true, except the simplest assumption that, if delivered 20 months earlier, the Xbox would have been less powerful. (As I don't assume you're saying it would have been exactly the same?) In what exact ways and how...? Who knows, and who cares? A complete rethinking is 100% as fruitless as discussing just what the PS2 would look like if their timetables were bumped up that amount of time. Fun to contemplate, goes nowhere, and says nothing.Lazy8s said:
And if I remember correctly, there indeed were murmurings about designs for an earlier-to-launch machine that seemed to point in AMD's (and still nVidia's? Not sure on the GPU side, but it didn't seem like a design-philosophy reworking) direction, which puts hypotheticals in a different light as it is.
One can say a lot about what "could have been" from any number of companies from looking at tech and track-records and our 20/20 hindsight perspective, but ultimately they're all empty words in a market that has continually defied expectations and has held 180-degree separated positions on matters of tech depending on which party you're looking at and in what generation. Which is most certainly why I don't feel matters of tech will have a huge impact this generation either, unless they are quite enormous.
A 20 month earlier xbox could have been better if it featured faster ram and a geforce 2 chip. It would have lost pixel shading, but would have been more powerful, though ram at the time was probably really expensive, more likely it would have been about the same power but without pixel shading.
BTW, early xbox reports said AMD would provide the cpu, but I heard they were dropped because of heat and power reasons, and more importantly Intel was willing to offer chips in bulk cheaper.
And early on Gigapixel(why gigapixel? wouldn't microsoft have been more interested in the powervr technology which was already proven?) and a bit later 3dfx.(I'd imagine they were interested in 3dfx for cheap chips, towards the end 3dfx really knew how to sell things at minimal profit)
BTW, early xbox reports said AMD would provide the cpu, but I heard they were dropped because of heat and power reasons, and more importantly Intel was willing to offer chips in bulk cheaper.
And early on Gigapixel(why gigapixel? wouldn't microsoft have been more interested in the powervr technology which was already proven?) and a bit later 3dfx.(I'd imagine they were interested in 3dfx for cheap chips, towards the end 3dfx really knew how to sell things at minimal profit)
From: http://www.d6.dion.ne.jp/~yosou-oh/hard.htm
Master System: 6M (this number is from http://www.eidolons-inn.net/sega/8bit_info.html)
Genesis/Megadrive: 34.32 M
Sega CD/Mega CD: 2.24 M
Game Gear: 10.43 M
Saturn: 14.46 M (I think that this number is wrong because the overseas number (8.86 M) is seems too high for me. Maybe the overseas number is actually the worldwide sales that already inludes the japanese number (5.6 M))
Dreamcast 11 M
GB/GBC: 118.42 M
NES/Famicom: 61.78 M
Famicom Disk System: 4.44 M
SNES/Super Famicom: 49.02 M
Virtual Boy: 1.26 M
N64: 32.92 M
3DO: 1.34 M
Neo Geo Pocket/Neo Geo Pocket Color: 0.85 M
Master System: 6M (this number is from http://www.eidolons-inn.net/sega/8bit_info.html)
Genesis/Megadrive: 34.32 M
Sega CD/Mega CD: 2.24 M
Game Gear: 10.43 M
Saturn: 14.46 M (I think that this number is wrong because the overseas number (8.86 M) is seems too high for me. Maybe the overseas number is actually the worldwide sales that already inludes the japanese number (5.6 M))
Dreamcast 11 M
GB/GBC: 118.42 M
NES/Famicom: 61.78 M
Famicom Disk System: 4.44 M
SNES/Super Famicom: 49.02 M
Virtual Boy: 1.26 M
N64: 32.92 M
3DO: 1.34 M
Neo Geo Pocket/Neo Geo Pocket Color: 0.85 M
Interesting how much the saturn outsold the dreamcast, yet the saturn is regarded as a true failure while the dreamcast isn't. Saturn is also kicking xbox's and gamecube's butts.
And I don't think GB and GBA should be lumped into one group....and same for gameboy color and gameboy as it is a new system with new games aned thus was a forced upgrade. That's like counting PS2 and PS1 as the same system, and game gear and master system had more in common hardware wise than the gameboys yet they aren't lumped together.
Hmm, starting with the NES generation.....
We could probably say the user base in the NES generation was around 60-80 million.(NES systems were sold after the 16 bit systems came out, and the NES had a fairly high failure rate)
SNES and Genesis appears to also be around 80 million.
I'd say the handheld market has always been around 40-60 million.
Last gen you could probably say was over 100 million.
And this gen is probably around 60-80 million so far.
BTW, I'd bet that the gameboy color is the most likely system to have surpassed its predecessor in sales, and the gameboy advance is the most likely to do so next. On that list it has about 120 million gameboys sold, minus like 50 million for gba and you're left with 70 million.(honestly I think gameboy color and old gameboy sold more than that, like 90-100 million combined as around the gameboy advance's release nintendo put out something saying how gameboy had sold 100 million) Gameboy Color hit around the time of pokemon, which was probably the gameboy's most popular time, I think it could be the fastest selling handheld. The old gameboy was just always moderately paced and steady.
And I don't think GB and GBA should be lumped into one group....and same for gameboy color and gameboy as it is a new system with new games aned thus was a forced upgrade. That's like counting PS2 and PS1 as the same system, and game gear and master system had more in common hardware wise than the gameboys yet they aren't lumped together.
Hmm, starting with the NES generation.....
We could probably say the user base in the NES generation was around 60-80 million.(NES systems were sold after the 16 bit systems came out, and the NES had a fairly high failure rate)
SNES and Genesis appears to also be around 80 million.
I'd say the handheld market has always been around 40-60 million.
Last gen you could probably say was over 100 million.
And this gen is probably around 60-80 million so far.
BTW, I'd bet that the gameboy color is the most likely system to have surpassed its predecessor in sales, and the gameboy advance is the most likely to do so next. On that list it has about 120 million gameboys sold, minus like 50 million for gba and you're left with 70 million.(honestly I think gameboy color and old gameboy sold more than that, like 90-100 million combined as around the gameboy advance's release nintendo put out something saying how gameboy had sold 100 million) Gameboy Color hit around the time of pokemon, which was probably the gameboy's most popular time, I think it could be the fastest selling handheld. The old gameboy was just always moderately paced and steady.
IST said:
Which I think is wrong, as it did have its own games, its own design, new features, and backwards compatibility didn't make ps2 into just another playstation. And the graphics were more than just colorized versions of the old graphics, the gameboy color could do color, have a higher framerate(or whatever it is 2d games have) and have more detailed graphics. It was like a game gear and a half + a gameboy of old.
And gba definetely shouldn't be lumped in with the other 2 gameboys. It's advanced! It does more than CoLoRizes!
IST said:
How so? If I recall correctly, gameboy color's hardware was more like a game gear x1.5 + a z80 for backwards compatibility with the old gameboy. They possibly could have had the things playing game gear and master system games if they wanted.
And gbc had plenty of its own games. Sure, they had quite a lot of those hybrid packs with enhancements for gameboy color, but they usually didn't look as good as the gameboy color only titles. Besides, GBC-GBA had a few of those as well, Shantae did, and I think the two zelda oracle games and pokemon crystal did. Granted it was far more limited, and gameboy color support basically completely died off after gba, whereas gameboy support continued strong after gameboy color. However, gameboy support was slowly phazed out, similar to how psx support was still strong when ps2 came out but is being slowly phazed out. The switch from gameboy color to gba was more like n64 to gamecube though, you saw a few remnants from the old generation(the 2 or 3 rereleases of ocarina of time, animal crossing), but it basically completely replaced the old system.
Fox5 said:
According to several FAQs that contain spec sheets for the systems over at GameFAQs, the CPU was a Z80 that had a GB and GBC mode. The GBC's CPU was faster in both GB and GBC mode than the SMS, but it had the same amount of RAM. It had a better pallete, but was limited to 52 colors at max, which was the same amount the SMS had. The SMS also had a good deal higher res as well. The SMS was also cabible of many more sprites as well. I wouldn't call the GBC an SMS and a half. In some ways it was more powerful, some just as powerful and some not as powerful. I used three FAQs for research. One SMS one, one GBC one and a GB one for measure.
Here are the links to them: http://db.gamefaqs.com/portable/gbcolor/file/gameboy_color_a.txt
http://db.gamefaqs.com/portable/gameboy/file/game_boy.txt
http://db.gamefaqs.com/console/sms/file/sega_master_system.txt
