Retro games and emulation - Discuss retro shit in case you're stuck in the past or a hipster

[Ibanez RG 350EX]

What would have REALLY saved Sega would be:

1. Stop keeping the Sega Genesis alive by releasing two attachments that were sub-par to "why the fuck does this even need to exist?"
2. Not screw with specific vendors and release the Saturn EVERYWHERE
3. Not kill the one big Sonic game that was supposed to be released for the damn thing.
4. Not have an anti-american mindset (i.e. office politics). it's either you support the west with your best service, or you don't. What you DON'T do is treat the west like a battered housewife and beat the shit on it while you claim to love it.

What would have really, REALLY saved Sega:

1. Be literally anyone except Sega, a company that accidentally succeeded once in the console market, despite making every attempt to fuck that up too.

 

[X Prime]

Sega will survive solely off of Sonic autism at this point sadly.

 

[Anime=Tranime]

That's kind of a Japanese company thing in general though.

Lol, Sega of America or more specifically Tom Kalinsky is largely responsible for Sega's downfall.
A) Created the Sega Technical Institute which Californian branch cost Sega something like 70 million each year between 1990 to 1995 while producing no successful games.
B) Developed and release the 32X just to kill it immediately after release
C) Enter some terrible agreements with big box American retailers like Walmart and Toys "R" Us which forces Sega to buy back any unsold stock. That lead to those retailers buying a lot of Genesis consoles, accessories and games since there was zero financial risk involved for them, which cost Sega unbelievable amounts of money when the sales for the Genesis start to decline in 1993/1994.

Sega will survive solely off of Sonic autism at this point sadly.

Modern Day Sega is just Sammy a entirely different corporation puppeteering around the name Sega despite having zero connections with the Sega people actually remember. After all they only acquired the name Sega and its brand in a hostile takeover in 2003, after which they ''restructured'' Sega which lead to all its relevant developers, beyond the Super Monkey Ball/ Yakuza team, either leaving or being fired.

 

[Baraka Obama]

Still, I think if Sega had launched the DC in December 1998 in America they would have had a much better chance to make the DC a genuine success in the West.

Launching early with fuck all for games would have been even worse.

I would propose the opposite -- go later. Wait for Sony to spill the beans on the PS2 and be ready for some last minute retools if needed; more RAM, included networking features, not a DVD drive though Sony could make that happen because it was their tech, it would be too expensive anyway. Give more time for dev tools to mature, including the Windows CE integration. Sell the system to developers as an easier & cheaper system to write games for, maybe keep Microsoft out of the living room with some sort of "strategic partnership" and DirectX on the box with a one time cash injection to stabilize finances.

Match Sony's date in March 2000 but make it a global launch. They still beat Sony to market in the US and Europe and have a better launch lineup for Japanese gamers that would make the PS2 launch there look pathetic.

Most importantly focus on keeping the company cash flow positive, that's what really killed Sega in the end. They were hemorrhaging money. Launch at a higher price of $250 to earn more from initial sales run limited mainly by production and be ready for a drop to $200 when the market makes it clear it's needed. Include a pack-in title to sweeten the deal.

If they pulled it off right they could have had a viable system for a lot longer, maybe an Xbox/GC qualified success, and a chance at a do-over in the future.

 

[Xarpho's Return]

A) NEVER EVER RELEASE THE 32X

Yeah. Why didn't they just use enhancement chips on the few games that it would've helped?

Most importantly focus on keeping the company cash flow positive, that's what really killed Sega in the end. They were hemorrhaging money. Launch at a higher price of $250 to earn more from initial sales run limited mainly by production and be ready for a drop to $200 when the market makes it clear it's needed. Include a pack-in title to sweeten the deal.

Releasing the Dreamcast to line up closer to the PS2 and by extension GameCube and Xbox makes a lot of sense but what could've been done in the meantime? Keep supporting the Saturn?

 

[Baraka Obama]

Releasing the Dreamcast to line up closer to the PS2 and by extension GameCube and Xbox makes a lot of sense but what could've been done in the meantime? Keep supporting the Saturn?

Another shitty genesis addon
Core strengths for Sega lied in entertainment products and electronics. For 1998/1999 Ride the Tamagotchi fad and release some handheld landfill product that sells 10 million units as a stopgap, the same way Nintendo made NES/SNES Classic Edition as a stopgap before Switch.

 

[The Hardest R]

There were only three competent Sega executives: Tom Kalinske, Bernie Stolar, and Peter Moore. They clashed with Sega of Japan and eventually got canned when they attempted to be competent. They all wound up doing bigger and better things afterwards.

NEVER EVER RELEASE THE 32X

The justification for the 32X was utterly insane: it was designed to just be a year or two stopgap until the Saturn. Imagine being a parent being asked by their kids to get this and hear that this is only designed to be around for a couple years. The concept of planned obsolescence was not yet a thing and the 32X library was shit. The fact it sold a couple hundred thousand units is impressive.

This was not just limited to Sega though. There were shitloads of PC Engine variants out there. The PC Engine failed harder and sooner, going full autist with their final console, the PC FX. From their Wikipedia:

NEC directed Hudson Soft, continuing their partnership over the PC Engine, to develop only games based on popular anime franchises and using prerendered animated footage. Though this policy played to the hardware's strengths, it barred Hudson Soft from bringing successful PC Engine series such as Bomberman and Bonk to the PC-FX.[11]

 

[The Ugly One]

You can't point to any one thing that killed Sega. It was an endless stream of bad technical and business decisions. I'm not sure there was any coming back from the Saturn/32X debacle, nor could it have been anything but a debacle, since the Saturn was a trash fire of high costs and poor design. Even without the 32X, it would have been too expensive, too difficult to program, and not as good-looking as the Playstation.

I still believe that Nintendo is still pissed that Sega basically created the perfect F-Zero game and can't figure out a way in improve it.

F-Zero only sold around 250K units and wasn't a small-budget game. Nintendo also has this weird internal culture where if somebody inside the company loves a game, like Fire Emblem, it will keep getting made even if it doesn't sell. Miyamoto is a self-important dick, too, and will kill projects he doesn't think are interesting, and he's always disdained F-Zero.

 

[SSj_Ness (Yiffed)]

No, the Switch sold hugely on its gimmick of being a portable ''Home''-Console.

If that was true then the Switch Lite would've bombed. It's like saying it sold on HD Rumble, a neat feature but it's Breath of the Wild that sold the system more than anything.

Did it help, sure. But it wouldn't matter to people if you could play a home console on the go or not if it wasn't for compelling software, which BotW absolutely (somehow) was to people.

Again no, I don't think that Namco would have been able to improve the graphics of Soul Calibur much on the Dreamcast.

This is just intuitively wrong. Anybody who's been gaming long enough knows early titles usually don't look as good as games released near the end of a console's lifespan, and that sequels usually look better than their predecessors.

If Dreamcast had a normal lifespan it goes without saying that a launch game's sequel nearly half a decade later would look noticeably better. It's technically no guarantee, but that's how things typically worked at least through 7th gen.

I nowadays believe that Sega's only chance would have been to scrap the November 1998 release of the DC in Japan and instead release the DC in December 1998 in America.

Releasing a successor so soon at all was a mistake, let alone sooner. They wasted money fucking up with 32x and Saturn, they should've rode it out instead of relying on a hail Mary with an early Dreamcast release. I get why they did it, but it obviously didn't work.

If they waited longer then they could've had an even better launch line-up (DC's was already arguably the best), had more online games ready sooner, perhaps more feasibly included DVD, and generally improve the console (beef it up a bit, fix their controller, etc).

 

[Ibanez RG 350EX]

If they waited longer then they could've had an even better launch line-up (DC's was already arguably the best), had more online games ready sooner, perhaps more feasibly included DVD, and generally improve the console (beef it up a bit, fix their controller, etc).

I doubt it would've made any difference at all. It's impossible to overstate what an unstoppable juggernaut Sony was around the time of the PS2 launch - the console had fuck-all games to play and it was still, what, 6 or 8 months before you could reasonably hope to find one on the shelf?

I remember the Walmart cashier asking me if I'd like someone to escort me out to the car when I bought one - people were THAT desperate to get their hands on a console with killer exclusives like The Bouncer and Kessen and, uh... the demo disc for Metal Gear Solid 2.

 

[SSj_Ness (Yiffed)]

I doubt it would've made any difference at all. It's impossible to overstate what an unstoppable juggernaut Sony was around the time of the PS2 launch - the console had fuck-all games to play and it was still, what, 6 or 8 months before you could reasonably hope to find one on the shelf?

I remember the Walmart cashier asking me if I'd like someone to escort me out to the car when I bought one - people were THAT desperate to get their hands on a console with killer exclusives like The Bouncer and Kessen and, uh... the demo disc for Metal Gear Solid 2.

A big part of Sony's success was DVD and the timing of its release (which doesn't get talked about as much)--after DC, but before GC/XB. It got to coast on PS brand hype (which was due to competition being so retarded they handed the industry to Sony on a silver platter) and be the hotter, newer thing, launching alone in 2000 with DVD.

I have no doubt Sony would've still won that generation, and it probably still wouldn't have been a close race, but it could've been enough to keep Sega from bankruptcy, if only for another generation or at least enough to keep DC around a full generation.

Really, to completely and surely save Sega they'd probably need to have not fucked up as badly as they did with Saturn & 32x before you even talk about DC. Maybe even the Sega CD was unnecessary, though I think I remember it did okay...? Regardless, probably not bad enough to make a big difference, unlike the other stuff.

 

[Two Dollars]

I doubt it would've made any difference at all. It's impossible to overstate what an unstoppable juggernaut Sony was around the time of the PS2 launch - the console had fuck-all games to play and it was still, what, 6 or 8 months before you could reasonably hope to find one on the shelf?

I remember the Walmart cashier asking me if I'd like someone to escort me out to the car when I bought one - people were THAT desperate to get their hands on a console with killer exclusives like The Bouncer and Kessen and, uh... the demo disc for Metal Gear Solid 2.

"Playstation console sells like hotcakes despite having no games"... a tale as old as time.

 

[Xarpho's Return]

The justification for the 32X was utterly insane: it was designed to just be a year or two stopgap until the Saturn. Imagine being a parent being asked by their kids to get this and hear that this is only designed to be around for a couple years. The concept of planned obsolescence was not yet a thing and the 32X library was shit. The fact it sold a couple hundred thousand units is impressive.

32X got bargain-binned very quickly, and 800,000 units isn't that impressive if you picked one up for twenty bucks, which a lot of people did.

 

[I am Jack's dead arm]

Yeah. Why didn't they just use enhancement chips on the few games that it would've helped?

IIRC that was the original plan, but those games would have been $100+ like Virtua Racing on Genesis.

 

[The Hardest R]

A big part of Sony's success was DVD and the timing of its release (which doesn't get talked about as much)--after DC, but before GC/XB.

The DVD playback was huge at the time because DVD players were going for double the cost of a PS2. DVDs were enough of a new novelty where it didn’t matter that the first 12-18 months of the PS2 were shit, they could watch DVDs instead, especially since a lot of shit that was hard to find on VHS was now getting pressed and available for $14.99. By the time Xbox and GameCube were getting going, it was no longer a hot new thing but it was a pretty big deal in 2001 up until Grand Theft Auto 3 came out.

 

[XYZpdq Jr.]

my new chinesium phone is far less of a toaster than my previous phones, so far I've successfully gotten PS2 Marvel Capcom 2 running, but it seems I was a bit too ambitious trying Bujingai and MGS2, they stay totally black screen after booting
next I'm going to try Okage, Shadow King, but is there something that's a good barometer for easy ps2 3d games

also I need to get some gamepad working on this so I can enjoy MvC2 and presumably other 2d fighters

 

[Celebrate Nite]

also I need to get some gamepad working on this so I can enjoy MvC2 and presumably other 2d fighters

>mobile game pad
>to play fighters
eeeeeeehhhhhhh
How forgiving are you willing to be with the input lag?

 

[Two Dollars]

>mobile game pad
>to play fighters
eeeeeeehhhhhhh
How forgiving are you willing to be with the input lag?

You know there are wired controllers, right?

 

[XYZpdq Jr.]

>mobile game pad
>to play fighters
eeeeeeehhhhhhh
How forgiving are you willing to be with the input lag?

it's just MvC 2 I don't really need to go beyond the touch screen if I want to get really lazy
also I've had decent results with a wiimote via bluetooth on my chromebook

 

[Shinkai]

I have everdrives now for all the cartridge based consoles I own (only N64, snes and mega drive)
Kid me would've been in Paradise. The SNES and Mega Drive ones I got off AliExpress for about £15 each with shipping. So I assume knockoffs? But really it does the job and I haven't heard any horror stories of knockoffs doing any damage to the hardware. Plus they all came full of ROMs so I have just taken all the rom files from there and backed them up onto my external drive.