As much as I am a confirmed Sega fan their history is littered with mistakes and missteps and their only real successes were in the arcade market and with the Megadrive.
Their Z80 based consoles were underpowered next to the Famicom. When they caught up with the Mark III the system was still bottlenecked with the CPU only being able to transfer 20% of the data per second the graphics hardware could cope with. And leaving the FM chip out of the Western versions of the Master System was a bad idea.
The Megadrive succeded because it offered a superior system to the market while Nintendo were content to stick with their highly profitable Famicom / NES system. But even the MD has some glaring hardware flaws. The sound chip wasn't properly connected to the rest of the system making using sampled audio more difficult. And the graphics chip should have dumped the Mark III compatibilty in favour of a larger master colour palette and at least eight palettes for use with sprites, backgrounds etc. And abandoning the MD so quickly after the Saturn came out cost them a lot of lost revenue.
The Mega-CD was a nice idea but too expensive and the rate of data transfer across the MD's expansion slot was too slow to really take advantage of the hardware. And the software support was lacklusture. Where were the Super Scalar ports? A standalone MD + Mega-CD system should have been released at the same time as the add-on.
The 32X was rushed and undersupported.
The Saturn is a fussy but very powerful design probably to be expected given their no expense spared arcade background. Too costly to manufacture with litle chance of consolidating the hardware and getting costs down. And I suspect they wanted to keep decent quality 3d in the arcades for one more geneartion. The CD subsystem was overkill, the sound harware amazing but criminally lacked compression / decompression hardware and the VDP 2 chip was underutilised and arguably really aimed at 2d games. And where were the large capacity ROM cartridge games?
Can't slate the Dreamcast though it's a great design with features other companies learned a lot from like online gaming, second screen etc.
The recent news points to Sega dissapearing soon but it's not the Sega we all knew years ago and has no chance of recapturing it's glory days. Their best work was on their own systems when they had access to the hardware creators down the corridor in the office. The games market is a different place today with Hollywood values and marketing focus (cheers Sony) with little space for quirky games. Even the flourishing indie scene won't provide a refuge for Sega.
Their Z80 based consoles were underpowered next to the Famicom. When they caught up with the Mark III the system was still bottlenecked with the CPU only being able to transfer 20% of the data per second the graphics hardware could cope with. And leaving the FM chip out of the Western versions of the Master System was a bad idea.
The Megadrive succeded because it offered a superior system to the market while Nintendo were content to stick with their highly profitable Famicom / NES system. But even the MD has some glaring hardware flaws. The sound chip wasn't properly connected to the rest of the system making using sampled audio more difficult. And the graphics chip should have dumped the Mark III compatibilty in favour of a larger master colour palette and at least eight palettes for use with sprites, backgrounds etc. And abandoning the MD so quickly after the Saturn came out cost them a lot of lost revenue.
The Mega-CD was a nice idea but too expensive and the rate of data transfer across the MD's expansion slot was too slow to really take advantage of the hardware. And the software support was lacklusture. Where were the Super Scalar ports? A standalone MD + Mega-CD system should have been released at the same time as the add-on.
The 32X was rushed and undersupported.
The Saturn is a fussy but very powerful design probably to be expected given their no expense spared arcade background. Too costly to manufacture with litle chance of consolidating the hardware and getting costs down. And I suspect they wanted to keep decent quality 3d in the arcades for one more geneartion. The CD subsystem was overkill, the sound harware amazing but criminally lacked compression / decompression hardware and the VDP 2 chip was underutilised and arguably really aimed at 2d games. And where were the large capacity ROM cartridge games?
Can't slate the Dreamcast though it's a great design with features other companies learned a lot from like online gaming, second screen etc.
The recent news points to Sega dissapearing soon but it's not the Sega we all knew years ago and has no chance of recapturing it's glory days. Their best work was on their own systems when they had access to the hardware creators down the corridor in the office. The games market is a different place today with Hollywood values and marketing focus (cheers Sony) with little space for quirky games. Even the flourishing indie scene won't provide a refuge for Sega.
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