I dont have much love for Atari and the Jaguar from false advertising about it being a 64 bit machine to its flawed hardware.
Atari was just riding the wave of the bit wars, there was plenty of false advertising on all sides. Because bits were unfortunately the only spec that consumers were aware of.
4) A terrible first generation development kit which was huge clunky, ineffective and expensive(something like 50K). This lead to a lot of devs having to write their own tools. The PSX dev kits were apparently amazing in comparison. It didn't help that the system used quads and not polygons. Of course Sega had massive experience in the Arcade with 3D title using quads but that was on powerful expensive hardware
The early Saturn dev manuals show a lot of their examples using straight up assembly code for the VDPs. PSX dev kits were well documented with examples in C. Eventually the Saturn documentation was improved and included more examples in C, but it was far, far too late by then. Only devs at Sega knew how to get the most out of the system.
The reason why the Saturn was based on quads is because it was 2D hardware repurposed for 3D rendering. VDP1 is responsible for performing affine transformations on sprites to distort them to support the geometry of a mesh. VDP1 being designed for 2D games is especially evident since it does not support transparencies with sprites in the background; any sprites behind a transparent one will not render. It is not noticeable in 2D games, but it would be noticeable in 3D games; you would end up with entire surfaces not rendering.
The VDP2 chip was added later during the system's design to address the architecture's poor 3D support. It was capable of drawing infinite planes, and also fully supported transparencies.
5) Gamers were burnt by the SegaCD and 32X addon which Sega dropped support for in no time.
Yep. Only in hindsight was the Saturn surprise launch was a terrible idea. While it was happening, it did not seem to go terribly. It was really the 32X and SegaCD that soured consumer sentiment towards Sega and sealed their doom.
Despite this Saturn was not a true failure. In Japan it sold very well.
Saturn games and hardware are easy to find in Akhihabara. The system was a huge commercial failure for Sega overall though.
Dreamcast did everything right, and it had the best hardware design of any system when taking into consideration the time it was released. Sega was in a no-win scenario, but at least they went out with a bang with one of the best consoles ever made.
Atari was just riding the wave of the bit wars, there was plenty of false advertising on all sides. Because bits were unfortunately the only spec that consumers were aware of.
4) A terrible first generation development kit which was huge clunky, ineffective and expensive(something like 50K). This lead to a lot of devs having to write their own tools. The PSX dev kits were apparently amazing in comparison. It didn't help that the system used quads and not polygons. Of course Sega had massive experience in the Arcade with 3D title using quads but that was on powerful expensive hardware
The early Saturn dev manuals show a lot of their examples using straight up assembly code for the VDPs. PSX dev kits were well documented with examples in C. Eventually the Saturn documentation was improved and included more examples in C, but it was far, far too late by then. Only devs at Sega knew how to get the most out of the system.
The reason why the Saturn was based on quads is because it was 2D hardware repurposed for 3D rendering. VDP1 is responsible for performing affine transformations on sprites to distort them to support the geometry of a mesh. VDP1 being designed for 2D games is especially evident since it does not support transparencies with sprites in the background; any sprites behind a transparent one will not render. It is not noticeable in 2D games, but it would be noticeable in 3D games; you would end up with entire surfaces not rendering.
The VDP2 chip was added later during the system's design to address the architecture's poor 3D support. It was capable of drawing infinite planes, and also fully supported transparencies.
5) Gamers were burnt by the SegaCD and 32X addon which Sega dropped support for in no time.
Yep. Only in hindsight was the Saturn surprise launch was a terrible idea. While it was happening, it did not seem to go terribly. It was really the 32X and SegaCD that soured consumer sentiment towards Sega and sealed their doom.
Despite this Saturn was not a true failure. In Japan it sold very well.
Saturn games and hardware are easy to find in Akhihabara. The system was a huge commercial failure for Sega overall though.
Dreamcast did everything right, and it had the best hardware design of any system when taking into consideration the time it was released. Sega was in a no-win scenario, but at least they went out with a bang with one of the best consoles ever made.