Pretty awesome. Goes to show the great lengths taken even on state of the art hardware at the time.
And the PS1 wasn't even the worst of it. The Sega Saturn and N64 were both considerably more difficult to develop for. And the PC market was terribly fragmented and had a high rate of obsolescence.
I sometimes wonder what could have been had Sega released proper documentation and a decent dev kit earlier for their difficult to program for Saturn.
It was only later on in its life did Sega start to utilise the second processor.
Shenmue was originally being worked on for the Saturn. How's that for ambitious. It was rumoured to require the 4 meg ram cart. That I believe 100%.
Absolutely. I've seen the Shenmue video and it's stunning. It's more impressive than anything that launched on the PS1 or N64.
>I sometimes wonder what could have been had Sega released proper documentation and a decent dev kit earlier
That is a complaint I have heard a lot, and it is valid. But ultimately I think Sega shot itself in the face by even having a second CPU. Concurrency is a hard problem, and certainly game devs back in the mid 90s were not up to the task of utilizing a second CPU. They had enough on their hands with transitioning from 2D to 3D already. I have read that most games developed on the Saturn only used one CPU.
Choosing quads over polygons was also a major blunder of the Saturn's design. The list of Sega's mistakes with the Saturn is so lengthy that it's impossible to think it had any chance of succeeding.
But I still play mine. :)
The sad thing is while Sega did everything wrong with the Saturn, they did everything /right/ with the Dreamcast and it still failed miserably. I kind of think of them as the Commodore of the games industry. Technology that was ahead of the curve, awesome products, but ruined by terrible management and stomped out by juggernauts (MS Windows, Sony Playstation).
And the PS1 wasn't even the worst of it. The Sega Saturn and N64 were both considerably more difficult to develop for. And the PC market was terribly fragmented and had a high rate of obsolescence.
This stuff can give you nightmares: http://koti.kapsi.fi/~antime/sega/docs.html