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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lD3kMcFr1o
Looks solid outside of the constantly opening damaged tray. Sega Neptune is still my favorite though as Sega console prototypes go, design wise.
Ugh it had to be that guy.
This mfer found it at a flea market and bout it for 3 dollars!?
This is old news.
That's what I just said to myself. I'm not sure what it is worth...or if anyone should sell it but damn.Quote:
Originally Posted by Da_Shocker
sweet thank for sharing, was there not also a Sega Neptune at one point...remember hearing rumours as a kid....
Ben Heck was tasked, similar to the Nintendo Playstation prototype, with fixing one of the Pluto's. I have to assume it's the same one that Koralik reviewed....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CeGoYHx_k90
Agreed. The Neptune looked really nice.Quote:
Originally Posted by SegaDreamcast
It would have been surreal to see a Sega Pluto with extra RAM, modem, MPEG card and a hard drive released in 1996. Would have been about on par with a low end PC. The hard drive would have been interesting for speeding up load times and allowing for DLC.
The price tag with that 2.5" IDE drive would have been astronomical though.
It's a shame , it would have been incredible value and ahead of its timeQuote:
Originally Posted by axel
The hard drive probably wouldn't have done much for load times, we're talking Mid-90's specs after all, and looking at the kind of drive it looks to be an off the shelf 500MB IDE hard drive. And DLC probably wouldn't have been that big either considering we're talking 28.8 kbps speeds here. It would have probably had to be done with on disc stuff that got unlocked. My guess is that the HDD was there for developers working with the unit, rather than being intended to release with the consumer unit.Quote:
Originally Posted by axel
You're probably right about it just being there for development but even in the 90s a hard drive was orders of magnitude faster than optical. The 2X CD-ROM in the Saturn has a 300 KB/sec transfer rate, versus 33.3 MBps for an IDE hard drive! That's a huge difference especially if you have more RAM, it would bring loading times down almost to N64 levels. I agree DLC would be more limited but depending on the genre you can do a lot with it, like updating rosters in a sports game or adding new levels to a Sonic-style platformer.Quote:
Originally Posted by TrekkiesUnite118
Such a system would be very expensive but it could have been marketed to high-end users as both a way to get online from your living room (similar to WebTV, launched in 1995) in addition to offering games and video playback.
I'm not so sure,you had plenty the shareware games and most of them were downloaded over a slow modem.
To have a Saturn with all those features in 97 would have been so special and at a much cheaper price point than PC and I gather very much like Joe Miller would have liked, since he was a big fan of the web.
Not sure th e HE would have been there for just development mind,since the development would have been done on PC.
A lot of shareware games were also distributed on Floppy disks. Sure you could download some small patch files and what not that were only a couple KB to a MB each. But you wouldn't need a 500MB HDD for that. Which is why I don't think it was meant to be there for consumers. If anything a much smaller and cheaper drive would be in there if it was for consumers. After all the Dreamcast got away with that kind of stuff just saving to the VMUs, and it had more reason to have a HDD with it since it had a much stronger online presence.Quote:
Originally Posted by Team Andromeda
You would still need to test your games on real hardware at some point. Having the ability to just swap in a HDD on consumer grade hardware would be a rather cheap and effective way to test without having to waste CD-Rs burning discs or having to pay for an expensive CD-ROM Drive emulator.Quote:
Originally Posted by Team Andromeda
500 MB was probably the smallest they could buy at the time. I remember buying a new hard drive in 1996, I wanted to replace a dead drive in my 386 and figured 200 MB would be more than enough. I was shocked to find stores in my area didn't carry anything less than 850 MB and most were over 1GB. At the time it seemed huge!Quote:
Originally Posted by TrekkiesUnite118
I'd imagine something smaller could have been ordered in bulk from the manufacturer, after all laptops and the like did ship with smaller drives around the time. Which again this seems to point more for it being for developers, not the end consumer. 500MB would be overkill in a console in 1996 just to store a couple MBs of downloaded files. You wouldn't be downloading full games back then over 28.8kbps internet after all. Installing games wouldn't be an option either as it's only enough to store 1 game at best, and I highly doubt Sega was going to sell games on HDDs.Quote:
Originally Posted by axel
It was most likely there in this unit as it was a prototype with developers using it. The option was probably there more for developers.
Its all context though . My mates father had Alone In The Dark Downloaded on his PC on a 28k Modem (for the full game) . My 1st Modem was only 33k and one could still download a demo of Quake for it. That Pluto would have been an impressive system for 1997 and so much cheaper than a PC . I think my 1st Hard Drive was only 400 MB' Put Quake and another game on it and it was full up LOLQuote:
Originally Posted by axel
I was downloading torrents using a 56k modem with an old Pentium II PC. It would take about an hour to download a 2MB file, because the torrents would drop down into the 10Kbps range.
I agree it was most likely just for devs but if that did go into production you wouldn't need to load the entire game on it, just put a few MB of commonly used assets like a RAM cart. It also gives (for the time) nearly unlimited storage for saved games and would have been very useful for web browsing.Quote:
Originally Posted by TrekkiesUnite118
You are right capacities were lower for laptop drives but even by then I think they were starting around 540 MB for the 2.5" drives.
Also I'm curious how the drive and modem are connected in the Pluto -- it looks like a PCMCIA bus?
I went up to 56k with my MMX Pentium PC in 98 LOL . I still remember it taking days to download footage of D2 and SONIC Adv running on the DC and all in terrible quick time too .Quote:
Originally Posted by gamevet
I was also gutted that SEGA Europe never brought the Net link over to Pal land . I so wanted to try SEGA Rally over the network.
I was just reading in one of the my old mag's that SEGA was looking to ask $400 for the system. If that was true, that would have been incredible value for the time, such a shame it was dropped
I think you're confusing that for the actual Netlink Bundle that got released. That was a bundle of a retail Saturn + Netlink Modem + Mouse + Keyboard + the Netlink Games pack if I remember correctly for $400. I don't think Pluto was ever unveiled to the public or advertised as coming out at $400.Quote:
Originally Posted by Team Andromeda
The magazine said an All one in one Saturn would be produced, but I guess they meant an all-in-one bundle for $400. When one read 'produced' I thought of hardwareQuote:
Originally Posted by TrekkiesUnite118
So žey žought žat online would save že Saturn in Norž America? What že western Saturn needed was GAMES!