Consoles who thought...I think I can, I Think I can..

[_skitzo_]

As we near to Nintendo's press conference, let's take a look back on consoles who thought "I think I can"
In no particular order our list...


Sega Saturn

The Sega Saturn was a 32-bit console that was first released on November 22, 1994 in Japan, May 11, 1995 in North America.
The system would later die in 1998 in North America, would oddly due to some clever marketing with the use of Segata Sanshiro character. The Saturn had a longer life span in Japan, with the system finally passing in 2000.

The Saturn in North America struggled from the gate. A poor launch line up, Nintendo and Sony didn't help matters. Sony pulling very aggressive ad campaigns during this time, attacking both Sega and Nintendo.

To make matters worse many third party studios and developers complained it was too hard to work on the Saturn technology.
Sega's 27-member Away Team, comprising employees from hardware engineering, product development and marketing, worked for two years to design the Saturn's hardware. The Saturn was a powerful machine for the time, but its design with two CPUs and six other processors, made harnessing this power extremely difficult. Also, many of the ancillary chips in the system were "off the shelf" components, increasing the complexity of the system because the components were not specifically designed to work together. Rumors suggest that the original design called for a single central processor, but upon hearing of the Sony PlayStation's capabilities, a second processor was added late in development to increase potential performance.

Yu Suzuki - "One very fast central processor would be preferable. I don't think all programmers have the ability to program two CPUs — most can only get about one-and-a-half times the speed you can get from one SH-2. I think that only 1 in 100 programmers are good enough to get this kind of speed [nearly double] out of the Saturn."

These problems where plagued with lack of software libraries and development tools, requiring developers to write in assembly language.

If all of the above wasn't enough to seal its fate, Sega was busy dealing with a political battle between Sega Japan and Sega America. Such as former Sega of America presidents Bernie Stolar claiming that RPGs would not be popular with American gamers.

One of the main issues with adding a second core last minute was no modifications were made on the motherboard or ram. Case in point both processors shared the same bus and had problems accessing the main system RAM at the same time. The 4 KB of cache memory in each CPU was critical to maintaining overall performance.

PlayStation and Nintendo 64 used triangles as its basic geometric primitive, the Saturn rendered quadrilaterals. This proved to be more of a punishment for developers because most of the industry's standard design tools were based around triangles. One of the challenges due to quadrilateral-based rendering was problems with making some triangular objects.

"Saturnday"
1995, Sega president Tom Kalinske announced that the Saturn would launch in the U.S. on September 2, 1995.
The date changed during E3 where Kalinske announced that the "Saturnday" date was a ruse and that the system was being released nationwide by a few select retailers immediately May 11, 1995, giving the Saturn nearly a four month lead over the Sony PlayStation.
The rush launch only left the Saturn with handful of games available at launch, as most third party games were slated to be completed and rolled out around the original September 2 launch date, on top of that the selling price was $399, shortly after Sega's launch date and price announcement Sony's launch price was said to only $299.

September 9, 1995
Saturn had sold approximately 80,000 systems, PlayStation sold over 100,000 units upon release in the U.S., and Sega's dreams of early domination in the next gen console market started to fade away, very quickly.

By the end of 97', Sega publicly saying that it would develop a successor, later known as the Dreamcast, console sales and released games dropped off the sales map.

The 3DO

Dave Needle and RJ Mical of New Technology Group originally designed the 3DO.
Despite early buzz towards the system and even archiving Time magazine's "1994 Product of the Year", it couldn't help the walking dead.
Limited 3rd-party developer support, heavy price tag at $699 and an over-saturated console market prevented the system from achieving success.

Under the hood of the 3DO was ARM60 32-bit RISC CPU, two custom video coprocessors, a custom 16-bit DSP and a custom math co-processor. It also featured 2 megabytes of DRAM, 1 megabyte of VRAM, and a double speed CD-ROM drive for main CD+Gs or Photo CDs (and Video CDs with an add-on MPEG video module)

3DO did boast some of the best PC ports during the time something unheard of during its time, show casing pc titles such as Alone in the Dark, Myst and Star Control II.
3DO had the best version of Road Rash, and Samurai Showdown was ported to the system with all original graphics intact. The first home port of Super Street Fighter II Turbo was also available on the system, exceeding any other home port at the time.

Game series that were originally launched on the 3DO by Electronic Arts, Studio 3DO and Crystal Dynamics established themselves on other 32-bit consoles. One major cult hit for the 3DO, Return Fire, was ported to the PlayStation and Windows, but was met with limited success.

The 3DO featured no region lockout or copy protection, making it easy to use pirated software. Although there is no region lockout present in any 3DO machine, a few Japanese games cannot be played on non-Japanese 3DO consoles due to a special kanji font which North American consoles could not read.

The 3DO system was eventually discontinued at the end of 1996 with a complete shutdown of all internal hardware development and divestment of the M2 technology, this putting the nail in the coffin for the much anticipated M2 console 3DO started to push.
The next-generation console that was never released due to various business, and technological issues. M2 was to use dual PowerPC 602 processors, newer 3D and video rendering technologies. During late development, the company abandoned the console hardware business and sold the M2 technology to Matsushita.

"Studio 3D0"
3DO made some changes nearing it death. Studio 3DO appeared porting over many popular titles to Saturn and PlayStation.
But they couldn't out run death, Studio 3DO went belly up in 2003 and filed for bankruptcy and liquidated its assets.

The Atari Jaguar

Do The Math!, I did the math twice and this console still sucked hard.
Released in 1993 (selected U.S. cities in November 1993, selected U.S. cities in November 1993) the Jaguar, it had only one purpose. To surpass the Genesis and the Super Nintendo in processing power.
Jaguar marked the system as the first promoted as the first 64-bit game system.
Martin Brennan and John Mathieson, said that they could not only make a console superior to the Sega Genesis or the SNES, but they could also be cost-effective.
Jaguar was marketed under the slogan "Do the Math", claiming superiority over 16-bit and 32-bit systems. The system sold well, substantially outselling the highly hyped and publicized 3DO.
Sadly the game was plagued with poor games. Even after several poorly received launch titles not that many titles came out for the system worth playing. The Jaguar did have games that defined itself games like Doom and Wolfenstein 3D. The most successful title was Alien vs. Predator which, along with Tempest 2000.

Jaguar's fate was written on the wall with the launches of the Sony PlayStation and the Sega Saturn.
In a bonehead move, Sam Tramiel, CEO of Atari Corp. and son of Jack Tramiel, declared that the Jaguar was much more powerful than the Saturn and slightly weaker than the PlayStation. He also predicted the price of the PlayStation to be $500 and said that any price from $250 to $300 would be price dumping and that Atari Corp. would sue to block sales, which they never did.

Several add-on peripherals were announced. However, only the Atari Jaguar CD drive and the JagLink (a simple two-console networking device) reached retail shelves. A voice modem and VR headset (with infrared head-tracking), existed in prototype form, but were never completed.

Under the hood..

Processors

Tom" Chip, 26.59 MHz
Graphics processing unit (GPU) - 32-bit RISC architecture, 4 KB internal cache, provides wide array of graphic effects
Object Processor - 64-bit RISC architecture; programmable; can behave as a variety of graphic architectures
Blitter - 64-bit RISC architecture; high speed logic operations, z-buffering and Gouraud shading, with 64-bit internal registers.
Jerry" Chip, 26.59 MHz
Digital Signal Processor - 32-bit RISC architecture, 8 KB internal cache
Same RISC core as the GPU, but not limited to graphic production
CD-quality sound (16-bit stereo)
Number of sound channels limited by software
Two DACs (stereo) convert digital data to analog sound signals
Full stereo capabilities
Wavetable synthesis, FM synthesis, FM Sample synthesis, and AM synthesis
A clock control block, incorporating timers, and a UART
Joystick control
Motorola 68000 "used as a manager."[13]
General purpose 16/32-bit control processor, 13.295 MHz