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[Henry Panic]

No, people did not want to play Sega games on their consoles. No popular Sega arcade game that had great mindshare, marketing, lines, coverage, sold to reflect that popularity when brought to their consoles.

As a matter of fact, ALL of Segas popular arcade games in countries or regions they had big games in, failed to sell at even close to a similar level to reflect their arcade popularity, when brought to consoles. Except TWO games: Virtua Fighter 1 and Virtua Fighter 2, and only in Japan on the Saturn.

But for other companies in most cases, they never had this issue, but Sega had it constantly from 1983-2001.

Reposting because people may not see the Sega exclusive problem here.

 

[Henry Panic]

As for the Jaguar it's 3D was fine at the time. There was no console able to produce 3D like it in 1993, and no, not the 3DO either, 3DO didn't prove itself better until middle of 1994.

Not even a well equipped PC could match the Jaguar unless you spent over $1000 because the prices for enhancements didn't drop until 1994 too.

Jaguar launched at $250! If they were competent they would have been a threat.

Those are nice numbers, but in the 21st Century, those numbers are not anywhere sufficient to sustain a hardware platform.

Those numbers would look bad even on the Gen honestly.

That was always the plan. Dreamcast was never meant to last more than two or three years, and there was no way Sega could survive in a global market dominated by Sony (valued at $60 billion) and invaded by Microsoft (valued at $infinity).

Sorry, kids. By the late 90s, Sega’s plan was to merge with another complaint or seek a buyout. Heck, half the reason SoA pursued the 3DO M2 console was because Matsushita would be the manufacturer for the machine, effectively allowing Sega to exit the hardware business in all but name.

By 1998, it’s very clear that in order to survive in hardware, you needed to control your own manufacturing, have billions in reserve to weather downturns or price wars (Sony & MS could lose billions and never break a sweat), and have key franchise titles that sell millions. Their only AAA franchise at that time was Sonic, and even there we could argue that Sega had over saturated the market with too many Sonic games 1991-94.

Did Sega make great videogames? Absolutely. Did those games deserve to sell millions? Absolutely. But the didn’t, and they weren’t going to. Just look at Sega’s software output on PS2, Xbox and GameCube. Nothing outside Sonic sold worth a hill of beans.

Sorry, kids. Sega was doomed.

Sega was wasting money constantly trying to find a long-term solution so they could stay in the industry. They tried internet 3 times, tried education, tried to create a arcade ecosystem that would appeal in the longterm but operators weren't having it, Chucky Cheese clones featuring other companies games as well as their own, 3DO M2, Making their own gaming PC, and even trying to jump on telecommunications.

They even started porting many games to PC because they knew their consoles weren't sustainable and poorly managed.

Most likely Sega was planning another attempt after the Dreamcast, but weren't expecting the console to lose that much money in such short time, with games failing to sell being the icing on the cake, so gave up and pulled out.

Then they almost went bankrupt anyway as a third party, after Sega released an avalanche of failing games on the big 3 and was saved by a Sammy merger.

We are lucky Sega is even still around frankly.

I think there biggest two problems were Sonics success was non-replicable after Sonic 2, and they could never find the 'next' Sonic. They also worked with 3rd parties poorly, so outside the Gen, 3rd parties were not system sellers selling millions of copies.

 

[Eddie-Griffin]

Parallel RDP is a pixel accurate LLE plugin that renders the games authentically and perfectly, down to every single graphical element and quirk.

But fair enough, i made these screens at 480p, which the real N64 doesn't support for this game.

At native resolution the filters hide some of the texture details in the distance but those details are still rendered by the console, it's not LOD taking place here. Object details, lighting, etc are the same, LOD doesn't reduce their quality, the filtering does. And there is no extra pop-in.

This can be improved depending on the CRT and cables you use but you have to mod the N64 for RGB to get the best quality possible. There are also Action Replay cheat codes that remove the VI filters and make those details appear more clearly on the real console. Makes the games sharper but more dithered, like what you would see on the Playstation, but with the N64's grunt.

You can clearly see the texture detail that's rendered on the top of the bushes, which shows the N64's filtering is what reduces the quality, not the LOD. Unfortunately, very few games have in-game toggle to turn the N64 filtering off (like how Quake 64 does). In most other games you have to use a cheat code to do that. Here's how it normally looks:

Like you said, there's some "missing" texture detail here but it's not really that, it's just the stupid filtering softening the image. The same filtering that would mangle textures in games like Quake and Quake 2 on PC using GL. Texture/image filtering and antialiasing were overrated during the early days of 3D and did more damage than good IMO. Only in higher resolutions these filters make sense.

Yes, this is all nice but you seem to be overlooking the point here, and that is your screenshots aren't actually possible from the technical capabilities of the N64, so wouldn't be representative of what the N64 could do, and show things even without the filters that the N64 would not be able to replicate from the actual machine, including clear detail from afar without blur, pop, or quality consistency, which it can't on actual hardware.

That would be like be saying this screen of gex is representative of the game running on a N64,

But that isn't actually the case and it actually looks like this on actual N64 hardware with big loss of detail and quality,

Still good looking games, but might be a bit TOO good looking for the hardware with some of those shots.

The Jaguar was a good 2D powerhouse in late 1993/1994. It was also good at pseudo 3D FPS games like DOOM so it had a good DOOM port, AVP and the best looking version of Wolfenstein 3D. With some good coding i don't doubt it might be able to pull off a good Duke Nukem 3D port as well.

And games like Rayman look amazing on the Jaguar.

And now the problems: A lot of focus on 3D games. The console was bad at 3D

it would be more accurate to say the Jaguar "ended up" being bad at the "type" of 3D that ended up being popular. Jaguar was basically a gourud shading 3D console, but with the capability of adding a percentage of textures (limited of course) and a few other hardware advantages to models and environments, that put it at double the power of the best 3D arcade machines that existed at the time it was test marketed.

But that 3D had a short shelf-life when the 3DO was aiming for the modern 3D rendering and texture technology, with early shadows and lighting involved as well, and Sony followed suit, which forced Sega to also follow suit, and while the N64 wasn't as good in these areas compared to the others, it still could do notably more than the jaguar, however, like the jaguar, too much would screw up performance, just not with drops in the single digits like the Jaguar, at least not until some later N64 releases anyway.

I actually miss that style a bit, because early advanced 3D was very messy and hard to look at despite being technically superior and allowing for more detail. That style also would have allowed more games at 60fps, but it only lasted barely 2 years, so we never got to see what kind of games developers could make with more time with that style of 3D. Sega abandoned it just as fast too,

 

[nkarafo]

Yes, this is all nice but you seem to be overlooking the point here, and that is your screenshots aren't actually possible from the technical capabilities of the N64, so wouldn't be representative of what the N64 could do, and show things even without the filters that the N64 would not be able to replicate from the actual machine, including clear detail from afar without blur, pop, or quality consistency, which it can't on actual hardware.

The only thing you can't replicate on the real hardware from what you see in the pics posted is the increased resolution. But you can remove the filter though, which can clean up the textures considerably, as i demonstrated here:

This is how the real N64 can look. But because very few devs ever allowed for this no-filter option in the game settings, the only way to remove it is using cheats. I used such cheats on my real N64 in many games and this is the reslut. It's what a real N64 can replicate.

Also, i'm going to repeat myself here just in case, there is no difference in LOD between the emulated shots and the real N64. Parallel RDP emulates the exact same level of LOD as the real N64. So there's no extra "pop" as all the objects and assets are loaded exactly the same.

it would be more accurate to say the Jaguar "ended up" being bad at the "type" of 3D that ended up being popular. Jaguar was basically a gourud shading 3D console, but with the capability of adding a percentage of textures (limited of course) and a few other hardware advantages to models and environments, that put it at double the power of the best 3D arcade machines that existed at the time it was test marketed.

I'm not sure what you mean by "that put it at double the power of the best 3D arcade machines that existed at the time". You are saying the Jaguar was more powerful than the Sega Model 2? Or the equivalent Namco board? I'm sure i'm understanding this wrong.

 

[Fat Frog]

Eddie-Griffin nkarafo
I don't care who is right,
just don't pollute this awesome thread with Nintendo 64 screenshots. I treasure my eyes...

 

[Eddie-Griffin]

I'm not sure what you mean by "that put it at double the power of the best 3D arcade machines that existed at the time". You are saying the Jaguar was more powerful than the Sega Model 2?

Jaguars first test market and demonstration was in June, so 2 months before Model 2 came out (Aug). I don't recall if a Namco more powerful board was out before June.

The next and major marketed test launch was in November, that was after Model 2 came out by 3 months.

When the Jaguar had the first release, it was the strongest gaming device on the market outside maybe an extremely expensive PC, and there was very little support for such a PC, in terms of gaming so I'm not even sure if there was a game out at that point that such PC could showcase it's specs.

After Model 2 launched, the second Jaguar release in November happened, at that point it was the strongest console (in practice), but not gaming system, as arcades and PC would actually run over it then, however it was the strongest console, and it was comparable to the other systems considering what you got for it's $250 price.

Then the third REAL launch happened in 1994, at that point the Jaguar was the weakest game machine on the market (excluding 16-bit of course).

There was actually a realistic time period where Sega could have taken a peak earlier in this timeline and saw the Jaguar, the demos, and marketing and say "holy shit" before it became obvious that everyone else was already running past the Jaguar. Leading in part to the 32X.

 

[nkarafo]

Jaguars first test market and demonstration was in June, so 2 months before Model 2 came out (Aug). I don't recall if a Namco more powerful board was out before June.

I'm pretty sure all systems, not just the Jaguar, had their own test market and demonstration period. You are comparing Jaguar's before it was actually released with other systems based on their actual release date. To me it looks like you are trying to find ways for the Jaguar to look better than it really was.

But even if we ignore this, you are still putting the Jaguar above the likes of Sega Model 1 and Namco System 22, which is insane.

When the Jaguar had the first release, it was the strongest gaming device on the market outside maybe an extremely expensive PC, and there was very little support for such a PC, in terms of gaming so I'm not even sure if there was a game out at that point that such PC could showcase it's specs.

In late 1993 you could buy a 486 PC (that's a CPU released 4 years before the Jaguar) and less than a month after the Jaguar's official release you could play a little game with it known as DOOM. Every console shortly after (including the Jaguar) could only handle a downgraded port of that, the equivalent of playing DOOM in double pixel low-graphics mode, with chopped up maps on top. That was the best looking, most advanced game you could play at home before 1994 kicked in.

Now keep in mind, im not saying the Jag didn't have good hardware. It was incredible for the price. I myself have said so many times. But i think you are trying too hard to put it on a pedestal. It was like a stop gap between 4th and 5th gen, there would be no way for it to compete with PS1 or Saturn with those specs so it was doomed to live a short life.

 

[Baki]

A SEGA backed with MS money would have been really interesting and exciting shakeup to the console market.

 

[Eddie-Griffin]

I'm pretty sure all systems, not just the Jaguar, had their own test market and demonstration period. You are comparing Jaguar's before it was actually released with other systems based on their actual release date. To me it looks like you are trying to find ways for the Jaguar to look better than it really was.

This is silly, pay attention to what I wrote. The jaguar was massively marketed at the time, you couldn't see any 3D games that looked like what they showed anywhere else at the time, and in June some even had the console.

I'm not "comparing" anything you seem to have forgotten the whole point of the discussion chain was to fart town bringing up how he thought it was silly Sega was reacting to the jaguar, when with proper context it wasn't silly at all.

Everything around that time period showed the Jaguar as the graphics king because there wasn't anything else to counter it at that SPECIFIC time, which could actually be shown. So if you are Sega and that's all you see what do YOU think they thought?

In late 1993

You seem to be just picking apart the post out of context forgetting the whole point of this discussion, why are you bringing up late 1993? Also this conversation is about polygonal 3D gaming, Doom isn't polygonal, and came out in December so after BOTH Jaguar test launches. The whole point was that when the jaguar first tested there was nothing else like it at the time.

Again, to put the topic back into frame,

Agree that SoJ also made awful decisions, imagine being legit terrified/motivated by the Atari Jaguar, lmao.

The Jaguar was a good 2D powerhouse in late 1993/1994. It was also good at pseudo 3D FPS games like DOOM so it had a good DOOM port, AVP and the best looking version of Wolfenstein 3D. With some good coding i don't doubt it might be able to pull off a good Duke Nukem 3D port as well.

And games like Rayman look amazing on the Jaguar.

And now the problems: A lot of focus on 3D games. The console was bad at 3D

it would be more accurate to say the Jaguar "ended up" being bad at the "type" of 3D that ended up being popular. Jaguar was basically a gourud shading 3D console, but with the capability of adding a percentage of textures (limited of course) and a few other hardware advantages to models and environments, that put it at double the power of the best 3D arcade machines that existed at the time it was test marketed.

Again, the point was that the jaguar wasn't bad at 3D, it had top 3D capabilities in its hardware when it was being shown off and during it's initial test release. They had to rely on that type of marketing to create hype and to hide the flaws and Ataris condition that would become apparent months later, and they could get away with it because they were alone, there was nothing being shown to counter that narrative at the time.

It's mostly in retrospect after everyone floored the jaguar later, that people look back and make fun of the claim, mostly because the "32-bits" were clearly more powerful (and the N64 which also was 32-bit but did better to demonstrate a "64-bit" system than the Jaguar did) and when you look through the library, the Jaguar was clearly behind in 3D gaming.

But that was after, at the time there wasn't an PS1 or N64 to look at, nor was there a model 2, a PC costed an arm and a leg to have all the hardware features the jaguar had and near no games to show for it, and 3DO was behind schedule and would rely on Crash N' Burn for months. Atari had demos no one could counter (yet, in practice) other than amount of polygons put on screen (Arcade), but for a home gaming console at $250. what it was touting was considered a big deal regardless and that was overlooked for it's other capabilities.

That's just the fact of the matter, so when people keep acting like Sega's reaction to the jaguar was just a random bad decision out the blue it wasn't. That early in June 1993, there was nothing else that had the coverage to counter what the Jaguar was showing and people were demoing.

If anything, what's funny is that with the 32X, Sega still had hardware weaker than the Jaguar. That's more of a reason to criticize Sega of Japan imo.

With that being said, we are talking only a handful of months. The jaguar was in fact poorly designed, at least in 3D, and it became clear VERY QUICKLY that they were doomed from the start. It's clear it's 3D was supposed to be limited to gouraud shading with limited textures and no further.

They put on a good show though for a few months. We are literally talking about a lead up from April 1993-June, and then June-Nov which Sega decided the 32X, which is also when the Jaguar problems were becoming obvious, and then going into 1994 when the Jaguar had it's full proper launch, where it was already far behind everything else, and the 32X releasing.

Heck, that's less than a year.

Maybe you could argue Sega should have been more patient to see what would happen. I think that's a valid criticism.

 

[TronNerd82]

I would buy a new Sega console instantly.

 

[Fess]

Day 1 no matter what it is!

 

[Daniel Thomas MacInnes]

For all its faults, Atari Jaguar had a killer 1894: Tempest 2000, Alien Vs Predator, Iron Soldier, Doom, Wolfenstein 3D, Brutal Sports Football, the best version of NBA Jam TE. Had those been the launch titles in 1993, and had Atari Corp been in a stronger position with finances and retailers*, things might have turned out differently.

It seems absurd now, but Atari was still a force to respect in the early 1990s.

 

[Fat Frog]

I would buy a new Sega console instantly.

A Sega return would gather many old and new fans...

- Sony/Microsoft lose money with their hardwares.
- Nintendo makes profits with Switch's hardware (so as Sega with its mini consoles).


Sammy is faaaaaar more cautious than wacky Sega. Their console would be less innovative but... alive:

A Sega-Sammy console would be in between Sony and Nintendo model. A moderate power efficient hardware a little more superior to a Series S i think...

 

[e0n]

You're in luck, there's an upcoming mobile game where Sega controls the world.

 

[Daniel Thomas MacInnes]

It would be impossible for Sega to survive in the videogame market as a hardware provider past, oh, 1999. The costs of developing and releasing a console, as well as financing hit software, costs far more money than the company was ever worth. More importantly, they would need to survive the inevitable price war when Sony and Microsoft—two mammoth companies who could buy Sega for the price of a sandwich—start dropping the price of their consoles to $149 or even $99.

Remember that Dreamcast was breaking even at $250 and losing money at $199. All the big boys need to do is simply bid them out of the poker match. They can afford to lose a billion dollars on hardware losses. Sega could not, and as a result, they nearly died before transitioning to a software-only publisher.

Sorry, kids. I love the Saturn and Dreamcast. But they were too expensive to build and the kids simply weren’t buying the games in the amounts necessary for Sega to survive.

So, once again, this reporter places the blame squarely on you, the viewer. Seriously, check out the DC sales numbers that were shared earlier on this forum thread and be prepared to
Be shocked.

 

[Alexios]

It would be impossible for Sega to survive in the videogame market as a hardware provider past, oh, 1999.

Seems like they did the impossible by surviving until 2001 when Dreamcast was discontinued then, though they still published games for it until like 2002.

 

[Scotty W]

 

[Art The Clown]

If Sega was still around all these consoles would be grabbing the comb.

 

[Eddie-Griffin]

It would be impossible for Sega to survive in the videogame market as a hardware provider past, oh, 1999.

They didn't survive past 1997 and barely that, they needed outside help for the Dreamcast. That whole console was a casino bet.