DF Retro's Failed Consoles

[benjipwns]

i approve of this concept

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[Great Rumbler]

It's really amazing how quickly Sega squandered all the success they'd spent nearly a decade building up during 1994-1995.

[benjipwns]

in the comments he mentions he's been acquiring more Jaguar games and getting his 3DO ready for capture

also plans to do Saturn at some point but it obviously has way more titles

3DO also has a surprisingly big library too especially if he includes all the multimedia crap and groundbreaking stuff like PLUMBERS DON'T WEAR TIES

Sega CD actually might be the easier one to do next, seems like he already has a good number of those games, plus it's full of Genesis ports with loading and FMV

TurboDuo or whichever of those one upgrades to the PC Engine only has like five games total

maybe Virtual Boy

[benjipwns]

 

[Positive Touch]

god dammit i would like this channel a lot more if he'd just do a better job editing his videos. "hey look this game uses the genesis to display the background! hey look all the other games do it too so let's see an example for every. single. game." COME ON

that said, good summary of this piece of shit console. just a trash idea from start to finish and imo worse than the damn virtual boy. it should have been cancelled a long time before release when it was clear that nothing was coming together for it.

[Let's Cyber]

Make My Video-INXS for the Sega CD got me laid in highschool

[benjipwns]

god dammit i would like this channel a lot more if he'd just do a better job editing his videos. "hey look this game uses the genesis to display the background! hey look all the other games do it too so let's see an example for every. single. game." COME ON

that said, good summary of this piece of shit console. just a trash idea from start to finish and imo worse than the damn virtual boy. it should have been cancelled a long time before release when it was clear that nothing was coming together for it.

it's dark1x from gaf, so he's kinda like that sometimes if not quite anywhere near a black falcon...that said he does a better job of showing "same footage" of various ports of games than a lot of amateur comparison dudes do which i enjoy, like in the quake or unreal tournament videos, he made sure they were same maps, standing same place, and did split/third/etc. screens, too many fegs will just play one clip then another and not even the same levels or whatever...but that sorta is digital foundry's intention in the first place

i'd like to imagine he didn't actually sit there plugging and unplugging the 32X when you can just disable it in all the emulators and he only showed the ones where it showed anything but i forget now if he did actually show each game even if the 32X was running everything

i remember thinking something was fishy about the 32X due to MKII because magazines were all "it arcade perfect finally!" and i was like...wait those backgrounds look off compared to SNES ones...now i know it's because it's still using the Genesis to draw them, gonna go back in time and shove this in that jerk day one everything sega nut Kirk's face and ignore all his dumb 1995 questions like "wait, why do you have a PADD from Star Trek and how are you playing video on this, wait, how are you playing Star Trek episodes on this that look better than the ones on TV and it has games?!? what's this ADVENTURE CAPITALIST thing?!?!?"

a few of the Sega fan sites have interviewed the Sega of America dudes from back then about the clusterfuck that was the 32X and how it was Japan freaking out about all sorts of stuff because the Saturn was a clusterfuck of development...and the Sega CD was a mess too: http://www.sega-16.com/2012/03/interview-scot-bayless/

Scot Bayless: I joined SOA as a Technical Director right at the end of ’90 and, if memory serves, we started getting preliminary technical information about Sega CD very early in ’91. All the documents were in Japanese, and the guys in Tokyo just didn’t have the infrastructure to translate them, so we started hiring local translators just to get caught up on the docs. The first breadboard dev kits started showing up early in the spring. They were huge, fragile beasts, sensitive to electrical noise and prone to random lockups, but that’s the nature of prototype systems.  By summer, we were in full burn, trying to get both our internal titles and several key external projects up to speed. That left us only a few months to launch; it was nuts. We literally worked around the clock all the way up to the launch in New York.

Sega-16: What were some of the technical issues? Former EA programmer Ernest Adams mentioned that developers had to check the status byte to “continually ask it whether the next block of data had arrived,” and he complained of the lack of hardware interrupt line from the CD drive. Were these major issues in game development? Was they a reason for the many cartridge games with CD soundtracks that were released (Wolfchild, Terminator, Sol-Feace)?

Scot Bayless: Ernest is absolutely right.  Like him, I had to write polling code to watch that status byte.  It was the only way to make sure you weren’t reading dead air. While the Genesis was an elegant design, the Sega-CD/Genesis combination was something of a Frankenstein. Add to that the schedule challenge of trying to get to the launch window with software that could work reliably, and it’s not surprising at all that many developers simply opted to use the unit as a CD player.

Scot Bayless: Well he was certainly involved at the incept point. 32X essentially started with a call to Joe Miller at CES. He, Marty Franz and a few of the senior production guys were in Joe’s suite when the call came through. Nakayama-san was on speaker phone and the word was, “We have to counter Jaguar. Make it happen.” The original concept for 32X was literally drawn on a cocktail napkin after that call.

and while others don't remember it exactly that way, it was basically like a CES freak out by higher ups who told them to come up with something FAST:
http://www.sega-16.com/2013/02/interview-joe-miller/

Sega-16:  That leads us to the question that has to be asked. There’s been great debate, great drama, about the origins of the 32X, so let’s settle it once and for all. Was the 32X something that began at SOJ, or was it SOA’s response to an order from Japan? There’s that famous story about you, Marty Franz, Scot Bayless and others in a hotel suite, coming up with the design for the 32X on a napkin. There’s the whole story about how SOJ basically wanted a Genesis 2, which was basically the same machine with a larger color palette, and you convinced them to go with the infamous mushroom add-on design instead. What’s truth and what’s urban legend?

Joe Miller: It’s not as dramatic at all as it’s been made out to seem. There was no palace revolt, and I don’t think there were any napkins involved, though we did have large stacks of sticky, white paper… easel paper all over the place. We were drawing pictures and diagrams (system diagrams) and doing lots of other things during those meetings which took place at all hours in rooms at our Las Vegas hotel.

Hideki Sato was right there with us, and I don’t want to rehash history – I certainly don’t want to rewrite it either, because there has been a lot said about it, about what exactly transpired there. Let me just put it this way. At CES (Consumer Electronics Show) – and perhaps we even had a little warning before CES – it became clear that there was a desire for us to take a product that was in the early design stages in Japan. It was a new platform (nobody was codenaming things “Jupiter” then, or even “Mars” at that point), and there was certainly an awareness that Japan had an idea of what they wanted to do with a Genesis platform that had more colors and was able to do 3D… take some of what we learned on the SVP chip – the polygon-pusher chip – and integrate something that was more capable and build a new platform. It was still going to be a 16-bit machine with some limited 32-bit capabilities.

When CES began, we started having discussions about the timeframe for this because there was a strong desire for it. It was January (this was winter CES), and there was a strong desire for whatever it was we were going to build to be available in the marketplace by Christmas of that year. That’s a tall order for a start-from-scratch machine. Nothing exists; no boards exist, no chipsets… a tall order for anybody at any organization to say “let’s design hardware; let’s build it; let’s get development systems, and let’s have titles that are compelling enough to actually gain the attention of our customers… not alienate them but actually cause them to be excited about it,” in basically a six to nine-month timeframe.

Joe Miller: No, it didn’t have an effect on what we were working on. It obviously made it more important that we resolve thorny challenges – and we had many. In all the things that have been written about the transition from the 32X to the Saturn I don’t think this one has been told. One of the rationales for the 32X was to give developers a step-wise way to get into 32-bit and multiprocessor programming.  Saturn had eight processors, and the set of tools, the documentation, training, sample code – to get that platform to do what it was designed to do was a very complex and painful learning process for developers, including the best and sharpest minds that Sega had to bring to bear on it, in both Japan and the U.S.

Our challenge, our focus was to make sure we had documentation, we had compilers that were producing correct code, that the SH-2 was optimized, that we had debuggers, hardware emulators and a variety of other things. I don’t think very many people understood the layers of infrastructure required to actually get developers up to speed on a new platform.

One of the stories that hasn’t been told is that the 32X actually helped development teams that had been successful on Genesis make the step up to the Hitachi SH-2 – dual SH-2s in that case – and there were a bunch of routines, a collection of tools and compilers that were created to support 32X development that were adapted and ported over to Saturn. The early launch meant that we had to accelerate all of that in the pipeline as well – all the cross-development tools, all the documentation – and get developers ramped up 6, 8, 12 months earlier than we had expected or intended.

[Sho Nuff]

Fuck I'm really curious as to what that SVP Genesis version of VF looked like

[Himu]

It's really amazing how quickly Sega squandered all the success they'd spent nearly a decade building up during 1994-1995.

The nomad

[benjipwns]

true story: they accidentally picked the name of that off a report describing their business plans

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/fake news

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/maybe

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[headwalk]

used to give dark10x a lot of grief on GAF but been properly enjoying his DF retro stuff. in a first for youtube he's neither clueless nor smug.

[tiesto]

32x was a disaster, but I think if given the choice, I'd put it ahead of LaserActive, Jaguar/Jag CD, and CD-i. At least there were some decent arcade ports on it, Tempo is probably the best original game for the platform though.

[Positive Touch]

one of the things i never hear about with the 32x is how hard it was just to get the damn thing to work. required a million cords (and 3 ac adapters if you had a sega cd!), had those stupid metal bracers you had to insert in the cartridge slot, and then it had the nerve to be crash-prone, especially if something happened to tap the system. made it a bitch to play even regular genesis games.

[Sho Nuff]

I find it staggering that the 32x could not comfortably do full-screen scrolling in high-color mode at 60fps

[benjipwns]

second part with Doom, Star Wars, sports games, CD titles, etc.:


very much the same as the first part in terms of much content seeing what runs on 32X and what runs on Genesis, I figure he grabbed everything before and mostly just split this into two parts by genre later

semi-backfire attempted shot at NBA Jam TE on Gameboy which actually plays decently for having to stick something on select (pass duh) and doesn't run like garbage either

[benjipwns]

also he hints at Jaguar coming up next, or potentially a Doom episode (hoping the latter, then the former)

[bork]

Fuck I'm really curious as to what that SVP Genesis version of VF looked like

There was one in development? 

I'd really like to know what possessed Sega to make that crappy 2D version of VF2 for the Genesis. 

[benjipwns]

Gaibrain did VF2 Genesis and though I can't find much information on it, I have a sneaking suspicious it may have started as a 32X title. Then they turned it into sprites and dumped it out on the Genesis which still had a large install base in the West.

That's one of the things that Tom Kalinske has talked about in multiple interviews over the years, that Sega of Japan instantly killed Genesis development and moved to Saturn and he was trying to tell them that he had a shit load of Genesis units out there (along with solid bases for the CD and 32X surprisingly) and people were still buying games for the thing and pointed to the SNES as further proof and Japan didn't care, they wanted Saturns out there even though there weren't games ready for it either. Peter Moore has suggested that these kind of internal politics were still at work during the Dreamcast days but he went over all their heads and got that multi-million dollar commitment from the owner, who wanted Sega out of the hardware business and died shortly thereafter, that he could still make money in the U.S. and Japan was the incompetent branch which let him import damn near everything unlike during the Saturn days. All of which helped him land the Microsoft job.

[benjipwns]

I was looking into some 32X stuff in the old magazines and archives, and seeing if I could come across anything on that still weird VF2 game, but came across in Edge something else I found somewhat amusing.

When Nintendo first showed off footage of Donkey Kong Country at CES people assumed it was the first Project Reality game and they later had to correct that it was a SNES game. (And then they showed off the newly dubbed Ultra 64 games behind closed doors....Crusin' USA and Killer Instinct.)

It's kinda crazy to think retrospectively that if you were a GAMES JOURNALIST at that show floor you're getting blown away initially by "here's our brand new amazing hardware and our games are DKC, Crusin USA and KI!" When that generation ultimately became about stepping into 3D games. And Nintendo didn't even bother publishing the N64 version of Crusin USA. (And enough time had passed that they put out KI on the SNES and GB and put 2 on the N64.)

Also is interesting in how the games media was divided with their local focuses, Edge, which straddled it and was more interested in the import market by being from the UK has far more reporting on Saturn and Playstation's upcoming ports of Virtua Fighter, Daytona and Ridge Racer. American magazines are full of 3DO, Jaguar, 32X and then these Nintendo games.

Further, E3 effectively centralized all this into a single event, as Sony didn't do CES, Sega chose not to show anything at that Summer CES and Winter CES was before they had anything, and Nintendo avoided TGS and earlier that year's Winter CES. 3DO was such a newcomer that their booth wasn't in the video games section at either CES, they were next to a company that made refrigerators and microwaves.

The Edge letters section also has a bundle of people complaining how they covered the 3DO and Jaguar as the new technology and now are talking about the Saturn and now the Playstation too as being better, what's next they dump those for Project Reality?!?!? Can't you just pick a system! (Also, being the UK, every issue has people complaining about they're slighting the Amiga which is the true machine of the future.)

And I'm sure it's been mentioned before, but when Sega first showed off the Saturn in Japan, the "prototype" was actually a painted and carved wood block.