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The Rise and Fall of Sega
jayintune writes "2old2play has a look into Sega's past, examining where they went wrong in the console wars. What did they do to lose their competitive edge, and how did they fall victim to the PS2 and Xbox?" From the article: "Sega started as a small business from which spawned a gaming giant. As with all great Empires, they eventually rot, crumble, and fall from their own ever-grasping hand. After the Genesis they tried to go in too many directions at once and spread their resources too thin. They knew they would have major competition from other game developers, but I bet when they started, they never imagined they would be their own worst enemy."
Basically this is one guy ranting about his childhood love of the Genesis and his opinion over the various mistakes Sega has made. It's just one page, no pictures, no research, and not really well-written. It's basically some guy's blog post.
Which isn't to dump on it for having those attributes, but don't expect anything like journalism.
SNES came out in 1991, not 1994.
(note that it was Microsoft and not Sony that made the claim about rendering Toy Story level graphics in real time)
People keep on claiming this, but miss the truth. Yes, Sony never said the PS2 could render Toy Story in real time. They said it could render the cutscenes from Final Fantasy 8 in real time. Final Fantasy 8's cutscenes were about as complex graphically as Toy Story, so it's a completely equivilent claim.
Yes, Sony never said "Toy Story" but they might as well have. They claimed the same thing.
(Interestingly, some people have not learned this lesson yet; read: Microsoft's Xbox 360's HD-DVD rumored add on).
3 2006/articles/20060507-hddvdexplained.htm
1. It's not rumored, it was offically announced long ago. http://www.xbox.com/en-US/community/news/events/e
2. It's a movie addon, not a game addon, so it doesn't matter at all to the overall xbox 360 strategy whether it succeeds or fails. Microsoft has said that they will not have hd-dvd games. Compare it to buying the dvd remote for a ps2 or an xbox 1 (or that whacky silver gamecube put out by some third party which also played dvds), don't compare it to the 32x. It simply allows you to watch hd-dvd movies, nothing more or less.
The Saturn was the better system for 2D, but only a few dozen programmers world-wide were good enough to program 3D in assembler instead of C to fully use both 28MHz chips. That made a huge difference in the Playstation's win with it's single 33MHz CPU. Programming the Saturn in C made it less powerful 3D-wise than the PS.
Oh, and don't forget Sony lied and over-spec'd the PS2's performance. Marketing by deceit helped keep people from buying a Dreamcast. If you remember, the Dreamcast version of DOA2 looked better than the PS2's since it had anti-aliasing and better textures.
SEGA Base
Essentially, I get from this that a lack of co-operation between the American and Japanese branches were it's biggest problem. (Oh, and Nintendo screwing them over with the Congress didn't help either.)
The Dreamcast would have had to have been a spectacular success to pull SEGA out of its financial doldrums, and the people at SEGA seemed to know it was a longshot (see the following article):
"Come on, Mr. Yukawa, get up!"
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
I'm a little worried your post got modded informative because as far as I can tell it's almost completely wrong. About all you got right was that Nintendo and Sony worked on a CD add-on to the SNES which led to Sony releasing the Playstation. The reason that project got canned was because of various contract disputes between Nintendo and Sony. AFAIK, the project was nearly dead by the time Sega CD was released, let alone before it proved to be a disaster.
I also don't know of a single game that spent any time in development for the SNES CD add-on, and certainly not Final Fantasy 7 which was released a full 2 years after the release of the original Playstation. Nintendo's loss of Square wasn't due to canceling the SNES CD add-on, it was because N64/SNES used cartridges which were totally insufficient for the amount of data Square needed. FF7 released on 3 CDs which would've translated to something like twenty some (expensive) 64MB N64 cartridges, assuming no fancy compression techniques.
I think you are confused about what happenned to Commodore (by which, I assume you mean the Amiga line). The Amiga always had superior 2D graphics, from the start in 1985. The PC wasn't able to touch it until about 1993 or 1994, when VGA cards became ubiquitous in the PC scene. Even then, you were limited compared to what the Amiga could do, because the VGA card was essentially a frame buffer - any and all effects had to be handled by the CPU. The Amiga had the advantage of a parallel chipset - consisting of chips for graphic manipulations (mainly the blitter), chips for sound (Amiga had the best sound - 4 channel FM stereo as well as digital sample playback - since 1985), and the CPU. Also, there were two different types of RAM in the Amiga - regular and something known as "Fast" RAM. Fast RAM was typically used for graphics and sound, while the other RAM was used for the OS. The blitter allowed for some weird and wacky things, like having two different frequency screens overlayed on top of each other. Plus, the Amiga also had planar graphics (as opposed to the scalar architecture of VGA), which also allowed for some interesting effects.
With all that said, though, that isn't what led to the PC outpacing the Amiga (I doubt it was cause for the downfall of Commodore - I blame that on mismanagement of the company and bad marketing of their products) - what led to that was two fold: not using the fastest and greatest Motorola 68xxx processors for their machines (and not making it easy to upgrade to a faster processor), and not pricing the machines aggressively enough to compete with the PC. Sure, there were third party CPU and RAM upgrades available, but the whole Amiga line, both OEM and third-party hardware, was an expensive beast.
At the time (ie, 1993-1995), the Amiga 1200, 600, and 4000 were the real Amiga line. Unfortunately, only the 4000 had the horsepower to be really effective for 3D games, but not many people owned them. So, software publishers targetted most games and such for the 1200 and 600 (which was really a strange form of the 500 - it didn't have the AGA chipset). When Wolfenstein 3D came out on the PC, it stunned a lot of people, myself included. But don't kid yourself: Wolfenstein 3D was a 2D game at heart - for that matter, so was Doom, and Doom 2. Arguably, Quake was "2D" as well (from the standpoint that it didn't have hardware accellerated 3D graphics), but it doesn't count since the graphics were really 3D, just rendered in software. The first three games, though, all used a form of graphic rendering called "raycasting", which was a very ingenious method combining the Bresenham algorithm and sprite scaling to simulate a 3D rendered world, very quickly, using very optimized assembly code.
The Amiga certainly had the horsepower to render such a world - indeed, shortly after Wolfenstein 3D stunned the world, other programmers figured out the "tricks" and the Amiga got its share of raycast games - not as many as the PC world (which may have been a good thing), but there were a few nice ones made. What really changed is that it proved the PC capable of doing some really nice graphic effects. The capability was there all along (in both the Amiga and the PC, mind you), probably since the days of the Amiga 1000 and PCs with CGA graphics - I say this because a guy named John Kowalski proved you can get a 2 MHz 8-bit machine to do raycasting (the TRS-80 Color Computer 3 - 320x200 16 color mode), along with a host of other wierd and wild stunts that were absolutely unheard of back in the heyday of the CoCo 3 (ie, 1987-1990 or so). From this, another individual used his talent (Nickolas Marentes) to create a game based off the Gloom-3D code, called Gate Crasher. Yes - both of these projects came out around 19
Reason is the Path to God - Anon