How much time do you seriously waste in a huff rushing to your magazine corner look for said magazine lay it out thinking "ha I got him" to then take a bunch of pictures? Then the next time someone posts and they still refute your post. Was it worth that time and effort?
The sad part is, I’m not even going to bother reading it.
New info about the Sony-Sega partnership!
Yesterday, an interview with former SOA vice president Shinobu Toyoda was published (in Japanese). The topic of the interview is primarily the events covered in Blake Harris's Console Wars.
Most of the interview doesn't reveal much new. In that very Japanese way, Toyoda doesn't directly contradict Console Wars, but he does say a lot between the lines.
He praises Sega president Hayao Nakayama quite a bit.
He says, "If you had to choose the one thing that made Sega successful, it would be Sonic. Without Sonic, there would be no Sega or SOA."
He goes on to say that when Yuji Naka was convinced by Mark Cerny to not quit Sega but rather go to STI, Nakayama was on board with the idea: "Nakayama didn't simply consent to Yuji Naka going to America, he said that if it meant holding on to Naka, then Naka could take 10 staff of his choosing with him."
But most importantly, Toyoda talks about the Sega-Sony partnership. That makes him the third person to do so (after Kalinske and Sato). Here is the quote:
It's a relief to have an account from someone at SOA that provides much more detail than Kalinske's account that "Sega said not a chance. Why would it want to share a platform with Sony?" It sure seems to be the case that Sega put some effort into this.Quote:
Originally Posted by Shinobu Toyoda
You really think that article is credible?. Looking over how it was meant to be TOM and his good mate Olf that wanted to make a console, I single out some glaring oddities ...Quote:
Originally Posted by Gryson
1) Night Trap had nothing to do with SONY: SONY never published the game, never held the game rights to the game, or developed the game.2) SONY Imagesoft was set up before the SNES, never mind the Mega CD even came out and was set up way back inthe late 80's and most NES fans will bang on about how amazing Solstice was on the NES
3)Why would SONY need SEGA to provide sprite power, when the PS it's self could handle over 4000 sprite's and other corps outside SEGA could provide sprite power (not least Flair) |Still it's nice to see at least someone other than Tom make out that SEGA could have worked with SONY... and yeah without SONIC the Mega Drive would never sold as well as it did.
No, you're absolutely right. Shinobu Toyoda certainly isn't a credible witness to this history. I'm not sure why YOU weren't interviewed instead.Quote:
Originally Posted by Team Andromeda
So Sony Imagesoft was set after the Mega CD came out, and SONY published Night Trap...Quote:
Originally Posted by Gryson
So Sony Imagesoft was set up after the Mega CD came out, and SONY published, or developed Night Trap? Is that was you're sayingQuote:
Originally Posted by Gryson
... Seriously? He was spontaneously talking about something that he probably hasn't thought about in over 20 years. Cut the guy some slack. Anyway, Night Trap was about the only famous Mega CD FMV game in Japan, and he's probably just using that to illustrate FMV games.
I have no idea what you're going on about otherwise, though.
His points corroborate what Sato said about working with Kutaragi, and you're stuck on some tangential comment about Night Trap.
It is unbelievable how much faith you put into Edge Magazine of all things, and when we finally get the freaking vice president of SOA to talk about these things, you dismiss him outright as not credible.
Is it too much to ask you to refrain from posting in my threads?
Sadly I can't rep you for this but I want to. You got a genuine laugh out of me. Well done sir.Quote:
Originally Posted by Gryson
Poor TA.
I still don't understand why Sega used quads in all their 3D hardware up to the Dreamcast, when almost everyone else was using triangles. Were quads just first in general 3D hardware?
SEGA used Quads in their Arcade boards, so I just guess it's what SEGA's designers were used too and at the time everyone held up Model 1 and 2 as the Pinnacle of gaming 3D. Didn't Joe Miller also say that SEGA and NVidia were in talks to develope hardware (at the time NVidia used quads too)Quote:
Originally Posted by Blades
That's why I said there are some discrepancies One doesn't need Google to know that Night Trap was nothing to do with SONY and that SONY Imagesoft started life on the NES system. You and I know would that, just from being well into gaming 20 years ago or notQuote:
Originally Posted by Gryson
Why would Ken Kutaragi and Phil lie to EDGE magazine, why would Hideki Sato lie when he looked back (I think you even linked the interview) where he thought 4000, hardware sprites would be enough, until SONY stunned the world with the PS.
Also speaking of EDGE at the Japanese launch of the Saturn, EDGE was invited to spend 2 days inside SEGA Japan to get all the info on the system and speak to staff and here's what a SEGA staff member said at the time (not now, looking back)
https://i.imgur.com/Ldlbiqo.jpg
I say its very clear SEGA Japan wasn't offered the chipset and basically knew nothing of the PS chipset or SONY plans...were caught off guard and with their pants down and rushed to add a 2nd CPU and beef up the VDP1 to handle more than double the planned number of sprites.
In just the same way you put your side of the debate, I put mine and don't do it to wind you up or blindly defend SEGA Japan , but to me SEGA showed all the signs of a corp that knew next to nothing of what SONY was up too and embarrassingly saw Atari and 3DO as more of a threat than SONY
Quads were a holdover from the days of hardware designed to scale and distort sprites, which is essentially what the Saturn is doing. On Sega's powerful arcade hardware this was fine but on consumer hardware in 1994 it meant a huge drop in performance. Quads are great for artists and animators when rendering time is a non-issue but much slower for a CPU, for one thing the triangle is always a single plane and second it's easy to divide it into smaller triangles, whereas dividing a triangle into quads usually means at least 3 quads for 1 triangle.
I can think of a few examples where quads might be better, maybe you just want a tiled plane or walls and floors along straight lines, for everything else it's worse.
There were interviews about that. The gist of it is that nobody at the company knew how to do 3d (read: a UV mapped triangle renderer) at all, except Yu Suzuki, and they couldn't pull him off the arcade division to help. So they tried using stretchy sprites to approximate 3d.Quote:
Originally Posted by Blades
There's also no evidence whatsoever that they changed anything on the VDP1; we have hardware docs and revisions in official documents back to late 1993 / early 1994. The only video hardware revisions we've seen is adding end codes and High Speed Shrink to the VDP1, to make it a tiny bit faster in some scenarios. HSS is a form of hardware mipmapping where the console only samples every 2nd pixel of the sprite, while end codes will terminate the sampling of the texture on a given position of a given line, to speed up cases where a part of the sprite is transparent. These are helpful but not game changing. And the VDP1/2 interaction runs extremely deep, I doubt they could have redesigned it thoroughly and then get engineering samples ready by 1994 Q2 (earliest Saturn chip dates are from spring/summer).
The more likely story is that they looked at getting a more powerful main CPU, and came across the dual cpu mode in the SH2 and decided on that. In other words, they changed to main CPU to a dual SH2 to improve the 3d performance of the machine, which technologically inept journalists would then confuse with the two VDPs that already were in, and report it as "THEY ARE ADDING A SECOND VIDEO CHIP".
I don't see any evidence the processor was changed either, based on interviews it seems like they decided on dual SH-2s fairly early in the process. I think the whole idea that Sega changed the Saturn late in development in response to the PSX is just an urban legend that got picked up by the press early on and has been repeated ever since.