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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

#41

Post by Grazester »

alexjplant wrote: post #7
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/

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 fan…

The Saturn is also my favorite. Is it bad that I think depends a dragoon saga kind of overeated? Zwei is my favorite. The music in one was awesome I thought though

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

#42

Post by Grazester »

chocochunks wrote: post #27
alexjplant wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Here's what's interesting.The Maple bus and the Dreamcast supported a second analog stick, They just never added it to the controller.

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

#43

Post by pjmlp »

trzy wrote: post #4
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/

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…

In what concerns game consoles, since we are on a thread about Sega, industry never standardized on OpenGL and Direct3D in regards to game consoles.

Playstation never had OpenGL other than OpenGL ES 1.1 + Cg, in parallel to their own, but that was hardly adopted and was dropped.

Nintendo has had flavours of OpenGL like, but not quite the same, and while Switch supports Vulkan and OpenGL, the main API is NVN.

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

#44

Post by pjmlp »

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…

Dreamcast has a very active homebrew community nowadays, ever moreso after KallistiOS (https://github.com/KallistiOS/KallistiOS) became quite usable.

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

#45

Post by pjmlp »

philistine wrote: post #5
crims0n wrote: post #3

What 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…

On the other hand, that is one of the reasons why Dreamcast has such an active homebrew community nowadays.

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

#46

Post by mortsnort »

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…

Piracy took a huge toll on Dreamcast. It came out during the rise of P2P file sharing and you could just burn CD's of the games to play without needing to mod the console in any way.

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

#47

Post by ab5tract »

Paianni wrote: post #17
alt227 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Their hardware business was doomed by 1998, FF7 and Gran Turismo had given PlayStation momentum that neither Sega or Nintendo could hope to match, but Sega was in a particularly tough spot because of years of misguided decisions. They could have extended the Saturn's lifespan to 2000 and thrown their lot in with the PS2 after release, but it seems many people at SoJ were emotionally attached to the idea of selling co…

The Saturn was the bestselling Sega console in the Japanese market by a wide margin, so I’m not convinced that SoJ was the party pushing for a new console.

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

#48

Post by trzy »

kilpikaarna wrote: post #39
trzy wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, as someone who still regularly plays arcade games I first played decades ago, but gets bored with most modern home games halfway through the tutorial, I'm sad that the incentive and design skill to create those 15 minute intense gameplay experiences has largely been lost. (Not claiming it would make business sense to try to cater to weirdos like me, or denying that it made sense for Sega to get out of the hardw…

I get it -- I don't have time for anything but short retro games these days!

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

#49

Post by Paianni »

ab5tract wrote: post #47
Paianni wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Their hardware business was doomed by 1998, FF7 and Gran Turismo had given PlayStation momentum that neither Sega or Nintendo could hope to match, but Sega was in a particularly tough spot because of years of misguided decisions. They could have extended the Saturn's lifespan to 2000 and thrown their lot in with the PS2 after release, but it seems many people at SoJ were emotionally attached to the idea of selling co…

The Saturn was the bestselling Sega console in the Japanese market by a wide margin, so I’m not convinced that SoJ was the party pushing for a new console.

They wanted a console they could write a full-3D Sonic game for, the Saturn couldn't quite do such a game justice.

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

#50

Post by some-guy »

jolmg wrote: post #37
some-guy wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Looking back and playing my Dreamcast again, I also believe the lack of dual shoulders (only one L and R) hurt because some games simply couldn’t be easily played with the standard controller (and not everyone is buying the keyboard and mouse)

You make it sound like dual shoulders were standard, but PS(2) was the odd one for having that. None of N64, Xbox nor Gamecube had them. It wasn't really until the Xbox 360 that you'd see it outside of Sony.

Now that you mention it, maybe I'm thinking more of the dual analog sticks than the shoulders. But yeah, Gamecube at least had a Z trigger in addition to the shoulders.
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