stu wrote:
I think it would of certainly changed the gaming landscape had Sega and LMC been able to shrink the R3D tech down enough for it to be included in a game console, it would seem that it was mainly the delays with the Model 3 and LMC's reluctance to get involved in the mainstream consumer market that killed the possibility off.
I agree.
I think it would transformed & changed the gaming landscape had Sega selected LMC R3D tech to be the GPU of at least one console. Sega should have never launched the 32X. They would have been better served to upgrade the SegaCD with a better color and sprite handling capabilities. Sega would then do better by making Sega CD the *only* upgrade to the Genesis, and not try to bring that console into the 32-bit realm. Then, with Saturn, Sega would wait until 1996 to launch it, centered around a PPC603 CPU and LMC R3D/100 GPU.
It would've streamlined the development process and allowed Saturn to run upgraded Model 2 ports and downscaled Model 3 games. Now before people jump down my throat and tell me that Model 2 was too expensive to be put in a console, I would agree, but tell them at the same time R3D/100 was not Model 2 (or Model 3).
Glad you enjoyed the M2 scans btw, yeah I noticed that the 3DO company kept the rights to future generations of the technology, it would seem to me that they wanted to transform the company from trying to create a standard system to just providing the hardware for game console, a contract gaming hardware design company if you like.
Really did enjoy them, thanks again. I don't know much about 3DO but it seems to me that's exactly what they were trying to do.
However 3DO had already lost a lot of money and sold off the hardware systems side of the company to Samsung, I think Samsung had plans to make a PC card version of the MX chipset, but got cold feet and then decided to sell off the company.
I didn't know Samsung had a PC card based on the MX chipset. I do remember that Cirrus Logic had a card based on M2. It went unreleased.
I checked out those Q&As from NG btw, the answers they provided were actually pretty accurate as far as the development system and the hardware performance from the Katana/Dreamcast system. I've been scanning over a few of the other archived versions of NG too now, thanks for the links.
Next Generation was always at least fairly accurate, much better than other publications. I wish we all had access to scans of the entire archive of NG. It's a shame what happened with Retromags.com, they had a huge archive of magazine scans but the uploads got axed for whatever reason, I haven't looked into why.