What If SEGA Released The 32X A Year Earlier?

That was pretty funny. I almost choked on my drink, when he talked about the power cords

 

I was a day one buyer of the Sega CD.
I was a day one buyer of the Sega 32X.
I completely gave up on video games until a friend made me play Resident Evil.

Pardon my confession, but I had to get that off of my chest.

 

So the extra 32768 colours it could produce didn't improve the Genesis' palette of 512 at all? Sure.

If the 32x had been released a year earlier, been cheaper, and had been built into a new model MD/Genesis at the same time, it would have been a wild success IMHO. However the chances that could have happened are pretty much nil so it's a moot point. The 32x is interesting, but really it shouldn't have been released, although SOJ's alternative would have been even worse.

 

Wild success is pushing it, assuming the same games would've magically been made a year in advance. Software sells consoles and the 32X was lacking enough quality wares.

Not sure why the SEGA fans are dwelling on 32X when it was the catalyst of the hardware business's decline into oblivion.

 

True, but if it had been released a year earlier it probably would have had more software support as Sega of Japan hadn't yet developed their stupid "Saturn or bust" mentality.

 

Legit.

 

Spend 10s of thousand of dollars now and wait for the core component to show up a decade from now.

Personally I think it would of sold better with a remote control, caterpillar tracks and an action figure. Because every time I see a 32X setup I see a futuristic tank and not a console.

 

Whats the title of that game?
I played it in the arcades on a superb sim-like cabinet when I was a kid. It was awesome.
And I wanted to find the name of the game

 

Why do they mention 32 bit processors?
For some reason I had faint memories that Sega initially had a 2 CPU console and later I remember ads that talked about 3 processors. Back then I think some people explained that it was updated from the original release. I thought it was my imagination but here it is.
What was the third processor about?

 

Holy thread necro, Batman!

Anyhow, @Nesh Galaxy Force as shown above did not run on System 16 hardware. It was either System Y or System 32 (I'm not sure which), because of the full-screen/sprite rotation. Anyhow, System 16 was very primitive in comparison to the Super Scaler series of hardware, starting with Space Harrier and Outrun and then moving onwards. System 32 in particular was quite hardcore, with several discrete pools of high-speed dual-ported RAM to support massive sprites scaled and rotated, multiple background layers simultaneously and so on. It's very unlikely it could have been squished down to fit a cheap consumer add-on like the 32X in the early 1990s.

Because # of bits in the 1980s/90s were extremely important?

Both Megadrive and SNES had twin processors as standard... Megadrive had MC68k and a Zilog Z80 clone for sound (and Master System backwards compat.) SNES had its 16-bit MOS 6502 derivative CPU and custom Sony sound CPU/DSP.

3 processors on Megadrive would be possible with SEGA CD addon which had another 12MHz 68k CPU as I recall, or if you count the SVP cartridge addon CPU as used in Megadrive version of Virtua Racing.

 

Oops

Typo there. I meant 3 32 bit processors.
That was referring to the Sega Saturn.

 

It’s available on the 3DS. Here’s a fantastic article about the development of it:

http://www.siliconera.com/2013/12/12/3d-galaxy-force-ii-going-run/

@Grall

 

So why did Sega sometimes adverdise 3 32 bit processors for teh Saturn when it had two?

 

Well, dependining on how you define "32-bit processor", I believe Saturn had somewhere between 5 and 8 of them.

You had the twin Hitachi main CPUs, another Hitachi CPU as CDROM drive/MPEG slot controller, the CPU/DSP integrated into one of the graphics chipset ASICs, there's a MC68k (which is basically a 32-bit CPU on a 16-bit bus), and also a sound DSP in there IIRC. And there's the foreground/background graphics chips themselves which I'm unsure how programmable they are, I think at least one of them runs a display list to draw graphics...? *shrug*

 

Hmm....I wonder which one they used as the third in ads. I do remember ads (or gaming mags?) back in the day adverdising 3 and if I recall correctly someone even asked in a mag or somewhere about it and the answer was that Sega upgraded for better performance which I found very odd.