111 ms·
Hideki Sato, designer of all Sega's consoles, has died
- jsmo 7mo agoRIP Sato san
- GenericDev 7mo ago[dead]
- monitron 7mo agoIf you want to appreciate his work today, consider reading these lovely articles about the systems he helped design: https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/master-system/ https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/master-system/ https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/mega-drive-genesis/ https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/mega-drive-genesis... https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/sega-saturn/ https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/sega-saturn/ https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/dreamcast/ https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/dreamcast/
- trzy 7mo agoCool articles :) I got into emulation in the late 90s and eventually wrote both an NES and Genesis emulator. I always appreciated how cleanly organized Sega’s systems were, at least superficially considering the memory and register layouts. You should take a look at Sega’s arcade systems, which were very cool, especially the Model 1, 2, and 3. Supermodel, an open source Model 3 emulator I co-wrote, and MAME have good emulation of Model 3 and 2, respectively, these days. Absolutely fascinating rendering architecture. It was early modern 3D when things were still weird and custom, before the industry standardized on OpenGL and Direct3D.
- pjmlp 7mo agoIn what concerns game consoles, since we are on a thread about Sega, industry never standardized on OpenGL and Direct3D in regards to game consoles. Playstation never had OpenGL other than OpenGL ES 1.1 + Cg, in parallel to their own, but that was hardly adopted and was dropped. Nintendo has had flavours of OpenGL like, but not quite the same, and while Switch supports Vulkan and OpenGL, the main API is NVN.
- kilpikaarna 7mo agoThank you for you work! It's easy to forget today, but the Sega home consoles were always secondary to their arcade business. The main reason the Saturn sold even as well as it did was because it was the only way to play versions of the heavy hitters: Virtua Fighter, Virtua Racing, Daytona USA and Sega Rally in the home, in any fashion approaching the arcade (though still quite cut down). Those Sega 3D arcade games were absolutely mind blowing back in the early-mid 90s, and the pace of technical progress and new ideas was unlike anything since. And the Dreamcast was conceived from day one to make it easy to port games from the Sega Naomi arcade system, and those arcade ports are probably the main reason people still play the Dreamcast to this day.
- pjmlp 7mo agoDreamcast has a very active homebrew community nowadays, ever moreso after KallistiOS (https://github.com/KallistiOS/KallistiOS https://github.com/KallistiOS/KallistiOS) became quite usable.
- trzy 7mo agoYup. Although sometime in the mid-90's, the home console business became more lucrative and Sega really missed the wave. Games at home were their own distinct art form: longer, more complex, far more replay value. Arcade games rarely have more than 15-20 minutes of content and this was true of Model 3 and Naomi games. Sega's arcade focus became a major liability by the time Dreamcast rolled around.
- kilpikaarna 7mo agoWell, as someone who still regularly plays arcade games I first played decades ago, but gets bored with most modern home games halfway through the tutorial, I'm sad that the incentive and design skill to create those 15 minute intense gameplay experiences has largely been lost. (Not claiming it would make business sense to try to cater to weirdos like me, or denying that it made sense for Sega to get out of the hardware game or whatever. But probably 95% of their output post-Dreamcast I find completely uninteresting. :)
- alexjplant 7mo agoThe Saturn is my favorite Sega system. I remember seeing it on the GameFAQs header in the late 90s when looking up strategy guides for Game Boy games and thinking "wow, that's a cool name for a system!" It wasn't until a few years ago that I finally got one. The next time I'm convalescent or snowed in I plan on finishing Powerslave and Panzer Dragoon Saga - I've only made it about halfway through both and they're fantastic. RIP.
- Grazester 7mo agoThe Saturn is also my favorite. Is it bad that I think depends a dragoon saga kind of overeated? Zwei is my favorite. The music in one was awesome I thought though
- throwanem 7mo agoWorthy of the HN black bar, I feel.
- ranger_danger 7mo agoblack bar?
- frogulis 7mo agoThis site will often have a thin black bar along the top of the page as a mark of commemoration for someone noteworthy who has recently died.
- ranger_danger 7mo agoInteresting... I wonder why I have never seen it then.
- frogulis 7mo agoAt least for me on mobile with a dark mode address bar, it's usually quite hard to see it.
- krapp 7mo agoI think that depends on whether dang was a Nintendo kid or a Sega kid.
- crims0n 7mo agoWhat a legend. The Dreamcast in particular was a work of art too ahead of its time to be fully appreciated. It was the first console with support for broadband, way back in 2000. For context, AOL dialup peaked around this time. Spec-wise, it traded blows with the PS2 (better GPU, slower CPU) despite releasing around 18 months earlier. The VMUs that plugged into the controllers were another highlight capturing the zeitgeist at the time, where everyone was into Tamagotchis and other little LCD toys. Everything about that console was a joy, shame it didn't do better in the market.
- philistine 7mo agoHideki Sato made a fatal mistake that killed the Dreamcast. The use of an obfuscated and strange disc format should have protected the system from piracy, but they did not think it through. The discs were barely larger than CDs (700 MiB to 1000 GiB) which made it perfunctory to excise videos and music to fit the game on a traditional CD. Once that was possible, the only problem was to boot the system from a pirated CD, which was shockingly easy. While a Playstation needed a special chip to run pirated discs, a vanilla Dreamcast could play any pirated CD you could throw at it. It was Game Over for Dreamcast 18 months after it was released, pirated discs had destroyed the market, and Hideki Sato was responsible. Source: https://fabiensanglard.net/dreamcast_hacking/ https://fabiensanglard.net/dreamcast_hacking/
- mjevans 7mo agoIMO there was one other fatal mistake. Dialup internet was also at and passing it's peek. This was the moment when anyone serious about connecting to anything wanted at least DSL if not one of those fast new 'Cable modem' connections. Today people would think someone is an alien for releasing a console or handheld that didn't support wireless (ethernet) connectivity in at least some way. In that era, it's shocking that a communications module wasn't at least an optional swap in to allow for a selection between a standard modem or a standard (hopefully easy to source) ethernet card. Heck if there were an 'OS module' that games had to call down to it might even obfuscate the difference between dialup, lan, and later wifi modules.
- 7mo ago
- dismalaf 7mo agoUgh sometimes I wish for an alternative universe in which Dreamcast had won over the other consoles of the day. It was just awkwardly released, too soon after PS1 and N64. On one hand it was massively impressive for the time, on the other, most people's desire to buy another console was probably at a low and then PS2 and Xbox stole the show. It probably also didn't help that Sega Genesis was a fiasco with all the weird add-ons.
- jolmg 7mo ago> Ugh sometimes I wish for an alternative universe in which Dreamcast had won over the other consoles of the day. And maybe that could've led to the standardized use of hall-effect joysticks from chasing the success of the Dreamcast. One can wish.
- mortsnort 7mo agoPiracy took a huge toll on Dreamcast. It came out during the rise of P2P file sharing and you could just burn CD's of the games to play without needing to mod the console in any way.
- drzaiusx11 7mo agoPersonally, I love the "fiasco" of secondary add-ons to consoles across the generations, from the Cassette drive from Atarti 2600 to Sega CD and 32X.
- alt227 7mo ago> It was just awkwardly released, too soon after PS1 and N64. > then PS2 and Xbox stole the show So in your opinion, when was a better time to release th Dreamcast?
- Paianni 7mo agoTheir hardware business was doomed by 1998, FF7 and Gran Turismo had given PlayStation momentum that neither Sega or Nintendo could hope to match, but Sega was in a particularly tough spot because of years of misguided decisions. They could have extended the Saturn's lifespan to 2000 and thrown their lot in with the PS2 after release, but it seems many people at SoJ were emotionally attached to the idea of selling consoles.
- grouchomarx 7mo agoWonder if they can get any more ads on that webpage
- ekipan 7mo agoI think everyone agrees with the sentiment but practically speaking that ship sailed decades ago. Browsing the web without uBlock or similar is ill-advised. Morbidly curious, I turned off my blockers and it's not as bad as I expected honestly. I can still read the article copy.
- guld 7mo agoRIP. I loved PSO on the Dreamcast, sank alot of hours into that game back then... Anyone here remembers that? And the Tamagotchi-esque memory cards (VMU) were cool.
- gryson 7mo agoCorrection: Hideki Sato didn't directly design all Sega's consoles, but rather oversaw their development as head of the R&D department. He was only directly involved in designing the earlier consoles. The Saturn hardware, for example, was designed by Kazuhiko Hamada and a team of about a dozen engineers who had previously made the System 32 arcade hardware. In addition to his work leading Sega's R&D efforts, Sato should also be remembered as one of the primary reasons why Sega began investing more into arcade video game development in the 1970s.