Was the Dreamcast and its 200Mhz SH4 CPU and whopping 16MB of system memory really impressive in 1998?

>>11857292 (OP)
How about you tell us what you think instead?

>>11857292 (OP)
It looks good today. Something about it's ability to generate really sharp and crisp textures.

>>11857396

And FSAA at no performance hit, and true 480P VGA output

>>11857414
Unrelated but it also had a hall effect joystick in 1998.

>>11857420

SEGA sure had some weird priorities, but forward thinking.

>>11857292 (OP)
At the time, I did think the Saturn still had great life left in it, and waited for Alpha 3 on the Saturn instead of going for the Dreamcast version (glad I did too). However, it was a bold plan for a comeback with the Dreamcast that I still supported it as much as possible. I thought it was really nice to no longer see wobbling textures and polygon seams. Those features making the look of the games guaranteed it as my primary choice with multiplats at the time like the Tony Hawk games, Rayman 2, Spiderman, UFC, etc. despite the lack of buttons compared to the competitors. Someone else at school was impressed how characters could have individually modeled fingers instead of a polygon mitt, due to how many more polygons the hardware could push. I remember a lot of arcade developers were willing to adopt the hardware for a few of their productions.

>>11857420
I prefer to use the Saturn 3d pad on dreamcast since the stick on the DC pad has those bullshit bumps on top that provide almost zero friction. They were just too clever for their own good with that stick

200 bucks was a great price. They hit the a magic ratio of high performance for a reasonable value. Part of me wants wishes for more ram, but I think they made the right call in the end

>>11857292 (OP)
It was 266 mhz CPU which was higher then ps2, this was a reminder the weaker console alway wins not because is better because is cheaper to make games for it.
It had 32 MB ram in reality as well, ps2 said it had 16 mb but was 8 MB for gpu, 4 for cpu and 2 MB for spu.

>>11857482
>it had 16
>it had 8+4+2

>>11857292 (OP)
It was good but not impressive. The jump between 5th gen and Dreamcast was not so big, though i wouldnt call it a 5.5th console like some do.

>>11858560
Nothing he said was wrong.

>>11857292 (OP)
Considering PS1 was its main competitor, yes, a thousand times yes.

>>11858560
Kek

>>11857292 (OP)
yah

>>11857292 (OP)
For a specialized gaming device, for sure

>>11857292 (OP)
During the announcement a normal pc from around then was 166 mhz while ps1 was 33 mhz and n64 97 so it was accepted that risc cpu's were just a lot more efficient so to hear of a system at 200 mhz was absolutely nuts that many people were like come on, you can't just straight up double the n64, its only a couple of years old, this must be some exaggeration. Remember back then the P5 was around from 1994 and in 1997 it was still around so it felt like it was still pretty good but it went from 100 mhz to 166. By the time DC came out p2 was out and 300 mhz was in people minds but it was expected you would need 500 mhz to match Dreamcast. Unfortunately the massive leap with Dreamcast caused people to believe the exaggeration about the ps2, DC was said to do 3 million polys and sony claimed 60 million, yes a lot of magazines did fall for it, N64 did exactly the same thing.

>>11857451
I remember noticing on DC that games like Crazy Taxi had good detail but no windows on the cars but with 30 fps games you could see in the interior. I said to someone at the time that i hope games just stick to Crazy Taxi style graphics and forget about to being ultra high detailed, as games came out I was like no what are you doing.

>>11857292 (OP)
In 1998, yes, it was at least on par with highest end PCs at the time.

By 2000 it was not really impressive except for a few extremely good looking games like say Shenmue.

Another zoomerbot thread

>>11861146
>good detail but no windows on the cars but with

Dreamcast GPU was only very fast at opaque textures or empty pixels. Alpha transparency took 8x longer to render, so games tried to not use it much. It was Saturn all over again.

>>11861186
Sonic adventure seemed to get away with using a lot of transparency.

>>11857396
>>11857414
>>11857420
It also had no games.

>>11857292 (OP)
>whopping 16MB
kek

>>11861686
Both Sonic Adventures
Crazy Taxi
Soul Calibur
MvC1 and MvC2
Power Stone
Seaman
Jet Set Radio
Shenmue
RE: Code Veronica
Ikaruga
DoA2
Cannon Spike

>>11857292 (OP)
I don't know. But I find it impressive that Piracy Killed The Dreamcast.

>1995 - Saturn releases, was designed around a new Hitachi CPU, SH-2
>1996 - Bernie Stolar gave STI the NiGHTS engine to mess around with for a few weeks while they were making X-treme, but Yuji Naka threw a temper tantrum and threatened to quit Sega in response, so they had to let go of it
>1996 - Dreamcast with SH-4 as a joint venture between Sega and Hitachi.
>Sonic Jam is released for the Saturn, containing elements from the then-forthcoming Adventure
>Sonic Adventure begins development as a showcase for Dreamcast hardware. Transparencies, lighting, FMVs, voice acting, etc
>Chaos according to Iizuka the director was made to shock, surprise people, something you would say "this is only posible on the Dreamcast"
>Genesis can't do transparency, Saturn can't do transparency, Dreamcast goes all out on transparency and lighting, supports 8-bit destination alpha blending with 24-bit sourcing 32-bit z-buffer
>SA1-2 used diffuse+specular lightning based on palette indices like some Saturn games
>SA1 was a game made by a maximum of 100 people, and only 11 people went to the US. Then, it was no longer possible to make 2 on that scale. I was hoping to make a small-scale game in the U.S., but at the time, Naka told me, “You can take our Japanese members with you and just make 2.” So when it came time to make 2, the starting point of the project was “How can we make 2 with this (small) number of people?”
>1999 - Iizuka goes to USA to patch up SA1 and begin SA2
>Iizuka: I had these ideas in my mind from when I was making Sonic Adventure 1 that if I were to make a second game, I wanted to have a “rival character who looked exactly like Sonic” and to be able to play two scenarios, one with Sonic and the other with the rival character.
>2000 - Dreamcast was flopping hard. Iizuka was determined to sell it on the Dreamcast at any cost

>>11857292 (OP)
It did have strong hardware for 1998/1999, it was like a high-end PC from back then. It had more VRAM than PS2, 8MB vs 4MB. It also did 480P through VGA and had AA.
I actually wonder what was possible on it late-gen, if devs had really mastered the hardware.

>>11857292 (OP)
>release modestly powerful hardware
>VN devs make some of the most technically garbage vinnies of all time
I'm glad devs tightened up their fucking pants for the PS2 era of vinnies and vinnie ports because DC exclusive slop like 北へ White Illumination is suffering on a purely technical basis.

>>11861408
Sonic Adventure was using palette ramping tricks from the Saturn days to mimic a lot of effects.

>>11863927
>It had more VRAM than PS2, 8MB vs 4MB.
PS2 had more system RAM (32MB vs 16MB) and it had 40x faster VRAM.

>>11861686
>It also had no games.

>>11857292 (OP)
Yes. Don't forget console exclusives (at the time) like Resident Evil Veronica and Shenmue. If you wanted to play the new main line Resident Evil game from Capcom, you had to own a dreamcast. That kind of says it all for me. This was before the playstation 2 landed. It had Playstation 2 graphics before the playstation 2.

We get asked this question a lot, so just get it in your bloody head, yes, the dreamcast was the most powerful console on earth for a short period of time, kind of like the way the Sega Genesis was beating the NES for a short period of time before Nintendo clapped back with the SNES and ended up beating the genesis. For a short period of time, Sega sold the most powerful gaming console on the market, twice.

The memory card had it's own screen and could play minigames when unplugged from the system. Sonic Adventure was also pretty decent.

Biggest drawback was the cable that came out from the bottom of the controller. What the fuck? They even put a clip on the top of the controller to hold it in a "Better" position, meaning they were aware that this was dumb. But apparently they couldn't engineer it to come out of the top of the controller.

>>11861987
You may laugh but in terms of Vram thats actually sizable. Most consoles of this generation had similiar degree's of VRAM.

You didn't see gigabytes of Vram happening until this modern era really, I remember being shocked that Ps2 only had like, 12 mb of vram when I found that out last month or something.

I don't care about this thread but every time I see it in the catalog I briefly misinterpret the pink controller as the interior of a Predator's open mouth.

>>11864382
What's a vinnie?

They just ran out of money. If they had more money they probably could have stuck around at least a few more years with Dreamcast. It looked bad in 2001, but the Xbox was a flop everywhere but the US, and the Gamecube was a flop everywhere but Japan, so I feel like they might have been able to be in at least 2nd/3rd place in a 4 way race in some regions. Nobody was beating Playstation until Sony made the PS3 cost too much.

>>11862796
There is no evidence STI ever had the NiGHTS engine. STI never developed a full X-treme engine anywhere but PC (LOL), and the levels for that engine wouldn't have worked with the nights engine. 90% of the ambiguity around Sonic X-treme's development is the American STI team not wanting to admit they were retards working 16 hours a day on a PC game because they were scared of assembly.

There's also nothing preventing the Saturn from doing transparency other than bad developers not rendering effects on the proper CPU. The crappy rushed port of PS1 Doom to Saturn even has real transparencies despite running at 8 fps.

>>11857292 (OP)
>>11857451
>>11857482
Gaming PCs had more impressive specs by then , but they were not efficient and madly expensive for the avg manlet.
IIRC 1998, even basic school PCs had 266Mhz Pentium II CPU , with 64MB RAM, no discrete GPU though.

Slightly off topic but the Dreamcast architecture reminds me of the architecture of 90s Roland and Yamaha grooveboxes. I don't mean that in a bad way. With the added bonus of being MIDI capable with an interface cable, I could see the Dreamcast, had it lasted longer, being known for Music 2000/MTV Music Generator clones much like the Atari ST was known for MIDI sequencers.

yeah. for the time. think about it. the playstation and n64 had like 1/4 of the ram and power.

>>11857292 (OP)
Soul Calibur connected to a monitor at game shop kiosks looked absolutely unearthly good at the time. Going from PS1 wiggle vertices and broken textures to that was like NES to SNES.
Now we actually took it home and hooked it up to a TV from the '80s like retards and it wasn't so hot anymore.

>>11865354
VN=Visual Novel=Vinnie

>>11866917
kino

>>11857465
you can't use the saturn 3d pad on dreamcast unless you got one of those 3d pads that were aftermarket converted. controller converters "read" the analog stick as a driving controller which means no vertical.

In the summer of 1999 I was in 4th grade summer school in the suburban city of Charleston SC. Expansion in the South was just starting and all of us degenerates were talking about Starwars, Pokémon, WWF now known as WWE and the Dreamcast and PS2. We didn’t know about DVDs yet and the Pokémon thing was still a little too new to us but we could play Pokémon Snap at blockbuster and so most of us knew about it. But as far the Dreamcast was concerned most of us saw it as a stop gap console for when we could finally get a PS2 one day, probably in HS or something… At the time WWF was really impressive with the Rock and Stone Cold being the toughest and coolest athletes around but BmX and skateboarding were starting to show up on TV more and more. The Dreamcast was really being hyped up as a mature console to play the best multiplayer and arcade games, similar to golden eye and stuff like that. Probably around May of 99 or around my first few weeks of summer school Starwars Episode1 had just come out and blockbuster had the pod racing game for that along with Pokemon snap running on their N64s and so we knew the Dreamcast would be getting that game or some kind of Starwars game along with some really cool multiplayer and sports games. Honestly It was something we wanted but most of us knew were only going to get the gaming magazine talking about the Dreamcast vs the real thing... You gotta understand that in 1999 people went outside more and games were something you had to save forever for unless you were a fat kid or rich. Spending money on sodas and BS like baggy jeans and trips to the water parks ,fishing and the beach were what most of us did and usually when it came to games it wasn’t really about the latest and greatest but rather what they had on shelves at KB toys, etc. Crazy Taxi did look cool though and I do remember thinking that’s not going to be the real game because it looked incomplete or like a unique demo.

>>11868202
I just realized I didn’t answer OPs question was it impressive? The only answer I have is no and that was because nobody knew about it in 1998. In fact in 98 the only thing I remember that stands out was the gameboy color,Metal Gear for the PS1 and maybe that Ranbow Six game for the. 64. In 98 it was about yomega yo-yos, Fruby and Resident Evil.

>>11861146
It is probably from a collaboration between the art director and technical artists to convince the main director how a game should push the technology. It may also be a financial decision for utilizing capabilities of an in-house made rendering engine or middleware such as renderware, unreal, or id tech for balancing the performance. I have wondered why hasn't anyone tried an art direction that just uses raw gourad/lambert shaded polygons without color maps/textures and post-processing shaders just for some performance in framerate while having a sort of souped-up retro aesthetic.

>>11865408
Oh yeah, even I eventually got a PC with better specs in its day, but there were games at the time more suited to arcade or home console play over the PC. At the time, I felt 4X strategy, FPS, RTS, adult themed visual novels, and MMOs were more at home on the PC over the Dreamcast which was more right with fighters, brawlers, platformers, racing, light gun titles, party games, etc. even though there were crossover for those genres it was just right with the right kinds of games suited to what it offered. Maybe it could be down to the control options like mouse+kb or a dance pad, maracas, whatever would be more easily accessible to their platforms. That's why I went to specifically get the Performance branded VGA box for the Dreamcast for its passthrough so I can use my monitor in playing on both my PC and Dreamcast (also Saturn/SFC/Genesis through XRGB2).

>>11857396
This

>>11862021
Imagine feeling defensive about your sad little box enough to come to its rescue in response to that.

That says more about the reality of things than if you just let it speak for itself...

>>11865408
A big difference is that if you make a game for a console then everything is on standardized hardware and graphics quality settings, and will have all the same quirks and tricks, including ones that allow for unique effects via hardware limitations or bugs.

Classic example, Sonic 1's title screen. Sonic being behind the banner is actually caused by a hardware sprite limit, preventing the lower part of his torso from rendering. In emulators with toggleable sprite limits you can see his entire sprite.

>>11863927
I unironically think this is peak graphics. We never needed to move past gen 6 capabilities.

>>11861686
For you