Is this normal?

[Vertigo]

Asian Megadrive: What are those coloured wires for?

Also, what is the EXT port for on the Asian Megadrive? They seem to have added the RF capability as an afterthought.

Mega-CD model 2: What is this brown little board with two chips for?

Are both of these things perfectly normal extra additions/fixes to board designs?

Thanks.

[NFG]

Until the second model Saturn and later the Dreamcast Sega wasn't really known for making quality hardware.  In fact, they sucked at it.  What you see are fixes for design flaws, or last minute changes that were made when it was deemed too costly or time consuming to remake the PCB.

[Aidan]

Sounds a bit like Sony and Cisco there then...

Last minute mods on PCB aren't unheard of, especially if it's only minimal changes.

[NFG]

With the thick wires the PCB was clearly designed for them, though almost certainly at the last minute.  Putting those in is rather labour intensive, I'd imagine they had time enough to change the design a little, but not start from scratch, which would require re-doing all the traces.

The Teradrive was bad too, with a large bundle of wires that ran across the PCB.

[Paper]

Until the second model Saturn and later the Dreamcast Sega wasn't really known for making quality hardware.  In fact, they sucked at it.

Could you give some examples of companies the exact opposite?
This interests me.

[kendrick]

Opposite in what way? A company that's always produced quality hardware and never had to learn how? Or a company that once had high quality and allowed themselves to get complacent and careless?

I vote to nominate Sony as a winner in the latter category. Used to be that their drive mechanisms and picture tubes set the gold standard, back in the late 80's. You could rely on a Sony CD-ROM or monitor to give you flawless functionality, provided you didn't toss the equipment around. Once they started having great success with the first Playstation, Sony started to rest on their laurels and outsourced a lot of their hardware manufacturing to cut costs. Now when I see a Sony brand on a case, I expect to find inside lots of sloppy components from at least five different factories slapped together.

JVC is a consistent player, if not largely represented in the video game world. Out of all the game consoles I've ever been asked to fix or make better, the JVC X'eye is the one that required the least effort. That might be because the thing is so rare, more than because of any inherent high quality.

Back to Lawrence's original observation? I really wish Sega had found a way to stay in the hardware business and remain profitable as well. The best of both worlds would have been a business agreement where Sega designed and manufactured a piece of gear with someone else's brand on it. Say what you want about them, when deciding to add features or functions Sega always asked themselves what a gamer would most like to see. If only they had asked themselves what parents and children were most likely to pay for, they might not have had so many missteps.

-KKC, digging on newly purchased, cheap Dreamcast games. Woo!

[Paper]

A company that's always produced quality hardware and never had to learn how?

Learning always occurs. Whether behind the screen or not.

I meant companies that produce quality; well designed hardware. Companies that do not "suck" at it.

Your answer being comprehensive as it is answered me though. Thanks!

Maybe you know of some companies the products of which the (internal) design is impeccable (another direction of my first question). I do not even mean high quality in this case, simply grand design using what they have whether cheap components or not.

[atom]

The gamecube is a well thought out piece of hardware designed for all components to be well taken advantage of. Nothing is out of balance with the rest of the hardware, and is certainly not an overcomplicated hardware. It has a decent CPU provided by IBM and a great GPU provided by ATI (who always makes excellent hardware, that is often bundled with poor software\drivers), and a simple chipset to tie it all together.

The XBOX is a somewhat unbalanced machine. It has a fast x86 CPU, which helps a lot in games, but it has a weaker GPU. With a slightly stronger GPU the Xbox could crush the Gamecubes graphics capabilities. The xbox's system software is more like an actual OS for a computer. In fact like the Dreamcast it runs off a modified Windows NT Kernel. This is often easier for developers to use higher level programming languages, but does hurt performance a little bit. It however is a great step in gaming and easier development is always better.

The PS2 is a very cost orientated design. It is quite lowtech even with its early release. While I wouldn't call it a poor design, it is an underpowered one. I will also point out, then unlike the xbox the PS2 uses a high quality DVD Drive and a good codec as well.


Impeccable hardware? Well I can't think of any gaming machine released that hasn't had some sort of deficiency. The SNES comes close, but had a somewhat weak CPU for the time. Its PPU or GPU certainly overcame its competition. Although none of us have really sank our teeth into the XBOX 360, I predict it will be a remarkable piece of hardware. It actually has what seems like a remarkable CPU from IBM, a GPU with embedded super fast ram, a decent amount of system memory and finally... stock wireless controllers. Heck this baby even has WI-FI and is 16:9 ready.

Nintendo, the innovation masters, are as usual are innovating all the wrong things. Looks like Nintendo is moving backwards yet again, and I predict this will be their last console.

It would almost appear that Sony this time around is using the same or a similiar CPU as Microsoft. They aren't cheaping out this time. They have a custom GPU from NVidia (which is supposed to be weaker then the 360's, but a powerhouse nonetheless). It also has WIFI and Wireless controllers.

[kendrick]

I just wanted to add to Atom's otherwise great information... The Dreamcast had a number of operating system and SDK options, all of which were the choice of the developer making the game. Windows CE, one of these options, is a stripped down Win32 core that allows you to add or remove libraries as needed, and so is not as closely related to the Windows NT core as Windows XP and the Xbox OS. The vast majority of Dreamcast games used Sega's own proprietary OS, which had direct hardware access to the Hitachi processors and the graphics core. The homebrew scene also had several OS options, the most widespread of which was the KallistiOS virtual machine.

We're running the risk of skewing way off topic here now, so I'll quit while I'm ahead. :)

-KKC

[Vertigo]

As far as actual hardware goes, i.e. not the internal implementation of the bits, but the actual machine itself, aside from the gamecube which obviously has moving parts and hence is something they haven't had to deal with much previously, Nintendo's hardware itself has been fairly consistently hard-wearing. The Famicom and NES were nicely bricklike and hence robust, my SNES has previously been run over by a proper car, an old Cortina Estate not some shitty little 250kg city runabout, and survived without any problems for 14 years until the recent video flicker, the N64 was just as strong and hard to accidentally break and was conveniently provided with a curvy shape so that you could drive a car up either side if that's what your mum accidentally wanted to do and I lost count of the number of times I threw my old GBC and the SNES pads in frustration.
It's only with recent very high precision electronics that Nintendo's seen a bit of product instability, disc drives, scratchy screens, etc.

As for your point about Sony, I overwhelmingly agree. I remember at the time of the release of the PS, some models of Sony TV were so fussy about the signals they'd accept that the PS fell outside of their range of tolerance. I saw it first-hand on a mate's new TV in 1997. I'll always be buying Panasonic as far as TVs go because I've found Sony interfaces and fussy design to be over complex and in some cases downright annoying. Panasonic haven't let me down in four TVs so far and have always provided the feature set I've been after at a reasonable price whereas often the equivalent Sony model has been between �50-100 more expensive for no obvious reason.

Wasn't the reason a lot of developers chose to avoid the DC's WinCE OS because it hogged a massive portion of the available RAM?

[kendrick]

Wasn't the reason a lot of developers chose to avoid the DC's WinCE OS because it hogged a massive portion of the available RAM?

I don't know of any evidence to suggest that developers avoided the Windows CE SDK for Dreamcast games per se. As I understand it, that library was made available so that ports of PC games could be easily produced. And since you can pick and choose which components of the library are necessary to run your game, you can use as much or as little RAM as needed depending on what functions you have to make available. Natively-produced Dreamcast games were almost always created with Sega's own SDK. You'll notice that most of the Windows CE games are ports (like the two Tomb Raider titles.)

The Hitachi SH series of chips has always been one of the supported processor types under the Windows CE spec. Come to think of it, MIPS and ARM are the other popular processors, so you wonder if anybody thought to compile a CE environment for the N64 or the Gameboy Advance. That'd be an interesting cross-platform development experiment. :)

-KKC, who needs to wait until the start of the California business day before trying to communicate with Hewlett Packard in any way..

[phreak97]

i agree, nintendo consoles are very well made, even though the gamecube is a little lesser in its unbreakability, it can sure take a bash. you can put 70 kilos on it and it wont mind too much, mine didnt. also mine has been kicked at walls more than once (it actually landed on the windowsil once, i didnt realize i had kicked it so hard), it has been played for a total of probably 3,000 or more hours. i have only recently had problems with it, and i think it was just because my ssbm disc is quite wrecked, it seems to be working again now anyway. i also had to replace the control sticks on a couple of controllers, but lets face it, nintendo havnt had a great track record with those, however, they kinda invented them for the n64, so those are forgivable, and i probably got some crap in my gamecube ones, so that might not be their fault.
both my ps2's are stuffed from normal play, granted i run backups most of the time, but if their drive was decent it would be able to take that. each ps2 has taken probably around a thousand hours or less even. they have taken extremely minimal force, the most would be being moved in a bag which was being treated relatively carefully.
i dont have an xbox, but having a hard drive in it probably reduces its durability, i know my friends xbox hard drive died after less than a year, and he only ever moved it around the house and occasionally to his girlfriends place.

thats talking durability, but the design of the actual consoles, i still think nintendo has done well, all their consoles are relatively easy to disassemble/reassemble, with most things easily accessable, the playstation has a nice bit of grounding copper which becomes useless if you take it apart more than once due to it being adhesive on one side, plus their huge range of revisions which makes everything hard, the ps2 is worse in its revisions, and also worse in their usage of ribbon cables and the buttons attached to the case, the ribbon cables are often made to be plugged in in obscure hard to reach places, hard to remove intentionally, easy to accidently pull out, hard to put back. theres a hundred million screws to get past, then the rf shilding is stuck to the ic's with heat compound, putting unneeded stress on the cpu and other ic's when removing it. when i took one of my ps2's apart, a bit of plastic shielding fell from somewhere, and i never found where it went back, like there was no real place for it, i foundplaces where it could have gone, but it didnt fit right anywhere, it shouldnt be like that.
the xbox, is impossible to get back together, it's a real bitch trying to get it all back in and the case on. (its not really impossible, but it can be annoying)
im gonna go, the im on the phone now.

[Paper]

Also, what is the EXT port for on the Asian Megadrive?

I distinctly remember typing out the following reply, but now I see it is nowhere to be found in the thread. I must have dreamt it.

The modem plugs in it for one (Mega Drive modem). I've seen also pictures of a printer and an adapter to hookup your telephone to your MD on the Assembler forum.

You people are console sadists! Haha.

[Vertigo]

The modem plugs in it for one (Mega Drive modem). I've seen also pictures of a printer and an adapter to hookup your telephone to your MD on the Assembler forum.

Any idea of the pinouts and which areas of signifance they attach to?

And thinking about it now, the MD model 1 feels particuarly flimsy because of the big bulbous bit and the hollow nature of it, but is surprisingly sturdy. Still not as geometrically sturdy as a SNES or N64 though.

I remember the old days when people would look at the round bit and ask if it took CDs  <_<  

[Paper]

Seems you need to register to search through all sections of the forum. Pff!

Mega Drive answering machine

[atom]

Yeah, that MegaDrive addon was designed by Al Gore. Only Americans will get this joke.