If the SuperFX was released as an add-on pass-thru cartridge

>>3425027
You gotta make it a super FX 2 at least, probably up the clock rate however much more you can past that, and if it can have extra memory or something on it, that would be absolutely called for.

I'd say you'd want to slip in both an SFX2 *and* an SA-1 chip, assuming that is feasible, though who knows how well they'd work together. But if it had some extra memory or something like that, and if only one chip could be used at a time but either could use the same add on memory, that kind of setup would be the sensible option.

>>3425064

2 SuperFX chips? Running at the same time? You absolute madman

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>>3425083
Damnit, NO! We were not running two SFX chips at once! It only seemed that way to uninformed people!

>>3425078
>>3425083
I don't even think it could be done back then. Nowadays you can do anything with less power, but back then SFX were pretty power hungry and capacitors could only hold so much.

>>3425115
What if it had two modes, running as an FX2 on its own, and running as an ordinary super FX together with the SA-1. Though you'd probably have some weirdness with the SNES CPU, the FX2@FX1-clockrate and the SA-1 all being able to interrupt each other.

>>3425027
Nintendo had the right idea. I wish Sega had stuck with the SVP chip they used in games like Virtua Racer instead of 32X.

>>3425332
The 32X was fine, Sega just screwed up by releasing it too close to the Saturn.

It would be like having two consoles on the market. Why split their userbase? It always backfires.

>>3425659
Of all the extra chips, the FX was by far the most expensive. Instead of buying it over and over and over with each game, why not make it a one and done purchase?

Or, they could've just put the chip in the CD add-on, that was going to split the userbase either way. Would've made it a real upgrade besides just offering expanded storage space

>>3425984
>Instead of buying it over and over and over with each game, why not make it a one and done purchase?
To not split the userbase. It's not rocker appliances, anon. Even now, if you want to play everything, you need 3 consoles a pc. If someone wanted to make a game for the nintendo console, he would have to make two versions to cover the whole market. People can barely make a single one and a port, there's no reason to overcomplicate it.
You would have the actual full game and the cut-down version no one would had wanted but had to settle with. It just looks bad all around

>>3426001
I should add that "power" isn't everything, being accessible is more beneficial.
Damn, If I lack sleep I can type a paragraph without saying anything noteworthy.

>>3425602
My general mode of thinking has always been that standard Genesis/Mega-Drive carts running 3D games without the need of an extra chipset run at roughly the same speed as an SNES cart with a SuperFX chip. It probably would have been a good idea to maybe perhaps experiment more with the systems strength through it's own limitations than to consider adding a heftier price to a cartridge

Let's be honest, there was no real good time to release the 32X. Too early and it would have been too expensive, too late and well, you saw what happened.....

>>3426015
Nintendo played around with the SNES quite a bit, and found that making Starfox on standard hardware was impossible

>Let's be honest, there was no real good time to release the 32X. Too early and it would have been too expensive, too late and well, you saw what happened.....

I think if Sega of America had delayed their launch of Saturn by another year, it could've worked. 32X would've gotten a better run, and the Saturn would've launched with a much richer library

>>3426023
32X would had been no competetion to Sony though. Taking too long to respond just shrinks their marketshare.

>>3425602
No it wasn't. Sega already had to do redundancy gymnastics to make the segaCD work. You'd think they might have properly planned for it after having created a very effective upgrade for the master system.

But they just fucking flip flopped! They made two clunky upgrades to a system unoptimized for expansion!

>>3426015
>Let's be honest, there was no real good time to release the 32X. Too early and it would have been too expensive, too late and well, you saw what happened.....

Earlier would have been better, they should have made it with two sega virtua DSPs, still with the Q-sound and new more colourful frame buffer.

Though this would have gone together best with making the Saturn use a different CPU setup, unless SVP and SuperH had some surprising programming similarities.

>>3426023
>delayed their launch of Saturn by another
Nasty course! The Saturn was firmly expensive, un-streamlinable hardware, it would have been much less efficient later on. Unless it could mean they could bump the CPUs by several mhzs.

>>3426383
What I'm saying is the Saturn wouldve been out, just as a Japan exclusive for an extra year.

Use the extra time so 32X doesnt feel like a rip, so you have an extra year of Japanese games to use as launch titles, and give western devs more time to work on their launch titles

This could've also incentivized SoA to push back their launch of the Dreamcast. A later launch means not getting overshadowed by PS2, and potentially not the death of Sega consoles

When people talk about alternate history SEGA releases it always reminds me of Hearts of Iron or Gihren no Yabou, it must be something like delaying the inevitable.

That old Tom Kalinski interview revealed that SoA was secretly in cahoots with the guys that developed chips for the N64 but when he asked the Japanese headquarters they basically refused because they didn't want to do as the American wanted out of pure stupidity.

http://www.sega-16.com/2006/07/interview-tom-kalinske/

>Sega-16: So could that have perhaps caused them to exert more authority over how things were done? The inner rivalry that existed between the American and Japanese branches of Sega is legendary, and most believe that this, rather than any hardware decision, is what caused the company to lose its focus. Would you agree? How much do you think SOJ’s treatment of its U.S. branch hurt business?

>Tom Kalinske: I think so. I don’t know how many different instances you know about, but what basically occurred (and I’m probably going to be a little fuzzy on the timing. Joe Miller could probably help you on that one) was that we all knew that there would come a day when the Genesis would no longer have a life, and we’d have to move on to the next technology. There was of course, a big debate as how best to go about that. When we started the CD-ROM efforts, clearly those were the early days of using optical discs for video games, and it was very rudimentary (a lot of it was even done in black & white back in those days), and the combination of live-action and real program software was very difficult.

to be continued...

>>3427085

>I remember Joe Miller and I were talking about this, and we had been contacted by Jim Clark, the founder of SGI (Silicon Graphics Inc.), who called us up one day and said that he had just bought a company called MIPS Inc. which had been working on some things with some great R&D people, and it just so happened that they came up with a chip that they thought would be great for a video game console. We told them that in the U.S., we don’t really design consoles; we do the software, but it sounded interesting and we would come over and take a look at it. We were quite impressed, and we called up Japan and told them to send over the hardware team because these guys really had something cool. So the team arrived, and the senior VP of hardware design arrived, and when they reviewed what SGI had developed, they gave no reaction whatsoever. At the end of the meeting, they basically said that it was kind of interesting, but the chip was too big (in manufacturing terms), the throw-off rate would be too high, and they had lots of little technical things that they didn’t like: the audio wasn’t good enough; the frame rate wasn’t quite good enough, as well as some other issues.

>So, the SGI guys went away and worked on these issues and then called us back up and asked that the same team be sent back over, because they had it all resolved. This time, Nakayama went with them. They reviewed the work, and there was sort of the same reaction: still not good enough.

continue'd

>>3427089

>Now, I’m not an engineer, and you kind of have to believe the people you have at the company, so we went back to our headquarters, and Nakayama said that it just wasn’t good enough. We were to continue on our own way. Well, Jim Clark called me up and asked what was he supposed to do now? They had spent all that time and effort on what they thought was the perfect video game chipset, so what were they supposed to do with it? I told them that there were other companies that they should be calling, because we clearly weren’t the ones for them. Needless to say, he did, and that chipset became part of the next generation of Nintendo products (N64).

>So that’s an example of how, partly due to our success in America, Japan just didn’t want to do the things that we suggested.

Now keep in mind that Kalinske isn't a random retard that used to work at SoA, he was the CEO of SoA and managed to bring the market share of SEGA in North America from 1% to 50% against a strong Nintendo monopoly through careful release planning and aggressive marketing.

>>3427095
And now for another episode of SEGA of Japan ruins everything...

>Sega-16: To this day, gamers have a love/hate relationship with the Sega CD, and unfortunately many don’t bother to look past the full-motion games in its library, where there really is a lot of quality software. In your opinion, what did you think was genuinely needed to make it a success?

>Tom Kalinske: That’s a good question, and you have to remember that this was the very beginning of the optical medium in terms of a video game experience, and none of us knew what the hell we were doing! I mean, it was really an experiment, a great learning experience. One of the interesting things to me is that one of our strongest partners in developing for that platform was Sony. And Sony didn’t have a hardware division (at least for video games) at the time. They had a software division run by Olaf Olafsson, who was a great partner to us. They spent lots of money developing games for the Sega CD (probably more than we did), we gave them technical help – a lot of it; we loaned them people, and there was really this wonderful collaborative effort. We each benefited from each other’s work, and I think that’s one of the things that has been forgotten in video game industry lore or history: that this very strong bond existed back then between the two companies. In fact, taking it to the next step, at one point Olaf, Mickey Schulhoff (former Sony of America CEO), and I discussed that since we had such a great relationship from working on the Sega CD, why don’t we take what we’ve learned from our software developers – their input – and use it as the criteria for what the next optical platform ought to be?

>>3427112

>So we got all that and put it together so that it wasn’t just pure engineeringese (jargon) but something that people could understand. I remember we had a document that Olaf and Mickey took to Sony that said they’d like to develop jointly the next hardware, the next game platform, with Sega, and here’s what we think it ought to do. Sony apparently gave the green light to that. I took it to Sega of Japan and told them that this was what we thought an ideal platform would be, at least from an U.S. perspective, based on what we’ve learned from the Sega CD, and our involvement with Sony and our own people. Sega said not a chance. Why would it want to share a platform with Sony? Sega would be much better off just developing its own platform, and it’s nice that we had some ideas on what that platform ought to be and they’d consider it, but the company would be developing its next platform itself.

>When you think back on that position, it’s an interesting one. We all knew we were going to lose money on the hardware, so our proposal was that each of us would sell this joint Sega/Sony hardware platform; we’ll share the loss on the hardware (whatever that is, we’ll split it), combine our advertising and marketing, but we’ll each be responsible for the software sales we’ll generate. Now, at that particular point in time, Sega knew how to develop software a hell of a lot better than Sony did. They were just coming up the learning curve, so we would have benefited much more greatly, at least in my opinion, than Sony would have, at least initially, at least for a year or two. But Sega of Japan didn’t want any of that.

Well at least SoA had control over the pinball division

What they should have done is aborted the Saturn and released everything that would have been on the Saturn on a choice of four console setups: 1) Genesis 2) Sega CD 3) 32X 4) on the dreamcast in 1999.

32x was so successful how could this idea possibly fail?

Honestly though 32x was just too ambitious and poorly supported. Add-ons like PCE arcade cards, Saturn ram carts and the N64 expansion pack all sold well enough. Starfox should have just came with the Super FX passthrough already attached to it at the $60 price point and it been available alone for $20 and it would have been fine. I can't tell you if more games would have used it or not though that's too much speculation

>>3427295
Couldn't agree more. Have you been reading my newsletter? It would have been so cute to see Genesis carts still being released in the late 90s as budget titles / mobile games for a better designed Nomad 2.

>>3426383
Saturn wasn't primitive, it just had an inefficient polygon chip (less than third of the power of the Playstation).

What they should've done was putting the VDP1 and SCSP into the 32x, with the SCSP being driven by the SH2s, and widen the cart slot so carts can use larger ROMs. Keep the add-on a limited release, and immediately shift production to the Neptune version that had it all integrated, so no one has to fuck with the add-on not working on every second console.

It would still be a stopgap solution but it would've been as good at 3d as the Saturn was; with complete backwards compatibility. This would've been enough to at least fight the Playstation, leveraging on their hundred+ library on launch, and then being able to do satisfactory 3d graphics later on.

This could've kept them competing for 2-3 more years, and then do a global launch on the Dreamcast.

32x was a mistake
So was sega cd
If they just skipped to saturn no one would know the difference

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>>3427256

>>3427412
Pretty much, what did SEGA CD had other than Snatcher and Lords of Thunder?

>>3427508
One of the best adventure games, Urusei Yatsura.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n32B4Gzbn5I

>>3427508
Sonic CD
Android Assault
Popful Mail
Keio Flying Squadron
Final Fight CD
Robo Aleste
Silpheed

>>3427375
A VDP, and the SCSP in a genesis add on?!? The SCSP was dubiously elaborate even for the Saturn, and still with two SH-2s?

Not all that believable that the neptune thing would have worked out either. All that makes sense is... reuse something from the saturn, cut down the two superHs. Maybe the VDP was reasonably cheap, maybe SH-1 yields were better, or maybe using just one superH.

But we know the safest bet would be if there was no 32x, and sega was fighting itself anyway.

>>3427508
Lunar, Silpheed, and Sonic CD were my favorite SegaCD games. It is truly bizarre, looking back, why Sega didn't spend more time fully utilizing SegaCD hardware. It had an additional 68k processor, more RAM, and the ability to do true hardware scaling. What did they do with it? FMV dumping ground

>>3427508
The Terminator motherfucker. Play that shit.

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>>3425027
This is the same line of thinking that spawned the 32X. Sega saw how impressive Virtua Racing was but was displeased over how expensive the cartridges were to produce. Then they got the idea to make a pass-through cartridge that just contained the chip and people could plug cartridges in, and the whole idea spun out of control until they were talking about making an entire new 32-bit version of the Genesis.

The reason Nintendo outlasted Sega is because Nintendo kept finding ways to do things with the SNES that didn't require people to buy any new hardware. Sega set the example of what happens when you have too many platforms to support-- they ended up with lots of confused customers and platforms that weren't getting any support. Sega should have just made more enhanced games like Virtua Racing instead of trying to make an entire new platform.

>>3427869
Where are you getting the impression that making enhanced games was ever working out for sega? What was so bad about their one upgrade per system pattern?

>>3425189
I'm pretty sure the SFX1 and SFX2 were the same CPU just running at different clockspeeds.

>>3427375
How the fuck would they widen the cartridge slot while preserving compatibiliity with Genesis games? The only way I could see would be to have two smaller slots at the sides with a gap between them and the Genesis slot.