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.
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.
> Hideki Sato was responsible.
I fail to see why you want to make one guy culpable for a hardware security hole (on a system without pervasive OTA updates, no less) or why you think it necessary to do so in a thread about his death. Did you lose your job because of the failure of the Dreamcast or something?
Effectively the Dreamcast doubled down a genre right at the absolute peak of its success, or more troublingly, possibly after some peak, which may have been a reason why people passed the console by.
Would have been interesting if the Dreamcast would have been able to survive just a year or two longer to see whether they would have been able to pivot away from arcade style titles or not.
[1] And no real surprise since the dreamcast shared technology with the NAOMI arcade hardware which enabled swift, high quality ports.
DVD playback, game catalogue and also the overwhelming success of the PS1 (with which the PS2 was backwards compatible) were much bigger reasons for its success.
I dont necessarily agree with the guy you are posting to, but if Hideki Sato is being bestowed the glory of 'Designer of all Segas consoles' then he also needs to hold responsibility for their failings, of which there are many.
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.
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.
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.
And maybe that could've led to the standardized use of hall-effect joysticks from chasing the success of the Dreamcast. One can wish.
> then PS2 and Xbox stole the show
So in your opinion, when was a better time to release th Dreamcast?
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.
Morbidly curious, I turned off my blockers and it's not as bad as I expected honestly. I can still read the article copy.
https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/master-system/
https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/mega-drive-genesis...
https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/sega-saturn/
https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/dreamcast/
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.
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.
(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. :)
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.
RIP.