That's interesting. Would it have been better if sega had wait until post PS2? The Dreamcast was the last console I loved. I bought one on launch day. But I think looking back it was always doomed. I can't recall properly but I think it was someone in EA or high up in sega America who tried to persuade sega Japan that they wouldn't survive with the type of games they were planning for the Dreamcast. Oh well in those two years the Dreamcast had some of my favourite games.
I'm not sure if delaying it would have made any difference. PS1 was a zeitgeist machine, especially with titles like wipEout. I remember going to underground nightclubs in London and there'd be a chillout room with Playstations in. The Dreamcast just wasn't cool enough I guess.
I think Sega also seriously fucked up with the Saturn. There were lots of claims of it being more powerful than the PS1, but nobody could extract that power really. A Saturn dev at a studio I worked at had a complete breakdown just trying to keep up with what I was doing on the PS1. I feel they burned a lot of industry bridges with that machine.
I'd have loved to see the Dreamcast succeed because I'd always been a big fan of Sega, but I think a lot of things just went awry for them.
Ha! I'm still playing wipeout (on retro arch though). I only bought a PS1 around 2010 as I'd been an N64 fanboy. I really had missed out.
I heard the Saturn was originally designed as a 2d machine, sega saw what the PS1 was going to be capable of and bolted on 3d. Hence it was a mess. Is it true it could only use quads not triangles for polygons?
> Is it true it could only use quads not triangles for polygons?
Yep, but obviously a quad could become a triangle with two shared vertices. I never worked on the machine myself, and my memory is definitely fuzzy on this, but I seem to remember one of the things stressing out my colleagues was the poor transfer rate of getting textures into the video hardware, and the space being quite limited. So, all textures ended up being down-res'd by 50%, which just made everything look terrible.
I'm sure there were other issues, that's just the one I can vaguely remember.
