Hideki Sato, designer of all Sega's consoles, has died
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Hideki Sato, designer of all Sega's consoles, has died
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Re: Hideki Sato, designer of all Sega's consoles, has died
#2If you want to appreciate his work today, consider reading these lovely articles about the systems he helped design:
https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/master-system/
https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/mega-drive-genesis...
Re: Hideki Sato, designer of all Sega's consoles, has died
#3What a legend. The Dreamcast in particular was a work of art too ahead of its time to be fully appreciated. It was the first console with support for broadband, way back in 2000. For context, AOL dialup peaked around this time. Spec-wise, it traded blows with the PS2 (better GPU, slower CPU) despite releasing around 18 months earlier.
The VMUs that plugged into the controllers were another highlight capturing the zeitgeist at the time, where everyone was into Tamagotchis and other little LCD toys. Everything about that console was a joy, shame it didn't do better in the market.
Re: Hideki Sato, designer of all Sega's consoles, has died
#4If you want to appreciate his work today, consider reading these lovely articles about the systems he helped design: https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/master-system/ https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/mega-drive-genesis... https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/sega-saturn/ https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/dreamcast/
Cool articles :) I got into emulation in the late 90s and eventually wrote both an NES and Genesis emulator. I always appreciated how cleanly organized Sega’s systems were, at least superficially considering the memory and register layouts.
You should take a look at Sega’s arcade systems, which were very cool, especially the Model 1, 2, and 3. Supermodel, an open source Model 3 emulator I co-wrote, and MAME have good emulation of Model 3 and 2, respectively, these days. Absolutely fascinating rendering architecture. It was early modern 3D when things were still weird and custom, before the industry standardized on OpenGL and Direct3D.
Re: Hideki Sato, designer of all Sega's consoles, has died
#5What a legend. The Dreamcast in particular was a work of art too ahead of its time to be fully appreciated. It was the first console with support for broadband, way back in 2000. For context, AOL dialup peaked around this time. Spec-wise, it traded blows with the PS2 (better GPU, slower CPU) despite releasing around 18 months earlier. The VMUs that plugged into the controllers were another highlight capturing the zei…
Hideki Sato made a fatal mistake that killed the Dreamcast. The use of an obfuscated and strange disc format should have protected the system from piracy, but they did not think it through. The discs were barely larger than CDs (700 MiB to 1000 GiB) which made it perfunctory to excise videos and music to fit the game on a traditional CD. Once that was possible, the only problem was to boot the system from a pirated CD, which was shockingly easy.
While a Playstation needed a special chip to run pirated discs, a vanilla Dreamcast could play any pirated CD you could throw at it. It was Game Over for Dreamcast 18 months after it was released, pirated discs had destroyed the market, and Hideki Sato was responsible.
Re: Hideki Sato, designer of all Sega's consoles, has died
#6What a legend. The Dreamcast in particular was a work of art too ahead of its time to be fully appreciated. It was the first console with support for broadband, way back in 2000. For context, AOL dialup peaked around this time. Spec-wise, it traded blows with the PS2 (better GPU, slower CPU) despite releasing around 18 months earlier. The VMUs that plugged into the controllers were another highlight capturing the zei…
Hideki Sato made a fatal mistake that killed the Dreamcast. The use of an obfuscated and strange disc format should have protected the system from piracy, but they did not think it through. The discs were barely larger than CDs (700 MiB to 1000 GiB) which made it perfunctory to excise videos and music to fit the game on a traditional CD. Once that was possible, the only problem was to boot the system from a pirated C…
There were numerous reasons the Dreamcast failed in the market and piracy is pretty far down on the list of those. The loss of major sports franchises and dearth of must-have games relative to competitors, Sony's hypewave marketing ("the PS2 is a supercomputer in your living room"), consumers and developers wary of a repeat of the CD/32X/Saturn debacle, trans-Pacific dysfunction between Sega's Japan and US branches... I could go on, but pirated discs wasn't it. If anything the lack of DVD playback was a bigger factor.
> Hideki Sato was responsible.
I fail to see why you want to make one guy culpable for a hardware security hole (on a system without pervasive OTA updates, no less) or why you think it necessary to do so in a thread about his death. Did you lose your job because of the failure of the Dreamcast or something?
Re: Hideki Sato, designer of all Sega's consoles, has died
#7If you want to appreciate his work today, consider reading these lovely articles about the systems he helped design: https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/master-system/ https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/mega-drive-genesis... https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/sega-saturn/ https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/dreamcast/
The Saturn is my favorite Sega system. I remember seeing it on the GameFAQs header in the late 90s when looking up strategy guides for Game Boy games and thinking "wow, that's a cool name for a system!" It wasn't until a few years ago that I finally got one. The next time I'm convalescent or snowed in I plan on finishing Powerslave and Panzer Dragoon Saga - I've only made it about halfway through both and they're fantastic.
RIP.
Re: Hideki Sato, designer of all Sega's consoles, has died
#8What a legend. The Dreamcast in particular was a work of art too ahead of its time to be fully appreciated. It was the first console with support for broadband, way back in 2000. For context, AOL dialup peaked around this time. Spec-wise, it traded blows with the PS2 (better GPU, slower CPU) despite releasing around 18 months earlier. The VMUs that plugged into the controllers were another highlight capturing the zei…
Hideki Sato made a fatal mistake that killed the Dreamcast. The use of an obfuscated and strange disc format should have protected the system from piracy, but they did not think it through. The discs were barely larger than CDs (700 MiB to 1000 GiB) which made it perfunctory to excise videos and music to fit the game on a traditional CD. Once that was possible, the only problem was to boot the system from a pirated C…
I don't buy it. NES and Atari 2600 piracy were widespread yet they were successful. Same for Nintendo DS and even the PlayStation in some markets.
Re: Hideki Sato, designer of all Sega's consoles, has died
#9Ugh sometimes I wish for an alternative universe in which Dreamcast had won over the other consoles of the day.
It was just awkwardly released, too soon after PS1 and N64. On one hand it was massively impressive for the time, on the other, most people's desire to buy another console was probably at a low and then PS2 and Xbox stole the show.
It probably also didn't help that Sega Genesis was a fiasco with all the weird add-ons.
Re: Hideki Sato, designer of all Sega's consoles, has died
#10Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hideki Sato made a fatal mistake that killed the Dreamcast. The use of an obfuscated and strange disc format should have protected the system from piracy, but they did not think it through. The discs were barely larger than CDs (700 MiB to 1000 GiB) which made it perfunctory to excise videos and music to fit the game on a traditional CD. Once that was possible, the only problem was to boot the system from a pirated C…
There were numerous reasons the Dreamcast failed in the market and piracy is pretty far down on the list of those. The loss of major sports franchises and dearth of must-have games relative to competitors, Sony's hypewave marketing ("the PS2 is a supercomputer in your living room"), consumers and developers wary of a repeat of the CD/32X/Saturn debacle, trans-Pacific dysfunction between Sega's Japan and US branches..…
I agree with this. In practice piracy on console is and always was fairly niche.
DVD playback, game catalogue and also the overwhelming success of the PS1 (with which the PS2 was backwards compatible) were much bigger reasons for its success.