The Sega Pluto was designed for North America?

[gamevet]

The link isn't working. You can check it out here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lD3kMcFr1o

[SegaDreamcast]

Looks solid outside of the constantly opening damaged tray. Sega Neptune is still my favorite though as Sega console prototypes go, design wise.

[Leynos]

Ugh it had to be that guy.

[Da_Shocker]

This mfer found it at a flea market and bout it for 3 dollars!?

[Greg2600]

This is old news.

[Hairlesswookiee]

This mfer found it at a flea market and bout it for 3 dollars!?

That's what I just said to myself. I'm not sure what it is worth...or if anyone should sell it but damn.

[TheGreyGhost]

sweet thank for sharing, was there not also a Sega Neptune at one point...remember hearing rumours as a kid....

[Greg2600]

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....

[Mega Drive Bowlsey]

Looks solid outside of the constantly opening damaged tray. Sega Neptune is still my favorite though as Sega console prototypes go, design wise.

Agreed. The Neptune looked really nice.

[axel]

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.

[Greg2600]

The price tag with that 2.5" IDE drive would have been astronomical though.

[Team Andromeda]

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.

It's a shame , it would have been incredible value and ahead of its time

[TrekkiesUnite118]

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 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.

[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.

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.

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.

[Team Andromeda]

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.