>not powerful like the Xbox
>no multithreading like the PS2
>tiny controller with awkwardly shaped face buttons and straight up terrible right analog
>mini-DVD with small capacity
>less RAM than the PS2
Who was the target audience for this?
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The same people who bought the N64, a console which also suffered from a lot of strange design decisions.
>muh power
It had fun games that worked fine. Its target were non-snobs. They did mess up by not having DVD compatibility, though.
Actually it had sufficient power, but insufficient RAM and no multithreading made it a difficult console to port PS2 games over. The Xbox could brute force through the architectural differences, but not the GC. Hence the library was small and some multiport games were missing visual effects.
It filled a niche and didn't care to do anything else. For me it brought me some of the best Star Wars games and some of the best arcade collections making it well worth the price.
Games ported from PS2 to Gamecube had way less cutbacks than games ported from Gamecube to PS2. In fact if they had any cutbacks going from PS2 to GCN it was probably just laziness.
Nah, they mostly had missing graphical effects.
>In fact if they had any cutbacks going from PS2 to GCN it was probably just laziness.
It was mostly cut backs due to small disc capacity, lack of buttons, struggling to do particle effects and a lack of RAM plus the slowest disc drive.
All of these look like shit.
From what I've seen the GameCube was usually the fastest loading (maybe due to less physical seeking area?). GameCube ports tended to suffer the most, and GameCube games ported to other SKUs also greatly suffered. But if you specifically targeted the GameCube as a main development SKU, there was a lot of power there. Outside of resolution, its most graphically impressive games had better results than most*** of PS2's most graphically impressive. Devs just did not have the time and money to make every SKU up to par with one another and tended to prioritize PS2 or Xbox for being more popular.
* This doesn't account for art style and personal taste, obvs
** The Matrix: Path of Neo on PS2 BTFOs pretty much any of the GameCube's technical feats. You name an effect, Path of Neo has it. If you ignore The Matrix's trademark ugly green color filters, there's some seriously good art design on display as well.
>From what I've seen the GameCube was usually the fastest loading (maybe due to less physical seeking area?).
No. It's simply because DVD is read by the main CPU and gets transferred into the main RAM without DMA. The PS2 on the other hand reads DVD in a parallel manner using its i/o processor.
Check this out
>Devs just did not have the time and money to make every SKU up to par with one another and tended to prioritize PS2 or Xbox for being more popular.
Wasn't GC the simplest console to develop games for with the most linear graphics pipeline? GC was pushed to its limits already from the get go.
>TEV shaders were highly configurable and could do most things you could ever want a shader to do.
TEV was nothing much than a color blender. GC's graphical pipeline really was the least modifiable of the three consoles. PS2's insane fillrate and highly customizable co-processor made it the most flexible one. And unlike modern consoles and PCs, PS2 crunches through overdraw like it's nobody's business.
TEV (or really the Flipper GPU altogether) being just a color blender is selling it short, it could do nearly any effect you'd want for a 6th gen console; distortions, reflection maps of various types, shadowing, whatever. Nonetheless the PS2 is definitely more flexible. If I'm not mistaken I think the PS2 can just do anything arbitrarily, if you can think of an idea then you can make it work, provided you have the headroom for it.
You'd think GameCube was the simplest and perhaps it is, but for most multiplat titles the GC version came out with botched flat lighting. Multiplat devs spent very little time with GameCube development, they just made sure it worked and shipped it - not popular enough to justify more than that. There's actually a decent old writeup about GameCube's limitations, tl;dr lighting/shading is free until it suddenly isn't, and then you have to spend time getting creative about it.
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/programming/shader-integration-merging-shading-technologies-on-the-nintendo-gamecube
>Actually it had sufficient power, but insufficient RAM and no multithreading made it a difficult console to port PS2 games over.
This is an issue with porting anything really that was specifically targeting the PS2. Games that really used the PS2 to it's fullest often made use of very specific quirks of the hardware that could not easily be replicated on GCN/Xbox/PC.
It was still the most graphically powerful console of that generation.
Lack of antialiasing has been fooling people into thinking that PS2 < GC for decades.
I think that it was mostly emulation. Widespread and easy access to emulation this past decade especially left that impression.
>no particle system and custom shaders
Nah.
PS2 doesn't have a particle system per se, it just happens to crunch through particles like nobody's business. TEV shaders were highly configurable and could do most things you could ever want a shader to do. But it was vastly less popular than PS2 and slightly less popular than Xbox - despite its supposed middle ground of power, who would want to honestly bother spending time learning the fine details of GC's rendering for a multiplat game? Especially considering that both Xbox and PS2 had much more disc space (even though a lot of games just filled that space with pre-rendered movies lol), and Xbox was obviously more powerful than GameCube even at the GameCube's very best.
Kids. It worked too
>Who was the target audience for this?
Can't you just say, "Who actually wanted this thing?" like normal people did back in the day? Why do 20-somethings ask about "target audience" and who the "demographic" is for something like they're members of a cooperate boardroom meeting? Are their minds that conditioned by companies and sales now? (I mean, judging by the fact that they keep bringing up sales figures for games with microtransactions and gacha games to argue how their game "won" or is a success, I guess I'm not surprised.) Can't they just talk like a normal human being?
I will now use "Who actually wanted this thing?" from now on and you will never figure out that I am younger than you! Ha ha ha ha!
To be fair, GameCube was a worthy addition to the franchise.
Schizo, "target audience" has been part of the common vernacular for decades and "demos" has been used for centuries
i dont know
constant conditioning via smartphone screen
the boys at gamestop tried HARD to stop me from buying my gamecube at launch period
all of my highschool peers thought it was homosexual
everyone i knew made fun of it
i had melee & soul calibur 2
i didnt give a frick
esp when re4 dropped
why would gamestop employees try to STOP a sale? what in hell?
they weren't wrong though
it had a rough launch cycle
and they could see the writing on the wall that it was the losing system that generation
they said to get the xbox
& if i couldnt afford it get the ps2
"youre SURE youre gonna waste all this money..?"
as a young teen that was a good chunk of change to blast they had good intentions & probably were not getting paid commission
Still the best console of all time for me. Just a pure gaming console without any bs
Still playing Melee to this day and just discovered what a masterpiece Pikmin 2 is
(1) The idea was to get people to buy both systems while keeping the console itself somewhat portable so you could carry it around to a friend's house as well. When that fell through they started pushing GBA more with the Game Boy Player and GBA SP. You could sort of see them experimenting this with the N64 "funtastic" colors as well. It wasn't until the Wii and DS Lite when it finally worked.
It's a real shame that they never expanded on this concept with the Wii and DS. The extreme popularity of both consoles and the wireless connectivity removing any need for link cables made it a perfect match.
But even Pokemon Battle Revolution was a total letdown.
I had one. I liked it. I was playing more PC games by then though
(2) I think part of the "portable" design was also inspired a bit by the PSOne that had a screen and a battery pack attachment, again with neither being actually included to reduce the price. It's a fun idea but one that I don't think really caught on in either case
Nintendo fans
It was designed to be cheap and simple to program. Basically, it was designed to undercut the PS2 without causing developers headaches like the N64. It was well designed for that objective but third parties had already made up their mind. At least the first party output was excellent that gen.
>It was well designed for that objective but third parties had already made up their mind.
No, Nintendo shouldn't have cheaped out on the RAM. Either give it more RAM or a full size DVD drive. Sure the lack of parallel processing was unfortunate, but more RAM could've made porting between the two consoles easier.
Nintendo looked at the N64's high latency and relatively high capacity RAM and chose to run in completely the opposite direction. Gamecube has large CPU caches and low latency memory specifically so developers wouldn't have to waste time optimising.
Gamecube would not have been more successful if it was harder to program but more powerful.
Having at least as much RAM as the PS2 would've made it a lot easier to port games into though. Would putting in another 1T-SRAM chip make it a lot more expensive?
In truth, I don't know why Nintendo opted to split the memory between 1T-SRAM and ARAM.
On the face of it, it seems like removing the ARAM and simply having 8MB more 1T-SRAM would have been wise.
>gamecube version runs in wii mode (nintendont)
Unfair comparison, this usually increases framerates by about 50%.
The uploader claims it's on real hardware on all 3 platforms, but he's got this video comparing the same game on actual Gamecube spec and Nintendont: https://youtu.be/uElz8P84I3M?t=138
That said, the graphics seem mostly intact on Gamecube
The uploader's captions say otherwise.
The graphics are intact, the FPS is massively boosted on Wii. (which is what the video is comparing.)
still makes you seethe 20 years later so it must have done something right
brb playing Melee online with friends
>seethe
Yeah, buyer's remorse.
Me (I was 10)
I remember reading it had better special effects on some games compared to Xbox. Was it a lie or just incompetent porting? People seem to prefer Sonic Heroes and Shadow the Hedgehog on GameCube.
There is absolutely no reason whatsoever for lack of second bumper. Being different for the sake of it maybe?
Did they ever gave an explanation for C stick?
I don't know what they mean. Gamecube had the least flexible GPU of the 3 consoles. Anandtech said it had a non-modifiable T&L pipeline unlike the Xbox where you could program custom shaders. PS2 was the craziest one of them all, you could rewrite RGB values into something else entirely and achieve glow effects for example.
>incompetent porting
Knowing sega that's the most likely case.
Heard something similar about TimeSplitters as well. Maybe dust effects? Not sure.
I remember reading Xbox have better API than even Wii. So it would be incompetent porting in both cases I'd guess.
I'm not sure whether their reports are true to begin with. Porting PS2 games to Xbox could be hard as PS2 has some advantages and is weird all around. GameCube doesn't have that problem.
PS2 vs GameCube is one thing.
Problem is it came out around same time with Xbox, and Xbox completely obliterates it.
Then again Microsoft sold it at a loss. I guess GameCube only makes sense considering Xbox was sold at loss. Otherwise there is no reason for GameCube to exist.
Lack of second bumper really makes me think they didn't really finished console design and just went on with it. There was no Mario game on launch as well.
>I remember reading Xbox have better API than even Wii.
Wii had the same GPU as Gamecube, only clocked twice as fast. Same compute units and everything. Nvidia simply made a better GPU than ATI, but also more expensive.
>Porting PS2 games to Xbox could be hard as PS2 has some advantages and is weird all around. GameCube doesn't have that problem.
Not true. The Xbox and Gamecube are a kind of similar, they both have PC-like architecture, although Gamecube has a PowerPC RISC GPU just like the Mac PCs rather than x86. The PS2 had parallel processing while these other two didn't, the codes would need to be rewritten. Porting PS2 games to the Gamecube would've been harder since the CPU was weaker and had less cache and the GPU was more rigid. However a rigid hardware also meant less chance to screw up. Screwing up with the vertex and shaders on the xbox would make the game look and/or run worse. You couldn't do that on the gamecube so there was nothing to screw up. The Gamecube did have a better compiler thanks to the flexible instruction set of the CPU, but the Xbox wasn't much less good.
I'm guessing it's because ARAM was cheaper. You could store non-audio data in the ARAM to extend the main RAM and the VRAM. It's slow however, but many if not most games did it.
>Porting PS2 games to the Gamecube would've been harder since the CPU was weaker and had less cache
This isn't true at all.
>PS2 EE
294MHz
16KB L1 i$
8KB L1 d$ + 16KB scratchpad
>Gamecube Gekko
486MHz with better IPC
32KB L1 i$
32KB L1 d$
256KB L2.
PS2's CPU only becomes faster when you factor in VU0 SIMD and TLP. Most PS2 games don't rely heavily on that kind of thing. I remember some developer presentation Sony was complaining that VU0 was underutilized by most devs, but I don't have it saved.
It's weaker and had less cache than the Xbox, that's what I said. It would've been easier to rewrite a PS2 game's source code into something the Xbox could handle than the GC.
>PS2's CPU only becomes faster when you factor in VU0 SIMD and TLP. Most PS2 games don't rely heavily on that kind of thing. I remember some developer presentation Sony was complaining that VU0 was underutilized by most devs, but I don't have it saved.
Yeah the PS2's advantage was its many co-processors. The GC and Xbox only had one.
Oh, my mistake for misreading.
In practice the PS2 only has one coprocessor and that's VU0. VU1 occupies the same function as the T&L units which are part of the Gamecube and Xbox's GPUs. VU0 can only help you if you're doing a lot of vector math.
You could write a microcode for the VU1 to make it do other tasks. It's a lot more flexible than simply a T&L unit.
You could, but I don't know why you would. If it's not essentially a vertex shader it's better off running on VU0.
To offload the tasks from the main CPU and VU0 of course. Demon Chaos used the VU1 to process and render tens of thousands of enemies on screen using PS2's particle system. I'm not a PS2 programmer so I wouldn't know what other crazy stuff other devs had done using VU1.
>I remember some developer presentation Sony was complaining that VU0 was underutilized by most devs
That was in 2001. Sony pointed it out because they were presenting new tools to developers in the development environment to encourage the use of the vector units because of what they could pull off internally and what hobbyists pulled off https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qlQhJCuBYsE most of the early PS2 titles were PC ports by lazy devs who treated it like a fairly straight forward platform but SCE wanted devs to push things farther because it could handle more.
I like it. I'm gettingnone for my collection. Many of the games aren't priced too badly yet.
Indigo is the best color. I had an Xbox during this gen.
>>mini-DVD with small capacity
in hindsight, i dont think it was that small. Even in the Switch era 20 years later, Nintendo games are still small
Nintentoddlers, next thread
gost buste
>comparable graphics to Xbox at $100 less, eventually reduced to $99!
>has the highest poly game of the generation (rogue squadron)
>God tier standard controller, best wireless controller of it’s time (and possible GOAT)
>Unlike the PS2, was actually well made, no laser issues
>1gb was enough space for the time for games without FMV or heavy voice acting
>small discs and speedy RAM means load times are minimal, even compared to it’s competition
>1/3rd the size and 1/5th the weight of the Xbox, even includes a carrying handle
>God tier standard controller
dunno about that one chief. the dpad and cstick both suck.
graphics to Xbox at $100 less
Not really. Just play both versions of Splinter Cell Chaos Theory.
>>God tier standard controller, best wireless controller of it’s time (and possible GOAT)
most overrated controller ever, which is only good for exclusive games designed around it. it gimped every port given its lack of buttons, the nipple stick was awful for controlling the camera/aiming, the Z-button placement was awkward, the d-pad is historically bad and it ruined any chance of having playable 2D games, and the controller itself was way too small overall for adult hands.
I'll give you the d-pad, but if you found the controller too small it means you are a fatty with blubber hands. Also the c-stick wasn't that bad and I'm tired of pretending that it is.
the PS2, was actually well made, no laser issues
The reason you barely see laser issues mentioned in regards to Gamecube is because barely anyone played pirated games on it. Dreamcast, PS2 and Xbox all had huge piracy issues.
>comparable graphics to Xbox
But not comparable gameplay.
>has the highest poly game of the generation (rogue squadron)
This cancelled Xbox launch game was going to have 30 million/sec but the studio closed down.
>God tier standard controller
For smash bros, maybe. Not for most games. It's only good when you press A most of the time and ignore the right analog and dpad.
>Unlike the PS2, was actually well made, no laser issues
There's not a single disc based system without laser issues. Anecdotal experience can't prove which system on average is more reliable. There's a known and well proven issue with the xbox's leaky capacitors though.
>1gb was enough space for the time for games without FMV or heavy voice acting
Too bad we didn't buy next gen consoles to look at slide shows.
>small discs and speedy RAM means load times are minimal, even compared to it’s competition
It doesn't have anything to do with the smaller disc or "speedy RAM". Disc reading on the Gamecube is handled by the main CPU while on the PS2 it's handled by the IOP, a different processor, and the data is sent to the main RAM using DMA, hence it's slower, but it's a parallel process which means the main CPU is free to do other things in the meantime. The Xbox completely blows the other two out of the water though. It's got the fastest disc read speed and a hard drive to cache gameplay data.
>1/3rd the size and 1/5th the weight of the Xbox, even includes a carrying handle
Yeah my 8-bit gameboy weighs less than my 8-core ROG Ally too.
do you guys really not have anything else better to do on a Friday besides shitting on the GameCube for the 210391849013891804th time
Kids 8-12, as everything Nintendo ever did and ever will do
Powerful enough to do bump-mapping at 60fps (Rogue Squadron). I don’t think a single PS2 game had bump mapping/normal mapping but I could be wrong.
(I looked it up, apparently Matrix: Path of Neo is the only PS2 game that uses those techniques, and it isn’t that great.)
On paper the GameCube has more cpu/gpu power than PS2, but PS2 architecture allowed it do certain things better.
I miss the era of each console having dramatically different architecture and components because it meant each one had strength and weaknesses.
The best looking games on each console all look incredible and achieve these looks through the limitations imposed by the hardware.
I want to add that playing RS at Walmart before GameCube launch was a mindblowing experience. This game is still amazing looking TWENTY THREE years later (we are OLD).
why does everyone cum so hard over this game
was the first game with good graphics tendies played. took them until 2001 to play something that wasn't years behind the alternatives.
The library is what makes this console, but to be fair, I think that's in spite of the eccentricities and not because of them. If the Gamecube were a more conventional system, I can only imagine how it would have done.
GC was a very conventional system. Problem is, its more popular competitors were not conventional at all.
On paper it's a perfect machine. Graphically on par with its competition (something Nintendo gave up on since the Wii) with Nintendo exclusives.
I'd say the Gamecube was a step up from the N64 in every way.
Nintendo cultists who will buy any mediocre underwhelming thing with the brand attached and then proceed to call it a masterpiece
I can't wait till mods add 7th gen to the rules and tendies fawn over the Wii as if it were the greatest thing ever
people who wanted mario, zelda, metroid, kirby, star fox, f-zero, fire emblem, pokemon, or geist.
>geist
Gamecube, making people post moronic threads since 2001. OP is a gay