[thearrow]

Nice analysis! I still have an original Sega Saturn I’ve owned since 1996 that I fire up occasionally for a nostalgia bomb. The thing still runs perfectly, same as the day I unboxed it! They may have ended up with quite a complex hardware architecture, but you’ve gotta love the reliability of the older consoles. The same cannot be said of the more modern consoles I’ve had over the years - burning themselves up or failing in other ways.

[Ghaleon]

It's not just old consoles that are reliable, it was SEGA (and Nintendo). When Sony and MS rolled in their consoles are ready cut corners in reliability, and here we are today. PSX and Playstation 2 disc-read errors are extremely common and crippling, even back then. But by the time people noticed they already owned a bunch of games and would just buy a new console lol.

[pezezin]

So true. I bought a Saturn a month ago after hearing and reading much about it for years, and the thing still works perfectly. I even bought a stack of CD-R to burn some "backups", and not a single read error. I was expecting to have laser power issues, but nothing, it just works.