Technically impressive PSX games and Hello

Sure high profile games required it, but how many people bought them? I'd have said that the wiimote plus was a successful upgrade, because loads of games used them and I bought one for every controller. But most wii's only ever played wii sports and wii fit and have sat in a cupboard for the last 7 years..

I think the new 3ds will be interesting as it's like the DSi all over again, but maybe they'll get it right this time.

 

MK2 was on everything except the N64. That includes the 32x too. Although the 32bit ports are all pretty early on the systems lifetimes.

There might have been much more to that. The SH2 manual itself speaks of its master-slave hookup, so it probably wasn't Sega themselves who decided on using it like that, they were just available that way so why not do it since they needed whatever extra power they could get. Unless they got in bed with Hitachi and asked them for the SH2 to have that feature, which isn't that far fetched since they were supposedly very tight with each other (and like 2/3 of the Saturn was made by them).
The original Saturn specs spoke of a single NEC V60, so they most likely changed that to dual SH2 config, not just bolted in another SH2. There was also 1mb of low ram that seems very tacked-on, especially since there is a whole entire MCU doing the accessing. And who knows how the SCU DSP ended up in there - it seems like some last-ditch attempt at doing what the GTE does, but failing miserably.

There are just so many things wrong on the Saturn design no matter which way you look. I think it's only strong point was the VDP2 which could do some absolutely sick effects that no other machine could do at the time (they could do most of them... but not all of them and not so much of them all at the same time, with zero tax on the rest of the system). Playstation in comparison was extremely good in every single thing, just not the best at anything. Very well rounded console, with only a few stupid faults most likely made to raise profits: shitty cd drive (planned obsolescence?) and the utterly wasteful memory card "block" system (buy another card!).

 

Well I guess you have to think about it this way. Those high profile games that people really into gaming bought, requiring a RAM expansion isn't going to stop them. I think when you look at games that would have needed ones on the PS like Capcom and SNK arcade ports then you would probably find people interested in those games are the same type that would not be bothered or discouraged by requiring a RAM expansion. You wouldn't need to make it something that everyone needs, that every game requires or uses at all. Some games perhaps could have benefited with reduced load times when it was available but not actually require it.

 

The cd drive issues are varied but Sony underestimated the usage patterns that game developers would want to use and the amount of hours games players would rack up. This was covered here http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/02/06/making-crash-bandicoot-part-5/

"Andy had given Kelly a rough idea of how we were getting so much detail through the system: spooling. Kelly asked Andy if he understood correctly that any move forward or backward in a level entailed loading in new data, a CD “hit.” Andy proudly stated that indeed it did. Kelly asked how many of these CD hits Andy thought a gamer that finished Crash would have. Andy did some thinking and off the top of his head said “Roughly 120,000.” Kelly became very silent for a moment and then quietly mumbled “the PlayStation CD drive is ‘rated’ for 70,000.”

My guess is they expected the game to boot and then use cd audio. The CD "hit" being some form of seeking.

Storage is often allocated in blocks (usually called clusters), they could have used the sector size of 128 bytes but then they would have needed to allocate more storage for keeping track of them. There are always compromises, the problem they had was that once it was out they couldn't change it.

IMO an expansion is only a success if it is so common that even the low profile games use it because people expect all games to take advantage of it in some way and avoid those that don't.
32x/mega cd etc isn't really an expansion as it's effectively a new console.

Using ram expansion to reduce loading times on something like a free roaming game in that generation isn't really practical.

 

I'd agree that it's certainly a success if even low profile games use it. But I still think it would be reasonable for certain types of games that have an audience that probably wouldn't be put off by needing an add-on. Obviously the most potential for a real RAM expansion is going to be for these arcade ports to hold more graphics data that can hopefully be DMAed to main memory fast enough.

 

It just reminds me of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imagine_Software#Megagames and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bandersnatch_(video_game)
If successful games are released afterwards without needing the ram expansion, then it probably was never that important.

If you like retro games from the uk then this documentary is a must watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yt9BsZCifgU

 

I think it would work for that - even with the narrow bus and the wait states the expansion port is far faster than the CD-ROM drive.

I would estimate that it would be about an order of magnitude slower than the main RAM - but there are lots of applications where that is more than fast enough.

 

I agree with this post.

 

I guess the thing to remember about memory expansions that did proliferate, such as the N64 and Saturn ones, is that they were provided as a bundled option with the biggest titles. This allowed the consumer to more easily acquire the card for the game they wanted to play. To an extent that ensured moderate success of the peripheral.

The Saturn had way too many different memory carts available. I wonder how this was received in Japan. Did it cause confusion, I wonder?