"So you've been playing traffic cop for the past few days, directing these two sets of rules?" Takuya Nakayama asked with a smile. "What's the compatibility rate?"
Yuji Naka swiveled his chair to face Takuya and slapped his chest confidently.
"Over ninety percent!" Naka's voice crackled with the absolute confidence of a technical madman. "My team and I pulled three all-nighters to write a middleware simulation instruction set. It intercepts all the direct hardware calls from the original MD development kit that are incompatible, repackages them, and then translates them for the new handheld's hardware to execute. Simply put, we've hired them a simultaneous interpreter!"
"Translation?" Takuya raised an eyebrow, immediately seizing on the core issue. "What's the performance overhead for adding a simulation layer? This is a handheld console; we don't have much headroom to spare."
"There's definitely a loss," Naka admitted bluntly. He grabbed a red-and-blue pencil from the desk and sketched a rough diagram on a scrap of paper. "The handheld's chip is already underclocked to save power. With this translation layer, the raw performance will be about ten to fifteen percent lower than a standard MD."
Takuya Nakayama remained silent, his fingers drumming softly on his knee.
A fifteen percent performance drop.
For a handheld system already struggling with limited resources, that was no small loss.
Action games would suffer from frame drops, and RPGs would face longer loading times—both fatal flaws that would severely degrade the player experience.
"However," Yuji Naka said, his tone shifting as he drew a heavy circle on the paper with his pencil, a cunning smile spreading across his face. "We have to be smart about this! How big is the handheld's screen? It doesn't need to render at the same high resolution as a TV. A lot of the multi-texturing used on the Mega Drive for anti-aliasing and rich detail is completely indistinguishable on a small handheld screen. If we just implement a subtraction mechanism in the development tools to automatically prune these redundant calculations, players won't notice any loss in visual quality."
As he spoke, Naka pulled open a drawer as if presenting a treasure, revealing a bare green circuit board.
The board was densely packed with chips and jumper wires, its edges still rough from manual cutting. It looked incredibly crude.
"This is the first-version motherboard test unit Sato delivered yesterday," Yuji Naka said, plugging the circuit board into the development kit and flipping a DIP switch. "I've already burned the early test code for Sonic the Hedgehog onto it. Running it with this new instruction set, the frame rate remains rock-solid even with the on-screen sprite count maxed out. It's completely acceptable."
Takuya Nakayama looked at the crude circuit board, and his heart finally set.
He knew that Yuji Naka had personally breached the moat of Sega's software-level barriers.
"Now, for the most critical question," Nakayama said, his smile fading as he looked seriously at Naka. "How steep is the learning curve for third-party developers using this tool? We need an ecosystem that can spread rapidly. If the barrier to entry is too high, those developers won't have the patience to grind it out with us."
"Hahaha, Managing Director, you can rest a hundred percent easy!" Naka burst out laughing, revealing a flash of white teeth. "It's as easy as drinking water! As long as they've made MD games before, they can just dump their original code into our new compiler. Aside from a few manual tweaks needed for special raster effects or extreme color counts, the compiler handles the rest of the packaging automatically. They could port their games over with their eyes closed!"
"Brilliant!" Takuya Nakayama slapped his thigh, not holding back his praise. "Get this development kit finalized and packaged as soon as possible. Once internal testing is clear, send it straight to Sega's various development teams. We need to buy them time so they can start building the game frameworks in the simulated environment. Tell the team—once this rush is over, I'm treating everyone to a hot spring trip in Hokkaido!"
Yuji Naka scratched his messy hair, his previously excited face suddenly falling as a troubled expression took over.
"Managing Director, don't worry about the hot springs just yet. Finalizing the toolchain is fine, but we've hit a major bottleneck that we just can't get past."
"What could possibly stump you, Yuji Naka?"
"The screen!" Yuji slammed the table, his tone turning unusually impatient. "Sato still hasn't finalized the exact screen specifications. Is the resolution 320 by 240, or some other odd ratio? What's the actual physical size? And can we even stably achieve 260,000 colors?"
He threw out a flurry of questions, then tossed his pencil onto the table like a wronged child.
"Without these exact specs, we can't even start on the UI and front-end display logic! Font size, icon proportions, the visible area—we'd have to guess everything. If the screen aspect ratio is wrong, the game image will be stretched and distorted. My Sonic will turn into a fatso! He'll become a blue ball! That would be a disaster, I will never allow it to happen!"
Takuya Nakayama couldn't help but laugh at Yuji Naka's exasperation.
He understood Yuji's frustration all too well. For a perfectionist game producer, distorted screen proportions were an absolutely unacceptable bottom line.
"Don't worry, we won't let your Sonic turn into a fatso." Takuya Nakayama stood up and pushed his folding chair back into place. "Sato led the team to Sharp's headquarters first thing this morning."
Yuji Naka froze, his eyes widening instantly.
"Sharp? The 'Father of Liquid Crystal' Sharp?"
"That's right," Takuya Nakayama said, smoothing his suit jacket with a confident air. "He's there to negotiate for a reflective color TFT display. If all goes well, the full physical specifications and pinouts will be on your desk by tomorrow at the latest."
Yuji Naka's eyes lit up, his earlier exhaustion and frustration vanishing instantly.
"A reflective color display? No backlight? Can we keep the power consumption in check?"
"Theoretically, we can keep it down to a few dozen milliwatts. Two AA batteries could power it for over ten hours." Takuya walked to the door and glanced back at Yuji, a fiercely ambitious smile playing on his lips. "Get everything ready on your end. As soon as the display specs arrive, the development kit will enter its final debugging phase. Then we can officially launch the planning for the New Handheld's flagship launch title. This is our first shot in front of the entire gaming world—it has to be a total bombshell."
Yuji snapped to attention and nodded vigorously, his eyes blazing with determination.
"Leave it to me! Once the display specs are finalized, I'll have the entire software development kit ready and polished within two weeks!"
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