I remember reading that the Maple bus used by Dreamcast's peripherals was pretty similar to USB in a lot of ways, and wondering why they didn't just use USB?
I definitely would not say this about all of Sega's hardware engineering efforts (I'm staring at you, Saturn) but the Dreamcast seemed like such a nicely engineered piece of equipment that I have always given Sega the benefit of the doubt. I assume there was an adequate reason: lower latency, cost, profits, quality control, licensing, etc. Or perhaps USB just wasn't mature enough - it was released in 1996 and Dreamcast design was probably already underway.
Not sure about the Dreamcast but with the GameCube I noticed the latency between plugging in a new controller and having the system respond to it is practically instantaneous.
I strongly suspect, but do not know, that the slowness in USB enumeration is a software stack issue on the host side of things.
If you think about plugging a USB device into a desktop OS, the OS has to check security settings, find and load a driver for the device, etc.
But as far as the protocol itself is concerned but I don't see any intrinsic reason why enumeration can't be nearly instant, for something like a console that only needs to recognize a few possible devices, each with minimal drivers that can be preloaded.
I remember reading that the Maple bus used by Dreamcast's peripherals was pretty similar to USB in a lot of ways, and wondering why they didn't just use USB?
I definitely would not say this about all of Sega's hardware engineering efforts (I'm staring at you, Saturn) but the Dreamcast seemed like such a nicely engineered piece of equipment that I have always given Sega the benefit of the doubt. I assume there was an adequate reason: lower latency, cost, profits, quality control, licensing, etc. Or perhaps USB just wasn't mature enough - it was released in 1996 and Dreamcast design was probably already underway.
But, I've never seen an official explanation.