New interview talking of unreleased Sega hardware

Aww, don't cry. Just make do with Next Generation - The Website!

http://www.next-gen.biz/

 

The Sega Black Belt was using some custom variant of either Voodoo2 or Banshee.

Either would've been less powerful, and certainly had fewer/worse features/image quality than the custom PowerVR2 (PowerVR2DC / CLX2) in Katana/Dreamcast.

 

Are we sure that Voodoo2 was to be used? Voodoo3 was released in late 1998 and offered 2D processing too. That would sound a more likely candidate (or I suppose Banshee).

 

I find it rather strange that the PowerVR2 for the Dreamcast is virtually the only 3D accelerator to come out of Japan that had any kind of success. Why is that? Is it just because nVidia and ATI have a stranglehold on the market now?

 

Voodoo3 was released in spring 1999 (or sometime in early-to-mid 1999) not 1998. So Voodoo3 was much to late to be a candidate for the competing Black Belt since much of the development of both consoles took place in 1997.

 

Videologic was a UK company. The chips were manufactured by NEC. So you're half right, I guess.

The reason it failed was that it used advanced technology that wasn't utilised properly with Direct-X, and that was the driving force behind graphics chips at the time (and still is). The PowerVR chips used tile-based rendering, like the new ATI chips, and this allowed for the incredible looking stuff we saw on the DC at the time.

 

After that they released the Kyro II boards with PVR3 chip if i recall. The chip had good DX7 support, it surpassed the GF2 in many ways, but it lacked T&L.. That was the main reason of the failure. They worked on a Kyro II+ with T&L but was never released.

 

just a question, so the video part of the model3 arcade board if more powerfull than the gfx part in the dreamcast?

 

In some ways yes, in others no.