/vr/ - Retro Games

>>9245749

> You didn't have 2 different CPUs either, you had 2 identical CPUs in a Master-Slave configuration.
The input was driven by an motorola 68k that can also be used for other purposes. On the saturn doom port it was used to drive both sh-2's to bypass the poor SH2 bus-to-ram contention if you dont do that. Its nearly a must if you want proper performance from all sources. In short: 2 diferent cpu architectures to write code in assembly with 2 different compilers.


> As for developer difficulty, it was no more difficult than previous systems or the N64 for that matter.

Saturn: had to pull of your SH2 assembly knowledge for proper performance. (i.e: nearly all games that dont suck)
"no more difficult than"
Nintendo 64: High level C code + "early days of what we call openGL" as graphical api.

you can literally read the decompiled mario 64 source code and see those things by yourself, source: https://github.com/n64decomp/sm64

Sega did the SGL library to make a standart interface for graphics in the saturn that uses both cpus but perhalps it was too little and for sure it was too late. Both Sony and Nintendo did way better SDK's right of day one. (Nintendo went with the "Buy an SGI computer, its very similar" and Sony outsourced to SN systems)