Game:

Daytona USA (1994)

Category:

Show

Duration: 36:57

14,902 views

290

All Sega Model 2 games rendered @ 4k resolution. There's a timer in the bottom left for each game time remaining. I don't think Yu Suzuki would have imagined these games being rendered at this resolution back in the 90s. It's amazing how well they stand the test of time. Sure they lack some of the modern day graphical bling, but there's a certain...vintage charm that you don't get in games these days. It was an incredible system.
Sega made 2 billion dollars from cabinet sales with model 2 hardware in it!!!!! The 90s were glorious times for arcade and gaming.

Sega Model 3 Showcase Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyRgrKvn888
Nintendo Triforce Showcase Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MUGDJND0O6E

Here's a longer history snippet taken from Sega Retro.
https://segaretro.org/Sega_Model_2

The Model 2's development was led by famed game designer Yu Suzuki and his team at Sega AM2 as part of a joint project between Sega, Fujitsu and GE Aerospace (acquired by Martin Marietta in 1993, now part of Lockheed Martin). Sega developed the polygon geometry engine in-house, using Fujitsu coprocessors DSP coprocessors that were modified with Sega's custom microcode for hardware T&L capabilities (it would be years before hardware T&L would appear on consumer home systems). This was then combined with GE Aerospace's expensive texture-mapping technology, which Suzuki's team condensed into a more affordable chipset.

Suzuki stated that the Model 2's texture mapping chip originated "from military equipment from Lockheed Martin, which was formerly General Electric Aerial & Space's textural mapping technology. It cost $2 million USD to use the chip. It was part of flight-simulation equipment that cost $32 million. I asked how much it would cost to buy just the chip and they came back with $2 million. And I had to take that chip and convert it for video game use, and make the technology available for the consumer at 5,000 yen ($50)" per machine. He said "it was tough but we were able to make it for 5,000 yen. Nobody at Sega believed me when I said I wanted to purchase this technology for our games." Suzuki stated that, in "the end," it "was a hit and the industry gained mass-produced texture-mapping as a result." For Virtua Fighter 2, he also utilized motion capture technology, introducing it to the game industry.

There were also issues working on the new CPU, the Intel i960-KB, which had just released in 1993. Suzuki stated that when working "on a brand new CPU, the debugger doesn't exist yet. The latest hardware doesn't work because it's full of bugs. And even if a debugger exists, the debugger itself is full of bugs. So, I had to debug the debugger. And of course with new hardware there's no library or system, so I had to create all of that, as well. It was a brutal cycle."

In a late 1998 interview, Read3D's Jon Lenyo, a former employee of GE Aerospace (later Lockheed Martin), stated that Sega's development for the Model 2 can be traced back as early as November 1990, when he and other GE Aerospace employees visited Sega and demonstrated the trilinear texture filtering and shading capabilities of their technology. As Sega was already working on the Sega Model 1 internally, they eventually incorporated GE Aerospace's technology into the Model 2.

The arcade board debuted along with Daytona USA, a game which was finished and copyrighted in 1993, and debuted at the Amusement Machine Show 1993.

Despite its high price tag of around $15,000 (equivalent to $25,000 in 2014), the Model 2 platform was very successful. It featured some of the highest grossing arcade games of all time, including Daytona USA, Virtua Fighter 2, Cyber Troopers Virtual-On, The House of the Dead, and Dead or Alive, to name a few. Sega sold over 33,000 units of the Model 2 in its first year, followed by 65,000 units annually, and eventually sold over 130,000 units by 1996, amounting to $2 billion revenue from hardware cabinet sales (over $3 billion with inflation), making it one of the best-selling arcade systems of all time.

#sega #arcade

Other Statistics