What if SEGA waited to 1996 to launch Saturn

they saw how Nintendo was going for the 64-bit market with it's 64-bit RISC console they were about to unveil.

so

SEGA realizes they only built Saturn up to rival the PlayStation and decides to go a step further into Atari Jaguar territory and reprogram it's dual Hitachi 32-bit CPUs to read 64-bit instructions.

Then launch Saturn in Fall of 1996 as a "64-bit" CD system.

and even boast it's backward compatibility with with the 32X/Genesis (they decide at last minute to code a rom chip to emulate the missing Z80 CPU)



and another big What IF

Yuji Naka decides to revive the co-collaboration with SEGA STI on the next Sonic sequel following Sonic & Knuckles.

Build a new project called code name NeedleMouseLXIV

and on November 1996 the Genesis successor, Sega Saturn launches with the release of Sonic the Hedgehog 64, SONIC 64.


NINTENDO vs SEGA wars continue. :D



mean while PlayStation doesn't do as good as planned. With no rival launch in 1995, they revealed at E3 their console price tag of $399.

Which the 3DO company responds with a $349 price tag drop of their 3DO.

3DO and PlayStation battle out the 32-bit wars, but are quickly overlooked when Nintendo and SEGA releases their 64-bit platforms.




:| now why couldn't history been like that above ??/

I think it could have been 128 Bit and been able to do the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs and it wouldn't have mattered.

I do think having Saturn day as planned would have helped though. I don't think it would have saved Sega but at least people would have known it existed.

All I think they needed was

-Lower Price
-Saturn Day
-No 32x
-Easier to program

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Originally Posted by Iron Lizard

All I think they needed was

-Lower Price
-Saturn Day
-No 32x
-Easier to program

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This was the ONLY one they needed. If the Saturn had had Playstation-like hardware they could have shrugged off the 32X debacle like it was nothing.

A lot of people didn't have faith in Sega even when they were kicking ass with the Genesis. They burned up a lot of credibility with the Sega CD and 32x. I don't the 32x could be so easily forgotten.

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Originally Posted by Iron Lizard

A lot of people didn't have faith in Sega even when they were kicking ass with the Genesis. They burned up a lot of credibility with the Sega CD and 32x. I don't the 32x could be so easily forgotten.

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A lot of people didn't have faith in Sony either:

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Originally Posted by Peter Dille

I can visibly remember that the media pundits and the analysts and the retailers... To some degree, I think the world was betting against Sony at the time. It's easy to forget that at that time Sony was a huge underdog.

Now, people think of us as a leader in this category, and that's flattering, but at the time, again, we didn't have a pedigree in the games business. It was really the early days of Sony making the hardware parts of the company work together with the software parts of the company.

And I can vividly remember a front-page article in the New York Times business section that predicted that not only we wouldn't be successful, there wouldn't be another console at all that would be successful because PCs were going to be where gaming was going and, you know, console gaming was dead.

So, there was a lot of noise in the pre-PlayStation phase. Conventional wisdom was we weren't going to be successful, and "What does Sony know about competing with the mighty Nintendo and the mighty Sega?" Well, again, 15 years later, Nintendo's still here and Sega's still in business, but of course they got out of the hardware business, and the rest is history.

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Source: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/featur...ny_.php?page=2

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Originally Posted by Iron Lizard

A lot of people didn't have faith in Sega even when they were kicking ass with the Genesis. They burned up a lot of credibility with the Sega CD and 32x. I don't the 32x could be so easily forgotten.

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As near as I can tell, the first sentence is especially true in the US except in certain urban centers. My experience all over Texas, Missouri and Colorado is that retailers and consumers never thought much of Sega. I run into people who ever owned a Sega console very rarely, and almost all of them never heard of anything *but* the Genesis.

I think it is more true of consumers that when a product doesn't grab their interest they ignore it.

To gamegenie's alternative history idea, I honestly cannot think of a better situation in the US than to have the Saturn launch in mid-late 1996. I don't think it would have mattered if it had any hardware or software lineup changes. Just having a huge Saturn launch with all of those games people somehow missed in 1995 plus 1996's excellent lineup would have been epic.

Having the 32X last with solid low cost software support from interested developers wouldn't have hurt anything either. Though that apparently gets me labeled a "blind fanboy" (a technical term only people smarter than you can utter you see) every other time I say it. ;)

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Originally Posted by roundwars

A lot of people didn't have faith in Sony either:

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This is true but its like walking into a bank and asking for a loan with no credit vs bad credit. Sony was an unknown but that did not stop sales one little bit. People loved Sony, it was cheaper, well advertised, its games were more appealing, and was easier to make games on. Sony was not brilliant by any means, Sega just got to big for their britches just like Nintendo had in the early 90's and stopped doing what they were good at. All Sony had to do was fill the gaps. It was depressing to watch. I was a hardcore Sega kid.

i remember saving up the cash to buy a psx when ti first came out. goddamn that was an incredible day. i bought ridge racer with it but returned it for battle arena toshinden. i can't even begin to describe the fun my brother and i had that day.

i bought the saturn late in it's life, probably around 1997. it came bundled with vf 2, virtua cop and daytona usa. i liked the games but it just didnt feel right, or have the same amount of fun that i had with the psx

Saturn hardware was already finalized some 6-9 months before Japanese launch; there was no turning back hardware-wise. SoJ was hell-bent on beating PS1 to the punch, launching Saturn in Japan with a scant launch window lineup of software (and an underwhelming port of VF1 which still sold like hotcakes), and of course the SoJ-influenced decision of launching Saturn in the U.S in May 1995, before U.S software devs had finished up their original launch lineup (for September 1995). Not to mention hastening the 32X's death......SoJ of course didn't give a damn about that console.

The simple architecture and promotional hooplah of the PS1 really made SoJ shit their pants.

It made SOA shit their pants as well... which is why Kalinske announced the earlier surprise launch for Saturn at the E3 in 1995.


He didn't sound as intimidated by Sony a few weeks earlier tho:

"Now, I can sit here and tell you today that no matter how great Saturn is, or PlayStation is, or Ultra 64 is, we will outsell them by an enormous amount with 32X -- simply because of the price."

Some mo' Kalinske quotes: http://www.defunctgames.com/shows.ph...heysaidwhat-22

Why are all of these quotes so hard to find actual sources for? Most of them could be contextualized by the basic marketing principle of under-promise and over-deliver.

Granted Kalinske's public quotes are equivalent to today's corporate shill quotes. Yet he adequately continued Katz' Genesis regime, nearly saw the Sega CD hit mass market success, and accurately forecast the generational change sales wise.

You should know by now that I agree that Sega of America made mistakes. I would just like to document them as thoroughly as possible. For proper documentation, I need to see the real questions asked to Kalinske before he answered, and I need to see a real date at the least.

Kalinske seems to be one of the most responsive of the old SoA staff. Let's not destroy that.

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Originally Posted by Christuserloeser

It made SOA shit their pants as well... which is why Kalinske announced the earlier surprise launch for Saturn at the E3 in 1995.


He didn't sound as intimidated by Sony a few weeks earlier tho:

"Now, I can sit here and tell you today that no matter how great Saturn is, or PlayStation is, or Ultra 64 is, we will outsell them by an enormous amount with 32X -- simply because of the price."

Some mo' Kalinske quotes: http://www.defunctgames.com/shows.ph...heysaidwhat-22

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Well that sounds good in theory but when you look at the 32X games compared to everything else they looked 299-399 dollars better than those cheap lookin 32X games.

I believe Kalinske commented on the early launch and the mandate by SoJ to can development on all non-Saturn Sega consoles as being bad ideas in retrospect. At the time (1994-1995), he may have just been towing the company line but not really agreeing with what he was saying. SoJ grabbed SoA by their balls and pretty much forced them to release Saturn early, did they not?

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Originally Posted by Da_Shocker

Well that sounds good in theory but when you look at the 32X games compared to everything else they looked 299-399 dollars better than those cheap lookin 32X games.

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Yeah, but the 32x could have pushed way further than it did: hell there isn't even any 4 MB games on it and no CD games beyond FMV.
And while I'm not a proponent of the 32x's release in general (without specific context), I definitely think it could have offered reasonable competition with early generation PSX and Saturn stuff, let alone 3DO or Jaguar. (polygonal jaguar games at least... get into some other rendering methods or effects and you're in a different ball game -32x Doom was never going to be as good as jaguar Doom and Jaguar Doom was about as rushed as the 32x as it was -but with a full 4MB of ROM and much more RAM to open things up in the system even if some other bottlenecks were worse than the 32x).

The sound could have jumped to about 8x better once they got DMA working (and that's for cart games, so not counting CD users), and it was canceled only a few months before some of the really promising games could have come out. (Amok seems to have been among them -and a prototype of that seems to be in the Lemon 32x demo video)

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Originally Posted by gamegenie

they saw how Nintendo was going for the 64-bit market with it's 64-bit RISC console they were about to unveil.

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That wouldn't have been it... the PSX alone would have been far more threatening given the general performance (even real world, let alone the massive PR tweaked specs) and multimedia capabilities as well as the high-level programming environment supported. (not sure when the latter would have become known)

That and being 64-bit has nothing to do with anything. The N64 would have worked about just as well (and likely been cheaper to make) had it been fully 32-bit, and as it is the CPU ran in 32-bit mode most of the time in most games. (there actually was a high performance 32-bit MIPS derivative available as well in the R3900, but the chipset had been designed around the R4000 architecture starting in 1993, and the "64-bit" marketing angle was a strong point -albeit the RSP alone would be enough for such a marketing gimick -and technically the R3900 was about as 64-bit as the R4300 except the R4300 did offer the full 64-bit address mode while the 3900 was locked into 32-bit mode and saved 32 pins on the package -again the N64 usually ran in 32-bit address mode anyway and even that was really overkill for what it needed)

Plus, if SoJ had't been exceptionally impressed by the SGI chipset when they saw it in early/mid 1993, why would they be worried about Nintendo picking it up just a couple months later? (or perhaps they had been impressed, but as some accounts imply, it was more a matter of questionable cost effectiveness -something the N64 obviously had a lot of work put into to optimize -especially the single bus and narrow width RAM configuration)

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SEGA realizes they only built Saturn up to rival the PlayStation and decides to go a step further into Atari Jaguar territory and reprogram it's dual Hitachi 32-bit CPUs to read 64-bit instructions.

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That's crazy and totally incorrect. The Dreamcast has a 32-bit CPU in any case and if they jumped to the SH3 for an updated Saturn (the next step up and fairly close to the N64's R4300 I believe) And in terms of system bus the Dreamcast is 64-bit like the GC though the Xbox is 128 bit. (with a 32-bit CPU -but 128-bit DMA to a dual channel DDR bus)

And in terms of instructions, the CPU core of the SH1, SH2, SH3, and SH4 use purely 16-bit length instructions. They can all do 32-bit operations and have 32-bit ALUs, but the ISA is fully 16-bit. (unlike the fully 32-bit ARM and MIPS CPUs of the time or CISC CPUs with variable word length -the 68000 in the Genesis has 8 16 and 32-bit instructions I believe and a 32-bit address model, but is considered 16-bit due to the ALU -the data bus is also 16-bit but given the 386SX is considered 32-bit and the 8088 and 65816 are considered 16-bit, that's not a factor for the CPU bitness as such)

The Jaguar has no 64-bit CPU at all, but it does use a 64-bit system bus and 3 graphics coprocessors with 64-bit DMA (blitter, object processor, and the RISC GPU which is actually a 32-bit architecture with a 32-bit ALU though it does feature some 64-bit instructions and all 64-bit registers -like the 68000 is all 32-bit registers- and is flexible enough to serve as a CPU though it's rather inefficient at that -way better than the 68k's configuration in the Jag unfortunately)
The 32x uses 16-bit buses only, so it's 16-bit in the sense the jag is 32-bit, likewise the SNES uses only 8-bit buses (not sure about the VDP) and the N64 uses a shared 32-bit bus for the RSP and CPU.

"Bittness" is a rather worthless marketing term and it's a damn shame that NEC's marketing wasn't smart enough to dispel that myth by 1990. The Channel F, RCA Studio 2, and VCS are just as 8-bit as the NES and SMS and from a CPU standpoint also as 8-bit as the PCE/TG-16 while the SNES's CPU is no more 16-bit than the Intellivision's. :p (IV's CPU is 10-bit externally vs 8-bit for the NES, but fully 16-bit internally)

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and even boast it's backward compatibility with with the 32X/Genesis (they decide at last minute to code a rom chip to emulate the missing Z80 CPU)

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You need WAY more hardware to make it backwards compatible, emulation would not be an option. Remember though that by 1995 or maybe '96 Sega had a single chip genesis.
And 32x compatibility would be a no-go without a compatible VDP and dual SH2s, let alone the Sega CD.

So going forward from the Saturn, you'd have no compatibility at all.


Really though, in the context of halting the Saturn's design and moving to a more advanced one it's would likely be very attractive to use as much of the Saturn's hardware as possible given how far along it was and remove that which was unnecessary:
looking at the Saturn they could easily drop the audio DSP (pretty much never used) swap the SH1 for a much cheaper MCU and use slower/cheaper DRAM for the CD-ROM cache rather than SDRAM (possibly less RAM too -512 kB was pretty massive compared to the 32k on the PSX and 3DO), you could probably drop the geometry DSP as well if you supplied enough CPU resouce to mitigate that, possibly drop the 68k and dedicated audio RAM (again depending on total CPU resource) and drop the SH2s in favor of a single SH3 at perhaps 60 MHz with fully SDRAM. (the lower end of the range with 100 MHz being high-end)
Then take VDP1 and VDP2, consolidate them, buffer VDP1's texture mapping capabilities and probably add a texture cache plus a general unified cache for the VDPs and perhaps 64-bit DMA (you'd get the 64-bit gimick too) and in any case buffer to allow the SDRAM to run at or near full speed (at least 66 MHz -but goign to what was convenient based on the system clock, though if it was 10 ns SDRAM and not 15 ns they could bump it up considerably to up to 100 MHz).
In fact, perhaps consolidate the RAM into a unified 4 MB block shared by the VDPs and CPU with enough caching and buffering to do so efficiently. Add hardware triangle rasterization if practical within time constraints and maybe a Z buffer, perspective correct rendering, or bilinear filtering. Whatever the CPU was clocked at would likely be the system bus speed and if the SH3 has 64-bit DMA (like the SH4, Pentium, Power PC, etc) going to a unified 64-bit bus could have been very attractive, otherwise sticking to 32-bit and engineering accordingly could be OK. (if you aimed at sticking to the ~28.6 MHz system speed used, a 60 MHz rated SH3 would probably be at ~57.3 MHz and at 64-bits that would give ~458 MB/s which is more than triple the bandwidth of the PSX's main and video buses and 4x the speed of the fastest buses in the Saturn -but all shared of course, not dedicated -so like the N64, Jaguar, Xbox, 360, etc)

A single bus design would really cut-down on cost and the SH3 should have been powerful enough to fill the gap for the omitted hardware (audio coprocessing and the geometry DSP -albeit the Saturn normally used the CPUs for that anyway) if the SH3 had an onboard FPU that would definitely make it attractive for handling the vertex calculations too. It woudl also be useful for other software rendering effects and rather capable video decoding. (I wonder if it would have been enough for software MPEG-1 decoding -I think even the Saturn managed that, but not full VCD quality)
Maybe bump the CD drive up to 3x or 4x as well.

And of course they'd need to invest in at least decent high-level programming support as well as detailed low-level access.

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mean while PlayStation doesn't do as good as planned. With no rival launch in 1995, they revealed at E3 their console price tag of $399.
Which the 3DO company responds with a $349 price tag drop of their 3DO.

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That's a very broad guess, but given the Saturn launched at roughly $450 in Japan and the PSX launched at roughly $400 as well, it probably would have been $350 tops in the US, and 3DO seemed to match prices not undercut them given the $400 price drop about the time the Saturn came out.
The PSX didn't start selling really big until mid 1996 in any case and they dropped their price months after Sega dropped to $300 in September of '95. (Nintendo had promoted a $250 N64 launch price that dropped to $200 to match Sony)

In any case, the same thing could have been accomplished with the historical Saturn by not revealing the true launch price until later, and perhaps even announcing a vaguely high figure to throw competition off and not reveal the real price until a couple weeks prior to the September launch.

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3DO and PlayStation battle out the 32-bit wars, but are quickly overlooked when Nintendo and SEGA releases their 64-bit platforms.

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I'm sure Sony would have figured a way around that with good marketing. They probably could have broken the BS bittness "benchmark" that had persisted too long as it was. Still the performance would have been less in some areas (more the Super Saturn than the N64 depending on just what the former could do -and the latter was artificially limited by use of carts and restricted support for RSP microcoding -but there's also the CPU access latency issue -PSX generally had higher res textures and higher polygon count by a good margin while the N64 had filtering, perspective correction, hardware z-buffering, reflection effects, etc)

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now why couldn't history been like that above ??/

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Because SoJ wanted the Saturn out ASAP and they may have even delayed it a good deal longer than desired. (there's some claims that they'd really wanted a successor to the MD out by late 1993)
That and they thought beating Sony to market was their only chance to get a lead on them. (though it had the opposite effect)

Kool Kitty see here http://www.sega-16.com/forum/showthr...356#post307356

ANd why is this in the Genesis forums anyways?