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For the Saturn? I think it was well known that documentation was bad. You see where he said about figuring out how to use the second SH2 processor. Not even Seg

For the Saturn? I think it was well known that documentation was bad. You see where he said about figuring out how to use the second SH2 processor. Not even Sega could figure out how use both of them efficiently(due to poor design) until the end of the system's life so I don't think there would have been useful documentation on that. The Saturn failed because consumers were burned by Sega's add-on in the past coupled with the fact that the system was expensive and lacked decent dev tools at launch making is difficult to program for.

mjevans 11y ago
I will readily agree to the /expensive/ part. I distinctly remember, as a kid, looking at that system on the highest shelf in the game store in the mall, and thinking that it cost a LOT of money. Checking with the internet, USD 399/449 (a game included), but that's in 1995 dollars. The CPI places that as being nearer to 625 USD today! http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=399&year1=1995&year2=2016 http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=399&year1=1995&...
- ido 11y ago
  A steal, compared to the 3do :)
- aab0 11y ago
  It puts complaints about VR headsets in a different light when you think about how much those consoles you loved as a kid cost after adjusting for 20+ years of inflation. When you compare how expensive a NES was in real terms at launch with how little you got in terms of possible experience, it drives home how much computing has advanced over the years and how high (spoiled?) peoples' expectations are now that they bitch about Oculus costing $700 or whatever.
  - snuxoll 11y ago
    Hell, look at people complaining about the Xbox One and PS4 costing $500 / $400 at launch respectively.
sokoloff 11y ago
The Sony PSX (original Playstation) English dev docs were also pretty bad, IMO/IME. I worked at a game company in 1995-1997 where we were porting our PC title to PSX and to Saturn. I was leading the PSX project which eventually shipped and was an "OK" title (but nowhere near the then state-of-the-art IMO). The Saturn project was eventually cancelled as the team couldn't get enough performance out of the Saturn and really struggled to get much pace of development. We were using a dev kit that I seem to recall was 3 ISA PCBs (though pictures on the internet now show only 2, so maybe my memory is faulty). There was also a "blue" physical playstation that would boot unencrypted disks, so if we were willing to go through a full CD burn cycle, you could test there, which is how we did QA and potential golden master testing, but most development was on the ISA cards. Compilation toolchain was gcc-based, and we did almost all of our debugging with printf. :) Most interesting to me technical tidbit: We did build our own pre-emptive interrupt system to ensure we could run the game physics engine at either 15 or 30 Hz (technically slightly less, as it was on the NTSC vertical blank). Sony support said it wasn't possible... ;) To the extent Sony won that round of console wars, I don't think it was on the quality of documentation, at least not the English translations.
- Narishma 11y ago
  I guess you'd feel that way if you came from a PC background. For console developers, Sony's SDK for the PS1 at the time was pretty good compared to the alternatives.
  - sokoloff 11y ago
    The technical information was decent. The English translation was rough at times. I can't recall the exact quote now, but my favorite was documentation around the interrupt handling area (IIRC). It went something like, "It must never be forgotten to fail to not enable the XYZ..." It was 3 or 4 negatives and utterly ambiguous as to what was meant. In cases like that, Sony support in the US was willing to run down the original Japanese text and re-interpret it for us, but those often took 3-10 days for the cycle to run its course, especially if there was no code demo to exercise that particular feature/subsystem.
  - 11y ago
Marazan 11y ago
The Saturn failed as Sega had made the best 2d system they could whilst Sony had made the best 3d system they could and it was $100 dollars cheaper. Sega fought the last was, Sony opened a new battleground.

mjevans 11y ago

I will readily agree to the /expensive/ part. I distinctly remember, as a kid, looking at that system on the highest shelf in the game store in the mall, and thinking that it cost a LOT of money. Checking with the internet, USD 399/449 (a game included), but that's in 1995 dollars. The CPI places that as being nearer to 625 USD today! http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=399&year1=1995&year2=2016 http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=399&year1=1995&...

ido 11y ago
A steal, compared to the 3do :)
aab0 11y ago
It puts complaints about VR headsets in a different light when you think about how much those consoles you loved as a kid cost after adjusting for 20+ years of inflation. When you compare how expensive a NES was in real terms at launch with how little you got in terms of possible experience, it drives home how much computing has advanced over the years and how high (spoiled?) peoples' expectations are now that they bitch about Oculus costing $700 or whatever.
- snuxoll 11y ago
  Hell, look at people complaining about the Xbox One and PS4 costing $500 / $400 at launch respectively.

sokoloff 11y ago

The Sony PSX (original Playstation) English dev docs were also pretty bad, IMO/IME. I worked at a game company in 1995-1997 where we were porting our PC title to PSX and to Saturn. I was leading the PSX project which eventually shipped and was an "OK" title (but nowhere near the then state-of-the-art IMO). The Saturn project was eventually cancelled as the team couldn't get enough performance out of the Saturn and really struggled to get much pace of development. We were using a dev kit that I seem to recall was 3 ISA PCBs (though pictures on the internet now show only 2, so maybe my memory is faulty). There was also a "blue" physical playstation that would boot unencrypted disks, so if we were willing to go through a full CD burn cycle, you could test there, which is how we did QA and potential golden master testing, but most development was on the ISA cards. Compilation toolchain was gcc-based, and we did almost all of our debugging with printf. :) Most interesting to me technical tidbit: We did build our own pre-emptive interrupt system to ensure we could run the game physics engine at either 15 or 30 Hz (technically slightly less, as it was on the NTSC vertical blank). Sony support said it wasn't possible... ;) To the extent Sony won that round of console wars, I don't think it was on the quality of documentation, at least not the English translations.

Narishma 11y ago
I guess you'd feel that way if you came from a PC background. For console developers, Sony's SDK for the PS1 at the time was pretty good compared to the alternatives.
- sokoloff 11y ago
  The technical information was decent. The English translation was rough at times. I can't recall the exact quote now, but my favorite was documentation around the interrupt handling area (IIRC). It went something like, "It must never be forgotten to fail to not enable the XYZ..." It was 3 or 4 negatives and utterly ambiguous as to what was meant. In cases like that, Sony support in the US was willing to run down the original Japanese text and re-interpret it for us, but those often took 3-10 days for the cycle to run its course, especially if there was no code demo to exercise that particular feature/subsystem.
- 11y ago

Marazan 11y ago

The Saturn failed as Sega had made the best 2d system they could whilst Sony had made the best 3d system they could and it was $100 dollars cheaper. Sega fought the last was, Sony opened a new battleground.