hey guys~

[Skunkworks]

SegaLeaks is making some bold claims -

http://s3gal3aks.wordpress.com/2011/10/ ... ive-leaks/

Hope they can back it up.

[mazonemayu]

same shit every year, do they never learn?

[CruSega]

@CruSega. The Sega 32X design itself is actually very confusing, which is a shame because it could have been executed correctly if SEGA of America had the right idea. Mars itself would have been better as a stand alone hybrid, not some cheaply made,crappy tumor shaped cartridge attactment for Genesis.

32X was designed with System 32 chips, which in ran direct contrast with the Genesis. Since it was cartridge based, developers simply added Model 1 converter 3D chips for Model 1 arcade ports. One of the serious problems 32X suffered was that unlike SEGA CD it didn't have its own seperate processor which as a result caused many games to look no different from Genesis. Mars by itself could have held its own in power,design & charm.

SEGA CD/MEGA CD was System 24 based. But watered down. Mainly because the board itself was very costly during 1990 & SEGA had just come off an ill fated Laser Disc project witn Pioneer. It was only capable of 512 colors, S24 used 1,024 colors. Now here's what SOA could have and SHOULD have done. Sega of America had the patent design of SEGA CD so its not like they had to ask SEGA of Japan first. What Skunkworks should have done was basically take "Mars", take the SEGA CD, upgrade it rearrange its motherboard and completely tune it up with System 32 hardware. Upgrading the SEGA CD into SEGA CDX as its own more powerful hybrid design would have been smart.

Instead, we got a badly made,poorly executed, faulty freakish piece of trash low grade System 32 based hybrid that should have never been made.

At least the SegaCD was a legitimate attempt to improve upon the Genesis. 32X, on the other hand, looked like nothing more than a quick cash-grab that backfired and became a PR disaster that is still laughed upon to this day.

[Mephiles550]

Somewhere....
A high rep Sega employe is reading the stuff posted here....
And is laughing his/her ass off.

I look forward to seeing what this "Zach Morris" has to give.

"Pictures of the innards of their next generation arcade board and console, pictures of the silicon powering both, pictures of the casing and controller of the console from all angles, pictures of the PowerVR RTX, the final name of both platforms, the final concrete spec sheet, plus much much more."

[MrSega]

SEGA designed the Sega CD/Mega CD for the sole purpose of selling an expansion pac for the Mega Drive & to provide consumers with viable Mode 7 techology. SOA's poor judgement was that people wanted another add on when all they wanted, was for SEGA to start releasing decent software for SEGA CD instead of FMV shoveware.

[CruSega]

SEGA designed the Sega CD/Mega CD for the sole purpose of selling an expansion pac for the Mega Drive & to provide consumers with viable Mode 7 techology. SOA's poor judgement was that people wanted another add on when all they wanted, was for SEGA to start releasing decent software for SEGA CD instead of FMV shoveware.

Exactly. And it had some good games like silpheed, soul star, batman returns, sonic cd, final fight cd, bc racers. Thats what people wanted, not garbage like Sewer Shark or Night Trap; might as well rent a movie instead. I wanna remember Dana Plato for Diff'rent Strokes, not for starring in one of the most controversial and bad video games of all time.

Kalinske's poor gaming background (more like no gaming background) was really showing by this point and should have been canned.

[MrSega]

@ CruSega. Its a crying shame that Kalinske was sucked into the multimedia FMV early 1990s craze. He never treated the SEGA CD like he knew what its purpose was & seriously thought that FMV games were the wave of the future when they were a shortlived fad. FMV games on any system like 3DO & CDi were bad. The silver lining is, that FMV games on 3DO were terrible, abysmal & horrid on CDi, but were BETTER executed on the SEGA CD.

[CruSega]

@ CruSega. Its a crying shame that Kalinske was sucked into the multimedia FMV early 1990s craze. He never treated the SEGA CD like he knew what its purpose was & seriously thought that FMV games were the wave of the future when they were a shortlived fad. FMV games on any system like 3DO & CDi were bad. The silver lining is, that FMV games on 3DO were terrible, abysmal & horrid on CDi, but were BETTER executed on the SEGA CD.

I was browsing through an old 1996 edition of Ultimate Gamer magazine and there was a letter directed from a reader to Kalinske. In summary, the reader was a long time Sega supporter-Genesis, than SegaCD, than 32X and he moved on to the PSOne, tired of being screwed over so many times for his loyalty.

Kalinske was great at marketing, like the "blast processing" commercials but you can only polish turd add-ons to a limit and the backlash will come back. I hate FMV now, and I hated it in 1993 just as much. Lucky I never purchased the SegaCD, but play some of the better games via emulation.

Any product from Sega should never have to be uttered in the same breath as Phillips CDi, that is just plain sad. 3DO was a little better mainly due to Road Rash but it is also below Sega by a mile.

[CruSega]

More from Kalinske:

The rise and fall of Sega: from the eyes of Tom Kalinske
By Ben Kuchera | Published 5 years ago
Sega was a company that had it all. They were beating Nintendo at the hardware game, consumers thought their software offerings were more grown up, and the money was rolling in. Then they made some bad hardware decisions (32X, we're talking about you) and lost it all. They ultimately became software-only, and it's been a while since they've released a truly great game. What happened? Could it really be as simple as the ego of the Japanese leadership?

Tom Kalinske, ex-president of Sega, seems to think so. He spoke to Sega 16 about his history with the company, and drops some bombs about how close Sega came to some very good hardware.

So, the SGI guys went away and worked on these issues and then called us back up and asked that the same team be sent back over, because they had it all resolved. This time, Nakayama went with them. They reviewed the work, and there was sort of the same reaction: still not good enough.

Now, I'm not an engineer, and you kind of have to believe the people you have at the company, so we went back to our headquarters, and Nakayama said that it just wasn't good enough. We were to continue on our own way. Well, Jim Clark called me up and asked what was he supposed to do now? They had spent all that time and effort on what they thought was the perfect video game chipset, so what were they supposed to do with it? I told them that there were other companies that they should be calling, because we clearly weren't the ones for them. Needless to say, he did, and that chipset became part of the next generation of Nintendo products (N64).

Ouch. Later in the interview Kalinske goes on to talk about the deal he tried to strike with Sony to codevelop hardware. That deal fell through, as did Sony producing optical drives for Nintendo, so if Sony wanted to get into the gaming hardware business they would have to do so themselves. Imagine, if either Sega or Nintendo had managed to wrangle a deal with Sony, the PlayStation would never have existed. What would the gaming world look like today?

Kalinske has a lot to say about his time at Sega, and he comes off as being honest and fair in his assessments of the company. This is a great read for Sega fans, or people who are interested in how the industry came to be the way it is.

[stu]

.
From what I have read,Stu, then-CEO Peter Moore went to SOJ and told them that Sega could not afford to stay in the hardware business. This was said in the presence of all Sega's major inhouse development teams and they walked off in anger and disgrace to hear that Sega would become a 3rd party publisher.

It is not the fault of Moore because he was just working with the mess left behind by Bernie "Saturn is not Sega's Future" Stolar and Tom Kalinske who crippled the Saturn with its stealth May 1995 launch and wasting millions of company resources on losers like Nomad, Pico, 32X, CDX, Mars, SegaCD etc. Kalinske started suffering from brainfarts around 1993 and he never recovered his magic touch.

According to SegaBase, written by Sam Pettus, Peter Moore did indeed meet with the SOJ Management, however it seems that it was Isao Okawa who told Moore what a precarious situation Sega was in, they actually saw the US market as their last hope of the Dreamcast being a success. He may of also met with the SOJ staff later on, as things got even more desparate for Sega.


Source: http://www.eidolons-inn.net/tiki-index. ... st+p5&bl=y

Quote:

"After he assumed the helm of Sega of America, a self-assured Peter Moore made the long trip to Japan to see his new masters. His boss, Sega CEO Isao Okawa, wasted no time in letting him know just how precarious the stakes were. While the full scope of everything that was said between the two is not and will probably never be known (due to non-disclosure agreements), two important facts have come to light about what happened during that meeting. Moore left Japan with US$500 million in his pocket for Sega of America and a firm command from Okawa: Make the Dreamcast a success in North America ... or else. "Or else what?" the uniformed might ask. "Did this mean Okawa was going to can Moore if he couldn't pull off the Dreamcast gamble, given that the odds were as long as they were?" No, not at all; in fact, quite the contrary. Okawa had given Moore what amounted to Sega's last cash reserves. The Dreamcast had bombed in Japan and was, in Okawa's opinion, not doing well in every other worldwide market save one. Dreamcast had proven to be a bigger than expected success in the United States and was, by any reasonable estimate, poised to take the #2 spot on the market away from Nintendo by Christmas 2001. If there was any hope at all that Okawa could pull off the Dreamcast gamble, his best bet was North America - where the odds were the shortest and the market most favorable to his designs. If he succeeded, then Sega could stay in the console business for at least another year, clean out its hardware back inventories, and be in a better position to remake the company once the time came. If not ... well, at least Sega would beyond all doubt have its much-soiled reputation back in the one market that really mattered. Moore's job was not on the line and he knew that. It was the very existence of Sega itself that was at stake. The year 2000 would have to be "the year of the Dreamcast" insofar as the United States videogame market was concerned. Sega would not be able to survive if it wasn't. Armed with this knowledge and the last of Sega's cash reserves, a determined Peter Moore went back home, faced with the daunting task of single-handedly saving Sega before all was lost."