The joint SEGA-SONY hardware system - Sega of America and Sony tried to team up

[A Black Falcon]

Saturn Netlink games don't work in the way you ware thinking. You essentially just dial someones phone number and make a direct connection over the phone. Bomberman allowed for 4 players but there's a catch. It's 2 people on one console and 2 people on the other connected over a phone call.

While there is an Internet connection involved, it's only used for web browsing and accessing the Net Link Zone IRC channel.

Well, in Japan the Netlink games actually did all have to dial into a service, so you can't play those online anymore...

[TrekkiesUnite118]

It wasn't really NetLink though, it was an early form of SegaNet.

[sheath]

There is no way on this insane forum for me to figure out all of the threads something has been discussed. I do recall a significant portion of the group claiming that Sony never had anything to do with Sega getting out of the hardware business though. I take that assertion to mean that Sony never had any "ill will" toward Sega nor actively caused or promoted their cancellation of any hardware line.

Well, that just ain't so.
Sony celebrating the Playstation's 15th Birthday:

"We sold more than 130 million PS1s, went on to sell more than 146 million PS2s, put Sega out of the hardware business, established us as a household brand, [and] created a huge profit center for Sony Corporation," announced Peter Dille, senior vice president of marketing at Sony Computer Entertainment at the event.

Put Sega out of the hardware business. Put. Not outlasted Sega, or made a better product than Sega. According to Sony, they put Sega out of the hardware business.

[bultje112]

Really? All of the mainstream sites went crazy with this when it first came up. They all said that Sega turned down the real world PS1 hardware as though that was what was presented to them, and everybody laughed, poor stupid retarded Sega. Then the SGI offer came out, and all of the mainstream sites printed that as though Sega had turned on the real world N64 hardware too, and everybody laughed at the industry's idiot step cousin.

What nobody did was fact check a thing. Neither did any mainstream site realize that these offers were placed without any of the key players in the real hardware development of the PS1 and N64. Also, the Saturn is always footnoted in these articles as "just a 2D system" or "not good at all at 3D". So we in fact have two prospective offers in a sea of prospective offers and a straw man Saturn to laugh at.

Nonetheless the damage has been done. The mainstream now believes that both Sony and SGI offered "Sega the moron" ample opportunity to "repent and be saved" by vaporware. It's a great story I guess.

the mainstream doesn't even know about sega cd, saturn, dreamcast or any sony offering on sega or anything for that matter.

[Vector2013]

That is when I bought mine yes, or 1997, but I'm not sure when it was actually released regionally. Still got mine btw.

Yes for md and snes but Netlink was a xband device too.

"The Net Link modem was an XBAND device, which had previously been used in the Super Nintendo Entertainment System and the Sega Genesis modem games."

Like picture implies though, first to use your own service for internet browsing on a console, and games like bomberman were first multiplayer (like 4 or more, maybe up to 32) over a modem for a console basically. Let's say picture is off by 1 or 2 years, still pretty impressive.

Saturn Netlink games don't work in the way you ware thinking. You essentially just dial someones phone number and make a direct connection over the phone. Bomberman allowed for 4 players but there's a catch. It's 2 people on one console and 2 people on the other connected over a phone call.

While there is an Internet connection involved, it's only used for web browsing and accessing the Net Link Zone IRC channel.

Wait wait wait Treks, why did you even quote my post then type that comment under it ?

In what way was I "thinking the Netlink games worked" or was "thinking wrong" about them ?

I know A LOT about the Net Link and the 5 games that support it (not everything though), I had one for years and still have matches with people on SaturnLeague.com and SegaSaturn uk. Last match was with Sega Rally and Virtua On.

In fact, my new video will show pictures of it. I still have an analog phone line so I can connect directly with others netlink modems (if they have an old school analog line, that is the key, non digital lines to directly connect to their modem) and I still can browse the internet with it (haven't done so in years but) you could if your dial up is on a analog line.

Here is the video.



Edit. Like I said I been playing games on it for a decade and have one (have you ?), so in what "wrong way" was I supposedly (by you) thinking exactly ?

[kool kitty89]

So we are suggesting that Sega of Japan should have gone with the designers of the 3DO, but not the 3DO design itself, and then combined that with the best aspects of the Saturn? That sounds like more than a few removals from historical reality. I don't like the idea of Sega of Japan being asked to partner with designers they had never worked with before and had no existing relationship with. Especially with Sega of Japan leaning heavily on Yu Suzuki himself for the development and "consumerization" of the Model 1 and Model 2 I'm not sure they needed to outsource for hardware designs in the mid 90s.

Sure they didn't need to, but there's plenty of attractive reasons to outsource as such . . . and I'm sure Sega actually did outsource a lot of their console and arcade hardware engineering work in the early 90s. (specifically I recall a good chunk of the Sega CD's custom hardware -including the ASIC- being done by an independent consultant)

That aside, I was suggesting 2 general scenarios:
Sega either use the 3DO custom chips as they ended up historically (or nearly identically so), but in a different system configuration. So same speed, same silicon, etc, but different CPU and memory configuration. (a 20 MHz SH7032 and dedicated texture RAM rather than the unified main bus) And still released in 1993, but in Japan. (and 1994 in the US) Probably using a mix of DRAM and (dual port) VRAM . . . they could have taken a different route and gone all DRAM, but given the original design used VRAM and that Sega had the advantage of already having connections to bulk VRAM suppliers (for arcade and MD), VRAM probably would have made sense.
On top of that, there's the general advantage of using Sega's low-level programming documentation . . . programming in C libraries alone just wasn't practical for good performance back then (even if the graphics libraries are efficient and feature-rich enough, and even with the bulk of CPU code in C, you'd want the option to go in and clean up in assembler after compiling the initial C routines -not to mention potential for some developers to make custom libraries and compilers)

And again, remember the 3DO's Cel (the one in all real 3DOs now) has a peak fillrate of 25 Mpix/s, compare that to VDP1's 26.6/28.6 Mpix/s and you see my point. Take away the bus contention and weak CPU, and you'd have very near to Saturn level graphics (sans VDP2) in 1993.

It's a similar argument to "what if Sega partnered over the Jaguar chipset" . . . even if the original chipset ended up mostly unchanged, there's major boosts to performnace that could have been done with different RAM and CPU configurations (seen to some extent in the CoJag) . . . though in this case they'd probably have had the funding/time needed to properly debug TOM and JERRY as well.


The other scenario is:
Sega sets a different roadmap for the developers, allowing them to target .8 micron tech (like Jaguar and Saturn) rather than the 1 micron historically used, allowing smaller dies and both lower cost and higher speeds. And probably a 25~28 MHz SH2 as the main CPU, depending on the exact master clock speed used. (along with dedicated geometry DSP and sound DSP, as in the original 3DO -so same basic chipset, but designed with a newer process in mind) Probably using SDRAM in this case too. (so more like the Saturn in that case)

That said, this isn't all that different than my "beefed up VDP1 only" Saturn suggestion, depending exactly what features were used. (in GPU terms, they'd both be 32-bit wide dual-bus -texture/framebuffer- warped quad architectures running at Saturn clock speeds and being around 2x as fast as the existing VDP1) The 3DO Cel has better shading/lighting, better alpha blending, and flexible texture depth/compression (1/2/4/6/8 bit with RLE), but again Sega could have implemented many/all of those features if they'd wanted to.

Also, with the Dreamcast the Hitachi plus NEC combo made a lot of sense especially because Direct X, Open GL and PC graphics cards in general had reached such a state that they would naturally be considered when designing a console anyway. With the 3DO and Saturn no such situation existed with off the shelf consumer grade GPUs being so easily benchmarked.

I don't think I ever contended this here . . . though on the DirectX and OpenGL note, PowerVR actually is kind of mediocre since it's forced into the role of a "conventional" GPU with it's performance enhancing tile-differed rendering unused. (one major reason WinCE games ran like they did) Hell, Sega managed pretty well for DirectX support on the DC given how problematic it was on PowerVR on PCs. (though PowerVR2 wasn't nearly as bad as older models)

If they DID want to emphasize the Direct3D/OpenGL angle, they'd have been better to go for Matrox, ATi, or Nvidia's offerings (G200/400, TNT, or Rage 128) given both tended strongly towards those big standards, though the G200 had poor GL support for most of its life, plus their carts were more expensive and workstation oriented anyway with dual monitor support and such. (3DFX's stuff was OK for those too, but obviously best in Glide -GL/D3D drivers improved later on though, but they also lacked 32-bit color support at that time -through Voodoo3- though the 16-bit dither algorithm is some of the best looking I've ever seen -not ugly, but at the expense of heavier posterization than some others) Actually, if 32-bit performance was of significance, ATi was the way to go with their faster 32-bit rendering support (in part due to 16-bit zbuffer being supported were TNT had to do 32-bit everything), though Matrox was good there too, but costly and with weaker GL support. (ATi really seems like the natural option given their huge OEM market and historically more favorable reputation for licensing deals compared to Nvidia -Nvidia had a better reputation for quality drivers and raw performance at the time though, both with Rage Pro vs Riva 128 and TNT vs Rage 128)

In any case, SH4+PVR was great as it was. (still, the peculiarities of PowerVR did add to the learning curve -Sega's excellent SDKs helped a lot though- and crippled WinCE game performance further though)

I don't see how 3DO or Saturn could have been released in 1993 for anything less than what the Panasonic 3DO went for, weak CPU included.

I do . . . it's called selling at cost rather than for profit. Sega would use their typical sales model rather than the licensed model 3DO used (which made for non-standard hardware manufacture and sizable profit margins). Hell, I'm pretty sure the FZ-1 was a bit more extravagant than it needed to be build-wise too, compared to what a minimalist/low-cost case arrangement might have allowed (ie more like FZ-10), so it might have even be somewhat lower cost to manufacture too.
I could imagine a ~$500 price point in 1993 falling closer to $400 in 1994 for the US launch (given the Saturn hit around $450 in Japan that year, and the 3DO -even a modified one- would have significantly lower component costs, $400 seems reasonably conservative, and $300 in '95 certainly should have been doable)

[Da_Shocker]

There is no way on this insane forum for me to figure out all of the threads something has been discussed. I do recall a significant portion of the group claiming that Sony never had anything to do with Sega getting out of the hardware business though. I take that assertion to mean that Sony never had any "ill will" toward Sega nor actively caused or promoted their cancellation of any hardware line.

Well, that just ain't so.
Sony celebrating the Playstation's 15th Birthday:


Put Sega out of the hardware business. Put. Not outlasted Sega, or made a better product than Sega. According to Sony, they put Sega out of the hardware business.

What a dick.

[kool kitty89]

There is no way on this insane forum for me to figure out all of the threads something has been discussed. I do recall a significant portion of the group claiming that Sony never had anything to do with Sega getting out of the hardware business though. I take that assertion to mean that Sony never had any "ill will" toward Sega nor actively caused or promoted their cancellation of any hardware line.

Well, that just ain't so.
Sony celebrating the Playstation's 15th Birthday:

"We sold more than 130 million PS1s, went on to sell more than 146 million PS2s, put Sega out of the hardware business, established us as a household brand, [and] created a huge profit center for Sony Corporation," announced Peter Dille, senior vice president of marketing at Sony Computer Entertainment at the event.

Put Sega out of the hardware business. Put. Not outlasted Sega, or made a better product than Sega. According to Sony, they put Sega out of the hardware business.

Didn't comment on this before, but yeah, that really is in poor taste . . . jerk move there.

[retrospiel]

I haven't paid much attention to this thread but I've seen people mentioning 3DO as an alternative to Saturn. 3DO wasn't a console it was a hardware standard. There never ever was an option for Sega to license it exclusively if that is what people were suggesting here.

[Aang]

Didn't comment on this before, but yeah, that really is in poor taste . . . jerk move there.

Really says a lot about Sony. Putting another company out of business is not something to brag about, at least not publicly. Less competition in the market is always worse for consumers.

[Vector2013]

They should have said "we were a main factor in putting Sega out of the hardware business" or "helped Sega to exit" (until mp4 player), not put them out. Unless Sony had managers working at Sega in the 90s.

[Aang]

Why even bring up Sega? They sold 130 million PS1s. That's already enough to boast about. Bragging about putting any company out of the business is unprofessional. Many people at Sega of America lost their jobs because of Sega's downsizing. Sega of Canada had already closed down around 1996. Now, Sony pretends to be the good guys with their non-intrusive policies towards DRM; what hypocrites!

[sheath]

I don't even consider that statement a slip on their part. I think that is exactly what Sony set out to do when they entered the market, put any and all competition out of business. Not make the best product, not be profitable, their goal as one of the premier anti-competitive megacorps in the world is to put any and all competition out of whatever industry Sony has entered. I'd say if it weren't for Microsoft's entry with the Xbox Sony would have effectively succeeded too.

[Aang]

I think Nintendo could smell something rotten about Sony during their co-development of the SNES add-on. That's why Nintendo dropped them like a bad habit. If Sony still had the clout of the 90s, they'd be thinking of a way to take over the smartphone market, today. But they're not in the same league as Google and Apple and will likely never reach the level of their 80s/90s heyday.

[sheath]

According to Game Over and Stephen Kent's journalistic book Nintendo did drop Sony specifically because they wanted royalties on CD-ROM production. Given Nintendo's persistence against optical media until the Gamecube I would not be surprised to find they simply didn't want to pay royalties of any kind per game sold.

On topic, I do wonder alterverse style at what would have happened if Phillips or 3DO or any other company had managed to create a system on a chip version of their newest platform back in the 90s. If Nintendo or Sony or Sega could have been forced to buy an "Gizmondo" on a chip upgrade for whatever platform they were currently supporting, it might have been a big win for some megacorp. The CDI "compatible" SNES add-on being developed by Phillips was supposed to do just that. So you could buy a CDI or a SNES plus CD-ROM add-on and get the same games to work. Something like that for the 3DO, NEO GEO or something else entirely might have been a really successful deal for somebody.

I wonder if the main console manufacturers intentionally blocked that idea for no other reason than their bottom line.