camineet said:
Many Dreamcast games didn't look 10 times better than N64 games, let alone 20-30 times, maybe twice as good in the worst cases with the worst games. But it's subjective for everyone, as it is for you, and me. To me Sonic Adventure is like 10x Mario 64 in graphics, even though I didn't really like SA and loved Mario64 much more at the time.
Sonic Adventure does look quite good, I agree. 10x Mario 64? I'm not sure... but it does look good.
I don't know if I'd agree that the worst look twice as good, though. What about the ones that truly were just straight ports of last-gen titles? I know there were some... most were improved at least a little bit, though, so in general that's probably true.
It's amazing that Dreamcast, with 1 pixel pipeline and 1 texture unit (thus, a 1:1 system) could hang with PS2 in PS2's early life, and the PS2 was a 16 pixel pipeline system, though it didn't have even 1 texture unit PER pipe, I think it used half its pipes to texture or something like that, making it effectively an 8:1 system. PS2 started to pull away when more geometry was used, and with its high bandwidth EDRAM.
The Dreamcast had one major advantage compared to the N64, PSX, or PS2. It was easy to program for. None of those were. That's why some of the DC's launch games look so good, while on the N64, PSX, or PS2, the best looking games were ones released late in the systems' lives. This is particularly easy to see on the N64 and PS2... the massive, massive gulf between early third-party efforts on either system compared to late ones. Like compare Cruis'n USA to San Francisco Rush 2049, or Blast Corps to Conker's Bad Fur Day... it's amazing they're even on the same system, really. On DC, development was easy so that just wasn't an issue, so game graphics could push the system from early on, if developers tried at all. The same would be true on the Gamecube, somewhat -- easy to program for, relatively easy to get a lot out of. Just look at how Rogue Leader has some of the best graphics on the system and was a short-dev-cycle launch title.
Of course, this had a side effect that the system had less room to improve on, so over time the gap between PS2 and DC would have become evident even if early on it was definitely not, but it did help initially.
N64 was more powerful than PS1 in most areas, although PS1 could push more textured polys to the screen on average. 180K vs 160K. Like I said though, N64 was more powerful in most every way.
Of course, that was my point. The N64 has far better graphics than the PSX. Pure poly fill rate isn't everything.
some yes, some no. but I agree with you for the most part.
Soul Calibur for instance, was originally on the System 12 arcade board, same board that ran Tekken 3. basicly PS1 plus 50% more performance. The arcade game could've been (but was not) done on PS1 with a small but noticable downgrade, like Tekken 3 was.
On Dreamcast however, it literally looks 10 times better than the 'PS1.5x' System12 arcade with the added polygons, textures, and the proper basic polygon image enhancing/rendering features that PS1 lacked, and everything Namco added.
Great example of both a DC game that actually looked next-gen and how easy it was to program for the system, making such a good looking game possible so early in its life. The game was good too, of course.
San Francisco Rush 2049 is the easiest game for me to compare because I've played that game for hundreds of hours, on the N64, DC, and GC... one of the best games ever.
When I first got the GC version (I only got a DC more recently), I was surprised at how small the improvent was. I had definitely been expecting more than the effects-textures-and-framerate improvement that it actually has... it does look better on DC, but not as much better as I would have expected.
I mentioned Re-Volt because that was a nice contrast to that, a title where the DC version did look a lot better. But of course, that N64 version struggled... bad framerate, removal of imporant gameplay aspects (4 vehicles instead of 12, removing the moving doors, bouncing basketballs, etc), etc... the question is whether that was a hardware issue or just that the N64 version was shoddy compared to the other ones. I don't know.
Depends on what exactly you compare. Matsushita claimed M2 was comparable to Sega's MODEL 3 board. The MODEL 3 board was, without a doubt, an order of magnitude more powerful than N64. Like 10x more. The M2 was really not close to being on par with MODEL 3 (3 million triangles, or 1 to 1.5 million square polys) Most developers said M2 was twice as powerful as N64. If the polygon counts are to be believed, it was: 160K vs ~300k to 500k, so about 2-3x. M2 had 4 times the texture cache: 4k vs 16k. And M2 had twice the amount of RAM of a non-RAM-expanded N64. Looking at the games in development and framerates, I'd say at least twice as powerful. If M2's bigger brother, the MX, was 2-4 times more powerful than M2, then you're at 4 to 8 times N64. Which is what Nintendo was starting with in 1997 after they moved away from SGI, and to MX via Samsung/CagEnt. Not a good enough starting point for their next-gen, given that GameCube ended up being 50 to 100 times N64 in polygon spec (even though Nintendo rarely pushed its own hardware later). While I cannot say exactly what any given system can do, I'm pretty good at comparing overall the overall look using each systems best games as examples, and comparing that to what the paper specs say. I am certain M2 wasn't 10 times stronger than N64, but I am also confident M2 wasn't 'N64 1.5x' either.
The 3Dfx Voodoo1 was somewhat more powerful than N64 and the M2 was slightly or somewhat more powerful than Voodoo1. We also shouldn't judge M2 based on the Konami M2 arcade games released, since that didn't use the twin PowerPC 602 version. Who knows what revision of the M2 that Konami board used. I became an M2 fanboy around the time it was canceled, in 1997, not when it was announced as Bulldog in 1994 or revealed as M2 in 1995. Man, the only thing I wanted more than M2 was the reported Saturn2 with Lockheed Martin GPU. That would've been the ultimate console of its generation, but that's another thread
Huh. It's very hard to say, really, how well the M2 would have done, graphically... after all, it never came out. You can't believe the PR of course, PR is always greatly exaggerated (see Sony's PS2 hype for one of the best examples of this). Maybe M2 really was that powerful, I don't know... without actual hardware really having been release, it's hard to know.
but how good were the graphics of those arcade games based off of the hardware? I don't
know...
As for the Voodoo1, yeah, that was a step above the N64. Amazing card, all we had at the time was an S3 ViRGE, the infamous 3d decelerator card... Voodoo looked so, so amazing in comparison. I wouldn't be able to get one until December 1998, though, when I bought an 8MB Voodoo2...
Came with three games, too. Didn't care so much about G-Police, but I liked Ultim@te Race Pro and Incoming. But anyway, yeah, it's pretty obvious that an M2-based system like the one you describe definitely would not have been a good choice for Nintendo as their next-gen system. Nowhere near powerful enough. As it was, the GC's power was one of the few things that helped it hold on... without even that (or a Wii/DS style innovative strategy, which Nintendo hadn't quite gotten to yet), Nintendo would have done even worse, I think.
DrGAKMAN said:
Funny enough, this dream team would either be totally fruitless (3D0 & Acclaim R.I.P.) or (in the case of Midway/DMA's Body Harvest) would later bear fruit (the 3D GTA's) on competing systems.
3DO wasn't on the Dream Team, they still at a console at the time!
They did later support Nintendo though, and Battletanx: Global Assault was amazing... (and the later PSX port of the game was awful) but they weren't in the Dream Team.
DMA Design was on it though, yeah, and they did publish two N64 games before moving to other consoles. Not many, but something at least. Midway didn't have anything to do with Body Harvest until very late, because originally Nintendo was going to publish it.
As for Acclaim and Midway (then Williams), they were both on it, Williams was on it at least, but those two companies were two of the system's best third parties, support-wise. Turok, Extreme-G, and wrestling games from Acclaim, racing and sports and great arcade ports from Midway, etc... in those two cases, at least, they followed through. Rare was also a part of the Dream Team.
Others on it were ones like Angel Studios (the two baseball games for Nintendo, Resident Evil 2), Virgin (nothing came out of that... they were originally going to publish Robotech: Crystal Dreams.), Paradigm (they did make several N64 games, starting with Pilotwings 64). So yes, it is true that the "Dream Team" was overall a mixed bag. Some companies in it did turn out to be major N64 supporters, but others did little or made more prominent games on other systems. And almost the entire list were Western developers, not Japanese. But most of the developers or publishers on the list did at least develop or publish something on N64, and a few were strong supporters -- Rare, Midway, Acclaim.
Oh yeah, and in my opinion, despite how it killed their relationship with the Japanese third parties, the cart decision was a good one. I can't imagine N64 games with load times and smaller areas (to deal with loading)... it would be awful. The real bad decision was going with a 4KB texture cache. Now THAT was a big problem. It was the cause of so much blurriness... but the carts? The right decision, really.
Before the generation even started I do believe that minshare "won" the war for Sony as MS & Nintendo fought over the previous generation's N64 userbase: GCN being bought by Nintendo fans, X-BOX being supported by everyone else (N64's garnered Western support: the Tom Clansey's, the Star Wars, the FPS's, the PC ports...and later in a devestating mindshare blow: RARE).
This is a very good point I completely agree with. Essentially, the Xbox took half of the N64's market away from Nintendo in North America, and that's why the N64 got 21 million sold here while the GC got 12. All of the people who bought N64s for Goldeneye, Turok, Rare games, and the rest bought Xboxes instead the next generation. Nintendo hasn't even come close to getting any of them back ever since.
camineet said:
I would've hoped that Nintendo, with a fully powered, fully featured, fully-taken-advantage-of-Dolphin, had roughly split the market more evenly with PS2. Now to be honest, The Wii Remote+Nunchuck does go beyond what might have been in the Dolphin controllers. The advanced versions of the Dolphin controllers that were abandoned probably had: microphone, speaker, maybe a removable screen (like DC's VMU) and basic tilt-motion capability (not as much stuff as Wii Remote). I am not talking about the later-Wii Remote that was going to be released as a peripheral for GameCube, but the original unreleased Dolphin controllers, circa 1999-2000.
Then for this generation, perhaps Nintendo would've gone with a more 'revolutionary' interface for Dolphin2/GameCube2/Revolution. Well, at least what the MotionPlus is soon going to offer. Plus, modern visuals with a more powerful GPU with a modern architecture, as powerful as Xbox360's Xenos, but rendering everything in SD instead of HD or near-HD as 360/PS3 do, to keep game development costs down. Also a simple, fast, single-core CPU instead of multicore CPU, 256 MB RAM instead of 512 MB, to also keep costs in check. Nintendo could still have launched at $249 and still have had a 'disruptive' console this gen. Game developers would have lowend hardware that was a major improvement over Dolphin/GameCube, but not totally obsolete late 90s hardware. Gameplay and new control would still be the focus, not hardware specs.
Of course, the above is just my ideas & thoughts typed up in a few minutes.
Better graphics doesn't necesarially lead you to greater success. The Gamecube as released was a quite powerful system, and its failings were not hardware design related aside from perhaps the relatively small disc size (1.5GB). A more powerful, but more expensive, Gamecube would not necessarily have done better. Look at every generation, hardware power usually has very little to do with success... other factors are always more important.
You are wishing for more powerful hardware, but other factors often matter more, and companies know it... why make a super-powerful, expensive Gamecube when the less powerful system they shipped was, as it was, very powerful and nearly a match for the generation's best system graphically (the Xbox)? It's not like better graphics would have gotten the Xbox audience on GC... they liked the graphics sure, but it was games, those games (read: FPSes) the N64 had had but Microsoft had taken, that they really wanted.
Oh, and as for tilt, as you can see with the PS3 controller, just having tilt only helps in a very few games. I liked Kirby's Tilt 'n' Tumble, sure, but even there, it felt somewhat gimmicky, and I was sure that the game would have been a lot easier and perhaps more fun with normal controls... though given how easy it was as is, I was kind of happy that you didn't have normal controls, because at least with tilt there was some challenge. But overall, tilt controls are cool but by themselves not hugely important.
As for this gen, Nintendo knew that they didn't need that. And besides, designing a whole new hardware would be very expensive, avoiding a high price would be hard I'm sure, even if you keep it SD... I suspect you are understating the price issues here. (And Nintendo's desires for profits, they will NOT sell consoles at a loss)
[Nintex said:
they probably didn't realize in Japan that SEGA discontinued the Genesis and pulled everything from store shelves to "help" the Saturn)
That's not really true, Sega discontinued all Genesis/32X/Sega CD/Game Gear development in late 1995, not late 1994. DKC (and the 32X) came out in late 1994, and that year was the key in the SNES's victory over the Genesis, really. Sega did play a crucial role in making sure Nintendo would keep that lead by killing all non-Saturn development in late 1995, but by that point, they had been seriously losing marketshare for over a year.
The design of the N64 was simply not good enough and Nintendo also lowered the price before it launched to take on Sony. They made their move and simply said "fuck you" to SGI who wanted to earn more money from the N64. Mario 64 saved the N64 in it's early days without games. But Nintendo understood that they were in trouble. You see they always made hardware together with their partners, but they never let their partners have full control over the design and features. SGI failed with the N64 chip and they failed hard and around the same time the rise of the PC GPU's happened. So Nintendo had the best looking games for a couple of months at best.
Once the dust settled the N64 was mostly succesfull in the US and Europe(due to the Saturn failure). SGI was "broken" the N64 was supposed to be the showcase of their technology but the performance in games was poor. Nintendo wanted to get rid of SGI as quickly as possible and with the PSX beating them and their "Silicon Graphics" with pre-rendered FMV they were frustrated. It wasn't untill they found ArtX that they could start working on that plan. ArtX offered Nintendo a great piece of hardware. Still even some of ArtX originated from SGI. The SGI curse actually followed them because Nintendo didn't want to downgrade the GCN, they simply had to. They had no choice since the first batch of Flipper chips had low yield rates.
ArtX was founded by SGI people, of course... if your story of Nintendo really hating SGI were really true, there's no way they'd have gone back to them. But earlier in this thread the stuff about how Nintendo liked the team but not SGI's management and production and stuff is more convincing.
But anyway, the N64 was a lot better than you suggest. "Not powerful enough"? Yeah, sure, it was only the most powerful console of its generation. That's a "letdown" any company should be happy to have...
The N64's hardware design was very hard to get the most out of, but that was also true for its competitors. PSX and Saturn were also quite complicated machines... but in the N64's case, the system had a lot of power. It was just very hard to get the most out of it, and Nintendo impeded that by restricting access to the details of the hardware for most third parties. Only certain teams were allowed to really get into the depths of the system, and their games looked better... only late in the system's life were third parties given full information, I believe. This is part of why third party games improved so much over time on the system. But the first and second party games improved hugely too, showing how hard the system was to program for. But if you look at late-cycle N64 games (or at least, if I do), they look really, really good. The N64 was an amazing console. I am a huge N64 fanboy, but still, your negativity is wrong.
The GameCube also lacked ram. The 1T-SRAM was rather expensive but the genius who picked A-RAM for the rest of the system should be shot. Another problem was the Mini-Disc, Nintendo understood that they couldn't stick with cartridges so they went with the GOD. They never thought about games that streamed entire cities from a disk like GTA. The performance of games on the GameCube that stream huge cities and such is rather poor. Just look at Need for Speed Underground 2, everything is compromized to fit on the disk and it looks like ass, if you play the same game on Wii it runs great. In fact I remember playing a GameCube demo that looked and played alot better than the final product. Even Nintendo's own Twilight Princess has framedrops on the GameCube because of the scale of the environments. The GameCube is a beast when it comes to smaller spaces and "rooms" see the Metroid Prime games and Resident Evil 4 but the design isn't great for bigger environments due to the lack of RAM. It's the TEV that saved the GameCube for being an utter failure in the graphics department. Nintendo also learned from their mistakes with the N64 so the systems design is also very efficient.
... And then you do the same thing with the GC. Listening to you, you'd think that the GC was a poor disaster performance-wise, not the second-best console of the generation out of four, and one much, MUCH closer to the top console than the two lower ones! But no, you just focus on the flaws, with only bare mention of its strengths. Very biased.
Hardware design was NOT the problem with the Gamecube. Hardware design had absolutely nothing to do with its lack of success.