Viewing Thread:
"Sega's future....."

Sega will release another console. At least, that's what I think and as I work for Sega Europe, I should know.

Sega has plans to release a 1024 bit console in 2008. They are currently around 40% of the ay through the basic design and implementation stage.

Sega hopes to ship the dev kits in 2006, giving all developers 2 years to create a number of games for launch. Sega wants a similtaneous worldwide luanch for the new console, tentatively named DarkStar.

As the console is still in the design stage, no definate hardware has been decided upon. Sega are aiming for 256MB RAM, a 40GB hard drive, ethernet connection, 4 controller ports, as well as a 2 machine link up.

Sega knows this console will take off as, in the next 5 years, they're going to release some "Kick ar$e software to drill it into everytone that we CAN make wicked games." By the time the DarkStar is released, everyone will associate Sega with top quality software, and will want to continue playing these titles, so they will buy the DarkStar.

Currently, 75% of all software companies have sighed up to develop for the console, including EA, who were notably absent from the DC's developer list.

Sega are currently working, closely and secretly, with Nintendo, on some cross platform internet games to play on the DarkStar and Nintendo's next project.

Sega are also working closly with the major European telephone companies to ensure broadband is available to EVERYONE by 2008.

All in all, the future's looking bright.

:-)

Your Honour wrote:
> Because that's whats being rumoured at work.

Also, everyone has
> to have a digital telly by 2010 as thats when the governemnt is
> shutting down the analogue transmitters and frequency ranges.

I
> suspect that by 2008, most people will have a digital telly, if not,
> they will have only 2 years to get one, and as well know 2 years is
> roughly just under half of a consoles lifetime.

Great. Now every channel can emulate Channel 5's snowy texture and tendancy to go off completely every 10 minutes!

Digital TV boxes are a right pain, since only a few areas can receive a good picture that stays on constantly, every single set top box I've seen has been a disappointment, even with an ugraded arial and on the top of a hill. The govenment have a long way to go before shutting the analogue system down. They realise the power of tv and can use it to control the masses, without it riots would ensue.

Glad you like it Tarrant.

:0)

BTW this is a highly original initial post!

All your own work? :-)

Your Honour wrote:

ARE YOU BLIND OR ARE JUST AN IDIOT!?!?

I SAID THE
> HARDWARE HASN'T BEEN FULLY FINALISED YET. NO DOUBT IT WILL
> CHANGE.

PULL YOUR HEAD OUT OF YOUR AR$E AND LOOK AROUND!!!!!


Chill buddy! You seem to be getting a bit heated over this.

Now put the kettle on and we can discuss this sensibly:-)

About digital TVs...

Even if the government does turn off the analogue transmitters (it's said it will, but it probably won't*) we won't all need digital TVs. We will only need digital set top boxes plugged into our plain old analogue TVs, and this will have no effect of the quality of picture obtained from a games console.

* Reminds me of a rhyme:
The maid of the mill,
the maid of the mill,
she says she won't
but I reckon she will.

Colour depth does matter (that's the number of bits used to represent the colour of each pixel, never heard it called a bitrate before). Of course you can't distinguish two adjacent shades of red, and the signal to noise ratio on most displays would hide any difference anyway. Regardless, there are very good reasons to have a high colour depth.

Most modern video graphics have a 24 bit colour depth plus 8 bits of alpha channel, where the alpha channel determines how transparent the pixel is. This transparancy, btw, is not the transparancy used in 3D scenes - that's done as part of the per-pixel rendering process - rather it's used to combine layers of graphics. Typically this would be some kind of user interface over either video or a 3D field.

A 24 bit display gives you 256 levels each of red, green and blue. For most purposes this is "enough" because the delta between shades is actually pretty small and, as somebody below noted, at high frame rates artifacts are seldom noticable. This is due largely to fast moving objects being hard for the eye to track and that the rendering process tends to introduce jitter into the colour choices (becuase even a small change in one part of a scene will generally have a slight effect on all other parts).

So why would a higher colour depth be a Good Thing?

Firstly, if you're shading an area of the screen from bright red to dark red, each pixel will be virtually indistinguishable from its neighbours however the overall effect will be visable. The higher your colour depth is, the smoother the transition from light to dark will be.

Secondly, we're not dealing with pure colours. Consider the colour orange. In particular, consider the particular shade of orange in a 24 bit colourspace with the RGB components 97,61,44 (i.e. the brightness of the reg, green and blue components of this colour is 97 out of 255, 61/255, and 44/255 respectively). Nice, isn't it? It's a bit salmony really. I digress.

If we wanted to display this colour at half brightness we'd need to use the RGB values 48.5, 30.5, 22. Oops. We can't display fractional values so the colour we end up displaying isn't quite the colour we wanted. Imagine of we'd used this colour on a 3D object and slowly moved it part a light source. The colours actually seen of the screen would be many and varied but few of them would be exact shades of the original colour. The problem is worse with darker colours because the relative differences between the required colours and the actual ones are greater.

These kinds of errors *are* visable even on nasty cheap CRT monitors. The human eye is rather good at spotting discontinuities so the smoother the better. A greater colour depth would help here.

Admitedly, this does apply mostly to slowly changing images but these are the ones you get time to examine so it's important that they look nice.

On the downside, higher colour depths require greater memory bandwidth and is (with 32 and 64 bit processors) less open to acceleration with SIMD multimedia extentions such as MMX and SSE (becuase at 24 bit you can put a whole pixel into one register and work on all three colour components at the same time). As 3D cards move from 16 to 32 bits per pixel, we're probably already seeing some dimishing returns but I suspect in ten years we will have a higher colour depth.

First of all, I must say, although it may sound stupid, but, I never knew you worked at Sega Europe. Second of all, are you allowed to be disclosing this sort of information?

Now, on to the matter of Sega. I have always liked Sega, but I must admit I was a little surprised when they did pull out of the console market, but then again, I suppose I saw it coming. I have been thinking about this lately, and wondered what could have happened if they had waited until they had finished the Naomi 2 Arcade board, and then based the Dreamcast on that board instead of its predecessor, the Naomi arcade baord. But, when I imagine this happening, I wonder if it would have been more successful, being more powerful, but facing the PS2 almost head on. Would have it been able to compete? What do you think Your Honour?

As to the future of Sega? At the moment, I see the future of Sega being a games publisher, which is what they are best at. In my books, they are one, if not the, best developer in the world. They have come up with the most original and fun games ever.
When I first read your post YH, I was doubtful to say the least. But, when I read it again, it would make sense. They could make a lot of money from being just a games publisher at the moment. I mean, supporting all three of the 128-bit consoles, as well as Nintendo's handheld console, the Gameboy Advance. And because Sega have ten different developing departments, the amount of games that they can churn out, is a lot more that other developers na d publishers can dish out. So, they stand to make a lot of money (of course, this does depend on whether the games are successful or not). And, this console war that start early next year, will have faded, with, possibly, one or more of the console developers being knocked out.

But, whether I actually believe it is a different question? I may have just said it would have made sense, but that doesn't mean I believe it. I would like to though.

Because that's whats being rumoured at work.

Also, everyone has to have a digital telly by 2010 as thats when the governemnt is shutting down the analogue transmitters and frequency ranges.

I suspect that by 2008, most people will have a digital telly, if not, they will have only 2 years to get one, and as well know 2 years is roughly just under half of a consoles lifetime.

Why did you mention the bit rate in the first place?

Also, why did you go on to say TV technology would have advanced by then?

Turbonutter wrote:
Bitrate is no gauge of a console,
> period.

ARE YOU BLIND OR ARE JUST AN IDIOT!?!?

I SAID THE HARDWARE HASN'T BEEN FULLY FINALISED YET. NO DOUBT IT WILL CHANGE.

PULL YOUR HEAD OUT OF YOUR AR$E AND LOOK AROUND!!!!!