Sega - no wonder they're a dud, Sega of Japan are MORONS.

[oldsk00l]

Amazing, simply amazing, the N64 could have supplanted the Saturn!?!?!?

So, the SGI guys went away and worked on these issues and then called us back up and asked that the same team be sent back over, because they had it all resolved. This time, Nakayama went with them. They reviewed the work, and there was sort of the same reaction: still not good enough.

Now, I'm not an engineer, and you kind of have to believe the people you have at the company, so we went back to our headquarters, and Nakayama said that it just wasn't good enough. We were to continue on our own way. Well, Jim Clark called me up and asked what was he supposed to do now? They had spent all that time and effort on what they thought was the perfect video game chipset, so what were they supposed to do with it? I told them that there were other companies that they should be calling, because we clearly weren't the ones for them. Needless to say, he did, and that chipset became part of the next generation of Nintendo products (N64).

So that's an example of how, partly due to our success in America, Japan just didn't want to do the things that we suggested.

My my my, if only we'd have known, hahha. I always thought that Sega of japan hamstrung Sega in the US.

http://www.sega-16.com/Interview-%20Tom%20Kalinske.php

[msxyz]

There are other episodes like this to testify that Sega of America and Sega of Japan competed against each other instead of working together for the good of the company. Their managers (particulary SoJ) were either too stubborn or arrogant to realize these internal battles were harming Sega.

[Knot3D]

Yeah..but look at what's left of SGi now ...

and N64 was a good machine.. but.. they already knew they were gonna make the 4mb expansion pak, at start...

[oldsk00l]

Yeah..but look at what's left of SGi now ...

and N64 was a good machine.. but.. they already knew they were gonna make the 4mb expansion pak, at start...

Well, look at nVidia now, and look at who was at SGI at the time they did all this...and there you go.

It's widely known that some of SGI's best talent jumped ship for nVidia, and current tech probably is a direct result of that, as well as SGI's demise.

Anyhow the point is, Sega's horrible leadership forged ahead with a blatantly inferior architecture and methodology. Meanwhile SGI was forging up some great tech that eventually became the N64, which was a great system.

[msxyz]

The Reality engine was heavily limited in many ways. First and foremost it could only use textures that fitted inside the internal cache of 4KB. While it supported Z buffering, it consumed fillrate so most developers preferred to use depth sorting of the objects prior of rendering the scene.

Then there was the choice of using RAMBUS ram which resulted in horrible latencies. The fact that it was a UMA with the GPU and CPU racing to get the data didn't help either (Nintendo 64 had a 16 bit memory interface running at 62.5MHz x 4).

And on top of that Nintendo imposed restrictions on the ability of developers to use the microcode of the Reality engine. SGi main hardware strenght was in its flexibility and the Reality engine was built bascially on the same tech of SGi famed workstations. Nintendo libraries were conservative with a sustained throughput of 100-150K polys per second while the Playstation could easily do twice that (of course official Sony specs boasted higher figures, heh)

Only a few developers like Factor 5 (which made all the Starwars games) were allowed to use custom microcode routines and the results were impressive.

The main CPU of Nintendo 64, while looking impressive on paper was really a cheap MIPS derivative created for the DSP market glued to the Reality Engine. It was about as fast as a 486 running at similar frequency but it was chocked by a multiplexed bus and no ability to access the memory directly.

In the end, SoJ went for a conservative choice that probably looked the best at the time. I still think that the first generation of 3D consoles produced subpar results in comparison to what PCs from 1995 were capable of doing (but at a much higher cost). The Saturn, considering that it didn't have any capability of doing 3D, obtained excellent results. And in oldskool games it produced better graphics and visual effects than its competitors due to its high profile chipsets derived from years of experience in the arcade sector. Sadly the market was caught in a storm and consumers preferred some blocky, flat lit and horribly pixellated polygons to the state of the art sprites that the 32 bit consoles were able to produce. That was Sega real downfall.

The internal struggles only made the things worse for them.

[Knot3D]

consumers preferred some blocky, flat lit and horribly pixellated polygons to the state of the art sprites that the 32 bit consoles were able to produce. That was Sega real downfall.

The internal struggles only made the things worse for them.

Well, actually, I still love the visual style of the early Virtua games and also StarFox's graphics. Evidently, a majority of ppl did perceive those early polygons as a fresh breeze of style opposed to more and more 2D pixel graphics.

More importantly ; it brought new gameplay.