@Zenszulu the ones on Microsoft Store are emulated so having a recomp native port is better. Microsoft doesn't seem to be as harsh as Nintendo Lawyers plus even Nintendo hasn't sued recomp projects as long as they don't include the game. There's a Ocarina of Time recomp and it hasn't been taken down even though the OoT remake is being released this year

Blame Yoichi Wada. He schemed his way to the top of Square in less than 2 years. He was hired as a consultant in 2000 and by the end of 2001 he was President & CEO. He used The Spirit Within 's failure to get Sakaguchi to quit/fired. The sad thing is that the was never a gamer and didn't even had any experience in the gaming industry. He was hired because he went to a prestigious university in Japan. He led Square thru the dog years from 2002 to 2015. He was finally forced to quit because of the failure that was the original launch of FF14 and the fragmented development of FF13Versus/15.

The only reason he took the job at Square: "As a student, Wada wanted to become the president of a company quickly, rather than gradually working his way up through his entire career. He set for himself the objective of becoming a president by the age of 40"
He did and took down a whole company with him.

I think all the boot-up sequences were real time until maybe the Xbox 360. The systems had very little ROM data so everything had to fit into the small space they had, which meant real time rendering.

@rob7979 that's weird since Sega was most popular in Europe other than the Saturn. The Master System & Mega Drive were the top selling consoles of their generations in Europe.
It's the opposite in Japan where Mega Drive was 3rd after the Super Famicom & PC-Engine and the Master System is just a footnote in the Famicom's dominance of Japan. Though the Saturn was was Sega's most successful console in Japan and actually was selling more than the PS1 until Final Fantasy 7 was announced as a PS1 exclusive.
In North America, only the Genesis was successful. The Master System was nothing compared to the NES. The Saturn was 3rd behind the PS1 & N64. The Genesis barely beat the SNES in sales.
With all those details, you'd think Sega would hide the Sega branding in the US not Europe. If I remember the marketing in the US, Dreamcast was marketed heavily as a triumphant return of Sega since Sonic was at the center of the marketing strategy.

This list is heavily skewed toward Western releases. I'm surprised D & Policenauts wasn't mentioned. The 3do versions maybe the best because they weren't censored unlike the PS1 & Saturn versions.

@-wc- there has been. MSU-1 is an enhancement chip that basically allows the SNES to access as much data as a DVD drive with the speed of a cart. They ported Road Blasters to it.
https://youtu.be/ryE4xjWNz58?si=BVCsh9HV8NSoxTnl

Would have loved to see other games announced for the SNES CD like 7th Quest & Myst ported to it.

There is also a Ray Tracing core for the SNES. https://youtu.be/2jee4tlakqo?si=Xug2z18oYbP-J6up

The main limitation is cart size. Tagging 3 on 3 shouldn't be a problem on a cart. The main issue is how many characters, animation, backgrounds and music they can fit on the cart. Surprised he's limiting himself to 64 megabit. Supposedly SNES could do 117 megabit without a mapper.

@sdelfin if Sega chose 3dfx it would have been vastly inferior to the Dreamcast we got. Looking at the time frame it would have been either the Voodoo Bashee or Voodoo 3. Both were basically Voodoo 2s with 2D hardware on one chip at a faster speed. Which the Voodoo 2 was basically a Voodoo 1 with an additional texture unit.

3dfx spent all their money buying companies and suing companies without improving their r&d

Years later when Nvidia had their IPO, Sega sold their shares for $50 million. Sure Sega made a $45 million profit but if Sega kept that stock they would have been worth over $300 billion today. More than the combined worth of Sony & Nintendo.

@Sayyadina Nvidia has never manufactured any of their chips. They're known as a fabless company. They designed the chips than outsource to another company to manufacture their chips usually TSMC.

The story really seems like Deering is confusing the PS3 and PS2 development.

Also the SPU2 is just basically the SPU in the PS1 but 2 of them and 4 times the amount of RAM. Ken Kutaragi designed the SPU1 himself, which is just an evolution of the SNES S-SMP. No Nvidia involvement needed. The only enhancement Sony made to the SPU2 was that it can be sent back to the Emotion Engine to enhance it. That's why it was able to do Dolby Surround Sound.

Sega's R&D expense must have been insane in the 90s. There were at least 3 separate Dreamcast prototypes. Sega was going to buy 3DO M2 for themselves and now what is basically a 32x for the Saturn has been confirmed. Was there any rumor about Saturn that hasn't turned out to be true.

@sdelfin the performance analyzer was reported back in the day. I remember reading about it in EGM and NextGen magazines. It's weird that you said sites because the Internet was new back then.

But Sony constantly improved their devkits for the PS1. The original prototype devkits in 1993 required Sony NEWS workstations. After Sony acquired Psygnosis, they changed their dev kits to ISA cards inserted into a PC, in 1997 they introduced the performance analyzer and allowed devs to write to the metal. Though this eventually backfired on Sony, as with the PS2 they thought devs wanted to write to the metal from the beginning, which made the PS2 insanely hard to develop for other than being a complicated machine

https://www.retroreversing.com/official-playStation-devkit

People bitch and moan about free stuff more then stuff they pay for sadly. I forgot what this phenomenon is, but it's completely true.

Nintendo basically pissed off all 3rd parties with their cart pricing and licensing policy during the 80s/90s. Once they lost their monopoly, they shouldn't have treated their 3rd parties that way.
Sony basically took all of the Super Famicom & PC Engine 3rd parties in Japan and all Genesis/Mega Drive 3rd parties in North America and Europe.
Nintendo was able to keep Western 3rd parties as part of their "Dream Team", I do wonder if Nintendo of America was willing to give them favorable terms unlike Nintendo of Japan.

@jygsaw Square was really into the SNES CD. Secret of Mana and Chrono Trigger wre in development for it. Nintendo has licensed 7th Guest (PC FMV game) for it. There were rumors that Dragon's Lair and Myst would have also been on it

@87th
Yeah, if was more like the PC-Engine CD-ROM/Turbo-CD than the Mega/Sega-CD. Just a CD drive and more RAM.

It is rumored though that the Phillips variant would have had the SuperFX and SA-1 built in to more compete with the Mega/Sega-CD.

@RupeeClock patents expire after 20 years. It's why you see so many clone consoles for the the 8 and 16 bit generations. As long as they don't use any PlayStation trademarks, he should be in the clear.

@Zenszulu PS1 and Saturn hadn't been released in the US when Phantasy Star 4 launched February 1995. But yeah JRPGs were a niche in the US at that time, especially on the Genesis. They were more popular on the SNES but still considered a niche, I believe the best selling JRPG on the SNES was Final Fantasy 3 (6) and it had only sold 300,000 copies.

@sdelfin I think GEMS is unfairly demonized. It was mostly due to lazy musicians/programmers for all the bad sound effects and music. It was a tool to make it easier for devs to the Genesis's sound system. Devs had the option of creating their own sounds in GEMs but many just used the default.

@snaphat it's probably using a cheap FPGA rather than an ASIC for the cart versions. That's why it's $80 for the cart versions. It's similar to the MSU-1 enhancement chip for the SNES that homebrew devs made that basically allowed the SNES to access up to 4GB of data.

@iidxgold they're also paying 7 full time employees. YouTube has been giving out less money per view now for awhile. That's why every YouTuber has pushing merch sales, sponsorships and Patreon.

Whoa. I didn't know European sales figures were that low. So the only place the Dreamcast was successful was North America? More than half of all Dreamcast sales (5 million) came from North America.

The Analogue Duo reads off disc, so it is certainly possible. With a Mister Disc reader it should be able to load all CD base systems.

@RetroGames But it did affect the consumer. Prices of SNES games on average were more expensive. It's one of the reasons the Genesis was competitive with the SNES even though Nintendo had a 90% monopoly of the video game industry in the United States from 1986 to 1990. NES games were on average $40. Genesis games were $50 and SNES games were $60. That $10 difference was huge in the early 90s, especially since back than parents bought games for their kids.
It's basically why Nintendo lost 3rd party support during the N64 era and was killed by the PS1. N64 games were $70 on average, while PS1 games were $50. Publishers also only had to pay Sony $5 per unit sold, while they had to pay Sega $8 and Nintendo was still charging $10. There were lower manufacturing costs since Sony allowed publishers to print their own discs, while publishers had to go to Nintendo to manufacture carts.
Higher costs always affect consumers. Which is why Nintendo is winning now. They learned that the high price of N64 and going just for graphics isn't worth it. Since the Wii, Nintendo has had the cheapest console.

@RetroGames

Like I explained to you earlier. Nintendo overcharged 3rd parties. That's why those 3rd party games were more expensive than Zelda. 1st party games, aka games published by Nintendo, were cheaper than games published by 3rd parties. Remember every 3rd party was charged a $10 licensing fee per cart . That's on top of the additional charge for manufacturing each cart, which had to be bought from Nintendo.
Also, like I explained to you earlier, costs were also dependent on the size. Zelda was 8Mb, which compared to the games on the ad was miniscule. For example Street Fighter 2 Turbo was 20Mb, more than twice the size of Zelda, which is why it was $70.
The enhancement chips greatly added cost to the games, just adding a battery back up would increase the cost by $2.50 per cart for the publisher, they would than up charge more onto consumers because retailers would take a percentage of each sale.
So yes enhancement chips cost more.

It seems you have a weird objective just to prove your point without looking at facts. Look I understand your a Nintendo fanboy and some of the other commentators are obviously Sega fanboys who are also using opinions as facts. But the fact is enhancement chips increase cost.

@RetroGames it was generally $5 to $10 more dependent on cart size. Here is an ad from Electronics Boutique. Both Zelda and Starfox were 8Mb games. Zelda also had a battery back up. Zelda is $50 and Starfox is $60. Even Mario Kart, which had a 4Mb cart but had a DSP expansion chip, costs more than Zelda at $55
https://huguesjohnson.com/scans/EBMay93/EBMay93-VG-06_2400.png

Publishers were very wary of the prices of carts and many games were cut down due to costs, even if it would have performed better. Here is an article about the development of Another World (Out of this World) port of SNES. It could have been 60fps with the Super FX but the publisher didn't want to incur the costs and the dev was forced to use the cheapest cart so the SNES version only ran at 20fps.
https://fabiensanglard.net/another_world_polygons_SNES/

@RetroGames SNES games with add-on chips did costs more than the average SNES game. The price of games was highly dependent on how large a game was, if it had battery back up, if it had an add-on chip, if it was a licensed game and if it was published by Nintendo. I remember buying Chrono Trigger for $80 back in 1995. It costs that much because it was a 32MB cart with battery back up.
Nintendo would undercut the prices of their own games compared to 3rd party games because Nintendo wasn't paying any licensing fees to themselves. Nintendo was charging higher fees than Sega and only Nintendo manufacture the carts. SNES games were usually $5 more than Genesis games because of that.
Here is a Toys R Us catalog from 1993 when Mortal Kombat launched. SNES was $70, Genesis was $60.
https://cdn.retrojunk.com/article-images/0zEX3imG6pCJz0q4g5iMG.jpg
https://cdn.retrojunk.com/article-images/Qg5F187TLMw85NibM8JDy.jpg

@RetroGames yeah the cart was much taller than a regular Genesis cart. Though there were many irregular Genesis carts since some publishers manufactured their own carts like EA.

Wrestling with Gaming has a great vid on this: https://youtu.be/x0qe1FNqtCo?si=9K1IFqz2D4Pj-4oq

Virtua Racing costs $99 at launch in the US. The average price of Genesis games was $60 at that time. Though it was highly dependent on the cart size and if it had battery backup. For example, Phantasy Star 4 was also $99 at launch.

Lite has the same amount of Logic Elements as Mars. So it should be able to do the Dreamcast.

Phat specs look insane. 588K Logic Elements!!!!!!