/vr/ - Retro Games

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>>4665931
I remember xtreme looked really cool and mysterious in magazines but then you realize it would have had controls worse than 3d blast.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzvS_beXtXk
Also would have never ran this good on saturn hardware

>>4666378
It probably would have run just fine if it had been given the right TLC. Many more graphically impressive games came out on PS1 which is a far inferior system from a technical standpoint, it's just a matter of how easy it would have been to do.

>>4665931
Would have saved the Saturn, even if it wasn't perfect (I still think it would have been a fun game even with flaws)

I forgot they even released a working build recently. I feel like I should give a damn, but it really just doesn't look fun.

>>4666579
>would have saved the Saturn
Why do you kids always say that?

>>4666392
>PS1 which is a far inferior system from a technical standpoint
what are you smoking

>>4665931
God that looks like shit.
I had a Saturn when it was new and I would have loved Sonic on there.
Now that I see what it was supposed to be, I'm glad it wasn't released. Shame someone almost died for it.

>>4666869
>what are you smoking
The PS1 is much easier to develop for but from a purely technical standpoint it is inferior in just about every way. Don't believe me? Take one look at the specs.

https://segaretro.org/Sega_Saturn/Hardware_comparison

The thing was a fucking beast. The problem is that very few people had the knowledge to utilize the hardware properly, although those who did were able to create some ungodly good looking titles like pic related.

>>4666871
>God that looks like shit.
I think it looks pretty cool honestly. It reminds me of Mario Galaxy. Pretty underwhelming compared to stuff like SM64 I suppose, but the actual gameplay looked very unique. A few tweaks and some polishing, it could have been awesome.

Also, even though people routinely shit on the Saturn for not having a "true" Sonic game... I actually kind of like that it didn't, because we got Sonic Jam instead. 4 of the best Sonic games, all redesigned from the ground up for the Saturn, with new features, better graphics/sound, and Sonic World to dick around in. Pretty awesome.

>>4666875
The processor and it's 2D graphics might be better, but it's a well known fact that the PS1 had better 3D graphics.
Hell, it used rectangles to make polygons instead of triangles. The fuck where they thinking?

>>4666869
there's a lot of dedicated segatards here that constantly shit on ps1 and think it killed gaming

>>4666879
It does not look like you would have had enough fov to go sanic fast around stages. Hell, in that demo, he hardly goes fast at all.
I think a NiGHTS 2.5D like gameplay would have been the way to go with Saturn's hardware

>>4666887
>The processor and it's 2D graphics might be better, but it's a well known fact that the PS1 had better 3D graphics.
I repeat, that's only true because it was easier to develop for. The PS1 is an incredibly simple system. Just look at what was achieved with stuff like Saturn Shenmue, the PS1 was absolutely 100% incapable of producing those kind of graphics. Also, both rectangles and triangles have advantages and disadvantages. Four-sided polygons can be much more memory efficient depending on how they are utilized.

When you look at the actual specs, you can clearly see that the PS1 has almost no distinct advantages over the Saturn in any capacity. The Saturn was a perfectly capable 3D machine, it was just difficult to work with.

>>4666894
Try modeling a sphere with quads. Then try texturing it without distortion

>>4666887
The reason why the Saturn only does quads is because they're literally just sprites being transformed, distorted, and arranged to make a 3D scene, As such due to the Saturn's 2D nature it's impossible to do UV mapping.

Because you can't do UV mapping on the Saturn you can't any neat texture effects like environment mapping or optimize your model's texture usage, unless you feel like coding up a software 3D renderer like this guy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDJgeuoaSvQ

>>4666879
An expanded Sonic World seems like it would have been a lot more fun than the Sonic X-treme prototypes. No idea why Sega never went that route instead.

>>4666894
Don't kid yourself. NiGHTs is the best looking game on the Saturn and nearly everything else looks like shit if it's not 2D.
Sega was the only company who knew how to code for it and they did it right only once

>>4666392
the Saturn general thread was too nice, you just had to start some shit

>>4666908
What about VF2?

>>4666908
Panzer Dragoon Zwei looks better.

>>4666903
Really not all that difficult. But regardless, even if you consider it a disadvantage, you're talking about one single aspect of the console's hardware design. What about the fact that it has some degree of perspective correction and doesn't suffer from as much texturing warping or jagged lines like the PS1 did? Or the fact that it didn't have to have frames of animation cut from games? Or the fact that it could display many times more sprites at once?
>>4666908
But that's just not true. I happily concede that there are far more good looking 3D games on PS1 due to the sheer quantity of its library and the ease developers had in making games for it, but to say that Nights is the only good looking 3D game is asinine.

>>4666915

>>4666925
You know that happens in PS1 games too, right? Quake 2, in fact. And that hardly diminishes from the fact that the PS1 suffers from all of the aforementioned issues.

>>4666927
The cumbersome design of the saturn nullifies any potential advantages it might have on paper. The saturn is a woefully inefficient machine when it comes to interprocessor communication. And while raw numbers may be on its side, the truth is that having to share busses, and needing eight processors to work in tandem to do anything does not necessarily equate to a graphical powerhouse. saturn quake for example was ported to the playstation 1 and ran at a full 60fps. Also, saturn quad distortion is very different to affine texture warping.

>>4666945
>The cumbersome design of the saturn nullifies any potential advantages it might have on paper.
You've got that backwards. It's the cumbersome real-world application of its design that nullifies the factual advantages it has on paper.
>needing eight processors to work in tandem to do anything does not necessarily equate to a graphical powerhouse
No, not necessarily, but to deny that the Saturn would have been vastly more powerful than the PS1 in the right hands is just willful ignorance. Almost every last one of the Saturn's issues comes down to devs who were incapable of working with it. For those who had the requisite knowledge, it was the superior machine, bar none.

>c'mon bro, take a whiff!

>>4666954
>For those who had the requisite knowledge, it was the superior machine, bar none
I’m not sure what this is worth considering the fact that in order for the saturn to truly shine, games would have to have been specifically written for it by extremely talented developers rendering ports effectively impossible. even then though, Sega themselves never really reached the systems peak performance minus the shenmue tech demo (which ran far below 30fps.) Most of the saturns memorable technical achievements involved overcoming its native shortcomings (burning rangers is a good example), and even then it was a graphical mess, not to mention that Sega almost never actually constructed 3D games exclusively with VDP1; NiGHTS, Virtua Fighter, Panzer Dragoon, and many other games actually minimized the taxing of VDP1 by using prerendered sprites wherever possible, and simulating floors, backgrounds, other effects with VDP2. What this essentially means is that developing and rendering games in the manner of the PS1 is out of the question, and whenever developers were forced to, performance was dramatically affected, good examples of this being Virtua Fighter 1, Daytona USA, Tomb Raider, Wipeout, etc.

>>4666378
starts with the same chord progression as daft punk's "get lucky"

>>4666925
>>4666927
>>4666945
>>4666954
Get a room you two

>>4665931
cancelled and unfinished

sega of japan came in and rightfully put pulled the plug on a deadend development. vegetables are supposed to be eaten, not on life support

>>4666954
>For those who had the requisite knowledge, it was the superior machine, bar none.

You keep saying this but there's hardly anything to back that up. Even the best Saturn games ran like shit or came up with workarounds to get past its limitations.

>>4667006
god dammit cant unhear now I hate that song

>>4667140
>You keep saying this but there's hardly anything to back that up. You keep saying this but there's hardly anything to back that up.
I already linked to a full hardware breakdown and the Saturn is 100% factually better at almost everything than the PS1 was. What about "easier to develop for" do you not understand?

>>4666894
It can't even do colored lighting without setting some retarded and extremely limited color depth mode first, and it has way less resolutions that the PS1 is capable of handling, not to mention much less flexible VRAM. Saturn only does some things better because they went overkill with the specs. But completely fucked up the internals, that's why games like SOTN only work well on a PS1, Saturn can't even do semi-transparency with its main 3D GPU.

>>4667183
>It can't even do colored lighting without setting some retarded and extremely limited color depth mode first
I'm not educated enough on that particular topic to say you're wrong but Quake on Saturn has some extremely beautiful colored and dynamic lighting effects, so whatever method they used seems to work just fine.
> and it has way less resolutions that the PS1 is capable of handling
Uh, no. Max display resolution for PS1 is 640x512, Saturn is 704x512. Virtua Fighter 2 ran not only at 704x512 but even at 60fps, which was a huge technical feat at the time and something the PS1 could not accomplish.
>not to mention much less flexible VRAM
How so? It has both more RAM and VRAM, and the VRAM is faster, with higher bandwidth and lower latency. Where are you getting any of this from?
>that's why games like SOTN only work well on a PS1, Saturn can't even do semi-transparency with its main 3D GPU.
I don't know what you mean by "games like SOTN only work well on PS1", you mean multiplats? 2D games? There are plenty of both multiplats and 2D games that look and run much better on Saturn than PS1.
>Saturn can't even do semi-transparency with its main 3D GPU.
This is the only correct thing you've said thus far.

>>4667168
You have made it abundantly clear that you only have a cursory knowledge of how computers and hardware work. Please try and grasp this concept: the saturn can sometimes surpass the abilities of the playstation when it’s ONLY doing that thing (speed varying wildly), but the machine is so damn inefficent that whenever MULTIPLE things need to be processed at the same time the entire process is slowed down. you do realize that the saturn is hopelessly bottlenecked by its shared system busses right?

>>4667212
>Saturn can't even do semi-transparency with its main 3D GPU.
>This is the only correct thing you've said thus far
wrong. also, you are beyond cherry picking

>>4667231
Please try to grasp this concept: the Saturn is no more bottlenecked by shared system busses than the PS1 is by its laughable texture memory and bandwidth, lack of perspective correction and linear approximation, and sprite capabilities, among other things.
>>4667238
>wrong.
That's just straight up faked transparency. Pic related.
>you are beyond cherry picking
Uh, how is me responding to misinformed statements that someone else said with verifiable facts "cherrypicking"?

>>4667212
>Virtua Fighter 2 ran not only at 704x512 but even at 60fps, which was a huge technical feat at the time and something the PS1 could not accomplish
Only because the only polygons being pushed by the machine are the fighters; VDP2 is literally handling everything else. Seriously, without VDP2 - a dedicated background chip capable of rendering and distorting mode 7-esque layers on the fly - every saturn game would look and run like Virtua Fighter 1 and Daytona USA. The playstation was MADE to push polygons, it technically couldn’t even do true 2D. This is the reason why SOTN runs so terribly on the Saturn; VDP2 was literally not utilized at all during the porting process, and the machine is being forced to churn out and manipulate countless textured polygons in the manner of the playstation. THAT’S how the saturn runs when VDP2 is removed from the equation. Also, please don’t get the impression that I’m a playstation fanboy, I actually kinda despise it.

>>4667238
That's a (pretty cool) VDP2 trick and it's prone to all kinds of rendering glitches, VDP1 can't actually do semi-transparencies AFAIK, that's why sprites and any kind of normals are checkerboarded when they need alpha.

>>4667270
> THAT’S how the saturn runs when VDP2 is removed from the equation.
Yeah, but... why are we removing it from the equation to begin with? Just because it wasn't fully utilized by every game? You could make the same argument of any console -- look how many N64 games look like complete shit when the console's innate abilities were ignored by developers, then compare them to what companies like Rare managed to accomplish.

>>4667269
>the Saturn is no more bottlenecked by shared system busses than the PS1 is by its laughable texture memory and bandwidth, lack of perspective correction and linear approximation, and sprite capabilities, among other things
please be bait. processor and ram busses are infinitely more important to performance than any of the other things you mentioned, and to think otherwise is simply delusional
>>4667272
I’m trying to make the point that all of the great looking and running saturn games use the unique dynamic between VDP1 and VDP2 to churn out something truly special. NiGHTS runs at 60fps, but very few polygons are actually being rendered. Games that lean on VDP1 pretty much exclusively like Quake, Tomb-l Raider, Wipeout, and Shenmue all run horribly.

>>4667269
>>4667270
PS1 is as much of a sprite machine as the Saturn, the only 3D polygons are things like the clock tower, mode 7 clouds, mist, and distorting enemies when they die, the rest is all 2D sprites because the PS1 also transforms 2D draw calls like Saturn does. SOTN runs worse because either VDP can only hold 512kb of VRAM (PS1 has a big 900k pool for SOTN), which means VDP2 couldn't render all the scenery at will and had to offload some of it to VDP1, which made things much harder to deal with. These are the bottlenecks I'm talking about. SOTN was first and foremost a PS1 game.

>>4667280
I don’t understand what it is you’re trying to say

>>4667280
>PS1 is as much of a sprite machine as the Saturn
Yeah... no.

>>4667292
First column is saturn, second is PS1 btw.

>>4667292
You keep citing that page, but the difference in maximum polygon count is not directly comparable because the playstation used triangles and the saturn used quads. Also, the rendering method is entirely different between the machines. Jesus christ specs on paper are totally contextless, do you not understand this yet?

>>4667292
>>4667294
I was only speaking in technical terms, not specs, but glad you posted it.

>>4667301
Also I don't know if you ommited the information, but PS1 can push 4 bit sprites, was the Saturn capable of doing so?

>>4667298
>specz donf meen nuffin

>>4667305
>wojak
opinion discarded

Both people in the argument are getting too specific in technical things which don't matter anyways because no game uses the hardware 100% efficiently. This debate can only be solved definitively with real examples, so we need to compare the most graphically impressive PSX titles against the most impressive Saturn ones. As an example, Quake 2 the Saturn version looks better, Tomb Raider, Croc, Die hard PSX looks better. Most games it seems have less jaggies on PSX so it wins

>>4666875
I just played Nights and I don't think it looks like that on Saturn.

even if it played like Bug!, I would still would have liked to see it exist.

>>4667313
There is no Quake 2 on Saturn and no Quake 1 on PS1 so not the best examples. You are right however, all that matters are real world results. The fact is, PS1 has better 3D games, with a select few 3D Saturn games being extremely good looking, and it blowing the PS1 out of the water in terms of 2D.

How does one keep their save data when the Saturns lithium battery dies ?

>>4667409
Just transfer saves to a memory card every few years, replace the battery and then copy them back over.

>>4667321
it doesn't

>>4667556
That looks fucking great.

>>4667558
of course it does, NiGHTS is one of the best games ever made. but that doesn't change its low resolution

>>4667560
What res does Nights run at?

>>4667429
Or just save to the memory card directly like a normal person

>>4667583
I want neoGAF to leave

>>4667363
>it blowing the PS1 out of the water in terms of 2D.

The only examples anyone ever brings up are fighting games and that is only when you take the RAM cart expansion into account.

>>4666925
fucking disgraceful

X-Treme looked incredibly interesting and if it was actually polished and finished by a competent Sonic Team in the 90s I could have seen it helping Saturn dominate.

>>4667757
>The only examples anyone ever brings up are fighting games and that is only when you take the RAM cart expansion into account.
Try getting Dragon Force to run on a PS1 with 100 large sprites on screen at once. Not to mention Guardian Heroes, Astal, Keio Flying Squadron 2, etc.

>>4667560
>NiGHTS is one of the best looking games ever made

fixed that for you, graphics are amazing. It plays like ass though. So much fun flying through hoops, not, geez

I don't think any 3d Saturn game looks even close to good. But then, any decent looking 3d Playstation game probably dates to after the Saturn was no longer supported, most are really titles. Neither console can do very good 3d graphics, and most presentable Playstation games make heavy use of pre-rendered 2d backgrounds.

>>4668425
>It plays like ass though
only if you're bad at it. the fun of the game is trying to shave off seconds from your high score

>>4668451
wrong

>>4669014

>>4665931
Could roboblast 2 be launched on saturn? Could it save sega?

>>4669016
That's a good ass lookin' frog. Goddamn.

>>4669014
This is Model 3 on some fucked up emulation.

>>4665931
Had Sega of Japan not wigged out at the idea of making a Sonic game using the NiGHTS engine and had instead embraced the project and put it into focus, maybe things would have gone a little better for the Saturn.
Trouble is, the damage was already done even before the Saturns western release. Sgea of Japan and America were pushing in two different directions entirely (SoJ wanted to focus on Saturn, SoA wanted to focus on the 32X and the CD32X), and the library suffered for it.