Recent content by Slowpoke

Absent the Dobrudja issue, there's a possibilty they might stay neutral. And the Romanians should've entered the war earlier, circa Spring 1915. This way there might've been a chance to cause some chaos in German/A-H planning for Gorlice-Tarnow.

Yes, Russia's reaction to Bulgaria is what made the Bulgarians break off their relationship and go looking for group with the Central Powers instead. Maybe the Western powers could somehow lean on the KoR to stay out of this one as well, given Romanian non-involvement in the previous.

You'd need a 1913 POD, wherein Romania is "persuaded" to not grab Southern Dobrudja during the 2nd Balkan War (creating a land claim/casus belli on Bulgaria's part).

I'm not sure SoJ could have a better relationship with SoA, as long as they were the 'senior' branch. Japanese business culture was ruthless when it came to seniority, at the time.

Not just that. Avoid using US metrics as yardstick for performance in other regions. Famously, SoJ employees became enemies of their US counterparts after getting repeatedly berated by Nakayama, for not managing to reach the performance of their overseas colleagues. There was no understanding in...

That was a pretty tall order for the late-80s/early-90s Japanese corporate culture. It would require granting considerable autonomy to their other branches (something they initially did, but then went back on), and creating individual strategies for each regional market. Not least of which...

Well, there is a way to avoid that, but it would require a considerable amount of effort for the 1980s. Instead of doing extremely staggered launches (a year+ apart), they could keep launch windows closer together. This way, you avoid the console becoming considered a failure/success in...

Ah, once more we charge into the guts of Sega dysfunctionality... Thing is, there were so many bad decisions taken throughout the years, by both sides, that changing even a couple of them can cause massive butterfly effects further down the road. Ex. the decision not to include the YM2413 in...

Unfortunately, the 3DO was insanely overpriced (due to all the special snowflake custom chips), plus it had a few design flaws. My latest idea of an early CD-based 32-bit Sega console is NEC V70 CPU, GPU consisting of an embiggened standalone version of what would become the 32X VDP (the OTL...

Out-of-order execution isn't necessarily a bad thing. All processor designs in use today are out-of-order. I'm not a computer scientist, but apparently out-of-order designs have an advantage when various bits of the system run at different frequencies. Something about not having to wait for a...

Hmm, I think @Nivek would be more knowledgeable in this respect. I have no idea regarding computational characteristics, so I can only look at a superficial level. Both Motorola 68030 and NEC V70 are relatively old processors, launched in 1987. So, they would be more reasonably priced come 1993...

Not very well. The twin SH-2 in OTL 32X were 23 MHz, and the ones in the Saturn were 28.6 MHz. Given that the ATL Mars would (should) have a single CPU (so no parallel computing headaches), you'd want a frequency at least as high as the OTL Saturn, even if the device itself is launched cca...

In the case of NAOMI, the impetus for its creation was the need for something considerably cheaper than their Lockheed-Martin-powered Model 2/3, and relatively urgently. By luck, the Katana architecture was suitable for expansion. This was a markedly different situation from 1990/1991. Very...

I have doubts that they could've used the Model 1 as template. For a handful reasons: - Sega's arcade boards were notoriously expensive; at arcade level this was mitigated by the revenue they would bring, but at consumer level nobody would pay $599 on a console at that time; moreover I doubt...

SH-1 was rather underpowered and had limited general processing functionality. If the SH-2 wouldn't be ready for a mid- to mid-late 1993 launch of the Sega 32X CD (and it wouldn't: full-scale development started Jan 1993), they would have to go for something else (not least because they would...