It was intended as an in-car game console / GPS navigation combo unit.
One of the unique selling points was that it could use the Saturn hardware to create a 3D map simulation of a planned route that you could view in advance of going on a trip. So, you could take it in the house, watch the simulation, then put it in the car for the actual trip and use the GPS navigation.
Seeing a product photo from that era evoked a particularly weird feeling of nostalgia that I had never reflected on before. I think it's the sleek molded-plastic consumer electronics design combined with crisp photography that still lacks the uncanny valley of extensive digital photo retouching or full-blown 3D rendering that would become prevalent only a few years later.
Now I kind of want to find a website with scans of old product advertisements from the 90's. While they seemed to lack the cultural distinctiveness of previous decades, the 90's were still a happening time and the eye of the storm of (post) modernity we find ourselves in now.
A good source for such photos are the ads in old Japanese computer magazines, such as Micom Basic. Archive.org has the entire run (I think) from the 80s and 90s. Here's April 1985:
I had the same feeling, and I think along with what the other commenters have said, the bit rate of the image contributes to it as well, you can see the grain in the light background where it doesn’t have the practically infinite color spectrum to work with and you get the color dithering effect instead.
Early digicams weren't powerful enough to pull off a lot of the fancy behind-the-scenes instant post-processinf modern cameras do before you even get to see the picture. The result was they often resembled film photography in many ways, especially the digital noise that in the right circumstances didn't look too dissimilar from film grain.
This is why I personally have a small collection of early digicams I like shooting on from time to time, and why they've recently become a whole TikTok trend.
I think if we allowed modern cameras to have an option that performs little to no post-processing on captured photos (without having to resort to RAW capture), we could get pictures that a lot more closely resemble this stuff.
How early would they need to be? I still have an original Canon 5D (2005) and in a way I prefer the output of it over even my Leica Q. I wonder if the reason is related to what you are saying.
2005 is about as late as you can go before the processors in cameras started being powerful enough to do a lot of stuff to the images. Most of my collection is very early 2000s or even late 90s. The Sony Cyber-shot DSC-F717 is a great cam from 2002 that was Sony's flagship at the time. Despite having cool features that modern cams don't (nightshot which also allows for easy IR photography, a swiveling lens assembly), the pictures have that "filmic" look thanks to the CCD sensor and little to no denoising done in-camera. It was also high resolution enough for the time (5MP) that the pictures still look reasonably detailed and sharp. Super early digicams often had like 1MP sensors that produce quite fuzzy images (though I feel that has its own appeal)
The Saturn had good 3D games! The work it took to get a decent 3D games not many game studio could do. In fact it might have been only Sega. And for something as simple as a 90's 3D map the Saturn could certainly do with ease, once again if it wasn't half assed
The most impressive engine released retail on Saturn was Slavedriver, which was developed by Lobotomy for Powerslave and re-used for ports of Duke Nukem 3D and Quake.
IMO the games which flexed VDP2 were the most impressive since you could do crazy raster effects without dropping the frame rate one iota. Equivalent effects on the Playstation, if even possible, came at a cost of GSU fillrate.
Yeah that's fine. The model 3 arcade board also used quads. The issue was the architect of the Saturn hardware itself along with the woefully inadequate development tools that developers had to use from sega
It wasn't so much Sega that made it, but M2 using off the shelf ARM SoCs.
Consoles and handhelds that can do all that exist though, they're just not made by Sega. A Steam Deck with a 1TB SD card is able to run almost the entirety of Sega's legacy back catalog, excepting a few titles that still aren't emulated correctly.
It still used emulation, though. None of these "mini" official systems is appealing to me. I can already use emulators on any device I already own, and have an equivalent or better experience. Why would I pay for a cute enclosure bundled with the same emulator I already use and a handful of games? Legality aside, they're a cash grab tugging at nostalgia strings.
What I _would_ like to see from the original manufacturers is an actual "mini" system, reimplemented using modern hardware components, and using software improvements (filters, upscaling, etc.). I would even settle for an FPGA implementation, which companies like Analogue are currently cashing on. The original manufacturers have an obvious advantage they can use, but it takes more effort than slapping together an emulator and some ROMs.
It would also be great to have an official digital storefront specific to these systems, with the entire game library, or as much as they have the right to publish. Similar to what Nintendo has done with their legacy systems, just separate from the Switch itself. It just seems like a huge wasted market opportunity to not do this right.
That's what I was getting at but didn't articulate it well enough.
I'd pay per title if the prices were reasonable. It does seem like a missed opportunity. I know plenty of people in their 40s who'd more likely slap money on retro titles than they would on any new game.
Sony provided exactly what you wanted in for PS1 games on the PS3/PSP/Vita, but stopped doing that for PS4. I am going to assume it was not a very big business.
As a console collector with a good number of odd consoles, this has always been a bucket list item. It reminds me of the PC engine LT in design sensibility.
Sega did a lot of console licensing in the 90s - JVC and Pioneer both released versions of the Genesis/Sega CD.
https://www.hitachi.co.jp/New/cnews/9512/1201.html
It was intended as an in-car game console / GPS navigation combo unit.
One of the unique selling points was that it could use the Saturn hardware to create a 3D map simulation of a planned route that you could view in advance of going on a trip. So, you could take it in the house, watch the simulation, then put it in the car for the actual trip and use the GPS navigation.