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Comment by ericrallen | Hacker News Reader

I may be a biased Genesis Kid, but SEGA was always ahead of its time.

Sega was also the first console manufacturer to use Blast Processing.

Sega was also the pioneer of online gaming, in a sense. SEGA channel was a service provided by your cable company. You got an adapter that went into your SEGA and had a coax that went to your tv box. Every month you get access to 20-40 games, all of which were a range of titles everyone could enjoy. There was no multiplayer, except locally. You could even plug in games you owned without removing the adapter. Also had the bonus of the ability to play the sonic version with the red sonic, by plugging in one of your sonic versions, when the adapter had the red sonic game expander available in its game list.

To me it still holds as one of the coolest technologies (aside from a computer of course) from my childhood. Managed through tv channel sideband data.

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASICODE#The_first_standard

https://newslttrs.com/in-the-1980s-we-also-downloaded-softwa...

PC Engine was also ahead of its time, actual 8-bit games on CD-ROM!

Given its age and considering early games on the system, it's amazing how good the street fighter II’ port is.

NEC made some good looking console hardware for the Japanese market too.

...much to their detriment, sadly.

R.I.P. Dreamcast, R.I.P. 32x, R.I.P. Mega CD, R.I.P. Saturn...

Not sure how any of these except maybe the Dreamcast (and then not by that much - it was almost literally a contemporary arcade board clone) were examples of “ahead of its time”.

https://dcemulation.org/?title=Bleemcast%21

I bought a DC on launch week, it's one of my favourite consoles of all time. I still own one. But what has bleemcast got to do with what the parent said?

To demonstrate how powerful and far ahead it was.

The Dreamcast charm is partly how simple it is, a jellybean CPU. The PowerVR is competent but it’s not outside the norm for 3D accelerators of the period (and there was a mass produced PCI card available of it). Nothing about the Dreamcast is exotic. Though the pack in modem and VMU are neat (did say “maybe” for the DC). GD-ROM vs DVD was obviously a dumb move. Perhaps Sega didn’t have the war chest to loss leader a DVD Dreamcast (they didn’t have the vision either at that point).

A technical demo like Bleemcast doesn’t demonstrate how far ahead something is, it has to be seen relative to the hardware of a similar generation. Having said that the PS2 which had some early programming hiccups would go on to eat DC’s lunch.

...and PS2 eating the DC's lunch has more to do with Sega and their terrible decisions made in prior generations that burnt retailers and consumers alike than anything else. The things the PS2 had going for it at launch was a cheap DVD player(yes Sega didn't have the money for this. They were very close to bankruptcy at the time) and Sony's hype.

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