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The Battle Of The Consoles: From Atari To The Xbox
msolnik writes: "There's been a lot of talk about Xbox, and GameCube, and even more speculation about the technology inside the box. However, the console wars are not going to be won based purely on technology. There's a long history of cyclical win and lose peaks and troughs for companies that have tried to stay the course in this business. Nintendo stands alone in having survived a number of generations of innovation and still managed to remain a contender in the market. Tom's Hardware has delivered this unique assessment of The Console Wars." Update: 12/06 16:28 GMT by M : Note that Tom's has updated some of the charts in the article - they note that there was a misunderstanding between Tom's and the article's author as to which version of the charts to post.
The 3do was a cool system, even if I was the only one in town who owned one.... Star Control II on the console, all the way!
They might be lost though. If it turns out to be really easy to modify an X-Box enough to run Linux and play your MP3's, DIV-X movies, do email, etc, then people might buy an X-Box and never spend a penny on an X-Box game.
Since Microsoft, as with most console companies, are selling the console at a loss, and making up for it with game sales, this can't be a good thing for them. Their choice of almost-standard components might cost them in the long run.
On this page, there is a chart that shows "Console History", with the relative successes by companies shown in bold. Not only is th SNES not boled, It's not even there. I find this very unsual, since growing up, everyone I knew had an SNES, period. You were considered "way out of it" if you were stuck with one of those crappy Genesis things.
A combination of two or more of these usually makes up for a lack in the others. Likewise, failure in multiple categories often doom a system. Nintendo dominated with the SNES, which had an incredible set of developers. But they took a long time developing a replacement, and when they did the N64 was both hard to develop for, couldn't run old games, and didn't have the ability to easily hold as much as the PS1(FMV on a cartridge?). It had plenty of power over the PS1, but not much else.
Likewise, the current PS2 isn't as easy to develop for, or as powerful as the Xbox and Gamecube. But it is easy enough, and since it can run all the PS1 games and came out first it has a huge market penetration jump start. If a company can only afford to initially develop for one platform, they will probably do it on the system that has the most market share. Likewise, many consumers will buy the system with the most games, building an upward momentum for the system. Neither Nintendo(with experience) or Microsoft(with $$$) are small contenders who can be counted out, which is good as it will make sure none of the companies sit on their laurels. Hopefully, we will get to seem some really great development in the years ahead.
Anyway, the GC has 12m triangles a second, the XBox can do 100m+. But XBox developers say they are having difficulty getting 30m a second, whilst GC developers are saying that they are clearing 20m a second without any trouble. This is obviously the real-world performance of each box - more accurate than the marketeering that Microsoft is chunking out.
The Genesis was highly successful... And so was the SNES, which isn't even on there. The PS1 was only a 32 bit system, but the Atari Jaguar was 64. The Dreamcast is 128 bit. Who wrote this article? 3 People from "Crocodile" Dundee securities, including a Dr. couldn't get it right... Gee, If they're this bad with these numbers, how good are they with financial numbers?
"Now that's rich. I challenge you to name any Microsoft product where the price has dropped with mass production"
Microsoft Sidewinder Joysticks. You're thinking of software, where the price rarely drops, unlike hardware, where it often (eventually) does, especially as they have stiff competition in that area.
CNBC did a report on the X-Box on monday during Business Center and brought up a good point. Historically consoles have been highly proprietary and had long lifespans. But with the introduction of the X-Box Microsoft is changing the industry. A typical console has a development time of 18-24 months and a lifespan of 5 years. The long lifespan is to recoup the losses incurred in the first few years of producing the hardware.
The X-Box on the otherhand is off the shelf parts. The original development cycle took 18 months, but it can be upgraded every year. There aren't much technical hurdles from keeping microsoft from putting P4's into next year's version of the XBox. They can upgrade is every year and it will still run all the games.
It introduces problems like minimum requirements for consoles, but Microsoft is still ahead because they shortened the development cycle. From now on Nintendo and Sony will have to rethink their business model and will have to play catch up to microsoft in the near term.
I don't know about the Genesis having better hardware. It had a faster CPU. 12 MHz against 3.58 MHz on the SNES, but the graphics and sound processors on the SNES blew the Genesis out of the water.
I'll never forget the SEGA commercial that was talking about Genesis and it's "Blast Processing". They showed Sonic and compared it to Mario Kart in an ill-advised move that was intended to illustrate the disparity in processing speeds. Unfortunately, I saw this commercial as a freshman in High School and was STILL playing Mario Kart for hours in my college dorm while Sonic's *third* incarnation was collecting dust on the back shelf.
Dissolve... Resolve... Evolve...
They say the Atari 2600 came out in 1976 - BUT the ORIGINAL name of that system was the Atari VCS (Video Computer System) the 2600 moniker was added later to keep it in line with the 5200.
-ShieldWolf
just = (My)Opinion.toCents();
My oppinion is that this kind of article represents a real problem in console gaming coverage by the PC gaming/hardware press. When dealing with issues that they feel they need to publish an article on yet they really don't know much about, they write a piece that doesn't say much of anything (yet fills up space!). Frequently, as part of this kind of article, the journalist will drop an unqualified chart or comparison sheet into the middle of their article.
For instance this article I'm annoyed with above has a large comparison chart in the middle of it that runs comparisons between the X-Box, PS2, and GameCube. Over half of the GC entries are marked "N/A" for not applicable. And stats in the GC column are just wrong in the context of what they're supposed to represent to the other systems. Top example here is the line that compares polygon processing. For X-Box and PS2 they have noted the "maximum poly rate", but on GC since Nintendo doesn't provide such a number, they have listed the "average poly rate"... yet nowhere do they distinguish what these numbers really represent, and the uninformed reader is left thinking that the GC is heavily inferior to the other two systems.
Ok, then next, how about this "3-D audio support in hardware" category? Well this is a bit misleading. All three systems have the ability to output 3-D audio... the GC supports Dolby Pro Logic II output, and the PS2 supports Digital Dolby output. Both of these allow for 3-D audio spaces (just listen to Rogue Squadron on the GC and tell me it doesn't feature some of the best separated audio space you've ever heard). All the "3-D audio hardware" does is it provides developers a crutch for their sound production. Now instead of having to actually engineer a program to handle the spatial modification/broadcast of sounds in a game space, they can just create a sound "bump map" (effectively a 2-D drawing with light and dark spots... a simple example would be light places allow sound through, dark spaces reflect sounds) and have their program send the sound clip, it's coordinates, and it's broadcast direction to the chip and the hardware does the rest. While this can be a boon to some developers, it isn't required to have 3-D sound.
Or worse yet, "HDTV support" listed as both Yes for Movie and Game support for X-Box when HDTV support for at least movies was actually canned just a few weeks ago... and wait, what's this, GameCube has N/A for game support??? Did the author of this chart do any research? The GC supports progressive scan output, and a number of games out now and coming soon also feature Anamorphic or 16:9/Anamorphic output to really take full advantage of an widescreen HDTV system.
Look, I'm not against listing comparisons between systems where one system has features that another lacks. But I do think it is a disservice to a company when you compare features that are only on system "A", yet skipping features that only appear on system "B"... or worse, listing a feature on "A" and not even acknowledging the feature on "B" (like in the HDTV game support reference above.
I guess I could say that it would be nice to see someone do a relevant comparison chart sometimes, with entries qualified as needed. Heck, the above mentioned article that shows this chart really doesn't even make use of the chart data, they just threw it in as a space filler to their readers to use for comparison. Unfortunately, if the author of the piece had a clue about what he was writing, he would have either A) not used the chart, or B) added the qualifiers needed to make the chart relevant.
Uhm, as I remember it; SNES could display 256 colours at one time from a 512 colour palette, and the Genesis only 64 from a 256 colour palette.
Evidence of this was quite clear when playing SegaCD games. One That comes to mind is "SewerShark", a gimicky FMV game. Unfortunately it looked like shit because of the dark scenes, narrow palette, and horrendous dithering. You may as well have played the game through a screen door. It would have at least explained the unwanted grid pattern over top of everything.
Conversely, while not a FMV game, "StarFox" for the SNES has some instances where it shows off the colour capability of the SNES. I refer to those scenes with the psychedelic backgrounds like the black hole level, or the final boss level. While not perfect, they are smoothly rendered, on-the-fly gradients made up of at least 32 colours. Gradients were never seen on the Genesis for one simple reason; they couldn't afford to waste the palette space.
All that being said, the Genesis DID have the faster processor, which could handle more moving things on the screen at once. Anyone who played some of the more bleeding edge SNES games is familiar with the infamous SNES slow-down feature. "It's like it KNOWS when you need slow-motion!" Though, I've seen the Genesis have trouble at times too.
As it relates to sound, it's gotta go to the SNES again, though SegaCD sounded great. And it should have, it was CD FFS (For Fuck's Sake). But the base Genesis sound unit was ass, I hate to say it.
I guess the best way to compare the systems is apples to apples. Street Fighter II Turbo (First SFII available for the Genesis methinks.) This title makes an excellent example of my points, especially the sound.
The colours on the Genesis look more saturated, but only because they couldn't afford the luxury of things like putting the depth of shadows that they did into the arcade or SNES versions. For an even more simple comparison, compare the backgrounds of the levels, it's clear that palette reduction techniques were used by the designers of the Genesis game, because they HAD to. The SNES version remains more closely true to the original.
The sound on the SNES was respectable. The music again remained pretty true, as did the sampled voices. Each, "HADOKEN!" and whatnot ringing true. The Genesis handled the music quite alright, but the sampled voices sounded like the characters had been gagged with their socks. The general effect wash muffled and mushy, "SHADOFEN!"
So, I concede the Genesis had the better number-crunching ability, but the SNES had the better graphics and sound units.
Feel free to argue me all that you want, just know that you're wrong. =)
Remember: umount it before you fsck it.
Why is there a gaping hole in the timeline of this article, from 1979 to 1993 with Duke Nukem? It can't be because their weren't any interesting technological improvements during those years, because there were.
Interesting nonetheless, but it seemed like he was missing a few things.
Most people would die sooner than think; in fact, they do.
That said, good luck to Microsoft and Nintendo -- we need more competition in the console wars.
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.