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.
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?
Unpacking the software issues with the Dreamcast a bit more, while so many of the games on the Dreamcast were great, it is very clear looking at the lineup in retrospect in comparison with the games that would release on the PS2, the Dreamcast was dominated by a sort of short form arcade[1] type game that would swiftly go extinct.
Effectively the Dreamcast doubled down a genre right at the absolute peak of its success, or more troublingly, possibly after some peak, which may have been a reason why people passed the console by.
Would have been interesting if the Dreamcast would have been able to survive just a year or two longer to see whether they would have been able to pivot away from arcade style titles or not.
[1] And no real surprise since the dreamcast shared technology with the NAOMI arcade hardware which enabled swift, high quality ports.
Yeah, I think it would have had other issues if it carried on further too. Games were starting to understand using the 2nd analog stick and the DC controller was also missing 5 buttons that the Xbox and PS2 controllers had. Even some GameCube ports felt weird because of the missing buttons and that only had 4 less buttons and a 2nd analog stick.
I agree with this. In practice piracy on console is and always was fairly niche.
DVD playback, game catalogue and also the overwhelming success of the PS1 (with which the PS2 was backwards compatible) were much bigger reasons for its success.
Looking back and playing my Dreamcast again, I also believe the lack of dual shoulders (only one L and R) hurt because some games simply couldn’t be easily played with the standard controller (and not everyone is buying the keyboard and mouse)
Let's throw on one more: consumers had lost faith in Sega. The Sega CD, 32X, and Saturn (in the US) were all abandoned by the company (for understandable reasons, but still). Why shell out another $200 for yet another system which was going to be prematurely dropped in a couple of years? Which, of course, was exactly what happened.
> I fail to see why you want to make one guy culpable for a hardware security hole
I dont necessarily agree with the guy you are posting to, but if Hideki Sato is being bestowed the glory of 'Designer of all Segas consoles' then he also needs to hold responsibility for their failings, of which there are many.
You may call those a debacle. But I think it was a great time in the world of gaming and electronics in general. Commercial failures aren’t necessarily a bad thing. They can still be fun.
You’re asking what motive the author has for the tone of this comment because that is wrong-headed because the author of the comment was an LLM. The real question is why the author would think it’s appropriate at any time, let alone on a thread about someone’s death, to post slop. The fact they didn’t even read the slop to think about the tone is just adding insult to injury.
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.
I recently replayed Warcraft II and fell out of my chair when I realized the original did not have control groups. Those were only added with the Battle.Net edition!
What are you talking about? The WiiU sold like crap! It was a disaster! And a big reason it was a disaster was because the Wii itself was not selling anymore. It was over and out, people were fed up with it. Nintendo is a very very very bad economic indicator, they're on their own planet, and they're far from selling nostalgia. They're selling well known characters in new environments. They completely redesigned Donkey Kong, that's not what a company coasting on nostalgia would do!
> They're selling well known characters in new environments. They completely redesigned Donkey Kong, that's not what a company coasting on nostalgia would do!
This is ridiculous and patently false. The US is equipped with many bases with permanent air space restrictions where they could perform such tests. It makes less than zero sense to test anti-drone tech in a crowded civilian space. I fully blame incompetence.
> According to a social media post by the Secretary of Transportation, Sean Duffy, Mexican cartel drones breached U.S. airspace, prompting temporary closure of airspace over El Paso. The Defense Department took action to disable the drones, Mr. Duffy said. Another person familiar with the situation had described the cause of the shutdown as a test of anti-drone technology. It is unclear if the brief airport closure was directly related to the presence of drones or how the technology was deployed.
It does not seem implausible or unreasonable to me that an anti-drone system would trigger airspace restrictions when activated. Whether system activation is intended to put out a 10 days block is probably a different issue, but probably related to SOP for an event of unknown duration.
You’re dangerously wrong. Winter tires make a very large difference in braking. If they’re so inconsequential, why are they mandatory in many northern places?
Culture has an impact on what people choose to do. I’ve seen so many Americans with your point of view. It’s maddening. Winter tires save lives!
Never forget cooling. People imagine a square box with a ginormous sea of solar panels attached, and forget the atrocious and horrible cooling required to vent all the heat that makes your home sewage line look like bottled water by comparison.
Apple controlling CLI utilities is a bad supposedly good idea.
They can’t stop themselves from tightening their grip ever tighter, and always want to ensure you have no functionality above what they deemed sufficient.
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/
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