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[Crazymoogle]

Tera Drive always looked so cool from the photos.

Back to the original topic though - yes, it would have been better for SEGA to redesign the Saturn, but Nintendo probably could have been told the same thing. Sega screwed up on 3D hardware and overall ease of development, while Nintendo gambled (and lost) on the memory market. A Saturn able to compete on every level with the PS1 or an N64 with 8MB of low latency memory...both are cool things to think of.

 

[Lazy8s]

The TeraDrive had a great Japanese TV commercial.

 

[Argyle]

The 3DO M2 does not seem very powerful at all...

It has MPEG1 decoding, and umm...well...the games look worse than N64 (no texture filtering) so I can see why it never came out as a console - I'd say the system is more like PS1-quality graphics.

If the alleged Real3D based upgrades for the Sega systems are about the same spec, it's just as well we didn't see those either.

 

[Lazy8s]

The M2 could do texture filtering. And there were two M2 configurations proposed at different times, one more powerful than the other.

Here are some shots of Warp's D2 that was in development for the M2:

 

[Lazy8s]

The single CPU configuration of the M2 was specced as follows:

CPU :
o PowerPC 602 @ 66Mhz
-- 64 kbits total Instruction/Data caches (32k/32k)
-- built in MMU
-- SPECint92 of 40
-- Single precision FPU (133 Mflops)
-- Price approx. $30US in volume.

Co-Processing:
o Graphics ASIC
o 10 custom co-processors for graphics/audio

Graphics:
o Over 1,000,000 polygons/sec peak throughput
o 700,000 polygons/sec sustained throughput with effects (including texture mapping, light sourcing, and MIP mapping)
o 100 million pixels/second throughput
o Destination-based texture mapping
o RLE compression/decompression
o Light sourcing
o Linear, bi-linear, tri-linear, and point sampled filtering
o MIP mapping
o Pixel-level gouraud shading and Alpha channel pixel averaging/anti-aliasing
o 3-D perspective correction
o Hardware Z-Buffering
o MPEG-1 video decompression

Resolution:
o 640x480 in 24bit or 16bit color
o 320x240 in 24bit or 16bit color

Memory:
o 4 Megabytes memory (SDRAM/NVRAM) on base system
o 64-bit bus
o 528Mb/second bus bandwidth
o Cache coherent memory system
o 2 Megabytes ROM

Sound:
o DSP running at 66mhz, with 2k cache
o 32 Channels with hardware decompression and interpolation
o MPEG audio decompression
o 3-D CD-quality sound

Options:
o PCMCIA slot

 

[FortNinety]

doncale - When I referred to the Genesis to "Earth", it was a classification that I gave, given how it was the starting point for all the systems.

Also, now that I think of it, I do in fact recall the Nomad being referred to as Venus. In that sense, wouldn't Game Gear be Mercury? Since it's the first planet closest to the sun, and comes before Nomad on the tech/portability side.... never-mind.

The TeraDrive had a great Japanese TV commercial.

Man, I'd love to see that one.

 

[Argyle]

Well, I *have* an M2.

Sure, the spec sheets say it has bilinear and trilinear filtering, but why don't the games seem to use it? They're pretty fugly...I have Battle Tryst and it can't even maintain a solid 60fps with two characters and an infinite plane for a background.

I think the hardware was way overhyped, personally.

 

[doncale]

Nintendo 64 was WAY overhyped, the M2 was overhyped but not as badly as the N64. the M2 was more powerful than N64. by at least 2x. the arcade M2 games probably were coded up with 1 CPU in mind. but thats just pure speculation on my part. but I cant defend M2 *too* much, because afterall, Sega rejected it.