Kenji Tosaki Talks Saturn/Dreamcast Peripheral Design, Reveals “Virtua Visor” | Hacker News Reader

Kenji Tosaki Talks Saturn/Dreamcast Peripheral Design, Reveals “Virtua Visor”

segasaturnshiro.com

119 pointszdw23 comments

In recent years, the rise of the “gaming history” genre has exposed me to many Western-centric Sega post mortems that essentially blame the fall of Sega on conflicts between Sega of America (and SoE) and the Sega of Japan mother company - with the vast majority of the blame being placed on SoJ for being ridiculously overly secretive.

Very interesting to hear the other side of the argument in this article. Paraphrased: SoA was a marketing division that kept biting off more than it could chew and was negatively impacted by proximity to SV and the “move fast and break things” ethos.

The prototypes shown in the article demonstrate that SoJ clearly had no lack of creativity or desire to experiment with unique hardware concepts - but they were extremely cautious not to release anything half-baked. Meanwhile, SoA kept announcing (and sometimes even releasing) hardware that was inferior to similar concepts under development in Japan.

The SoA “Sega VR” vs the SoJ “Virtua Visor”, the SoA 32X vs the SoJ Saturn, etc.

SoJ still likely deserves much of the blame since they repeatedly refused to share information on internal prototypes to SoA, but the issue is clearly more nuanced than the “stodgy Japanese vs dynamic Americans” explanation I kept getting fed.

I have translated countless interviews and articles from Japanese sources over the past few years on Sega's history, and yes, the whole issue is full of ridiculously inaccurate information.

Here's a thread of some recent info I uncovered about the 32X, for example:

https://www.sega-16.com/forum/showthread.php?35945-Japan-exe...

I'm also not sure what you are talking about when you say Japan refused to share information on internal prototypes. Is there actual evidence of this refusal?

They might be referring to the Mega CD/Sega CD?

As an engineer, I love hearing that marketing is wrong and engineering is perfect. But how do you explain the Sega Saturn? A half-baked, expensive and overly complex system driven by Sega of Japan & hated by Sega of America.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_Saturn#Development

> In 1993, Sega and Japanese electronics company Hitachi formed a joint venture to develop a new CPU for the Saturn, which resulted in the creation of the "SuperH RISC Engine" (or SH-2) later that year ... According to Sega of America president Tom Kalinske, Sega of America "fought against the architecture of Saturn for quite some time".[18] Seeking an alternative graphics chip for the Saturn, Kalinske attempted to broker a deal with Silicon Graphics, but Sega of Japan rejected the proposal ... In particular, Dreisbach criticized the Saturn's use of quadrilaterals as its basic geometric primitive, in contrast to the triangles rendered by the PlayStation and the Nintendo 64.

Recorded history also shows that the broader industry was not happy with Sega of Japan's hardware decisions, that Sega of Japan loved pushing for super-cool & interesting engineering that was way too ahead of its time.

https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4128/the_rise_and_fal...

> According to Gordon, Sega had flip-flopped over whether to include a modem, but it also picked the wrong chipset. "I remember our CTO (chief technology officer) talking about the processor and going, 'Oh my God, I don't know anybody who has even heard of this chip. It's non-standard and there are no libraries for it.' It was kind of a slap in the face. But even then, at first blush, EA is thinking, 'It's Sega. We've got to support them.' You know, we went to war with them on Genesis and did great things. So the chipset alone was not enough to stop EA from working on it."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamcast#Hardware

> He further stated that "Sega's relationship with NEC, a Japanese company, probably made a difference [in Sega's decision to adopt the Japanese team's design] too."[33] Stolar, on the other hand, "felt the U.S. version, the 3Dfx version, should have been used. Japan wanted the Japanese version, and Japan won."[33] As a result, 3dfx filed a lawsuit against both Sega and NEC claiming breach of contract, which would eventually be settled out of court.[32] The choice to use the PowerVR architecture concerned Electronic Arts (EA), a longtime developer for Sega's consoles. EA had invested in 3dfx but was unfamiliar with the selected architecture, which was reportedly less powerful

As someone who does firmware for consumer electronics, I feel like having such ardent fans interview you years after the fact must be a great honor. Hopefully, someday I can be involved in something that's just as exciting to me and others.

As a side note on the Saturn analog stick section, there's actually an open source Gamecube controller project called PhobGCC,that's using a similar technique for the analog stick. I believe it uses hall-effect sensors to magnetically detect the stick position, with some fancy algorithmic filtering (Kalman filters, etc.)

I'm on the PhobGCC project (I wrote the snapback filter), it's pretty exciting where things are going.

Finally people are going to have controllers that will last.

Oh hey CarVac! Yeah, PhobGCC was sorely needed and I'm excited to see where it goes. :)

I'm already on the Frame1 train, but I may end up building one soon just to check it out.

I had built a homemade rectangle last year and switched fully, but the Phob has me back on the sticks, especially now that I got the opportunity to try it (I wrote the filter without having any controllers on hand).

(For the uninitiated)

PhobGCC is a project to create a teensy based gamecube controller with hall effect sensors, snapback filtering, and notch calibration

https://github.com/PhobGCC

We've moved to https://github.com/PhobGCC now.

Link updated, thanks.

> TOSAKI: There was only one problem with the development of the Virtua Gun… Virtua Cop was so good that SEGA was flooded with Virtua Gun orders.

They knew it was so good that they even went through the trouble of remodeling the in-game gun to exactly match the look of the controller. The arcade gun is the same mold as the Virtua Gun but looks more generic in the game :)

Compare the attract loops:

- Arcade: https://youtu.be/bE1I6riA-NU?t=70

- Saturn: https://youtu.be/rcfzFFpOtuY?t=90

It's likely my age, but articles like this are inspirational to me. Look at all that beautiful design. Sega really knew what they were doing. I'm sad they were pushed out by stuffy Microsoft and Sony.

If Sega had a true Steve Jobs like visionary they could have become the Apple of console gaming. Alas, their time has passed.

Yeah they were definitely out marketed. A Steve Jobs like marketing force but hopefully not the utilitarian design of Apples products. Barf!

To me the Dreamcast controller was by far the best-feeling controller of that generation. It's a terrible shame they didn't have the vision to embrace dual-analog and game-agnostic online voice chat.

It's really too bad that SEGA completely hemorrhaged talent after dropping their hardware business -- nothing they've made since then has come close to what they used to release.

On the contrary I think they're good again; they own Atlus and the Yakuza series which are very popular, and some smaller things like Project Diva. Although I think Atlus's games are kind of shallow and relying on teenage edginess lately, Persona 5 feels like they wanted to be about relevant societal issues but only researched them by watching TV dramas.

Sonic games are consistently bad, but they've always been like that, and the main appeal of the series is wondering why its fans are so weird. (ie just think of any word X and google "X the Hedgehog" and you'll get strange fetish art)

> Sonic games are consistently bad, but they've always been like that

I suppose that's my main point of reference so I'm a bit biased. Sonic games were generally considered to be good on SEGA hardware, and generally became awful afterward with very few exceptions. (Generations, Colors, and Mania were arguably the only good Sonic games in the past 20 years)

Sega was so far ahead on console tech while also completely unable to manage a business. They basically released the Wii in 1999 with their bass pro fishing controller for Dreamcast that could also play games like Virtua Tennis. They just decided not to tell anyone lol. Baffling but impressive. The Dreamcast was such a fun console.

Another fun Sega-ism is that the Genesis/Megadrive could play games online in 1994, although I think only in Japan.

including meganet only games like "phantasy star text adventure"!

It's fun to see the author describe himself as a"massive Saturn fan since Christmas ’96."

I turned 8 right around then, and my parents agreed to buy either a Sega Saturn or the N64. I don't think I cared which, but the first toy store we drove to had sold out of Saturns, so we got the N64 and Super Mario 64, and from that day on, I've been a Nintendo fan.

If they'd had Saturns in stock, maybe today I too would call myself a "massive Saturn fan."

I was also a Nintendo fan growing up, but we bought a Dreamcast on the cheap around the turn of the millennium when Sega was going through financial troubles and loved it. I also tracked down a Sega Saturn many years later.

One thing I will give Sega credit for is that it really feels like they "took care" of their user-base. And by that I mean that there was enough variation in their first-party titles that for pretty much any kind of gamer, Sega made a game for you. Action, platformer, RPG, fighting game, racing game, sports: there was at least one of everything. This is in contrast to Nintendo, whose N64 and Gamecube libraries often had huge gaps around certain genres. Nintendo's mindset felt more like, "We're going to make the games we want to make, and for anything else you can find a third party." But of course third-party support fell off a cliff during the N64 and GCN days, so if wanted something Nintendo didn't offer: good luck!

Just an observation in hindsight. I still hold both companies very fondly (well, at least before the Sega/Sammy merger), because both Sega and Nintendo seemed like the last companies that wanted to make games, rather than the all-in-one entertainment centers of the Sony and Microsoft consoles.

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