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Hideki Sato, designer of all Sega's consoles, has died

videogameschronicle.com

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Re: Hideki Sato, designer of all Sega's consoles, has died

#21

Post by jgon »

alexjplant wrote: post #6
philistine wrote: post #5

Earlier 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..…

You’re asking what motive the author has for the tone of this comment because that is wrong-headed because the author of the comment was an LLM. The real question is why the author would think it’s appropriate at any time, let alone on a thread about someone’s death, to post slop. The fact they didn’t even read the slop to think about the tone is just adding insult to injury.

Re: Hideki Sato, designer of all Sega's consoles, has died

#22

Post by ranger_danger »

throwanem wrote: post #20
monitron wrote: post #2

If 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/

Worthy of the HN black bar, I feel.

black bar?

Re: Hideki Sato, designer of all Sega's consoles, has died

#23

Post by frogulis »

ranger_danger wrote: post #22
throwanem wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Worthy of the HN black bar, I feel.

black bar?

This site will often have a thin black bar along the top of the page as a mark of commemoration for someone noteworthy who has recently died.

Re: Hideki Sato, designer of all Sega's consoles, has died

#24

Post by ranger_danger »

frogulis wrote: post #23
ranger_danger wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

black bar?

This site will often have a thin black bar along the top of the page as a mark of commemoration for someone noteworthy who has recently died.

Interesting... I wonder why I have never seen it then.

Re: Hideki Sato, designer of all Sega's consoles, has died

#25

Post by trzy »

kilpikaarna wrote: post #16
trzy wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Thank you for you work! It's easy to forget today, but the Sega home consoles were always secondary to their arcade business. The main reason the Saturn sold even as well as it did was because it was the only way to play versions of the heavy hitters: Virtua Fighter, Virtua Racing, Daytona USA and Sega Rally in the home, in any fashion approaching the arcade (though still quite cut down). Those Sega 3D arcade games w…

Yup. Although sometime in the mid-90's, the home console business became more lucrative and Sega really missed the wave. Games at home were their own distinct art form: longer, more complex, far more replay value. Arcade games rarely have more than 15-20 minutes of content and this was true of Model 3 and Naomi games. Sega's arcade focus became a major liability by the time Dreamcast rolled around.

Re: Hideki Sato, designer of all Sega's consoles, has died

#26

Post by frogulis »

ranger_danger wrote: post #24
frogulis wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This site will often have a thin black bar along the top of the page as a mark of commemoration for someone noteworthy who has recently died.

Interesting... I wonder why I have never seen it then.

At least for me on mobile with a dark mode address bar, it's usually quite hard to see it.

Re: Hideki Sato, designer of all Sega's consoles, has died

#27

Post by chocochunks »

alexjplant wrote: post #6
philistine wrote: post #5

Earlier 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..…

Yeah, I think it would have had other issues if it carried on further too. Games were starting to understand using the 2nd analog stick and the DC controller was also missing 5 buttons that the Xbox and PS2 controllers had. Even some GameCube ports felt weird because of the missing buttons and that only had 4 less buttons and a 2nd analog stick.

Re: Hideki Sato, designer of all Sega's consoles, has died

#28

Post by chocochunks »

alt227 wrote: post #13
dismalaf wrote: post #9

Ugh 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 wei…

> It was just awkwardly released, too soon after PS1 and N64. > then PS2 and Xbox stole the show So in your opinion, when was a better time to release th Dreamcast?

I keep wondering if it would have been better for Sega to launch it at the same time but in the west first instead of Japan. The Saturn was DEAD by 1998 outside Japan. That extra year might have actually meant something.

Re: Hideki Sato, designer of all Sega's consoles, has died

#29

Post by gryson »

Correction: Hideki Sato didn't directly design all Sega's consoles, but rather oversaw their development as head of the R&D department. He was only directly involved in designing the earlier consoles.

The Saturn hardware, for example, was designed by Kazuhiko Hamada and a team of about a dozen engineers who had previously made the System 32 arcade hardware.

In addition to his work leading Sega's R&D efforts, Sato should also be remembered as one of the primary reasons why Sega began investing more into arcade video game development in the 1970s.

Re: Hideki Sato, designer of all Sega's consoles, has died

#30

Post by krapp »

throwanem wrote: post #20
monitron wrote: post #2

If 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/

Worthy of the HN black bar, I feel.

I think that depends on whether dang was a Nintendo kid or a Sega kid.
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