The unreleased SEGA 'Saturn 2' and The Dreamcast Story

[Skykid]

Woulda coulda shoulda. The story of Sega.

They really have redefined the term. The sad thing is, I think they did a good job w/ the DC (even the marketing wasn't bad... at least in Japan). Nobody gave a shit though.

I dont know, i think the marketing here in the UK was terrible god I even remember the TV adverts most gamers recognised it but the majority of people watching the ad didnt have a clue what the heck was being advertised lol

Yeah it was atrocious. And they used Robbie Williams, which is always a recipe for disaster.

The Cyber Razor Cut days of the MD and MCD were a little more memorable.

[louisg]

edit: Tell a lie, they pissed away a lot of their advertising spend on sponsorship of a Premier League football team. Like the magazine, a poorly judged attempt to appeal to a non-videogaming audience.

What?

[BrianC]

Have you tried playing Jet Force Gemini recently? I only tried it emulated briefly, and if my experience was anywhere near the real thing, it's one example of things wrong with the N64 library (and a harbinger of things wrong with console shooters today). I can imagine N64 owners enjoying it back then, but I can also name quite a few polygonal TPP run & guns of the time that's aged far better. N64 needed more S&P, Star Fox and F-Zero, not more textures, even fever frames per second and slower pacing like in JFG.

I remember that game getting mixed ratings, even when it first came out. I noticed other Rare games tended to be overrated, especially DK 64, though.

[louisg]

Rare on N64 is all about Blast Corps to me. Goldeneye was pretty entertaining also if you can ignore the bugginess, though I never got why people liked the deathmatch so much. It seems sub-Doom to me.

[dannnnn]

Goldeneye was pretty entertaining also if you can ignore the bugginess, though I never got why people liked the deathmatch so much. It seems sub-Doom to me.

I used to play Goldeneye deathmatch every day with a couple of mates back when I was about 11-12. Stick it on Licence to Kill and it's so, so good.

[Estebang]

Goldeneye was only successful because the N64 had four controller ports and most kids back then didn't have a PC that could run Quake II.

[louisg]

Goldeneye was only successful because the N64 had four controller ports and most kids back then didn't have a PC that could run Quake II.

I dunno, it was kind of innovative even when compared with PC FPS games. It had a lot of the scripted design and in-game cinematics that you didn't really see in PC FPS games until Half Life, for example. And IIRC, Goldeneye predated Quake 2 by a few months. Not only that, but it had the independent move/look control you got in later FPS games. The first Quake which actually came set up for that was Q3, though you could remap keys of course in Q2 and it featured an always-on mouselook you could enable (as opposed to Q1 where you had lookspring).

[parallaxscrolling]

Here's an interesting USENET post from 1996 about Lockheed Real3D/100 and 3DFX Voodoo Graphics:

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys ... urce&hl=en

First, let me start off by saying I am going to be buying a Voodoo card.
For low end comsumer grade flight sims and such, the Voodoo looks like
about the best thing available. Second, I am not necessarily responding
to just you, because there seems to be a hell of a lot of confusion
about Lockheed Martin's graphics accelerators. I have been seeing posts
all over the place confusing the R3D/100 with the AGP/INTEL project that
L.M. is working on. The R3D/100 is *NOT* the chipset that is being
developed for the AGP/INTEL partnership.

However, since your inference is that the Voodoo is faster than the
R3D/100, I have to say that you are totally dead wrong. While the specs
say that the Voodoo is *capable* of rendering a higher number of pixels
per second, or the same number of polygons per second as the R3D/100,
the specs fail to mention that these are not real world performance
figures any you probably will not ever see the kind of performance that
3Dfx claims to be able to acheive. This does *not* mean that the Voodoo
is not a good (its great actually) card, just that the game based 3D
accelerator companies (all of them) don't tell you the whole story.


The Voodoo uses a polygon raster processor. This accelerates line and
polygon drawing, rendering, and texture mapping, but does not accelerate
geometry processing (ie vertex transormation like rotate and scale).
Geometry processing on the Voodoo as well as every other consumer (read
game) grade 3D accelerator. Because the cpu must handle the geometry
transforms and such, you will never see anything near what 3Dfx,
Rendition, or any of the other manufacturers claim until cpu's get
significantly faster (by at least an order of magnitude). The 3D
accelerator actually has to wait for the cpu to finish processing before
it can do its thing.


I have yet to see any of the manufacturers post what cpu was plugged
into their accelerator, and what percentage of cpu bandwidth was being
used to produce the numbers that they claim. You can bet that if it was
done on a Pentium 200, that the only task the cpu was handling was
rendering the 3D model that they were benchmarking. For a game,
rendering is only part of the cpu load. The cpu has to handle flight
modelling, enemy AI, environmental variables, weapons modelling, damage
modelling, sound, etc, etc.


The R3D includes both the raster accelerator (see above) and a 100 MFLOP
geometry processing engine. Read that last line again. All geometry
processing data is offloaded from the system cpu and onto the R3D
floating point processor, allowing the cpu to handle more important
tasks. The Voodoo does not have this, and if it were to add a geometry
processor, you would have to more than double the price of the card.


The R3D also allows for up to 8M of texture memory (handled by a
seperate texture processor) which allows not only 24 bit texturemaps
(RGB), but also 32bit maps (RGBA) the additional 8 bits being used for
256 level transparency (Alpha). An addtional 10M can be used for frame
buffer memory, and 5M more for depth buffering.


There are pages and pages of specs on the R3D/100 that show that in the
end, it is a better card than the Voodoo and other consumer and
accelerator cards, but I guess the correct question is, for what? If
the models that are in your scene are fairly low detailed (as almost all
games are - even the real cpu pigs like Back to Bagdhad), then the R3D
would be of little added benefit over something like the Voodoo.
However, when you are doing scenes where the polys are 2x+ times more
than your typical 3D game, the R3D really shines. The R3D is and always
was designed for mid to high end professional type application, where
the R3D/1000 (much much faster than the 100) would be too expensive, or
just plain overkill. I've seen the 1000 and I have to say that it rocks!
I had to wipe the drool from my chin after seeing it at Siggraph (We're
talking military grade simulation equipment there boys, both in
performance and price!)


Now then, as I mentioned before, I'm going be buying the Voodoo for my
home system, where I would be mostly playing games. But, I am looking
at the R3D for use in professional 3D application. More comparible 3D
accelerators would not be Voodoo, Rendition based genre, but more along
the lines of high end GLINT based boards containing Delta geometry
accelerator chips (and I don't mean the low end game base Glint chips,
or even the Permedia for that matter), or possibly the next line from
Symmetric (Glyder series), or Intergraph's new professional accelerator
series.


Ted K.
Shadowbox Graphics
Chicago - where being dead isn't a voting restriction.

Extremely interesting and well written IMHO.

[parallaxscrolling]

By April 1997, Next Generation Online discovered that Lockheed Martin would not be involved with Sega's home console plans, and that Black Belt would not be an upgrade for Saturn but a whole new console.

Black Belt from a Lockheed Perspective
Two former Lockheed Martin employees, N-Space's Erick Dyke and Dan O'Leary voice their views on Sega's move to use 3Dfx instead of a Lockheed Martin solution.
April 29, 1997

With experience in developing for Model 2 (Desert Tank) and having helped develop the Model 3 hardware while at Lockheed Martin, Erick Dyke and Dan O'Leary have indicated that it would have been difficult for Sega to make a better decision in terms of a graphics subsystem.

"3Dfx has proven itself. Just look downstairs (at CGDC). Nearly every major demo at every booth is running off of some form of the Voodoo graphics chipset," said O'Leary. While consumers have yet to establish a standard in 3D acceleration, most of the developers projects and demos were using Voodoo as their target platform.

Commenting upon the strengths of the proposed Black Belt Dyke said: "Not only is Sega getting the hottest chipset around, but with Microsoft in its corner it will be getting useful libraries; something the Saturn desperately lacked."

The major question facing the duo was why did Sega neglect its long-term hardware partner Lockheed Martin when designing the hardware? O'Leary stepped up to the plate answering: "Sega has to find the cheapest but most powerful hardware it can. Lockheed Martin is still trying to figure out how it fits into the consumer space seeing as it has traditionally worked in the simulation arena. 3Dfx on the other hand was created from the ground up to be a consumer level product. It isn't at all surprising that Sega has gone this route."

When comparing Lockheed's Model 2 and Model 3 hardware to the proposed Black Belt specification, both O'Leary and Dyke felt that that Black Belt would be far more similar to developing for the Model 2 than Model 3. "The Model 2 is a beautiful board that is simple to get right to the metal, " said Dyke. "The Model 3 was designed around more of a traditional simulator model with a host and GPU arrangement where the database runs the entire game."

While Dyke mentions getting to the metal easily, some developers such as Scott Corley and Dave Perry both voiced some concern over Microsoft's OS getting in the way. "Good developers will cut through the OS to get to the metal as they need it." says Dyke. "As long as Microsoft doesn't force the OS upon the developers it should be fine."

With the ease of development that is expected to go along with the system, and the double-edged sword that this situation can present, Dyke said that Sega's quality assurance program should help to weed out games from developers that are relying too much upon the base libraries or that are quick ports of substandard PC titles.

Both Dyke and O'Leary also pointed to one non-technical element that is different at Sega presently than it was at the launch of the Saturn: executive personnel. Both men cited the fact that Bernie Stollar was a major factor for the third party support that PlayStation enjoys and the fact that Stollar is now responsible for generating that same third party support for Sega. "They've assembled a really good team at Sega now and it's going to be interesting to see what the next generation brings." said Dyke.

http://web.archive.org/web/199706051619 ... 997b.chtml

Black Belt eventually lost the internal competition within SEGA in favor of Katana in the summer of 1997, which was then named Dreamcast in May 1998.