Air Raid wrote:
> 'A do-or-die machine which will decide whether Sega stays in the
> hardware biz'
> Sega boss Hayao Nakayama angrily berated Sega's engineers for their
> failings, but it was too late to totally redesign the system if the
> 1994 launch was too proceed. Instead, Sega added yet another processor
> to an already over-complicated design. In terms of raw power, the new
> Saturn was much more of a match for PlayStation, but it would never be
> an easy machine to program for. The twin CPU design in particular
> demanded highly specialised machine code rather than the C most
> Japanese developers prefered: barely a year after Saturn's launch a
> key Sega manager admitted only one in a hundred programmers would have
> the skill to use the machine's full potential.
Here it is again, who invented this idea that the Saturn wasn't
going to have 2 Hitachi CPUs prior to this? There is no resource that
backs this up. It is speculation entirely spawned by early 3rd party
Saturn titles looking worse than PS1 games, which we now know was an
issue of Development kits, not hardware. Any "history" which claims
this as fact is playing to the crowd, or asking the wrong people.
Sega's arcade games were exclusively 3D for at least the years the
Saturn was in development, there is absolutely nothing to support that
they were going to go with a 2D only system, with "mild" 3D
capabilities. Hell, the 32X even has 2 SH-2s in it. Sega's long
history of dual arcade boards is what spawned the Saturn, whether or not
it was "tweaked" after Sony's bloated PS1 specs were published.
> Ironically, the Saturn's Japanese launch would be Sega's best ever
> performance in its home territory. Even a flawed version of Virtua
> Fighting was enough to transform the company's traditional weakness in
> its home territory. Overseas, however, it was to be a different
> matter. Scepticism about the prospects of a CD-ROM machine succeeding
> in the cost-sensitive US market meant Saturn was originally partnered
> with a low-cost, cart-based system codenamed Jupiter -- principally
> due to American scepticism that a CD-ROM machine could be
> competitively priced. When Saturn was upgraded, Jupiter got axed in
> favour of Mars, an upgrade for Sega's 16bit Mega Drive which was
> supposed to protect the company's hugely lucrative US market. In fact,
> 32X was an unmitigated disaster, drawing vital developer support away
> from Saturn and destroying the company's reputation among gamers who
> found themselves with an add-on with barely a handful of games.
Nobody bought a 32X, there were less than 500k ever made, and the
vast majority of them sat on shelves at $30 for years after its
discontinuation. Again, the theory that "gamers" were discouraged in
any way by the 32X is a story invented by game magazines and their ever
reliable slandering of the underdog, or undersupported console.
> Written By: Stuart Wynne
>
> http://www.tinyurl.com/c5rk7
>
I wonder if anybody will every get off this kick of speculation and
hearsay and actually write a legitimate history on what happened in the
90s.
--
Scott
http://www.gamepilgrimage.com
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