Hideki Sato, designer of all Sega's consoles, has died

https://www.videogameschronicle.com/news/hideki-sato-designer-of-segas-consoles-dies-age-75/

by magoghm • 5 months ago

441 48 5 months ago

videogameschronicle.com

monitron• 5 months ago

If you want to appreciate his work today, consider reading these lovely articles about the systems he helped design:

https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/master-system/

https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/mega-drive-genesis...

https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/sega-saturn/

https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/dreamcast/

trzy3• 5 months ago

Cool articles :) I got into emulation in the late 90s and eventually wrote both an NES and Genesis emulator. I always appreciated how cleanly organized Sega’s systems were, at least superficially considering the memory and register layouts.

You should take a look at Sega’s arcade systems, which were very cool, especially the Model 1, 2, and 3. Supermodel, an open source Model 3 emulator I co-wrote, and MAME have good emulation of Model 3 and 2, respectively, these days. Absolutely fascinating rendering architecture. It was early modern 3D when things were still weird and custom, before the industry standardized on OpenGL and Direct3D.

kilpikaarna2• 5 months ago

Thank you for you work!

It's easy to forget today, but the Sega home consoles were always secondary to their arcade business. The main reason the Saturn sold even as well as it did was because it was the only way to play versions of the heavy hitters: Virtua Fighter, Virtua Racing, Daytona USA and Sega Rally in the home, in any fashion approaching the arcade (though still quite cut down). Those Sega 3D arcade games were absolutely mind blowing back in the early-mid 90s, and the pace of technical progress and new ideas was unlike anything since.

And the Dreamcast was conceived from day one to make it easy to port games from the Sega Naomi arcade system, and those arcade ports are probably the main reason people still play the Dreamcast to this day.

pjmlp3• 5 months ago

In what concerns game consoles, since we are on a thread about Sega, industry never standardized on OpenGL and Direct3D in regards to game consoles.

Playstation never had OpenGL other than OpenGL ES 1.1 + Cg, in parallel to their own, but that was hardly adopted and was dropped.

Nintendo has had flavours of OpenGL like, but not quite the same, and while Switch supports Vulkan and OpenGL, the main API is NVN.

alexjplant2• 5 months ago

The Saturn is my favorite Sega system. I remember seeing it on the GameFAQs header in the late 90s when looking up strategy guides for Game Boy games and thinking "wow, that's a cool name for a system!" It wasn't until a few years ago that I finally got one. The next time I'm convalescent or snowed in I plan on finishing Powerslave and Panzer Dragoon Saga - I've only made it about halfway through both and they're fantastic.

RIP.

Grazester2• 5 months ago

The Saturn is also my favorite. Is it bad that I think depends a dragoon saga kind of overeated? Zwei is my favorite. The music in one was awesome I thought though

throwanem• 5 months ago

Worthy of the HN black bar, I feel.

ranger_danger2• 5 months ago

black bar?

krapp• 5 months ago

I think that depends on whether dang was a Nintendo kid or a Sega kid.

crims0n• 5 months ago

What a legend. The Dreamcast in particular was a work of art too ahead of its time to be fully appreciated. It was the first console with support for broadband, way back in 2000. For context, AOL dialup peaked around this time. Spec-wise, it traded blows with the PS2 (better GPU, slower CPU) despite releasing around 18 months earlier.

The VMUs that plugged into the controllers were another highlight capturing the zeitgeist at the time, where everyone was into Tamagotchis and other little LCD toys. Everything about that console was a joy, shame it didn't do better in the market.

philistine• 5 months ago

Hideki Sato made a fatal mistake that killed the Dreamcast. The use of an obfuscated and strange disc format should have protected the system from piracy, but they did not think it through. The discs were barely larger than CDs (700 MiB to 1000 GiB) which made it perfunctory to excise videos and music to fit the game on a traditional CD. Once that was possible, the only problem was to boot the system from a pirated CD, which was shockingly easy.

While a Playstation needed a special chip to run pirated discs, a vanilla Dreamcast could play any pirated CD you could throw at it. It was Game Over for Dreamcast 18 months after it was released, pirated discs had destroyed the market, and Hideki Sato was responsible.

Source: https://fabiensanglard.net/dreamcast_hacking/

alexjplant2• 5 months ago

There were numerous reasons the Dreamcast failed in the market and piracy is pretty far down on the list of those. The loss of major sports franchises and dearth of must-have games relative to competitors, Sony's hypewave marketing ("the PS2 is a supercomputer in your living room"), consumers and developers wary of a repeat of the CD/32X/Saturn debacle, trans-Pacific dysfunction between Sega's Japan and US branches... I could go on, but pirated discs wasn't it. If anything the lack of DVD playback was a bigger factor.

Hideki Sato was responsible.

I fail to see why you want to make one guy culpable for a hardware security hole (on a system without pervasive OTA updates, no less) or why you think it necessary to do so in a thread about his death. Did you lose your job because of the failure of the Dreamcast or something?

glimshe• 5 months ago

I don't buy it. NES and Atari 2600 piracy were widespread yet they were successful. Same for Nintendo DS and even the PlayStation in some markets.

mjevans• 5 months ago

IMO there was one other fatal mistake. Dialup internet was also at and passing it's peek. This was the moment when anyone serious about connecting to anything wanted at least DSL if not one of those fast new 'Cable modem' connections.

Today people would think someone is an alien for releasing a console or handheld that didn't support wireless (ethernet) connectivity in at least some way. In that era, it's shocking that a communications module wasn't at least an optional swap in to allow for a selection between a standard modem or a standard (hopefully easy to source) ethernet card. Heck if there were an 'OS module' that games had to call down to it might even obfuscate the difference between dialup, lan, and later wifi modules.

pjmlp3• 5 months ago

On the other hand, that is one of the reasons why Dreamcast has such an active homebrew community nowadays.

dismalaf2• 5 months ago

Ugh sometimes I wish for an alternative universe in which Dreamcast had won over the other consoles of the day.

It was just awkwardly released, too soon after PS1 and N64. On one hand it was massively impressive for the time, on the other, most people's desire to buy another console was probably at a low and then PS2 and Xbox stole the show.

It probably also didn't help that Sega Genesis was a fiasco with all the weird add-ons.

drzaiusx11• 5 months ago

Personally, I love the "fiasco" of secondary add-ons to consoles across the generations, from the Cassette drive from Atarti 2600 to Sega CD and 32X.

alt2272• 5 months ago

It was just awkwardly released, too soon after PS1 and N64.
then PS2 and Xbox stole the show

So in your opinion, when was a better time to release th Dreamcast?

Paianni2• 5 months ago

Their hardware business was doomed by 1998, FF7 and Gran Turismo had given PlayStation momentum that neither Sega or Nintendo could hope to match, but Sega was in a particularly tough spot because of years of misguided decisions.

They could have extended the Saturn's lifespan to 2000 and thrown their lot in with the PS2 after release, but it seems many people at SoJ were emotionally attached to the idea of selling consoles.

dismalaf2• 5 months ago

Either same time or before the N64 or closer to when the PS2 and Xbox were released. Sega missed an entire generation but then released between generations. Also they released right as N64 and PS1 games were arguably at their peaks.

chocochunks2• 5 months ago

I keep wondering if it would have been better for Sega to launch it at the same time but in the west first instead of Japan. The Saturn was DEAD by 1998 outside Japan. That extra year might have actually meant something.

jolmg2• 5 months ago

Ugh sometimes I wish for an alternative universe in which Dreamcast had won over the other consoles of the day.

And maybe that could've led to the standardized use of hall-effect joysticks from chasing the success of the Dreamcast. One can wish.

mortsnort• 5 months ago

Piracy took a huge toll on Dreamcast. It came out during the rise of P2P file sharing and you could just burn CD's of the games to play without needing to mod the console in any way.

grouchomarx• 5 months ago

Wonder if they can get any more ads on that webpage

ekipan• 5 months ago

I think everyone agrees with the sentiment but practically speaking that ship sailed decades ago. Browsing the web without uBlock or similar is ill-advised.

Morbidly curious, I turned off my blockers and it's not as bad as I expected honestly. I can still read the article copy.

guld• 5 months ago

RIP. I loved PSO on the Dreamcast, sank alot of hours into that game back then... Anyone here remembers that? And the Tamagotchi-esque memory cards (VMU) were cool.

gryson• 5 months ago

Correction: Hideki Sato didn't directly design all Sega's consoles, but rather oversaw their development as head of the R&D department. He was only directly involved in designing the earlier consoles.

The Saturn hardware, for example, was designed by Kazuhiko Hamada and a team of about a dozen engineers who had previously made the System 32 arcade hardware.

In addition to his work leading Sega's R&D efforts, Sato should also be remembered as one of the primary reasons why Sega began investing more into arcade video game development in the 1970s.

jsmo• 5 months ago

RIP Sato san

Hideki Sato, designer of all Sega's consoles, has died

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