On 2 Feb., 23:11, nem  wrote:
>
> The Saturn's dual processors theoretically made it more powerful, but also
> made it difficult to program. It's 3D capabilities were weak because it was
> originally meant to be a 2D system, and Sega hastily tacked on 3D
> capabilities to compete with the PSX. The Saturn actually did quite well in
> Japan where it had a nice library of RPGs, but failed in the US because of
> Sega's inept marketing.

Ack. And when they finally stopped support for the Saturn they
angered their most loyal fans. The Dreamcast had to suffer from that.

> For one, they didn't believe that Americans would go for RPGs and
> thus refused to bring them over from Japan.

With Europe it has exactly been the same and that's why FF7 was so
important. It paved the way for many gamers to love RPGs (regardless
how different they can be). FF7 was also one

But with RPGs we also have a long development cycle (2-3 years
minimum for a larger game) and this meant that the first Playstation
RPGs had to be 2D (because the companies came from 2D platforms)
- which in turn wasn't really wanted by Sony (they wanted 3D games
to show-off the power of the Playstation and distinguish itself from
the Saturn). It took the leading developer - SquareSoft - to really
show what was possible with FF7 and Xenogears.

> Both the Saturn and N64 also had memory-expansion capabilities
> (though the former's never made it out of Japan), while the PSX was
> limited to 1MB of memory.

The PS1 (or PSX) has 2 MB of RAM, 1 MB of video RAM and 512 KB
of sound RAM to be exact. There's also a 32KB CD-ROM buffer.
The memory cards, which can't be used as a real memory expansion,
can access 1 MBit at the same time (several cards use bank
switching and compression techniques to offer a multiple of that).

The standard N64 offers 4 MB - including all memory needed for
video (frame buffer and textures) and sound. This is not so different
but the programmer can decide on his own how he wants to
divide it into main, video and sound RAM.
The RAM expansion increased this all-around RAM to 8 MB -
and most games using it offered only a higher video resolution.
A handful of games actually needed it to offer better or extended
gameplay like Donkey Kong 64 and Perfect Dark.

Wikipedia has some nice articles about these machines if you
want to know more (the problem of N64 memory latency, for
example).

> In the end, the N64's greater power was moot because it's cartridges
> maxxed out at 64MB and could not hold much graphics data.

A 64 MB cart is not so small - after all they compressed Resident Evil
2 into it. This game needs two CD-ROMs in the original PS1 version
and the N64 offers practically the same experience. It's regarded a
technical miracle of some sorts, though ;-)

To put that further into perspective: Ocarina of Time uses only half
of that and nobody ever accused that game of not making good use
of it. Of course, this meant no orchestrated soundtrack and no large
amounts of speech output (only text), but Nintendo refused to do
both even at the Gamecube for the most part.

But, as you already pointed out, these carts were expensive.
The real technical consequence, however, was that the games often
had low resolution textures which either lead to ugly, blurry visuals
or games that looked like cartoon strips (Mario 64 being a prime
example) with their Gouraud-shaded polygons.

> Finally, it might as well have been a 32-bit system because almost
> all it's games were written with 32-bit code for both performance
> and space reasons.

True and another blunder of Nintendo at the time. They actually
gave only a handful of parties full access to the hardware, i.e.
"the groups able to make good use of it" like themselves, Rare
and Factor 5. These really make the hardware shine, especially
Factor 5 with their use of custom microcode.

> In Japan at the time, Nintendo's image was golden, and after their
> past successes they seemingly could do no wrong. So on the N64's
> launch day, everybody rushed out to buy them, but ended up being
> really disappointed.

Imagine having bought a system with three games available for it
and the situation not changing for more than half year!
Nintendo marketed the N64 mostly as a hype system: First they
hyped it iself ("Ultra 64", "Project Reality" and
whatsnot), then the
games (which didn't came) and then peripherals like the strange
disk drive "64DD". Read videogame magazines of the time and
how they dream of endless possibilities...

> The Gamecube ended up getting the moniker "Barney's Purple
> Purse". It's silly minidisks were partially to prevent piracy (a thing
> Nintendo was long obsessed with) and to improve loading time
> (since the minidisks were smaller, they had a higher rotation speed).
> Nintendo really didn't help their cause by saying that the disks were
> "small enough to easily fit in a child's hand".

The disks are quite nice, actually, but as they are a variant of the
"Mini-DVD" they offer only around of 1.5 GB of storage - a third
compared to a normale single-layer DVD...

> Sony was like Nintendo in 1996. They had enjoyed so much past
> success that they though they were unstoppable. At least they could
> boast that they managed to keep Squaresoft in their camp,
> something Nintendo wasn't able to say back then.

Exactly.

> The PS2's success was partially due to backwards compatibility with
> the PSX. Meanwhile, the Wii is Nintendo's first console able to play
> it's predecessor's games (something their handhelds have long
> benefitted from).

See the retro trend with the downloadable classic games?
Which idiot really thinks that compatibility is a bad thing?
You only frustrate your most loyal fans!

> As long as there's Halo, there will be a market for the Xbox line.

Nicely put.

bye
Marcus
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