Panajev2001a
GAF's Pleasant Genius
Exhibit A:
http://media.xbox360.ign.com/media/749/749074/vids_1.html
Exhibit B:
http://media.xbox360.ign.com/media/749/749072/vids_1.html
Lindbergh is SEGA's idea to take an easy to program for PC-like board to stay beyond what a lot of the PC's people have can do (besides those hard-core gamers with overclocked dual core Athlon 64 FX and overclocked dual 6800 Ultra's, but still ) while still being reasonably close to what Xbox 360, PLASTATION 3 and Revolution can do.
I think it was a smart move IMHO: it does not make sense to spend tons of money for an arcade board's chipset
: you can spend extra money on the screen, on the speakers, on custom feedback functions (strong and localized rumble control, force-feedback, etc...) and other extra/custom accessories that always made the arcade experience interesting .
SEGA needed a platform easy to work on and to be able to focus on content: still neither Sonic nor Afterburner look crappy IMHO .
The problem might come when they do Lindbergh to consoles ports since we go from an architecture which is definately more standard (~3.0 GHz Pentium IV HT with 1 MB of L2 cache and 1 GB of RAM as well as 256 MB of VRAM) and easy to maximize to more custom and harder to program for architectures.
That should not be impossible to do though: the home consoles will have the peak performance advantage over Lindbergh and you can keep a team or two, internal teams or external ones (Sumo Digital did not do a very bad job with the port of Outrun from Chihiro to Xbox 1 even though the system had much less RAM to play with than its arcade brother although they shared the same basic architecture), dedicated to optimize the engines and the art assets for the console ports.
I think SEGA is doing a lot of good moves since the merger with Sammy was effective and I think they should be complimented for that after all the shit they were justly hit by.
http://media.xbox360.ign.com/media/749/749074/vids_1.html
Exhibit B:
http://media.xbox360.ign.com/media/749/749072/vids_1.html
Lindbergh is SEGA's idea to take an easy to program for PC-like board to stay beyond what a lot of the PC's people have can do (besides those hard-core gamers with overclocked dual core Athlon 64 FX and overclocked dual 6800 Ultra's, but still ) while still being reasonably close to what Xbox 360, PLASTATION 3 and Revolution can do.
I think it was a smart move IMHO: it does not make sense to spend tons of money for an arcade board's chipset
(even though we might see an arcade board that moves in the power league of the Next-Generation consoles when they are able to release that arcade board with AGEIA's PPU on it if they ever release it though, if they have not canned it completely already)
SEGA needed a platform easy to work on and to be able to focus on content: still neither Sonic nor Afterburner look crappy IMHO .
The problem might come when they do Lindbergh to consoles ports since we go from an architecture which is definately more standard (~3.0 GHz Pentium IV HT with 1 MB of L2 cache and 1 GB of RAM as well as 256 MB of VRAM) and easy to maximize to more custom and harder to program for architectures.
That should not be impossible to do though: the home consoles will have the peak performance advantage over Lindbergh and you can keep a team or two, internal teams or external ones (Sumo Digital did not do a very bad job with the port of Outrun from Chihiro to Xbox 1 even though the system had much less RAM to play with than its arcade brother although they shared the same basic architecture), dedicated to optimize the engines and the art assets for the console ports.
I think SEGA is doing a lot of good moves since the merger with Sammy was effective and I think they should be complimented for that after all the shit they were justly hit by.
) and LINDBERGH as their current high-performance board was a smart idea.