Nuon, a gaming chip that nearly changed the world, but didn’t (2015) | Hacker News Reader

Nuon, a gaming chip that nearly changed the world, but didn’t (2015)

arstechnica.com

40 pointspjmlp27 comments

The PS2 was basically the inverse of the plan for Nuon. The PS2 was a gaming device first and a DVD player second. Adding the DVD playback feature really got it into many of homes as the first DVD player for the household. If someone was just looking for a DVD player, why would they opt for the more expensive Nuon-enabled device than the cheaper DVD-only device? The only people that would have bought a Nuon-enabled DVD player would have been first adopters looking to actually buy a Nuon. Perhaps Nuon would have had more success selling a console that happened to play DVDs rather than a DVD player that happened to play games. Sony repeated the same strategy for the PS3 as a console that played Blu-rays and had immediate success with that too.

It's like trying to sell a commuter car with a souped up engine next to the cheaper commuter cars. Someone buying a commuter car just wants 4 wheels and an engine at a low cost. Sony sold affordable sports cars that just so happened to be capable of commuting.

> first DVD player for the household

True for me, I bet PS2s and PS3s are now the last DVD players in a lot of households too!

I bought a PS2 because I didn't have a DVD player and wanted a PS2 anyway, so it was a slam dunk. I never bought a dedicated DVD player because I always had a PS2 or PC that could play it. It was the same with PS3 and my Blu-Ray laptop as well.

I often blame the Dreamcast’s lack of DVD support as its ultimate reason SEGA failed in the hardware console with an otherwise unbelievably innovative piece of hardware and incredibly strong software.

Even a DC pro priced at $100 more or whatever might have done the trick to have SEGA in the door first.

> The Japanese manufacturers were not comfortable with firmware updates. "They didn't want the computer experience to be transferred to consumer electronics," Ram said. And that extended not just to updates but also to error handling—"If something goes wrong there's got to be a way to flash the firmware quickly and restore it to the last best-known state"—and startup times. Toshiba expected things to just work.

Love the spirit

Prior to the sixth-gen consoles, there were no firmware updates. What made it out the door was it. I don't know if the PS2 or Dreamcast ever received software updates but the original Xbox included updates with newer games. Seventh-gen received online updates constantly. Toshiba was clearly just looking at what had come previously and didn't want to buck the trend.

The PS2 actually did have a firmware update, to support title skip and chapter selection on newer DVDs, and bring the BIOS up to date of the PS2-Slim. Exactly one.

I had the Toshiba DVD player with Nuon. It also supported HDCD music. They were regular CDs that could be played in any CD player but in an HDCD device there and it supposedly sounded better. I never had any Nuon content but I did have a single HDCD disc and an extra light would show up when I played that.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Definition_Compatible_Dig...

"High-definition" audio for consumers is essentially a scam. The original 44.1khz/16bit redbook CD audio standard already exceeds the limits of human hearing.

https://web.archive.org/web/20190606054038/https://people.xi...

(For professional use, having more resolution/depth is useful, because you may be performing lossy operations, etc)

While the gist of your argument is technically correct you are missing one important factor, amplification wether through solid state transistor or analog tubes, causes distortion. With 44.1 kHz all sine waves above 22 kHz cannot be reproduced which makes for some pretty unpleasant distortion harmonics if those wave forms are being fed through the wire without a filter on the output signal.

This is a video of a complete playthrough of every game released for the Nuon, with commentary: https://youtu.be/lfqiwg-wQB8

There is a reason they did not sell.

I remember these people from my time in the game industry. They were very, very bright.

If only they could have gotten this to market a couple of years earlier! Sounds like the tech itself was ready. It would have had something like class-leading performance.

It sounds like the marketing was all wrong. They wanted to sell it as a premium feature for DVD players, but consumers shopping for a DVD player weren't interested in a pricey upsell to play a tiny number of games and whatever other features they bundled.

What they should have done was position it as a premium games machine that included a "free" DVD player. Sony had massive success with this approach for the PlayStation 2, which I would guess was the first DVD player that most of its purchasers had owned.

consumers shopping for a DVD player weren't interested in a pricey upsell to play a tiny number of games

Yeah, people found this out in 1993 via the Pioneer LaserActive [0].

Nuon's angle was a little different though. They were trying to triple dip with licensing - license to the companies who make DVD players, the devs who make videogames as well as to movie studios for the DVD interactive features. That way, maybe they solve the problem of having to sell their own hardware at a loss to make it up in game sales (as most console makers do). Nintendo had done something like this in the past, licensing out their hardware to Sharp, who made the Twin Famicom and a TV with an NES built-in and would do it around the same time with the Panasonic Q GameCube.

It looks like they did the work in terms of getting in good with the hardware side, but the software side left a lot to be desired. As close as they were working with Toshiba, they should've also been working with EA...

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaserActive

    What they should have done was position it as a 
    premium games machine that included a "free" DVD player.

I can't agree with this at all.

They would have been an utter nobody with zero history and zero name recognition going up against the absolute titans of the gaming industry with decades of experience, consumer brand recognition, and developer relations.

When you are fighting a superior foe, frontal assaults don't work.

Now, in Nuon's case... the non-frontal assault didn't work either. But it was probably their only shot and it might have worked if they could have made it to market sooner.

It did. It was called 3DO. They failed, too. They were too early and so were too expensive because of the CD.

The PS2 got the price and performance timing exactly right--and they are tied together.

The Crash Bandicoot writeup talks about how they had to work around the graphics (triangle limits) and hardware (cycling the CD a lot more than expected) limits of the device.

That meant that the PS2 had juuust enough horsepower to do interesting things but still be affordable. That was a difficult needle to thread back then.

I was at 3D0; I worked on the video streaming subsystem. so much potential, but the chips simply did not work, so the engineering became too complicated working around their bugs.

This sounds so frustrating and fascinating at the same time. Is there anywhere I can learn more about the kinds of problems you faced?

The issues with the 3D0 hardware were eclipsed by the back stabbing corporate culture of Electronic Arts. This was the height of the EA spouse era. It was bad.

Oh man. I'd love to know more. I'm sorry you had to toil at such a rotten place though.

It runs DOOM.

https://www.nuon-dome.com/doom.html

I think the Nuon did change the world, inasmuch as it influenced the PS2 to have a DVD player; I assume Katsuragi had to burn some serious social capital to push that through...

I had one of these! It came along with a fun little game called Merlin Racing, a sort of proto-Mario Kart

Super Mario Kart came out in 1992, predating Merlin Racing by 7-8 years...

From the Wikipedia article, it looks like a pretty interesting architecture.

For reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuon_(DVD_technology)

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