Sony - System G

Hello

I am looking for information about "System G"

I read about it in Reiji Asakura book.

Are there any photos of this system?

How many pieces were produced ?

Does anyone currently own the equipment?

Someone have more info about this ?

I think the System G was purely an internal R&D prototype at Sony, so information is probably pretty scarce. I don't know if there are any photos of it, but it's probably little more than a gray or black box since it was never intended to be a commercial product.

@chaser324: I can confirm that System-G was a real product. It debuted at the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) trade show in the spring of 1989. I was the product manager. It was very real, an amazing graphics system, priced around $350,000 as I recall. It was a rack-mount device about 85 cm tall and 120 kg (35" and 265 lb).

The NAB demo material was created by the team at Television by Design (TVbD) from Atlanta: Jay Antzakas, Melanie Goux, and Jay Cordova. Initial creative work was executed over several days at the Sony Professional Products headquarters in Atsugi, Japan. Further work happened at the TVbD facility in Atlanta. The TVbD team performed all the demos over four days of NAB. They were brilliant! Their innovation with a completely new and radically different device was extraordinary, their patience was infinite.

So there you go - System-G was definitely real. The official model name was DME-9000 (DME = Digital Multi Effects). I even have a copy of the brochure as further evidence.

J

On a bit of a wikipedia dive I also found the Sony NEWS (Network Engineering WorkStation). Sony. WorkStation. Wow.

@shindig: The Sony NEWS workstations were actually the basis of the pre-release PlayStation development kits before they teamed up with Psygnosis on Psy-Q dev-kits which were much more affordable.

However, the NEWS workstations weren't particularly special for their time. They were UNIX workstations.

UNIX is sort of the grandfather operation system. Linux & MacOS are it's descendants. In the early 90's everyone was making UNIX workstations such as SUN, SGI, Sony, IBM, etc. Hell even Microsoft had a UNIX OS called Xenix.

I ended up here because I'm working on a PlayStation documentary, and System G is mentioned.

Basically I'm trying to figure out how Sony managed to make the PlayStation when 3D hardware was mostly limited to SGI's UNIX machines like the Indy. The N64 was co-developed with SGI, and at one point SGI even approached SEGA USA(Sega Japan told them to kick rocks apparently). The PlayStation even uses MIPS processors(which is what SGI used on their $100,000 graphics workstations), but I can't find any real connection between Sony and SGI.

People allege that Ken Kutagari(designed Sony's DSP/sound processor that was used on the SNES) was also responsible for the PS1's GTE & GPU designs because he was allegedly the driving factor of the System-G.

I wasn't expecting a new post to take the conversation forward but I'm glad it did. Good luck on the documentary.

I don't know a lot about how the N64 and Playstation do their thing but I do find the Playstation renders similarly to how software-rendered 3D would get done on the PC. That's got to be a lower barrier than the hardware accelerated approach Nintendo managed with SGI's assistance.

Sega had figured out 3D stuff in arcades so could cram that into the Saturn. Admittedly with less success. Point being that companies were already well into figuring out true 3D environments and that Nintendo's route was just one approach.

https://twitter.com/ObsoleteSony/status/1695856678363685043

Designing hardware for real-time 3D graphics was not a problem. Silicon Graphics may have been most famous, but they weren't the first, nor were they the only one. The problem was making it cheap enough to put into a $300 consumer device. Sony's solution was to use much cruder, and thus cheaper, hardware than was used in the workstation market, and selling at a loss until Moore's law dropped manufacturing costs.

Playstation using a MIPS CPU is not a big mystery. Anyone could license the architecture, and if you wanted a medium-to-high-performance custom processor without rolling your own, there weren't a whole lot of alternatives. Sony also had experience with MIPS from their workstations.

Kutaragi was the system architect for the PS1, I'm not aware that he was involved in the design of any of the custom chips in any kind of hands-on capacity.