You seem to be glossing over the fact that DC games are 99.9% identical to NAOMI games, who the hell cares what they did to make DC smaller/cheaper. The only thing that matters is that they did it and it didnt' affect NAOMI->DC games.
Well of course they're going to be largely un-affected. NAOMI didn't support GD-ROM streaming initially so the extra memory allocations weren't used much for anything other than caching data that would normally be streamed from the GD-ROM. There are a couple of NAOMI GD-ROM titles that actually leveraged the extra memory that would've required re-working had they been ported down to the DC. There's of course the multi-board games too, but those don't really count since none of them were ported to the DC.
Again, the only difference between an N2 based Xbox and DC would be, a second gpu which was already cheap since it's the same one used in DC, a 100 MHz TnL chip which wouldn't of costed more than the SH-4, and additional RAM which was cheap 100MHz SDRAM
If only things were so simple. Adding a second GPU also entails the additional memory pool for it, additional support components, a more complex board (to deal with the additional trace layouts and routing). Then of course there's Elan (I won't speculate into costs, however at least SuperH cores are far more widespread than Elan thus have their costs amortized across other customers), with it's memory support and routing for two GPUs. Need add an ATA interface controller if you wanted to have an HDD. You'd be surprised how much the little stuff can add to your costs. There's a reason SEGA went with a relatively cleaner design for the DC (compared to the mess inside the Saturn). Hell look at the GCN's board design, or look how many board revisions Sony's done to the PSX and PS2 to reduce part count and simplify board design to reduce costs.
Not only that, Xbox could've used half the RAM as N2 just like DC used half the RAM as N1, didn't change the way DC games looked compared to N1.
Well if you halved the main mem of NAOMI 2 then you wouldn't even have the amount of main mem that NAOMI (or Hikaru for that matter) had you'd have the same as a DC. Half the VRAM? You'd be about the same as a NAOMI then (16MB per GPU). You could probably get by with half the geometry cache for Elan (16MB). Halving NAOMI 2s audio RAM would give you half of what NAOMI had (still twice that of the DC). You're essentiall getting rid of one NAOMI 2s strongest advantages (really large memory pool).
The PS2 sold for $300 and it costed around $450 to manufacture.
$374 and $488 respectively if you wanna get a bit more specific.
[ Using NAOMI->DC for reference, Xbox based on N2 technology wouldn't have costed more than $450 to manufacture and could be sold for $300 like PS2 was.
Doesn't quite work as accurate reference. Xbox requires additional support for the HDD (which keep in mind would represent a higher percentage of system cost launching it 20 months earlier). However if you did wanna do the whole NAOMI -> DC reference, then you'd be looking at $600-$800 for home unit. But hey that's right in the range of 3DO and Neo-Geo systems (both in the $700 range)
