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Someone should design a modern replacement ethernet interface.

It’s not really needed now because you have the DreamPi. Which is a RaspberryPi powered server for the Dreamcast to dial into and which communicates out over Ethernet.

I wonder how much more powerful that Pi is compared to the Dreamcast ? XD

Haha it’s not something I had considered before but yeah you have a point!

I don't think swap over dialup would be usable ;)

I love arcade games so both DC and Saturn are perfect for my use, especially with my MODE upgrades. Saturn team just couldn’t pick a lane. I have a couple of DC Ethernet adapters but they don’t work with most games so the modem+dreampi is good enough for me.

You’re talking about modern gaming now the original servers are down. I used a DreamPi now too. But the DreamPi is a comparatively recent addition as well as being notoriously painful to set up for non-technical gamers (doubly so if you’ve got a PAL Dreamcast).

Whereas I was talking about gaming on the Dreamcast back when it was still supported by Sega.

I was referring to how most games never supported the broadband adapter. Compatibility list: https://segaretro.org/Broadband_Adapter. I'm old so I bought mine on launch day(s) both US & JP. BBA in 2000.

I'm guessing you already know, but just in case (and for any others reading)...

There was an arcade system based on the Dreamcast hardware called the Atomiswave. Instead of GDROMs, it used solid state storage.

Many (20+) of the Atomiswave games have now been converted to the Dreamcast and work great on the MODE etc.

https://www.retrorgb.com/dreamcast-atomiswave-ports.html

Yes and they're amazing. Tremendous work by Megavolt85.

The Sega CD and 32x, sure. But the Saturn shouldn't have existed? Sega might as well have gone home if they weren't going to compete with the N64 or PSX.

I didn’t say Sega shouldn’t have released a console for that generation. I just think the Saturn was architecturally the wrong choice of console.

Hindsight is 20-20. I was in a meeting at Activision after the E3 where the PlayStation and the Saturn came out. The conclusion our analysts reached was that the Saturn would win, largely on the strength of Virtua Fighter as compared to Tekken.

> Hindsight is 20-20

Of course it is. If I were in on Sega’s board at the time then I’d have made they same decisions they had too. Those were the “correct” decisions for what they knew at the time. But that doesn’t change that it was the wrong architecture in hindsight.

That said, execs at Sony predicted the downfall of Saturn and would tease Sega execs about it at friendly lunch events. (There have been details accounts of those conversations shared by Sega execs, but a lot of them are published in Japanese)

> The conclusion our analysts reached was that the Saturn would win, largely on the strength of Virtua Fighter as compared to Tekken.

Sega developers were already experienced working on the Saturn’s architecture because they’d had exposure to similar boards on Sega’s arcade architectures. The problem was Sega existed in a little bit of a bubble compared to the direction that the rest of the industry was moving in with regards to 3D rendering.

So the problems with the Saturn weren’t obvious to observers until much later when games studios started complaining (though Sony had also “incentivised” discontent by buying up studios with exclusivity deals).

From what contemporary developers have said, being able to write the games in C and having much better dev kits was a major coup for PlayStation that attracted a lot of developers. This was something that hadn't really been done before, so you can't blame Sega for not realizing how important it was, but everyone says it made it, comparatively, a nightmare to work on. Sega later developed some better tools for 3D game development that they dogfooded with the development of Virtua Cop (if you think you'd like to hear about this for over 4 hours this video is great: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OrMqYVB5G-4), but too little, too late.

On top of this, Sega had some major unforced errors between harming their own credibility with the 32X and Sega CD and their surprise early launch that led to them launching with almost no games and angering retailers so badly that they refused to stock the system.

To me these are bigger factors than the architecture; the Saturn still does have impressive 3D games.

That’s all partly true too but the architecture was definitely impactful because it didn’t render triangles. It was a sprite machine that faked 3D by using a second processor to skew spites into triangles (which also broke alpha blending in the process).

I also don’t think it’s entirely fair to say that SDKs were unknown to Sega at the time. They were being occasionally used on earlier consoles too (even if it wasn’t the norm). The real reason Sony had an SDK on launch and Sega didn’t was simply because Sega had a massive development resource whereas Sony had to rely entirely solely on 3rd party developers. So releasing an SDK was always on the roadmap for Sega but a lesser priority than it wouldn’t have been for Sony.

An SDK would certainly have made it easier to program for the Saturn but ultimately it would still have been significantly harder than the PlayStation.

Your overall point that there were lots of contributing factors is correct though. I wasn’t intending to suggest that the Saturns failure was down to one specific thing.

Edit: just to add, I agree there are some awesome 3D games on the Saturn. I own one and have a few. But the existence of good 3D games doesn’t negate the point that it was architecturally a challenging platform to do 3D on. I’d describe it really more of a 2D console that can do 3D via an official hack.

If one had to make a console that would go against almost every trend that would come to dominate, The Saturn would hit almost all of them.

From going multicore before the tools were ready to backing quads over polygons.

YouTube channel Video game esoterica actually had a fairly good idea on how should have handled it. Put a little more hardware grunt into the 32x and release the Neptune (Genesis + 32x) while pushing heavy on the software support for this. Use the current user base to hold over enough momentum to slow Sonys progress. Then progress with the then offered to Sega - 3DO M2 hardware which would have launced in 97.

The big thing folks have remember, Sony was not considered a major threat. It was entirely possible it could have just become. another obscure Japanese console from a hifi company. Like the X68000, PcEngine, Pippin & FMtowns Marty.

Most of those in your list are not consoles at all but super-expensive Japanese PCs. The PC Engine had substantial success in the Japanese market.

With Sega CD it was hard to know, everyone was figuring out what this "CD" thing would mean. In hindsight, it was a bad idea.

The biggest problem with it was simply that it primarily ended up in the hands of Western consumers and dev houses during the height of the FMV craze, the PC Engine CD did much better comparatively speaking because most of the things on it were actual games and it had (within Japan) wide support from nearly all major software development houses.

The main mistake with the Sega CD was adding a bunch of expensive new hardware to it. It gave the Genesis a second, faster Motorola 68k and a special ASIC to handle sprite scaling and rotation effects (to compete with the SNES), but these inclusions effectively doubled the price of the add-on and were seldom used by developers. The Turbo-Grafx CD, on the other hand, just added a CD-ROM drive to the Turbo and cost half as much. The Turbo CD was also much more necessary since the console used HuCards that were much more limited in space than the cartridge ROMs used by the Genesis.

That said, the Sega CD was reasonably successful for what it was, and I don't think it contributed much to Sega's downfall (if anything, it helped Sega foster an impression with customers of being on the cutting edge of things back then). Far more egregious were the 32X, since it confused customers about the company's direction after the Genesis and was abandoned so quickly, and the Saturn's architecture being so much more expensive and complicated than the PlayStation, especially for 3D games. The cost let Sony undercut them because they knew Sega couldn't match them without losing money on each console, and the complexity was such a hurdle that even Sega's first-party developers had trouble figuring it out (they had to release "do-over" ports of Virtua Fighter and Daytona USA because the first versions were so rushed and buggy). Sega of America also pulled the plug on the Saturn way too early (because of Bernie Stolar's infamous interview where he said the console wasn't the company's future, which caused third parties to immediately cancel their releases for it), which left the company with basically no presence in their biggest market for about two years.

It didn’t help that Sega America and Sega Japan were in constant disagreement, fracturing the company and confusing consumers.