Comment by trzy
9 days ago
Cool articles :) I got into emulation in the late 90s and eventually wrote both an NES and Genesis emulator. I always appreciated how cleanly organized Sega’s systems were, at least superficially considering the memory and register layouts.
You should take a look at Sega’s arcade systems, which were very cool, especially the Model 1, 2, and 3. Supermodel, an open source Model 3 emulator I co-wrote, and MAME have good emulation of Model 3 and 2, respectively, these days. Absolutely fascinating rendering architecture. It was early modern 3D when things were still weird and custom, before the industry standardized on OpenGL and Direct3D.
Thank you for you work!
It's easy to forget today, but the Sega home consoles were always secondary to their arcade business. The main reason the Saturn sold even as well as it did was because it was the only way to play versions of the heavy hitters: Virtua Fighter, Virtua Racing, Daytona USA and Sega Rally in the home, in any fashion approaching the arcade (though still quite cut down). Those Sega 3D arcade games were absolutely mind blowing back in the early-mid 90s, and the pace of technical progress and new ideas was unlike anything since.
And the Dreamcast was conceived from day one to make it easy to port games from the Sega Naomi arcade system, and those arcade ports are probably the main reason people still play the Dreamcast to this day.
Yup. Although sometime in the mid-90's, the home console business became more lucrative and Sega really missed the wave. Games at home were their own distinct art form: longer, more complex, far more replay value. Arcade games rarely have more than 15-20 minutes of content and this was true of Model 3 and Naomi games. Sega's arcade focus became a major liability by the time Dreamcast rolled around.
Well, as someone who still regularly plays arcade games I first played decades ago, but gets bored with most modern home games halfway through the tutorial, I'm sad that the incentive and design skill to create those 15 minute intense gameplay experiences has largely been lost.
(Not claiming it would make business sense to try to cater to weirdos like me, or denying that it made sense for Sega to get out of the hardware game or whatever. But probably 95% of their output post-Dreamcast I find completely uninteresting. :)
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Dreamcast has a very active homebrew community nowadays, ever moreso after KallistiOS (https://github.com/KallistiOS/KallistiOS) became quite usable.
In what concerns game consoles, since we are on a thread about Sega, industry never standardized on OpenGL and Direct3D in regards to game consoles.
Playstation never had OpenGL other than OpenGL ES 1.1 + Cg, in parallel to their own, but that was hardly adopted and was dropped.
Nintendo has had flavours of OpenGL like, but not quite the same, and while Switch supports Vulkan and OpenGL, the main API is NVN.