Why didn't this take off like the PlayStation? It seemed

>-played audio cds
Anyone who could afford a Sega CD already owned some form of CD player by that point anyway
>-fmv
more like 1/3 of the screen MV
>-solid lineup
No.

>>3877020
Sega was retarded and pushed the horrible FMV games hard over the actual good stuff like Final Fight and Lords of Thunder. The CD is a great addon that has a terrible reputation from bad marketing.

>>3877034
They inherited a lot of FMV games, they didn't make many of them and, at least in my country, didn't push them.

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>>3877020
>couldn't do 3D capability anywhere NEAR that of the PSX
>released 3 years earlier than PSX
>was an addon, not a self-contained console, unlike PSX
>PSX PSX PSX

>>3877041
I was never claiming they made them just that their marketing campaign at least in the US had a huge focus on FMV games which made people think that's all it had.

>>3877041
I remember seeing a metric butt ton of ads for the FMV and releases featuring them from the pre-internet days. I used to alot of comics and magazines and sega inserts mentioning them so there was always something about them.

>Make my video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Az9SPXR83xg

Pure. Hot. garbage.

>>3877056
Didn't get that as much here, but the Mega CD was much later.

>>3877020
Well, there was price. And it was expensive. And oh yeah, the price.

The PCE-CD was better.

>>3877020
The real reason was the price. This was one expensive add-on.

How does twice the price of the base Genesis model sound?

>>3877056
I was going to post this - good lord that shit cost $50 when it came out

OP the Sega CD was a pretty good CD player but it wasn't like most people didn't already own a CD player of some sort by the time the Sega CD came out.

There were some great games for the system like a wonderful Final Fight port and competent Samurai Shodown port, plus some (then) exclusives like Lunar and WWF rage in the cage.

There was just too much bullshit. The FMV looked like total ass and was part of too many games on the system. It didn't have a killer title that people really wanted the system for.

>>3877020
>-solid lineup

God I hope you're a millennial, because aside from like 15 or so games there really aren't that many good games for it.

And this coming from a Sega fan who owns three.

>>3877046

SHE SAID THAT LIKE A ROMANOV

>>3877020
They should have pushed more devs to take advantage of the extra hardware to make Special Edition or CD ports with extra frames/better music and extra content.

I remember renting the system from Blockbuster a few times to play the CD version of Eternal Champions. I think Blockbuster needed a $200 deposit to rent it for a weekend so I only got to do that a few times.

>>3877960
>They should have pushed more devs to take advantage of the extra hardware to make Special Edition or CD ports with extra frames/better music and extra content.

They tried. The CD was stupidly difficult to program for, and the only extra it gave was proper PCM sound (four times better than the SNES), a pain in the ass scaler that halved your framerate if you used it for anything impressive, and the space on the CD to be used for extra graphics and audio. Except you couldn't really use it for space because it did not have instant random access like carts, if your game used more than 3-400kbyte of data, it had to stop to load from the CD.

Combine that with absolutely shit CD loading times, the hardware being extremely unreliable, and the super low user base, and you can see why they opted for FMV crap. That one required minimum code, once someone wrote a decoder you just had to change the movies out and ship the game

>>3877975
>a pain in the ass scaler that halved your framerate if you used it for anything impressive
But Sonic CD which uses it for Mode 7-esque special stages doesn't run any worse than SNES games.

Games like Soulstar use it and don't run too badly

>>3877815
>Sega CD was a pretty good CD player
Just barely. Its not quite a CD-ROM its just a budget CD player with the moving parts beefed up so it doesnt catch fire (which it did while in development) So they wear out relatively quickly depending on what types of games you play.

Anecdotal evidence warning:

One buddy o mine would watch the FMVs in games on repeat and his burned out ling before mine.

I mostly played shit like earthworm jim, batman, spiderman, ecco, lunar and other side scrolling genny games with music added on and my player still works fine even though ours are from the same batch.

>>3878048
I wouldn't say it had a great FPS for what it did. Would have been nice if they launched it later with the 32x CPUs built in. The CD alone added very little power.

Maybe they could launched it with a 4mb ram expansion cart like the Saturn had for storing sprite data and saved instead of charging $60 for a separate ram cart.

>>3878072
>Would have been nice if they launched it later with the 32x CPUs built in.

I have often though this myself, but it was already prohibitively expensive. Imagine the cost if they included the 32X hardware too.

>>3877020
>literally retarded
FMV was shit and it had a handful of decent games not a "solid lineup". Only real similarity to the PS was both ran off electricity.

>>3878063
The laser is a stock KSS-210a
It's unlikely to "burn out", and even if it did, replacements are plentiful ($10 each)

>>3878207
Biggest problem with Sega CD is the redundancy. The whole reason they put in an extra copy of the 68k CPU into it is two fold:

Firstly I think they were worried that the regular 68k in the main console wasn't clocked fast enough to drive the CD subsystem without sacrificing performance elsewhere. Secondly, the console's expansion port wasn't particularly well designed as was alluded by >>3877975
there wasn't as much communication across the divide as would have been convenient, so they're just like "fuck it" let the CD half have its own CPU.

Substituting the 68k (and perhaps even the DSP) for a single SH-2 (one chip from the 32X) would have certainly boosted 3D performance substantially. There's one problem: that chip literally was not commercially available until early 1994.

I suppose by then the other components of the Sega CD would have been cheaper, so the final product wouldn't have been more expensive than the CD we got, and the 3D capabilities would be half way to 32X (certainly no worse than the SVP chip). Of course, the lingering problem is that the system would still be bound to the VDP's low color count, but I think it's a pretty decent proposition for "turbocharging" your Genesis/MD.

>>3878048
>But Sonic CD which uses it for Mode 7-esque special stages doesn't run any worse than SNES games.

The Sonic CD special stages run at like 15 fps.

>>3878245
Actually now that you mention it, I checked and you're actually right about that. But does Mode 7 run at 60 FPS? I doubt it.

In any case, though the framerate is low, the DSP in the CD is much more capable than Mode 7 is. Seems to me that the framerate is purely choked on the expansion port bus as opposed to matrix calculation speed on the DSP.

>>3878072
The expansion connector did not provide enough connections to make anything there that could add more power in a meaningful way. Half the extra power would always be used up by just communication between the two devices.

32x got around this by being almost totally independent and using the Genesis as a genlocked video background. Which was more problematic because the 32x had fuck all power and had to use the Genesis for half its graphics and sound.

RAM cart for the CD actually wouldn't have been a bad idea, other than the fact that it would cost way too much on an already expensive system. And the extra loading times. Just so you can get a game to work as seamlessly as if you'd run them on a cart. Not such a good idea, then.

>>3878232
>It's unlikely to "burn out",

It can burn out easily, because it was designed for reading audio CDs in a tabletop player, not for nonstop data loading in a console. One of the reasons the Sega CD had huge reliability problems was the fact that they just used bog standard cd player hardware, and they found out 1 day before launch that it is prone to catching fire from the extra workload.

>>3878257
Mode 7 itself runs at 60fps. The only thing slowing it down is the gameplay calculations. But you could rotate a 3d playfield at full speed easily.

Sega CD scaler can't do 60fps because it brute forces new tile graphics into the VDP, and there's just not enough time to upload one frame worth of tiles. Only way it could do 60fps would be if you were only scaling a very small area.

>the DSP in the CD is much more capable than Mode 7 is. Seems to me that the framerate is purely choked on the expansion port bus as opposed to matrix calculation speed on the DSP.
It's not a DSP though, it's a simple chip that reads data diagonally from memory given a rotation delta, or skips/doubles bytes of there is a scaling value. I think it also converts the bitmaps to tiles too. In bandwidth itself it can outdo the SNES, and it can scale and rotate everything you throw at it, including sprites. In that regard, it is faster. And late games figured out how to change the rotation matrix mid-line, which allowed them to draw 4-point transformed sprites (ie Saturn style polygons).

But the only thing that can display graphics is the VDP, and it does not allow video expansion in any way. You have to upload the new tile graphics inbetween frames, which is slow, because the VDP halts when you take control of the VRAM, so you have to upload new graphics only during VBLANK. There's just not enough time to upload enough tiles for a full screen, which is why it can't rotate shit at 60fps.

>>3878292
Since the expansion port is timing limit, I still believe an SH-2 on a Sega CD would have been a good idea, and for Sega to just forget about 32X.

Sure the framerate wouldn't be great, but neither was SuperFX shit. But the SH-2 could calculate a far FAR more complicated scene than the SuperFX, so Sega could roll in CD and its answer to SuperFX into one, and the games could be cheaper than SuperFX games since not only would they come on CD but wouldn't each have to come with a copy of the fucking chip either.

>>3878331
>Since the expansion port is timing limit

The expansion port is not speed limited (not enough to cause issues anyway). It's limited in that it has no cpu interrupt connection. The problem is that you have no way of directly adding new graphics to the VDP, which itself is a limitation of the entire Genesis, not its expansion port.

If they put a SH2 on the Sega CD, it would've been equally shit because it solves none of the weaknesses of the system and now it costs $50 more and competing with the 3do and playstation.

The only way they could've made it non-shit is by making the Sega CD a standalone Genesis unit, not an expansion. With a new VDP that can take external video without speed penalty and is otherwise backwards compatible with the regular Genesis. That way the system would've been 2-3 times as powerful, half as difficult to program for, could've fixed other issues too like the crap palette, and COST EXACTLY THE SAME as a Sega CD expansion.

>>3878362
>It's limited in that it has no cpu interrupt connection
That does put a framerate bottleneck because the CPU would then have to periodically check for new data to copy to VDP.

>If they put a SH2 on the Sega CD, it would've been equally shit
Not quite. The SH2 can basically *do complicated 3D* and then have that complicated 3D copied by CPU to VDP. Because the CPU has no interrupt the framerate would be capped due to the periodic check, but you'd still see all of the complicated shit that SH-2 has calculated on the screen.

>now it costs $50 more
Well, by 1994 the Sega CD already went down substantially in price, and you wouldn't be able to put an SH-4 into it before then. The sprite scaling chip could be removed because it's un-needed since the SH-4 could do everything it does in software.

>The only way they could've made it non-shit is by making the Sega CD a standalone Genesis unit, not an expansion.
While this isn't a bad idea it certainly does make me think of Nintendo's New 3DS. Even if it's the same price as the regular Sega CD, I almost feel like a stupid psychological barrier by consumers in having to buy a "new console" instead of an "addon" (even though the Sega CD is pretty much a new console as it currently exists) could kill it.

>>3878379
*meant SH-2 in this post obviously, SH-4 wasn't even invented yet

>>3878263
You mean it was designed for non stop audio playing instead of intermittent data loading. Like every CD player laser ever. What a dingus.

>>3877153
This. At least the PC Engine was actually made with CD-ROMs in mind, it was just less expensive to sell the drive separately back in 1987.

The Sega CD's added enhancements are all bottlenecked by the Genesis's base hardware.

>>3878379
>That does put a framerate bottleneck because the CPU would then have to periodically check for new data to copy to VDP.

It's much worse than that. The CD can't tell that it finished processing anything, not even that it just read a data sector from the disc. You have to set up a lock-step timing where each cpu can only access the shared ram at a given time. Neither half can "check periodically" because they hang up if they access the shared RAM while the other part of the system is using it. Which then pushes all your code out of sync. It's a nightmare and a bad joke, and it makes the Saturn look like a well designed system.

>The SH2 can basically *do complicated 3D* and then have that complicated 3D copied by CPU to VDP.

The SH2 can do the math. You then need to rasterize all that math, convert them from bitmap to tiles, and copy them to the shared memory poor. All the while controlling the CD drive (the entire point of the SCD having an extra 68k is because it is meant to control the CD drive, which is an expensive operation for 1992 standards). Even assuming that it can use the scaler chip as a rasterizer, it still couldn't pull off any impressive 3d. It would be at best on the SVP level, just way more expensive.

>Well, by 1994 the Sega CD already went down substantially in price,

SH2 would be too expensive and it would also need expensive new SDRAM if you want to take advantage of it.

>The sprite scaling chip could be removed because it's un-needed since the SH-2 could do everything it does in software.

The SH2 wouldn't be nowhere near fast enough to rasterize 3d in software.

>>3878513
this guy knows his shit

ITT: people are geniuses on here

stop calling it psx

How did the Sega Cd and 32x work together?

Could Sega have just made a 32x expansion with no cart slot and added built in memory for saves and sold 32x games on CDs?

I know there are like two games that could use both systems.

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>>3877020
Sega CD:
—addon
—costs $300 on launch
—barely any good games
—shitty FMV
PS:
—standalone console
—$300 on launch and $200 a year later
—tons of games
—actual 3D
Gee I wonder

>>3879069
Stop giving a shit. We don't.

>>3879069
Woah dude did you just say "psx"? I find that very problematic. Do you realize you're triggering older people? It's 2017. You can't just go on the internet and call PlayStation "psx".

>>3877153
Only because it has Rondo of Blood.

>>3879165

Anyone who uses the word "triggering"... deserves some.

(Yes, I know YOU were being sarcastic. This message is for the ass-burgers).

>>3879181

And the very best port of Gradius II.
And Super Darius
And Super Darius II (which whips Sagaia's ass)

>>3878292
What framerate does F-Zero run at? That game always felt really smooth.

ITT: people hate on the lineup of the sega cd even though they discount how incredible it was at the time.

>>3877020
>solid lineup
OP pls

>>3877020
Just because they used CD doesn't mean they were anything alike. The PSX had way more logical and graphical processing power. The Sega CD was basically a Genesis. The disc is just a data storage device, it means nothing.

>>3877020
Sega CD was just a bridge gap add-on

something with specs like that couldn't possibly curtail what 3D was going to inevitably do the industry

>>3877020

Everyone in this thread is going to shit on Sega CD games, but they are wrong.

There are plenty of great FMV games, despite the memes, especially if you like light gun games (incidentally because you can't emulate them with a lightgun people think they are bad.)

Keep in mind that lightgun games were the rage at the arcade at the time and laserdisc and FMV games were going for $1 per play. These games are incredibly fun if you play them as they are made to be played--with a lightgun.

There were plenty of them:
Mad Dog McCree 1 and 2
Who Shot Johnny Rock?
Crime Patrol
Ground Zero Texas
Corpse Killer
Lethal Enforcers 1 and 2

It also had amazing ports of games that looked poor, sounded bad on other consoles, or weren't even able to be released:

Final Fight
Mortal Kombat
NBA Jam
Dragon's Lair 1 and 2
Space Ace
Escape from Monkey Island
Eternal Champions CD
Shining Force CD
Ecco CD

It also had some unique games and hidden gems like:

Lunar 1 and 2
Sonic CD
Snatcher
Heart of the Alien
Dark Wizard
Popful Mail
Tomcat Alley
Sol-Feace

The truth is not many people owned a Sega CD because SNES was dominating and an expensive add-on if you already owned a Genesis wasn't as enticing as buying a SNES. I find that people who actually owned one back in the day tend to like them. I love my CDX and would never sell it.

There are 27 great games that I listed. How many good games do you want to justify a system being good? How many great games have there been on newer consoles like the Gamecube, Wii, Wii U, or PS3 that are romanticized compared to the Sega CD?

I love my CDX despite what the hive mind thinks about a console they have likely never played.

>>3879754
Will the Master System Phaser work on the Genesis in place of it's more expensive light gun?

Like could I play Lethal Enforcers with it?

>>3879773

I honestly don't know, I've never tried.

The best lightgun is the one that came with Lethal Enforcers. I believe it was made by LaserActive.

>>3878513
>You have to set up a lock-step timing where each cpu can only access the shared ram at a given time
That does sound bad, but the principle is the same. Graphics from the CD unit are timing bound as opposed to complexity bound (well obviously, very small uncomplex tiles are OK as you said).

>All the while controlling the CD drive
To be fair, controlling a slow CD drive would be trivial for a part as fast as the SH-2.

> it still couldn't pull off any impressive 3d. It would be at best on the SVP level, just way more expensive.
Oh I'm not arguing it could do better than SVP quality (well visually it could if you adjust for the lower frame-time bottleneck meaning the SH-2 has more time for calculation) but it also makes the need for 32X and the SVP itself redundant. All the Mega Drive needed was a solid answer to the SuperFX, and "SVP" level graphics is that answer. Bundle it into the CD drive, and not only is there more of a reason to buy the CD, but you don't need to start putting chips into every cartridge.

>SH2 would be too expensive and it would also need expensive new SDRAM if you want to take advantage of it.
It wouldn't be that expensive for a single SH-2 (remember, Saturn coming with a LOT more equipment inside was released that year). Even so, by 1994 the price of CD drives, and basic PCM sound chips had fallen through the floor to make up for it.

Sega CD wouldn't be working with games of sufficient complexity to require the bandwidth of SDRAM.

>The SH2 wouldn't be nowhere near fast enough to rasterize 3d in software.
Something like SVP level is really, really basic 3D. SH-2 could likely power through it without breaking a sweat.

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FMV games were held back by the color restrictions of the Genesis, which left only a slightly faster processor and Redbook audio as its selling points. The only Sega CD game to "wow" me is Silpheed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Crjgu2aE1QE

Still did a lot better than the 32x.

>you will never live in the universe where the 32x came out in 1993 as a response to Super FX

>>3879821
>You will never live in a universe where the SegaCD and 32X did so we Sega had enough money to produce Sonic X-Treme
>Due to its success we both get Sonic Studium/Crackers as a complete and component game that is basically Mania 20 years early
>In competition the SNES CD was developed and PlayStation was never created, but most games for it came out on the SNES
>Nintendo kept Square and games like Bravely Default come out 20 years earlier instead of stereotypical weeabo fanservice trash we get now
>Sonic Adventure comes out and it hailed as the revolution of 3D Sonic games, Shadow is never invented because Sega doesn't need to pander to teenagers
>Nintendo 64DD is released and we get Mother 3 as Itoi intended
>Two companies warring leaves no room for Xbox to enter and ruin shooters with Halo, Gears of War and other brown and bloom trash
A huge crash would be the horizon. Would it be worth it?

>>3879754
>There are 27 great games that I listed
And a lot of them are shit. Mad Dog McCree was shit even if you have a light gun fetish. Dragon's Lair was shit even if it was more shit on other systems. Sounds like you have a bad case of nostalgia goggles.

>>3879102
It just used the additional processors of the 32X in combination with the larger data capacity of CDs. It still didn't compete with the PSX in any way, it really just let you make 32X games with better music and videos.

Contrary to popular belief, the 32X had no 3D hardware acceleration, all 3D had to be done in software. It would never be able to compete with the PSX in terms of 3D performance, even if it had similar data capacity.

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Friendly reminder that 32x was a nightmare to develop for. Even demoscene-fags don't touch that console and they have an even bigger hardon for obscure retro hardware than /vr/.

>>3879909
>one insignificant thing changes
>everything else changes because of it
?