[laumars]

That was the Saturn you’re thinking about. The Saturn had two sprite based processors and did 3D by skewing those tiles. This also presented other problems like with transparency (morphing squares into triangles causes problems with alpha blending). It was how Sega arcade boards also worked at that time and so Sega engineers were well versed in writing 3D engines like that but the rest of the development community had settled on the now standard approach of triangles. Couple that with the lack of an SDK and a dual processor system in era before developers were used to writing for such hardware and you had a very problematic console.

The Dreamcast, however, ran a PowerVR2 chip which was much more familiar for anyone with prior dev experience.

Perversely the PlayStation 2 was more complex due to custom hardware like the “emotion engine”. But Sony already had enough momentum from developers and consumers for any such difficulties to become game changing.