has there EVER been a more poorly designed console? being a technical

>has there EVER been a more poorly designed console?
See anything in the 6thgen or later minus the GC.

>>4099175
The Fairchild channel F, Atari 5200 and especially the RCA Studio II

>>4099181
>See anything in the 6thgen or later minus the GC.

Nah, all of those were well designed, other than the PS2 using a completely different philosophy compared to the rest of the industry (extreme parallelism). GC and DC were small but powerful, Xbox was excessively powerful and paid for it in size.

Saturn makes sense in that they wanted to bring the System32 to home, and then the industry took a 180° for triangle rendering - so they beefed up the machine and it became more complex.

>>4099175
dat gamepad doe...

>>4099296
you don't belong here

>>4099294
How is receiving multiple lawsuits "well designed"?

Has there EVER been a more poorly managed big software and hardware than Sega?

>>4099304
>How is receiving multiple lawsuits "well designed"?

Because lawsuits are very american, and if the design is very american then obviously it must be well designed.

>>4099314
I think the PS2 lawsuit was from Europe actually. But ya in America we like to have the ability to have a company held responsible for offering an intentionally inferior product/service.

Should note though that earlier consoles generally didn't get many lawsuits for the hardware. Other than copyright shit. PS2, XBox, DC, and every console after has had some kind of big lawsuit because they're just garbage designed, garbage quality, and garbage service from the company.

>>4099294
PS2 philosophy being different from other GPU technology wasn't so much extreme parallelism as an extreme focus on blending pixels in the framebuffer as opposed to inside the GPU pipe. Quite interesting is that the Dreamcast's GPU took the literal opposite approach - pixels aren't even written to the framebuffer until they are the final ones. Gamecube and Xbox's GPUs were somewhere in the middle, particularly since both supported Early-Z hidden surface removal and loopback multitexturing but were still immediate mode renderers like virtually every GPU ever.

People often overrate the power of the Gamecube. It was actually a little on the weak side, but due to good design it made the most of it. Other than playing around with the TEV pixel shader, there just wasn't much headroom to push the machine or do interesting things with the hardware. The GC's vertex shader is far less programmable than the one inside the N64.

A consequence of PS2's brute-force approach is you could virtually emulate advanced rendering techniques like DOT3 with the right set-up. And the PS2's vertex processing was supremely programmable, so you could get it to do almost anything. Shame the texturing / VRAM subsystem was so utterly fucked. Supposedly Sony put a dedicated edge anti-aliasing unit into the GPU but they broke it on the final silicon so developers had to create their own AA.

Xbox wasn't badly designed, but just economically overkill - they basically consolified a PC rather than making a console from ground up due to time constraints and inexperience, which resulted in a bit of an unbalanced system. The GPU is so incredibly overpowered the unified memory bus can't have a hope of catching up to it.

Best designed console of that generation was Dreamcast. Its PowerVR2 (as alluded to above) was a radical piece of tech and uber-efficient. Despite coming out in 1998, its power rivals the best PC GPUs of 1999, with possible exception of GeForce 256.

>>4099175
Treasure took advantage of it but we can't talk about them here anymore..... tis a shame.

>>4099181
Fucking this, especially the fucking PS3.

>>4099392
This. The early ps3's were terrible.

The first slim unit is what it should have been out of the gate.

>>4099392
PS3 is pretty badly designed. Its GPU is a joke compared to 360, despite being released a year later and initially much more expensive.

Cell's whole job is give PS3's GPU a helping hand so it doesn't fall too far behind. Pretty sure that's not what Krazy Ken had in mind for it...

>>4099394
Well all PS3 units suffered from the Cell being so useless for games, but yeah at least Sony decided to address all the shitty quality issues on the slim. Shame too, the original model was so sexy.

>>4099392
>>4099394
Don't forget the 360 and dreaded RROD.

>>4099403
360's thermal management was HORRIBLY designed but the console's architecture itself was very good.

>>4099404
It also had a really good lineup of games until around 2008 or 2009 where Microsoft dropped the ball so hard it completely tarnished the console's reputation.

Atari jaguar has to be up there with being the worsed, just bad overall with so many bottlenecks

>>4099175
Yes.

File: N64-Console-Set_1320685128.jpg (2MB, 3917x2108px) Image search: [Google]

2MB, 3917x2108px

>>4099175
Oh hello.

>>4099512
It wasn't hard to develop for

>>4099513
You had to be in bed with Ninty to have access to the real goodies like Rare. Also partly why it's emu scene is such a shit show.

>>4099398
>Cell's whole job is give PS3's GPU a helping hand so it doesn't fall too far behind. Pretty sure that's not what Krazy Ken had in mind for it...

Kutaragi wanted the PS3 to ship with 1 cell as a cpu and 1 cell as a gpu.

They were either falling behind in development, or realized that this was utter fucking stupidity, so they went plan B and asked Nvidia to give them whatever was their best chip at the time, bolted it on, and shipped it.

The "falling behind" happened because IBM (a co-developer of the Cell chip) fucked them over by designing a simpler and better chip with equal processing power for Microsoft, who then launched the 360 very early despite its design flaws (the shit soldering that broke off from the chips own heat).

>>4099175
Oh and also the Goldstar 3DO, and the Model 2 SMS.

>>4099512
N64 wasn't badly designed, arguably it was very well designed from an economic perspective due to how intergrated and minimalist its internals are.

Nintendo's tightfisted though resulted in a console with a single shared memory channel, making it bitch to optimise. Arguably this was done on purpose, not only for money but to meet Yamauchi's goals of trying to scare off 'unworthy' devs.

>>4099515
The microcode programmable vertex shader was a really good idea though. Rather than putting in enhancement chips like SNES, newer games could 'unlock' more power out of the hardware through low-level optimisations. It was precisely the reason it was used to replace SNES enhancement chips that Nintendo didn't want just *any* third party to take advantage of it. All according to plan.

>>4099552
>designing a simpler and better chip with equal processing power for Microsoft,
Well it wasn't equal in processing power, it was just differently configured. Basically the 360 had 3 general purpose cores, while the PS3 had 1 general purpose core identical to one of the 360 cores plus 6 SIMD-speciality cores.

The issue was that GPUs became more programmable around that time so you didn't need powerful SIMD on the CPU if the GPU was good. Essentially the 360 had 3 times the general performance, a GPU that was flexible enough to handle any SIMD load, and a much better memory configuration. PS3 would just bottleneck on the GPU/memory before Cell could really stretch its legs.

>>4099569
I guess if it was planned to be the oddball console it's only bad design in retrospect.

Think the winner is probably the Wii U though going by the horror stories devs have put out about it.

>>4099587
Wii U's hardware looked quite well designed too, albeit extremely low-end. I'd suspect th horror stories have more to do with the fact that optimisations designed for 360 and PS3 would be utterly unsuitable for Wii U.

For instance, Wii U's CPU has no support for real SIMD whatsoever, so any 360/PS3-designed code that relies on tapping the CPU for SIMD will fuck the Wii U hard. But at general processing it would certainly be much faster than, say, Cell.

>>4099512
>I don't know what I'm talking about: the post

Oh bye.

>>4099581
>The issue was that GPUs became more programmable around that time

That was a generation later. PS3 and X360 GPUs could not run generic computational loads. Actually the X360 gpu had some functions reminiscent of the Radeon HD2000 (it had unified shaders for example), but to the best of my knowledge it still couldn't do compute like opencl or cuda.

GPUs at the time could only do programmable pixel and vertex shading, and the x360 had a unified shader pipeline where each shader could do either. Previous GPUs had fixed amount of pixel-only and vertex-only shaders.

The big deal here was that the X360 had a much more powerful GPU.

The 360 also had a CPU that was better, or at the worst near equal. It had 3 PowerPC cores and hyperthreading, so it could run 6 threads in hardware. PS3 like you said had 1 general PPC core and 6 SIMD cores, but these were only better in very few tasks tailor-made for them. Games in general did not have this. The X360 was simply better in every way than the PS3.

IBM had a paw in designing Cell, and they practically did something that was easier to use but equally powerful for Microsoft. I think MS may have specifically went to them for this very reason (they could give them something that specifically destroys the PS3), but I don't have a citation for this.

PS3 only came through for that generation because both Nintendo and MS shot themselves in the foot halfway through and pretty much quit the battle (Wii U and Kinect).

>>4099512
The CPU was what made it 64-bit. The GPU was much closer to the playstation

>>4099569
>>4099512
>N64 wasn't badly designed
>use tiny cartridges
>without soundchip

>PS1/Saturn
>use large CDs
>with super elaborate soundchips

>>4099512

It was not baddly designed, other than the bottleneck ram and lack of a dedicated soundchip.

>>4100246
>lack of a dedicated soundchip
Oh, then what did it use for sound? I know it didn't use a beeper nor buzzer like many 1970s/early 80s computers did.

>>4100248
I'm pretty sure it was just all done on the CPU, leaving little priority for sound capabilities then

>>4100248

Soundchip is not the same as sound channel. The N64 used the CPU to send information to its sound channels. So when games demanded more from the CPU (like when you had to split the screen in 4 players) there would be no music or the sound would be lacking. All this could be solved with a dedicaded soundchip and ram being more easily accessible.

>>4100248
It did all mixing on the cpu (it's just a task of adding up the date of x number of PCM samples), then sent the output to the DAC.

Saturn and PSX had a dedicated chip to do this, that could also apply special effects like echo or surround.

>>4100250
>>4100256
>>4100394
All these answers are incorrect. The N64 did sound processing on the GPU's vector unit (RSP). It was not a real issue because RSP was never itself the system's bottleneck. Actually it had some advantages. Because RSP was fully programmable, you could write your own sound DSP effects for it. That's the reason some N64 games support real-time surround sound.

>>4100586

then explain the lack of music and sounds when the cpu was under heavy use.

>>4100610
I suppose when doing 4-way split screen mode that might actually put real stress on RSP, since it has to setup four different render viewpoints. Honestly, it still might be a memory bandwidth limitation rather than RSP itself.

Giving the N64 a second memory channel would be far more beneficial than giving it a dedicated sound chip.

On another note, you can actually mix audio in software on the CPU and some developers did so, but it wasn't the method specified in the N64 SDK which advocated hardware accelerated mixing on RSP.

>>4100930
My Playstation doesn't have a rectum, unfortunately.

Why has there never been a homebrew port of Doom to the Saturn?

>>4101145
Because Doom was actually released on the saturn

>>4101153
And it was a completely shit rushed port.

>>4101145
Powerslave

>>4099401
It wouldn't have been so bad if the Cell was better documented.

Also it's too bad that the quality issues addressed in the Slim models came at the expense of the ability to play PS2 games off of their discs (I think Slim and Super Slim PS3s they can still run PS2 games purchased from PSN, please correct me if I'm wrong).

By the way, is it true that Fat PS3s have a higher failure rate than the old 360s, or is /v/ carelessly spouting unsourced/unproven memes again? I can't find any statistics to back this up. When I search "console failure rates," I get either stuff from 2009 talking mostly about the original 360's ~54% failure rate or newer articles about the PS4's failure rate.

Also can Slims and Super Slims be jailbroken now? From quick research it seems you can do it on most models (even the Super Slims) on the latest official firmware (4.80), I just wanted to be absolutely sure.

>>4100209
>PS3 and X360 GPUs could not run generic computational loads. Actually the X360 gpu had some functions reminiscent of the Radeon HD2000 (it had unified shaders for example), but to the best of my knowledge it still couldn't do compute like opencl or cuda.
IIRC if a shader is flexible enough to function as either a vertex shader or pixel shader (i.e. work as a unified shader) then it should also be flexible enough to do OpenCL and CUDA

File: stop.gif (100KB, 300x275px) Image search: [Google]

100KB, 300x275px

>>4099569
>N64 wasn't badly designed
>console with a single shared memory channel

>>4099358
great post. where did you get so much information on these systems? did dev manuals get leaked for all of them?

>>4101513
arguably more tightfisted than badly designed

>>4101528
Used to work with GPU hardware around the time these consoles came out (mid 90s to early 00s) so I have a pretty good grip on the technologies of that time. Of those machines, I've only read the Dreamcast, N64 and Saturn SDKs since they are actually out there, the rest of the info I've worked out by piecing stuff online together combined with my pre-existing knowledge of the tech. Didn't work with quad-based GPUs so I don't understand the Saturn as much.

>>4099371
lmao get fucked weak faggot

>>4101195
>I think Slim and Super Slim PS3s they can still run PS2 games purchased from PSN, please correct me if I'm wrong
You are right, IIRC it uses software emulation.

>>4099298
The Saturn controller is either the best or the second-best retro 1st party controller depending on who you ask, so what's the problem? Maybe you don't belong here.

>>4101643
It's clearly the best.

>>4101195
>It wouldn't have been so bad if the Cell was better documented.
Well, that's pretty much the reason Uncharted existed: to document the PS3 hardware. You got also Linger in Shadows and some other stuff. The key point is, Sony was buying / creating documentation to share with other developers when they financed these experiences.

Jaguar.

I don't give a fuck what Carmack says it can do decades after the fact. Nigga can probably get the most out of any set of hardware.

>>4101792
I heard Kojima/Konami discovered some cool shit you could do with the Cell that no-one else figured out while working on MGS4.

>>4101737
>>4101643
It isn't a Nintendo pad so by default it cannot be the best retro pad.

>>4101923
call it maybe,but defy the best for arcade and beat em ups,a genre that didnt see a nintendo controller in a long time.

>>4099427

It was a nice design initially, but they kept trying to cut it down to reach that low $100-150 pricepoint they were trying to get and wound up with not enough cache ram, crippling the machine.

>>4099175
RCA Studio II makes the Original Fairchild Channel F look sordid.

>>4099294
>Xbox was excessively powerful and paid for it in size.

I don't know. Seems like they made it a bit bigger than it needed to be so consumers would assume it was that much more powerful

>>4102660
It's big because the motherboard is based on PC technology

>>4099307
Atari