Why was the Saturn so technologically behind the PS1 and N64? It barely even had any 3D games. And when it did they all performed terribly. It released the same year as the PS1 so there's no excuse for it's backwardness.

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Anonymous Fri Dec 22 22:40:33 2023 No.10535995 [Reply] [Original]

Why was the Saturn so technologically behind the PS1 and N64? It barely even had any 3D games. And when it did they all performed terribly.

It released the same year as the PS1 so there's no excuse for it's backwardness.

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 22 22:44:58 2023 No.10536014 >>10535995 >It released the same year as the PS1 wrong Also because it’s Sega. Sega’s straight garbage. as a Sega fan it hurts to say this

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 22 22:46:40 2023 No.10536018 >>10536014 Not a true sega fan Verification not required.

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 22 22:46:41 2023 No.10536019 >>10535995 it was misunderstood

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 22 22:48:16 2023 No.10536023 >>10535995 It wasnt. All three consoles perform similar to each other with different drawbacks. The power gap is pretty small

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 22 22:51:42 2023 No.10536030 >>10536023 Then why did the Saturn have such few 3D games?

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 22 22:58:19 2023 No.10536045 >>10536030 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGeULeHiJUE

Anonymous Fri Dec 22 23:02:31 2023 No.10536050

A. Saturn was better at 2D while Playstation couldn't handle it. If you're too dumb to understand how technology works and that different consoles are optimized to be powerful in different aspects, well you're dumb.

B. Early 3D is shit. Mario 64 is worse than every SNES Mario, and Crash and Spyro are worse than every Genesis Sonic game. I don't care about your gen z infatuation with "late 90s aesthetics", the games don't hold up to objectivity

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 22 23:05:00 2023 No.10536053 File: 44 KB, 628x417, 1693696267955906.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>10536050 >Saturn was better at 2D while Playstation couldn't handle it >Early 3D is shit Are you implying the Saturn has a better library than the PS1?

Anonymous Fri Dec 22 23:07:10 2023 No.10536060

>>10535995
It wasn't far behind at all.
Gun griffon 1 & 2, Sonic R, VF2, Fighters Megamix, Fighting Vipers, Last Bronx, Panzer Dragoon 2, Nights, Virtua On, Decathlete, Burning Rangers, Ninpen Manmaru, Virtua Cop 2, Die Hard arcade, D-xhird, Fantastep, Final Fight Revenge, Goiken Muyou, G-vector, Gundam SS3, Steeldom and Shutokou battle 97 aren't just good looking Saturn 3D games, but good 3D games for that generation's standards.

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 22 23:08:26 2023 No.10536062 >>10536030 It was hard to develop for, do you live under a rock or something?

Anonymous Fri Dec 22 23:08:31 2023 No.10536063

>>10536053
No, I'm saying the PS1 wasn't "more powerfully performing" when it couldn't even handle 2D animations. It's like saying your arms are stronger than another guys legs because he can't lift weights with his feet.

I am saying early 3D is shit though. It's not true retro, just modern games but shittier only only held up for nostalgic aesthetics.

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 22 23:08:40 2023 No.10536065 >>10536023 Then why isn't there a 3D Saturn game with free exploration like Spyro or Mario 64?

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 22 23:11:52 2023 No.10536071 File: 58 KB, 640x448, images (23).jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>10536065 Probably because programing such thing on 2 cpus would be hell in the mid 90s. Anyway, here's your 3D platformer bro.

Anonymous Fri Dec 22 23:14:49 2023 No.10536078

>>10536050
>while Playstation couldn't handle it
Dude, you can use 2 3D triangles to draw a textured rectangle on the display just like you would with a sprite. In fact, your browser does it all the time for 2D graphics and you probably didn't even realize it. There are literally no benefits from dedicated 2D acceleration if your hardware can do 3D well. Saturn had dedicated 2D acceleration because 3D was added late in its development cycle as an afterthought after the higher-ups at Sega realized that 3D games were going to dominate the 5th gen and they were in deep shit with their outdated design.

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 22 23:18:15 2023 No.10536086 >>10536078 You're not really debunking his argument

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 22 23:18:22 2023 No.10536087 >>10535995 Neurodivergent architecture

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 22 23:19:05 2023 No.10536090 >>10536078 Finally a good explanation

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 22 23:20:23 2023 No.10536092 >>10536045 Is this supposed to prove something? Because the Saturn version looks very inferior.

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 22 23:20:57 2023 No.10536093 >>10536078 Not really, Sega started designing the Saturn in 1992, it was always supposed to have 3D capabilities however they were more like the 3DO's than what we got.

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 22 23:21:58 2023 No.10536094 Ironically, the Saturn got the best version of Duke Nukem and Quake.

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 22 23:22:35 2023 No.10536095 >>10536071 It would have been created if it was possible. The fact that there is an entire sub-genre of games that are impossible on Saturn but possible on its rivals completely disproves your initial statement.

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 22 23:26:48 2023 No.10536103 >>10536095 >It would have been created if it was possible Guess you'd have a girlfriend by now if it was possible for you to get one.

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 22 23:32:44 2023 No.10536124 >>10535995 Imagine your perfectly mixed cake batter looking good. In the middle of baking it at the correct temperature you decide to take it out cause you just gotta make sure everyone gets from your cake first.

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 22 23:34:57 2023 No.10536134 >>10536094 Not when it came to framerate. And for shooters nothing is more important.

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 22 23:37:21 2023 No.10536140 >>10536134 Duke Nukem actually had better frame rate on the Saturn than on other consoles.

Anonymous Fri Dec 22 23:46:46 2023 No.10536162

>>10536078
>you can use 2 3D triangles to draw a textured rectangle on the display just like you would with a sprite
Which is the standard that emerged in that gen and continues to this day.
Pathetic retards try to be pedantic and reach for technicalities when all that matters is that you see 2D sprites on your screen. How you do 2D graphics literally does not fucking matter unless you're on HRT.

Anonymous Sat Dec 23 00:04:11 2023 No.10536196

>>10535995
3D was only just hitting the arcades while the Saturn was initially being designed, Sega seemingly didn't expect 3D to really be part of the 5th gen until Sony announced the PlayStation as a 3D oriented console.
To be fair to Sega, they were correct in their initial assessment because 3D games in the 5th generation fucking sucked until the very end of the generation when enough experience with controls and pushing the hardware to its absolute limits actually provided good gameplay.

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 23 00:06:54 2023 No.10536203 >>10536162 >Which is the standard that emerged in that gen and continues to this day. It was a standard in the 80s in video editing for tv.

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 23 00:07:35 2023 No.10536204 There are some refreshingly well informed takes in this thread even from the Sega widows who don't have a breeding kink

Anonymous Sat Dec 23 00:16:39 2023 No.10536224

>>10535995
The Saturn was still really good for the time, the assumption was the mode 7 style background would heavily make up for the slightly lower polycount, it worked really well in some games but game design didn't go in that direction.
Its just that ps1 had abnormally high polygon performance, it took until 3dfx before pc could beat it and even ridge racer looks like it uses a lot more polygons than ridge racer 64.

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 23 00:24:12 2023 No.10536243 >>10535995 it was designed as a 2d console then when they noticed the shift to 3d too late they were just like "toss in another cpu lol"

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 23 00:26:15 2023 No.10536252 I get the feeling that a lot of the 2D transformation trickery that later sprite-based hardware could do would be harder to do with just two triangles and a texture.

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 23 00:28:21 2023 No.10536256 >>10535995 segas hardware was always bad. the only time they were ever relevant was in the 90s because the super nintendo had no other competition.

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 23 00:28:38 2023 No.10536257 >>10536252 ? it's all the same thing, the fact that the texture is drawn to a quad at the end instead of just directly bliting it to a frame buffer is irrelevant

Anonymous Sat Dec 23 00:29:20 2023 No.10536260

>>10536224
They must have thought that 3D "marionette" style they had on stuff like Virtua Fighter would be the future because that's what a lot of Saturn games look like, but 3D graphics quickly went in a different direction and left the Saturn looking half a gen behind. I mean the Saturn could do better if the devs really tried but what dev would spend that much effort getting their Saturn ports to look as best as they could when the Saturn was selling like shit?

Anonymous Sat Dec 23 00:36:03 2023 No.10536273

>>10536196
Yeah, Sega's perception of 3D was "we have this $10,000 arcade machine that does it" and the Saturn was designed as a 3D system but it was only intended to have 3D for flourishes or smaller details. When word got out what the playstation was capable of in its price range everyone immediately had to rethink how far off 3D was. Saturn got upgraded, but it still wasn't the right fit for 3D at the time.

The other problem was the tools for Saturn were really poor at first, Sega thought devs would be fine working on the metal like in the past but that wasn't the case. By the time they started catching up Sony owned SN Systems and was pushing a development environment that could point out where resources were being spent down to the pixel, down to the byte in real time so devs could wrench every frame out of the PS.

PS1 made all the right concessions for the generation, accuracy, unfiltered textures, traded off for higher poly counts, higher performance and higher quality assets.

Anonymous Sat Dec 23 00:36:49 2023 No.10536276

>>10535995
Saturn is better than PSX but the design made it difficult for 3D
>The PS1's straightforward hardware architecture, triangle polygons, and more effective development tools and C language support, made it easier for developers to program 3D graphics. While the Saturn is just as powerful in terms of 3D graphics, the Saturn's architecture was complex and difficult to program 3D games for.

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 23 00:59:31 2023 No.10536329 >>10536252 Literally try it and see for yourself

Anonymous Sat Dec 23 01:04:34 2023 No.10536339
File: 986 KB, 2560x1440, novdp2.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

Just dropping by to say Sonic Jam's 3D World uses VDP2 to draw the floor, yet it's not perfectly flat. The river is a polygon object drawn over the VDP2 plane despite being under it, and collision markers to let Sonic pass thru the VDP2 plane in those areas. You can see this for yourself by emulating Sonic Jam in Yabause and disabling VDP2. The ground plane disappears but the rived bed models are still there:

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 23 01:10:09 2023 No.10536356 >>10536065 because that genre started up after the Saturn was already dead. Croc is the closest I can think of, and technically the "find the balloons" mode in Sonic R was also that, and so is the sonic mode in Xmas Nights.

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 23 01:12:26 2023 No.10536365 >>10536224 That wasn't an assumption during design but a necessity formed by the fact that the machine fucking sucked at 3d.

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 23 01:20:42 2023 No.10536392 >>10535995 Shiturn is shit

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 23 01:25:59 2023 No.10536409 >>10536392 Seethe

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 23 01:34:13 2023 No.10536428 Burning Rangers and Bulk Slash proved it could do 3d pretty well, it’s not much worse than anything on PS1

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 23 01:48:18 2023 No.10536469 >>10536428 BR was a Saturn first party moonshot. It should not have required the manufacturers of the thing pulling out all the stops to achieve graphics "not much worse" than PS1

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 23 01:49:57 2023 No.10536471 >>10536428 Virtua On is much more impressive than Bulk Slash though. >>10536469 There are plenty of good looking Saturn games that aren't made by Sega though.

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 23 01:59:10 2023 No.10536492 >>10536071 Having 2 cpus was never the issue. The real problem is the gpu. The gpu is greatly flawed.

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 23 02:03:16 2023 No.10536512 >>10536078 > 3D triangles The ps1 does not actually draw 3d triangles. The ps1 gpu knows nothing of 3d.

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 23 02:08:04 2023 No.10536528 >>10536469 If you perform massive contortions you can sometimes make something that looks ok. Saturn is pretty poor at 3d in non-contrived cases.

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 23 02:11:42 2023 No.10536537 >>10536014 What year do you think the Saturn and PS1 came out in?

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 23 02:13:55 2023 No.10536546 >>10536050 SFA3 runs on a stock PS1 and has frame data that's closer to the CPS2 original than the shiturn port that needed a 4MB cart to run properly.

Anonymous Sat Dec 23 02:15:35 2023 No.10536548

>>10535995
Sega needlessly split effort, they were competing with themselves extending the life of the Mega Drive/Genesis with 32x and CD and the related games. In hindsight they should've just focused entirely on the Saturn.

The Saturn had a complex dual-CPU architecture that was challenging for developers to harness effectively. Sega also didn't provide developers with as user-friendly development tools as Sony and Nintendo did. This made it difficult for developers to get the most out of the hardware.

Sega announced the release date suddenly and earlier than expected, meaning companies cut corners to try to ship games quickly for the new console.

It's 3D hardware capabilities were limited. You could only draw quads too, which meant when you want to port over your game like Tomb Raider, that used triangles, well you'll have to tell the Saturn to draw a quad with one of the points the same.

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 23 02:19:07 2023 No.10536553 >>10536546 Proof?

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 23 02:21:55 2023 No.10536561 File: 26 KB, 348x544, Saturn.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>10536356 >that genre started up after the Saturn was already dead SM64 came out in 1996 and the Saturn died in 1999 (pic related). They could have released something in 97-98

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 23 02:24:20 2023 No.10536569 >>10536561 Saturn was dead by 96 in the west. Japs never care for 3d bing bing wahoo

Anonymous Sat Dec 23 02:37:15 2023 No.10536607
File: 424 KB, 926x3503, Saturn.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

>>10536569
>Saturn was dead by 96 in the west
Yet some of the system's biggest games released near the end. You can't say they didn't make that kind of game because the platform was dead when they released games like Burning Ranger and Panzer Dragoon Saga near the end. They still made SA2 even if the Dreamcast was doomed

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 23 02:51:54 2023 No.10536653 >>10536607 It was too late, maybe sega thought they would save it, but bernie stolar announced the dreamcast too early

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 23 03:01:06 2023 No.10536684 >>10536553 Immediately bad post

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 23 03:07:51 2023 No.10536710 >>10536684 Still waiting for the source.

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 23 03:09:15 2023 No.10536716 What a dumbass.

Anonymous Sat Dec 23 03:09:37 2023 No.10536717
File: 771 KB, 1400x1400, Vf2_sat_jp_1995cover.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

Why is it that this was considered the second coming of Jesus Christ when it released (especially in Japan), yet nobody ever talks about playing it these days? I always see people talking about 90s fighting games they're playing, both 2D and 3D but I never see people talking about VF2

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 23 03:09:50 2023 No.10536718 >>10536050 >Saturn was better at 2D while Playstation couldn't handle it saturn required a RAM cart just to handle neo geo games lmao

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 23 03:11:42 2023 No.10536723 >>10536717 VF2 is probably the best looking 5th gen fighting game, imo anyway, only tekken 3 comes close. That’s part of it, it definitely has a following

Anonymous Sat Dec 23 03:11:45 2023 No.10536724

>>10536607
>and Panzer Dragoon Saga

it had a very limited print run of only 20,000 copies in the US
it was essentially a "parting gift" from sega
>>10536569
saturn was dead by 99 in japan. for all it's successes and sales, 3rd parties abandoned it once the dreamcast came out

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 23 03:13:36 2023 No.10536727 >>10536724 I almost wonder if the dreamcast should’ve come out in 1998 in america and europe and 99 in japan

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 23 03:22:45 2023 No.10536741 >>10536727 The Dreamcast came out at the end of 1998 in japan, they've launched it in the west earlier, but not that early.

Anonymous Sat Dec 23 03:59:50 2023 No.10536812

>>10536561
>the Saturn died in 1999 (pic related)

It peaked at 1996 and immediately died in early 1997 everywhere in the world except Japan where it lasted barely a year longer.

>They could have released something in 97-98

Making a SM64 style open world platformer would take a year at minimum, a year and a half if you actually want it to be half decent with enough content and not just 5 stages like Sonic R. That's assuming the company is already capable and doesn't have to spend extra months learning mocap or how to do 3d math, in which case you'd get Bubsy 3D.

If any company started when SM64 came out, then the Saturn would've already been either a stone dead platform (usa) or already being downsized in preparation for the Dreamcast (jap). The one single notable exception I can think of is Tomb Raider and that was already far into development when SM64 was released.

Anonymous Sat Dec 23 04:17:49 2023 No.10536851

>>10536607
Most 1998 games were rushed (Burning Rangers, Touring Car and HOTD were confirmed) as Sega was already preparing for the Dreamcast.
Shining Force III was a late 1997 game that took until mid 1998 to be released outside japan.
Magic Knight Rayearth was a trash Working Designs port of a 1996 game.
Winter Heat was a reskin of Decathlete.
Panzer Dragoon Saga barely missed the 1997 holiday season by a month and bombed so fucking hard in Japan that one of the devs killed himself. It was only ever popular in the west, and even that was partially because it was it released so late and in so small quantities. It was the swan song of the system.

I admit that SF3 and PD Saga were fun, but that's two good games for all of 1998. Hardly what I'd call a well supported system.

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 23 04:19:30 2023 No.10536859 >>10536717 Because VF2 was bigger than SF2 in Japan in 1994-5. And aside from the horrible backgrounds, it looked damn good too.

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 23 08:46:29 2023 No.10537313 BEHOLD THE POWER OF THE SEGA SATURN https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBDpeTUHqCs&t=24s

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 23 11:02:24 2023 No.10537494 November-December 1997 and January 1998, was that christmas was hurt Saturn in Europe at least, PSX and PC got hundreds of games, and sega saturn just 23.

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 23 19:45:02 2023 No.10538401 Bump

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 23 19:46:32 2023 No.10538405 >>10538401 Bumping this thread won't bring the Saturn back

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 23 19:55:56 2023 No.10538429 >>10535995 It has better super scaling capabilities. People were just more interested in the newfangled 3d poylgons at the time.

>>	Anonymous Sun Dec 24 02:20:18 2023 No.10539273 >>10538429 Yep, 3D had so much hype behind it, anything that was still in 2d was considered "outdated" at the time

>>	Anonymous Sun Dec 24 02:28:18 2023 No.10539285 >>10535995 Sega Saturn is great for 2D games. Its shit for 3D games. PSX is shit for 3D games and for 2D games. Saturn > PSX.

>>	Anonymous Sun Dec 24 02:34:15 2023 No.10539293 >>10539285 PSX has some of the best looking 3d ever produced. Modern 3d graphics look like complete garbage in comparison.

Anonymous Sun Dec 24 02:40:17 2023 No.10539308

>>10535995
It really wasn't. It's strengths were just A) underused, and B) not particularly necessary for the types of games that ended up becoming popular. For example, the Saturn has a lot more VRAM to play with thanks to the VDP2 being an entirely separate GPU. The Saturn typically had better draw distance than the PS1, for example. But in the grand scheme that wasn't what people were going to base their buying decisions on. The PS1 could push more polys which is clearly going to be a bigger draw.

>>	Anonymous Sun Dec 24 02:46:43 2023 No.10539319 >>10537313 I used to be a huge nintendo fan, and a PS1 enjoyer up to this moment. This masterpiece changes everything...

>>	Anonymous Sun Dec 24 03:10:57 2023 No.10539383 >>10539308 >The Saturn typically had better draw distance than the PS1 Are we just talking about the infinite flat VDP2 plane or actual geometry? Because the pop-in in Daytona and Sega Rally says otherwise

>>	Anonymous Sun Dec 24 03:18:29 2023 No.10539398 >>10539383 Tomb Raider is a good example.

Anonymous Sun Dec 24 03:23:48 2023 No.10539413

>>10535995
prepare for the extreme copium of butthurt sega fans who will make up the most random bullshit to claim the saturn was actually much better than the other systems

>b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-b-but if you code your game in assembly you can get an extra frame per second in 2d games with a specific amount of sprites being drawn of the screen!

>>	Anonymous Sun Dec 24 03:25:07 2023 No.10539418 >>10536050 you're pretending to understand how different consoles are optimized to be powerful in different aspects, because the saturn and the ps1 do 2d in the exact same way, you fucking retard

>>	Anonymous Sun Dec 24 03:27:56 2023 No.10539424 >>10539413 Nobody said that.

Anonymous Sun Dec 24 03:30:54 2023 No.10539432

>>10539398
I'd say the biggest difference is the PS1 textures look washed out and the Saturn has a really cool water effect for the time. The draw distance looks like it's better on the Saturn because the textures have better contrast so you see them pop out of the dark fog earlier and more easily

>>	Anonymous Sun Dec 24 03:45:10 2023 No.10539469 >>10539424 Nta, but it does sound familiar and I own 2 Saturns.

Anonymous Sun Dec 24 03:55:57 2023 No.10539493

>>10535995
>Why was the Saturn so technologically behind the PS1 and N64?
It's not as technically behind as people like to meme. Sure it has some issues with transparencies and VDP1's fillrate leaves a bit to be desired, but the system is more than competitive for 5th generation stuff.

>>10536339
Sonic World just draws the 3D River model overtop the plane and then uses masks to hide it at certain camera angles. Grandia does far more impressive stuff by using windows to change the coefficient tables in different regions on the same plane:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSHJ8x7L2rM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOsUdG8P9pg

>>10536548
>The Saturn had a complex dual-CPU architecture that was challenging for developers to harness effectively. Sega also didn't provide developers with as user-friendly development tools as Sony and Nintendo did. This made it difficult for developers to get the most out of the hardware.

This is literally a meme at this point. the Dual CPU Architecture wasn't that challenging to work with. Any developers with Arcade experience, experience with SNES Enhancement chips, or Sega's previous systems would have dealt with this in some capacity. As for the tools, we literally have Sega's entire SDK that they gave to developers. The C libraries date back to 1993 and 1994 and are actually pretty good. They even still compile with modern GCC. While yes Sony's kits were better, that's purely because they bought SN Systems who had previously made the best devkits for Sega and Nintendo.

Saturn wasn't anymore complex to develop for than the N64, SNES, PS2, etc. The only reason it didn't get support was because the sales weren't there. And the reason the sales weren't there was because the US launch was a disaster. And the US launch was a disaster because of the 32X.

>>	Anonymous Sun Dec 24 04:00:58 2023 No.10539513 >>10538405 Sega here. The earnest heart of that bumping anon has touched us. We shall rerelease the Saturn starting next year.

>>	Anonymous Sun Dec 24 04:02:19 2023 No.10539516 >>10539513 God knows they have enough Saturns in a warehouse somewhere.

>>	Anonymous Sun Dec 24 04:05:50 2023 No.10539527 >>10539513 I am overjoyed to be proven wrong and now all I can hope for is English releases of the VNs I don't know enough moonrunes to read

Anonymous Sun Dec 24 04:07:01 2023 No.10539534

>>10539516
Unlikely. Sega actually handled production some what responsibly with the Saturn unlike what they did with the Genesis, Game Gear, etc. Those are the systems they had sitting in warehouses and eventually liquidated.

From new Old Stock laying around it seems what was over produced for Saturn was the accessories. So Virtua Sticks, Stunners, Multi-taps, Controllers, NiGHTS 3D Controller bundles, Netlink Modems, Netlink Game Packs, Keyboards, 3 Free Games Bundles, etc.

>>	Anonymous Sun Dec 24 04:58:10 2023 No.10539646 >>10536204 For sure, good insight

>>	Anonymous Sun Dec 24 05:02:40 2023 No.10539664 Sega was the poor kids console is the console that no one wants to pick now the modern Sega is Xbox

>>	Anonymous Sun Dec 24 05:07:31 2023 No.10539678 >>10536050 >Saturn was better at 2D nice transparencies bro

>>	Anonymous Sun Dec 24 07:06:16 2023 No.10539903 File: 599 KB, 640x480, SaturnComposite.webm [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>10539678 With composite that doesn't matter.

>>	Anonymous Sun Dec 24 13:44:04 2023 No.10540508 Even their one Sonic game on the console was just a 2d isometric game.

>>	Anonymous Sun Dec 24 15:08:27 2023 No.10540654 >>10539903 It does. Fake transparency using meshes has only around 50% of the detail, in comparison with real transparency. That's why the practice has been frowned upon since the 5th gen, when people knew better.

>>	Anonymous Sun Dec 24 15:21:53 2023 No.10540680 >>10535995 It had some absolute bangers like >sega rally >virtua fighter >tomb raider

Anonymous Sun Dec 24 16:01:42 2023 No.10540784

>>10535995
I checked Sega arcade hardware specifications and looked like they was way behind the competition. Psx hardware is crude but it is relatively simple and allows to code on C but sega arcade boards had dozens of chips instead of one powerful graphics unit and required to code on assembly. BTW, probably Nintendo was in the same position but they worked with silicone graphics for a new console.

Anonymous Sun Dec 24 16:43:55 2023 No.10540881

>>10540654
>Fake transparency using meshes has only around 50% of the detail, in comparison with real transparency.
Most people were on a CRT over composite all the way up to the start of 7th Gen. I highly doubt they could tell a difference.

>That's why the practice has been frowned upon since the 5th gen, when people knew better.
The practice is continued to be used into 6th gen and is still used to this day. Load up Wind Waker on a Gamecube with Component Cables and you'll see dithering everywhere. It's used in a lot of modern games for things like foliage fading in from the distance, etc. If the resolution is high enough, or the picture quality blurred enough it works well enough to pull off the effect without the performance hits that actual blending has.

Dithering is significantly faster than performing actual blending. So using a mesh can be the difference between your game slowing down or not slowing down. Even the PS1 has this issue. People love to point out the Saturn port of SotN slowing down, but the PS1 version slows down a lot too, especially when you have a lot of those additive transparencies piling up.

Finally the Saturn can do actual blended transparency. The main issue is dealing with what chip is drawing what. VDP1 can't see what VDP2 is drawing so it can't blend with it's layers, but VDP2 can blend stuff just fine. So you can use dithering for the tricky stuff and real transparency when you can get away with it.

>>10540784
>Psx hardware is crude but it is relatively simple and allows to code on C
Sega provided C Libraries for the Saturn dating back as far as 1993.

Anonymous Sun Dec 24 17:09:25 2023 No.10540950

>>10540881
>I highly doubt they could tell a difference
Perhaps, if you were using an early 80s Telefunken. I know for sure that, whenever I played on the living room TV, meshes wouldn't look good. I used Shinobi III for the Mega Drive. Meshes blended, but the end result was a "slimey" mess. I'd rather much have real transparencies. Were meshes lighter on the hardware? Of course, being the inferior option. If we go by that rationale, we shouldn't even get past the Odyssey, because graphics were becoming "too complicated".

Anonymous Sun Dec 24 17:24:34 2023 No.10540991

>>10540950
>Perhaps, if you were using an early 80s Telefunken.
Even mid 2000s era CRTs will still blend them just fine. I know because that's what my main CRT is. Heck most of your arcade boards didn't even support transparencies. Capcom's CPS2 board didn't support transparencies and used meshes all the time. No one complained in the arcades. The main trick they did was they alternated the mesh offset each frame which made the illusion more convincing. This mode is in the Saturn ports of their CPS2 games, you just need to turn it on. With Street Fighter Alpha 3 and Vampire Savior it results in the effect still working on S-Video and RGB.

Most of the places people complain about meshes in Saturn games is pretty silly when you realize they blend and work just fine on the consumer televisions of the era.

>Meshes blended, but the end result was a "slimey" mess.
If you're on composite on a consumer grade CRT that's not going to really matter. Everything is going to be blurred and softer looking. It's blurry enough to even hide video compression artifacts.

> If we go by that rationale, we shouldn't even get past the Odyssey, because graphics were becoming "too complicated".
That's not what I was saying. I was saying that meshes are still in use to this day because there are places where they make more sense to use them.

>>	Anonymous Sun Dec 24 17:42:37 2023 No.10541029 >>10536019 By creators, developers and the players...

Anonymous Sun Dec 24 18:14:12 2023 No.10541085

>>10540991
The problem isn't blending. As I said, even my better living room TV blended just fine. The problem is: cheap TVs make everything looks bad, meshes or not; good TVs improves the overall picture, making the (((BLENDED))) meshes standout. The fake transparency looks like something underwater, slimey, like inside a syrup. Good TVs show that just fine. Blending still happens and it's not being discussed or challenged by me. My point is: meshes aren't as good as real transparencies, unless you have a bad CRT. Once fucking again, blending still happens regardless, but it's not perfect. Hope you understand now.

>>	Anonymous Sun Dec 24 18:18:23 2023 No.10541094 >>10536561 By 1997-98 the Saturn was old news. Nobody in the west gave a shit about it past that point. That's also when 3D platformers were really taking off.

>>	Anonymous Sun Dec 24 18:22:21 2023 No.10541105 File: 46 KB, 1920x1080, mega-man-x4-intro-stage[1].png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>10539903 The overlapping spotlights look really bad here, not the best example.

>>	Anonymous Sun Dec 24 18:33:48 2023 No.10541130 >>10536050 >Mario 64 is worse than every SNES Mario, and Crash and Spyro are worse than every Genesis Sonic game b-a-s-e-d!!

>>	Anonymous Sun Dec 24 18:38:55 2023 No.10541139 >>10539678 Nice ripple effect bro. https://www.reddit.com/r/SegaSaturn/comments/ba73oo/sega_saturn_2d_superiority_over_psx_mega_man_x4/?rdt=43533 It's amazing how Mega Man X4 is always used as the example when PS1 is also missing effects, too.

>>	Anonymous Sun Dec 24 18:40:36 2023 No.10541143 >>10541139 Really what MMX4 proves is that both consoles had pros and cons. Zoomers don't understand when hardware had different strengths.

>>	Anonymous Sun Dec 24 18:40:41 2023 No.10541145 >>10541139 Before you retards "reddit" me, the gif is too big to post on this shitty website.

>>	Anonymous Sun Dec 24 18:41:51 2023 No.10541150 >>10541143 Pretty much. It's just funny how X4's spotlights are constantly posted when that game in particular is a terrible example of PS1's superiority. The music doesn't even loop properly on PS1.

>>	Anonymous Sun Dec 24 18:49:41 2023 No.10541164 File: 79 KB, 960x540, 3gd4Rf5.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>10541105

Anonymous Sun Dec 24 19:30:44 2023 No.10541242

>>10541085
> The problem is: cheap TVs make everything looks bad, meshes or not; good TVs improves the overall picture, making the (((BLENDED))) meshes standout.
I have a pretty decent quality CRT TV. Things look pretty crisp but the dithered transparencies still blend over composite just fine and look fine.
> The fake transparency looks like something underwater, slimey, like inside a syrup
I think the real issue here is your TV is dogshit if it's making things look that bad.
>My point is: meshes aren't as good as real transparencies, unless you have a bad CRT.
Again, they blend and look fine on anything short of a PVM style monitor. They're good enough for basic 50/50 blending and work just fine for the spotlight effect in MMX4 and most other transparency effects in 2D games. The only time you really run into an issue on Saturn for 2D stuff is when you are trying to pile a bunch of additive blends on top of each other like Symphony of the Night does. If Meshes were good enough for Capcom, Sega, Konami, etc. to use on RGB Arcade Monitors, then they're good enough for home consoles on consumer grade CRTs.

>>10541105
And if you move forward a few steps you have proper transparencies on Saturn as well with the glass foreground tube. The Spotlights are a background detail and most people playing aren't going to examine them under a microscope. Dithering is fine for something like that. Is it 1:1 with PS1? No, but it's good enough and not really worth making as big of a stink about as people like to meme around here.

>>	Anonymous Sun Dec 24 20:10:24 2023 No.10541332 File: 521 KB, 2560x1440, Tombraider.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] Everyone talks about how the Saturn can't do transparencies but nobody mentions how the PS1 can't draw a straight line. Check out the wobbly textures on the floor.

>>	Anonymous Sun Dec 24 20:19:42 2023 No.10541361 >>10536050 Haven't seen a case of "Fox and Grapes" this bad in a while

Anonymous Sun Dec 24 20:26:29 2023 No.10541380

>>10541242
"Good enough" meshes are, but things could be better. That's why, even if limited, the Saturn used real transparency when it could. As you said, real transparencies are more complex, and would require the hardware for it. That's why arcade developers used it; the CPU power would be better utilized on sprites count, colors and scaling.

I still have my experience: my bad TVs didn't make me notice how meshes swallow detail, since everything was already low quality, but a good CRT made me realize that loss of detail. I don't have those screens anymore, but see if you can try it on your own: Shinobi III, for the Mega Drive, stage 6. The second part of the stage is filled with smoke. In my good TV, it seemed a lot like an underwater section. I think you can also see this under that spotlight in the first stage of Streets of Rage 2. I wish I still had the TV, so all this talk wouldn't look as a schizo rambling of mine.

Anonymous Sun Dec 24 20:35:48 2023 No.10541406

>>10536078
>Dude, you can use 2 3D triangles to draw a textured rectangle on the display just like you would with a sprite.
You could do that, but you only need to do that if you need to rotate or scale the sprite.
Playstation is perfectly capable of drawing flat sprites and gets a 2x performance benefit from doing so over using polygons.

>>	Anonymous Sun Dec 24 20:39:58 2023 No.10541421 >>10541332 The issue wasn't that it couldn't draw straight lines, but that it lacked sub-pixel precision.

Anonymous Sun Dec 24 20:41:33 2023 No.10541428

>>10541421
There were several issues. Sub pixel vertex precision wouldn't fix the texture warping, but it would fix the jitter and pop.
Saturn doesn't have the warping in that case because of quads but it still has some texture warping. It's just harder to see most of the time.

>>	Anonymous Sun Dec 24 20:42:49 2023 No.10541430 >>10541428 Well, it also had no floating-point math.

>>	Anonymous Sun Dec 24 20:44:00 2023 No.10541435 >>10541430 And no Z-Buffer.. overall the PS1 was garbage from a hardware perspective.

Anonymous Sun Dec 24 20:46:36 2023 No.10541443

>>10541430
>Well, it also had no floating-point math.
That's the same problem as "lacking sub-pixel precision", and it's also true for the Saturn, although in practice fixed point precision was lower on Playstation than Saturn.

>>10541435
>And no Z-Buffer
Saturn didn't have that either.

Anonymous Sun Dec 24 20:57:18 2023 No.10541463

>>10541435
>>10541443
I don't think either the Saturn or PS1 could handle a Z-buffer. The N64's CPU was way more powerful and the Z-buffer ate a shit ton of its resources. It meant it was the only system that could have seamless stable landscapes but it came at a cost of most games running at like 15 fps.

Anonymous Sun Dec 24 21:03:16 2023 No.10541476

>>10541463
It's the bandwidth of the VRAM that makes Z buffering practical. The GPU needs to support it too, but it wasn't expensive to add that feature. The CPU doesn't matter at all. And yes, the N64 had a lot more bandwidth which is what made it doable.

>>	Anonymous Sun Dec 24 21:54:47 2023 No.10541593 >>10541421 >The issue wasn't that it couldn't draw straight lines, but that it couldn’t draw straight lines.

>>	Anonymous Sun Dec 24 22:57:45 2023 No.10541720 >>10541435 Not having a Z-Buffer is a good thing. The Z-Buffer was a mistake and the point at which 3d graphics started going wrong.

>>	Anonymous Sun Dec 24 22:58:58 2023 No.10541723 >>10541720 >not having depth information is bad for 3D graphics What the fuck? Care to explain your absolutely pants on head retarded take?

>>	Anonymous Sun Dec 24 23:14:47 2023 No.10541769 >>10541723 The z-buffer is completely incapable of handling transparency, so you have to perform all kinds of hideous contortions to work around this.

>>	Anonymous Sun Dec 24 23:20:03 2023 No.10541782 >>10541720 It was only a mistake because of the processor power at the time Which affected the frame rates pretty harshly

Anonymous Mon Dec 25 02:24:51 2023 No.10542121

>>10541332
>Everyone talks about how the Saturn can't do transparencies but nobody mentions how the PS1 can't draw a straight line. Check out the wobbly textures on the floor.

The warping textures wasn't really an issue that was exclusive to the PS1, though, it was a common issue with early 3D triangle rendered in general. Many early polygon games on the PC that don't have hardware acceleration had this issue too. But PC devs were also capable of taking advantage of the extra horse power and implement some form on perspective correction through software. But it was ultimately an issue solved with hardware acceleration. The Saturn using quads, does alleviate the texture warping issue, to a degree, even though the system still had warping texture issues. >>10539493
>Sonic World just draws the 3D River model overtop the plane and then uses masks to hide it at certain camera angles. Grandia does far more impressive stuff by using windows to change the coefficient tables in different regions on the same plane:
>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSHJ8x7L2rM [Embed]
>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AOsUdG8P9pg [Embed]

Yeah, a lot of Saturn games use the VPD2 layer to compensate for the Saturns 3D capabilities. The original Virtua Fighter on the Saturn has mesh 3D arenas, which caused heavy pop-in. Virtua Fighter Remix uses the VPD2 for the floors, just like VF2, Fighting Vipers, DOA, MegaMix, Last Bronx, Virtual On. Basically, all of the 3D fighters after VF1 uses the VPD2 layer. Decathalete for the Saturn uses the VPD2 pretty heavily:

https://youtu.be/pEm8Uy1tqRI?t=536

Gun Griffon makes good use of VPD2:
https://youtu.be/3t0N4IUBRB8

One of my favorites is Shining in the Holy Ark, which is a dungeon style crawler and uses the VPD2 for the ground. I like the use of pre rendered sprites with polygon objects.

https://youtu.be/87bCXG2m-EM?t=2804

Anonymous Mon Dec 25 02:59:51 2023 No.10542202
File: 119 KB, 464x538, christmasnights2.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

>>10535995
Sega and Sony almost teamed up after being rejected by Nintendo, but Sega leadership shot it down. Sega made the Saturn thinking Sprites would still be the future of gaming and designed it with 2 processors, one for rendering sprites, and the other for rendering backgrounds. Then Sony then dropped the PS1 with full 3D capabilities which were beyond what Sega expected from the competition. Sega went full panic mode and had to frankenstein another processor in so it could also do 3D which is why developing for the thing was a nightmare, especially during a transitional time for game devs having to go from 2D -> 3D.

Sony being a hardware giant could supply a lot of their own parts and tech where companies like Nintendo and Sega could not, so Sony could afford to sell at a loss and offer a cheaper console. It caused this famous moment where they completely embarrassed the shit out of sega with a console that was 100 dollars cheaper; https://youtu.be/ExaAYIKsDBI

What we ultimately got was a weird Hybrid that was a little weaker with 3D, but if we had another generation of sprite based consoles, it may have stood more of a chance (had sega not been stupid.)

>>	Anonymous Mon Dec 25 04:02:29 2023 No.10542361 >>10542121 >saw Anons mention Shining the Holy Ark through the years but never looked into it >finally look at video >this sounds like Golden Sun music >look at dev Oh

>>	Anonymous Mon Dec 25 04:08:01 2023 No.10542375 >>10541435 imbecile

>>	Anonymous Mon Dec 25 04:11:04 2023 No.10542391 >>10541769 You're seriously suggesting that a visual effect, reproducible with other workarounds, is more valuable than polygons that stay where they're supposed to be and don't have visible seams up the ass?

>>	Anonymous Mon Dec 25 04:12:57 2023 No.10542397 >>10542391 B-but... MUH ADDITIVE BLENDING

Anonymous Mon Dec 25 04:19:01 2023 No.10542412
File: 1.18 MB, 875x772, shiningwisdom.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

>>10542361
>>saw Anons mention Shining the Holy Ark through the years but never looked into it
>>finally look at video
>>this sounds like Golden Sun music
>>look at dev
>Oh

'Shining in the Holy Ark' is basically part of the 'Shining' RPG series. It's a sequel to Shining in the Darkness and is connected to Shining Force. Camelot Software Planning worked with Sonic Software Planning (not Sonic Team) on a lot of the Shining games for Sega. Shining Wisdom is a Zelda clone. Shining Force III is also great too.

>>	Anonymous Mon Dec 25 05:17:32 2023 No.10542561 >>10542361 The whole shining series is done by those Camelot

Anonymous Mon Dec 25 05:22:57 2023 No.10542571

>>10541332
>how the PS1 can't draw a straight line

No one brings that up because every 3d game shared between the two will run at twice the framerate on the PS1, with actual working transparencies and sharper textures. Saturn looks a generation behind when you compare something like Wipeout between the two consoles.

>>	Anonymous Mon Dec 25 06:34:54 2023 No.10542695 >>10542571 Saturn wipeout looks like a 4th gen game to you?

>>	Anonymous Mon Dec 25 06:50:06 2023 No.10542720 >>10536030 Resident evil on Saturn is great. Virtua fighter 2 is beautiful. To be fair tho, Saturn excelled at 2d graphics and could do 2D fighting games better than the ps1 and n64. All 3 consoles are great and any respectable gaming plays on all 3.

>>	Anonymous Mon Dec 25 11:33:11 2023 No.10543135 >>10539319 Ngl, the music is pretty catchy for how basic it is.

>>	Anonymous Mon Dec 25 12:12:09 2023 No.10543183 What are the best Saturn games? I'm playing Mega Man X4 and I like the Saturn version of SotN for the Maria mode.

>>	Anonymous Mon Dec 25 12:59:59 2023 No.10543246 >>10543183 Panzer Dragoon Saga, in fact try out all the Panzer dragoon games, but for me it's Saga. Very ahead of the times.

>>	Anonymous Mon Dec 25 13:01:18 2023 No.10543248 >>10542695 It might as well be a fucking Jaguar game when you compare it to the Playstation original.

>>	Anonymous Mon Dec 25 13:04:12 2023 No.10543250 >>10543248 Jaguar games were lucky to even be textured. That's not very fair.

>>	Anonymous Tue Dec 26 00:24:24 2023 No.10544446 >>10543250 Yeah, Jaguar makes the saturn look God tier

Anonymous Tue Dec 26 04:04:07 2023 No.10544985

>>10543248
>>10543250
>>10544446
I remember being excited for Jaguar and seeing the advertisements for that robot mech game and of course AvP. Then it just flopped. I never saw it anywhere being sold like at FuncoLand. Strange, but we didn’t go to Toys ‘R Us if it was sold there or any other major retailers.

Regardless, I’m glad to have bought a Saturn instead.

Let me tell you about the joy of buying a used Sega Saturn in the late 90s for $30 with Gungriffon! Can you imagine how awesome it was? Amazing graphics and gameplay. Fast action, jumping/hovering, cool weapons, and classic explosions with sounds that sounded real. And then SoTN with the cart to play imports. Hell, then I bought Metal Slug (the whatever ram cart let me play that too) and that’s when I finally had a true (no arguing but I know it’s not perfect as a true NeoGeo system) arcade port that wasn’t wildly gimped like SNES/Sega ports.

Saturn was fukn amazing and is far better than the worse cluster-fuk of the Jaguar. Rebellion UK should have ported AvP to the Saturn in hindsight.

Then I bought a Genesis/Sega CD and got to play all the fun shit I missed in the early to mid 90s. Sega was just an amazing company! I know why they fell and we have those threads all the time but they could really make some good shit such as consoles for games and just games themselves so you could enjoy those moments.

<3 Sega

Anonymous Tue Dec 26 05:56:44 2023 No.10545294
File: 1.60 MB, 2708x1634, 1932732522_preview_parm.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

>>10542571
>sharper textures
This is game dependent. In fact, most of these issues are game dependent. I realize looking at ports is the easiest apples to apples comparison but the lead console matters a ton given how wildly different the architectures were. If you ask the Saturn to act like a PS1 it's going to fall on it's ass. But so will the PS1 if you ask it to act like a Saturn. Check out how fucked Grandia's environment texture is on PS1. The Saturn has the benefit of an entirely separate GPU with it's own VRAM. The PS1 meanwhile had to repeat a small part of the texture across the entire town map. Ports from one console to the other generally range from "adequate" to "shit the bed." The best examples are Mega Man 8 and Mega Man X4 which are pretty even. Though Mega Man 8 is missing effects on PS1 and Mega Man X4 is missing different stuff on each. The stuff missing on PS1, like the ripple effect of the water and heat, are again because of how much easier it is to do that kind of thing on the Saturn's VDP2.

>>	Anonymous Tue Dec 26 11:23:29 2023 No.10545793 somewhere in alternate reality stolar never left sony and instead saturn is VGH weeb console and we woulda had smt devil summoner and instead never gotten persona on ps1, which was trash anyway

>>	Anonymous Tue Dec 26 11:28:27 2023 No.10545798 >>10536030 because it's sprite console. devving 3d on sprite console is too much effort for western code shitters

>>	Anonymous Tue Dec 26 16:02:47 2023 No.10546219 >>10545294 I don't think its fare to use this example for any kind of comparison. Whoever did this port was straight up brain-dead.

>>	Anonymous Tue Dec 26 16:20:58 2023 No.10546273 >>10545798 the best looking 3d games on the Saturn were made by western code shitters, and some of the special effects made by SOA coders ended up in japanese 3d games.

>>	Anonymous Tue Dec 26 17:22:05 2023 No.10546432 >>10546219 Maybe but then so was whoever did the SOTN port to Saturn.

>>	Anonymous Tue Dec 26 20:02:21 2023 No.10546748 File: 543 KB, 2560x1440, tombraider1.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>10539383 This is a good example of Tomb Raider's draw distance and texture stability between both platforms. PS1 has a framerate edge but Saturn beats it in other areas.

>>	Anonymous Tue Dec 26 20:18:56 2023 No.10546790 File: 510 KB, 2560x1440, Untitled.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] Why does it seem like Saturn always has higher contrast in the color palette?

>>	Anonymous Tue Dec 26 21:09:13 2023 No.10546903 >>10546748 >Why does it seem like Saturn always has higher contrast in the color palette? Lower colour depth on the Saturn. I think in most cases Saturn 3D games use 256 palette colours per tile, while the PS1 uses 24bit colour depth.

Anonymous Tue Dec 26 22:20:53 2023 No.10547037
File: 466 KB, 936x1436, 1703629236076.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

>>10546903
I do like the Saturn's looks more. That being said, the more computional power a dev has, the lesser he feels the need to be creative. Modern gaming has to deal with this issue quite often.

>>	Anonymous Tue Dec 26 23:04:03 2023 No.10547152 >>10546748 You can still see the wall in the PS1 version, it's still being rendered. PS1 just uses a different kind of fog that looks thicker and darker but also smoother

Anonymous Tue Dec 26 23:07:31 2023 No.10547162

>>10546903
>>10547037
This is Genesis VS SNES all over again, where the Genesis could display less colors than the SNES so the SNES usually had smoother gradients, but Genesis games usually had more contrast and colors that popped much more, while the SNES looked smoother but washed out

Anonymous Tue Dec 26 23:15:39 2023 No.10547181

>>10547162
>This is Genesis VS SNES all over again, where the Genesis could display less colors than the SNES so the SNES usually had smoother gradients, but Genesis games usually had more contrast and colors that popped much more, while the SNES looked smoother but washed out

256 palleted textures were not uncommon with software driven 3D games for the PC, back in the day. Duke Nukem 3D comes to mind, as a game that uses paleted textures. On the PC, this changed with the introduction of 3D acceleration cards. It was really common in Saturn 3D games. Also, another thing is the lighting too, where the Saturn uses 256 color gradients, the PS1 can use 16-24bit colour gradient lighting.

>>	Anonymous Tue Dec 26 23:19:03 2023 No.10547190 >>10547162 it also has to do with the way saturn does lighting, generally results in higher contrasts

Anonymous Tue Dec 26 23:29:05 2023 No.10547231

>>10547152
>>10541421
There's a lot of "that's not what it looks like" when the PS1 has a failing but then people will post the Mega Man X4 spotlights with no further elaboration. I'm all for diving into the technical peculiarities but it seems like the Saturn's transparency quirks aren't given the same latitude.

>>	Anonymous Wed Dec 27 11:13:11 2023 No.10548482 >>10546903 >, while the PS1 uses 24bit colour depth. Playstation only uses 24 bit color on FMVs. The GPU only renders in 15 bit color.

Anonymous Wed Dec 27 19:03:08 2023 No.10549563
File: 212 KB, 695x1476, The Sega Saturn and Transparency.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

>>10536050
This is not the first time you bring up this point, and won't be the last time I debunk it https://mattgreer.dev/articles/sega-saturn-and-transparency/

Anonymous Wed Dec 27 19:49:49 2023 No.10549720
File: 226 KB, 700x405, saturn_sdk.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

>>10535995
As for the subject of the thread, as far as I can tell only one anon has mentioned the real issue >>10536548
The saturn was actually the most powerful console of the great three (which in part is the reason why emulating it requires much more power than emulating n64, let alone psx), but the architecture was so confusing it scared off developers, despite what this other anon want to believe >>10539493
>Saturn wasn't anymore complex to develop for than the N64, SNES, PS2, etc

The reality however is quite different:
>Of the Saturn's 8 processors, 2 are dedicated to drawing graphics onto the screen, the VDP1 and the VDP2
https://mattgreer.dev/articles/sega-saturn-and-transparency/
>The decision really didn’t take very long. 3D0, poor 3D power, and no sales. 32X, unholy Frankenstein’s monster – and no sales. Saturn, also a crazy hybrid design, and really clunky dev units. Then there was the Sony.
https://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/02/02/making-crash-bandicoot-part-1/
>Here’s where the Saturn shined and struggled at the same time. While this console had eight processors to take advantage of, it all came down to: Whether programmers would be able to master most of the console’s features during a small time frame (remember the console’s commercial lifespan would be over once its successor is released, or even announced). Whether their game would be shipped at a reasonable date. For this reason, most games ended up dramatically ranging in quality since each studio came up with a unique solution.
https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/sega-saturn/

Anonymous Wed Dec 27 19:50:50 2023 No.10549727
File: 101 KB, 1280x720, maxresdefault.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

>>10549720
>In the early 1990s, professional engineers had decades of experience with multi-threaded programming on Unix and other professional operating systems. Home developers and hobbyists were not yet familiar with the practice as very few home operating systems supported multiprocessing.
https://tedspence.com/the-enduring-weirdness-of-the-sega-saturn-edf19f9dbfa9
>To learn to program the Saturn was to learn the machine. To learn to program the PlayStation was to learn C. Learning C is much easier than learning the hardware of a new machine, and with the Saturn, there was a lot of hardware to learn
http://179.49.112.238:2020/get/PDF/Sam%20Pettus-Service%20Games%20The%20Rise%20And%20Fall%20Of%20SEGA_1746.pdf
That last quote is form Steve Balmer by the way

So paradoxically enough, the saturn was much more powerful than its competition, but for the average programmer it was too much. This is also the reason why programming in Unity nowadays is more popular than programming in C SDL. Convenience but slow product vs Raw power but more complexity.

>>	Anonymous Wed Dec 27 20:05:04 2023 No.10549770 >>10549727 IMO, anybody who uses unity can't call themselves a "programmer". It does most of the programming for you.

Anonymous Wed Dec 27 20:23:36 2023 No.10549845

>>10549720
The Saturn is in no way more powerful than the N64. Nintendo wouldn't allow it but if you were to throw the z-buffer out the window and ask the N64 to just push as many polys as it can it would trounce the Saturn and PS1. The issue with emulating Saturn was because it's a pain in the ass to get the timing right, not because it was powerful. The Sega CD took a while to get off the ground back in the pioneering days of emulation, too, for the same reason.

The architecture being "confusing" wasn't the problem. It's that it didn't have the same convenience the PS1 hardware did. Namco's arcade hardware at the time, the System 11, was practically just a PS1 with some extra RAM. It meant Namco's games had a smooth pipeline from arcade to console because of that synergy. And back then Namco and Sega were the Coke and Pepsi of the arcade. The relationship between Namco and Sony was a stroke of brilliance on Sony's part. Especially since as Sega's main rival, Namco was never going to work with them.

Sega COULD have done something similar, consolidating their arcade hardware and home console hardware. They sort of did it with the Genesis, which was a scaled down, more affordable Sega System 16. But by the time the Saturn came out they made the ridiculous decision to treat the arcade and console divisions as if they were entirely separate companies. It didn't help that Arcade Sega was sticking bleeding edge technology into their games that made porting them to an entirely different and much less expensive home console a pain in the ass at best or totally impossible at worst. Virtua Fighter 3 came out in arcades in 1996 and it took until the Dreamcast to get a home port. And even then it wasn't arcade perfect.

People understood how to make games on Saturn. But nothing exists in a vacuum and under the circumstances it ended up not being worth most developers' time. Because of the Namco arrangement the PS1 had a massive install base almost right out of the gate.

Anonymous Wed Dec 27 20:56:41 2023 No.10549976
File: 49 KB, 640x480, guardianHeroesOverlapTransparentSprites-a6f5c290b4eabecd428b73c2c20580da.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

>>10549563
So basically if I understand correctly, the Saturn can only do transparency between completely different layers with VDP2 and all of the sprites and polygons are drawn by VDP1 and given to VDP2 as a single layer to include in the final image it's going to draw, so there can't be any transparency between sprites/polygons because any of them being drawn over another is going to completely ovewrite and erase the pixels of the other. That's why the part of the other sprite that's behind the cape is gone, because the cape is essentially drawn by VDP1 as opaque but with a flag that tells VDP2 to make it transparent when it draws the final image

>>	Anonymous Wed Dec 27 21:04:12 2023 No.10550004 >>10549976 That's the gist of it. It is technically possible to do transparency entirely on VDP1, but there are a ton of caveats (much slower, can't use palettes, polygons will corrupt because of overdraw)

Anonymous Wed Dec 27 21:24:11 2023 No.10550086

>>10549976
Bingo. Saturn can do transparencies but it's picky about how it works, essentially. A game built specifically for the Saturn would be able to design around this limitation but a lot of examples are games ported from PS1 so the only choice was either to use the meshes in it's place or come up with a software solution. And nobody but maniacs like Traveller's Tales would have bothered creating a software implementation of the PS1's hardware:

https://youtu.be/WDJgeuoaSvQ?si=iBxpovoMx7nPOBO_

Anonymous Wed Dec 27 21:24:30 2023 No.10550087

>>10549770
The problem with Unity isn't how much it does for you. It's how halfassed everything is, and how much you have to redo from scratch if you need to change any part of it. The competent Unity devs are doing a lot more work than you give them credit for, but also, they shouldn't fucking be using Unity in the first place because at that rate they might as well be writing their own engines. The only reason they stick with it is the console SDKs.

Anonymous Wed Dec 27 22:48:44 2023 No.10550315
File: 832 KB, 1147x596, 53213.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

Even better hardware wouldn't have changed the Saturn's destiny, Sony had a much bigger budget and already a year after its release it had a much bigger library of games, SoA and SoJ were busy bickering and nothing that the console needed got done in time.

>>	Anonymous Wed Dec 27 23:33:58 2023 No.10550437 >>10549845 Sane poster. Great to read.

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 28 02:42:51 2023 No.10551003 >>10550315 imagine the audacity of thinking you can just enter the game market everyone knows the cutoff date for your first game was 1989, after that the market was locked and no studios were allowed to enter or leave

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 28 04:10:36 2023 No.10551157 >>10550086 You can say a lot of shit about bong games but they're technical masters. They can make hardware do shit that was considered impossible

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 28 04:25:40 2023 No.10551187 >>10551157 Yup, they do amazing things but they often lack focus because they want to do ALL THE THINGS in a single game. Toy Story is a technical marvel but it's like playing an entirely different game every level.

Anonymous Thu Dec 28 04:41:13 2023 No.10551224
File: 529 KB, 2560x1440, tombraiderwater.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

This is a good example of the Saturn doing something the PS1 has trouble with and vice versa. In the Saturn the water doesn't have the same blue tint as the PS1 when you dive in but it has a ripple effect like you'd expect in a real pool. The PS1 has a blue tint but there's no distortion.

https://youtu.be/YXCkcprQUro?si=xScKfW4wNanZjzV2&t=268

https://youtu.be/YXCkcprQUro?si=xScKfW4wNanZjzV2&t=268

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 28 04:51:42 2023 No.10551252 >>10551224 anon the psx could easily do that, developer choices are not hardware limitations

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 28 04:57:48 2023 No.10551268 >>10551252 Why does that apply to the PS1 but not the Saturn?

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 28 05:01:34 2023 No.10551278 >>10551268 PS1 had tint to indicate that you were underwater, it didn't need additional hints. Saturn has difficulty tinting so they had to resort to something else like waggling the vertices. It was a compromise for the Saturn, not for the PSX.

Anonymous Thu Dec 28 05:04:10 2023 No.10551282

>>10549845
>Sega COULD have done something similar, consolidating their arcade hardware and home console hardware.
Uh what? That's exactly what they did with the Saturn. The failure of the Saturn was that they only released arcade games and then gave up on porting anything else to America.

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 28 05:07:07 2023 No.10551285 >>10551278 The Saturn version came out first.

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 28 05:09:18 2023 No.10551289 >>10551282 What? No they didn't. The Saturn is nothing like the Model 1 or Model 2. You might be thinking the ST-V but that was just a side hustle Sega did.

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 28 05:11:27 2023 No.10551291 >>10551289 All their arcade games were released just fine on the home console, until the company decided to suicide that is.

Anonymous Thu Dec 28 05:13:07 2023 No.10551296

>>10551291
Virtua Fighter was such a shit port on Saturn they gave people Virtua Fighter Remix for free. It was better on 32X. Granted, that was a rush job but that's kind of the point, isn't it? Namco didn't run into problems like that porting Tekken.

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 28 05:14:35 2023 No.10551298 >>10551296 >Virtua Fighter was such a shit port on Saturn How so?

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 28 05:20:57 2023 No.10551313 >>10551298 https://youtu.be/zcl_hg4zJGw?si=RnnhU2PUko4nbyAm https://youtu.be/2HPgrUiOcsY?si=1IKy-GDSwkJWUtc8 You can see how badly the Saturn version flickers. The stage will disappear beneath your feet because it struggles to render shit.

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 28 05:22:53 2023 No.10551315 >>10551313 Never noticed that happening, seems like some bullshit or you would never even realize it. It was a decent port.

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 28 05:25:08 2023 No.10551318 >>10551315 Then why did they give Virtua Fighter Remix away for free? https://segaretro.org/Virtua_Fighter_Remix

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 28 05:26:36 2023 No.10551323 >>10551318 They gave Virtual Fighter itself away for free when you bought the Saturn, and Virtua Cop and Daytona USA

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 28 05:29:18 2023 No.10551326 >>10551323 So I'm making it all up. I didn't post video evidence and an independent link that also explains what happened. Do you want to have a good faith conversation or not?

Anonymous Thu Dec 28 05:31:59 2023 No.10551331

>>10551326
>So I'm making it all up.
Ok I guess you are? They gave away virtua fighter, virtua cop, and daytona usa to people who bought the saturn in the usa. I don't know what you want me to tell you but if you think that means I am personally insulting you then you are mentally ill.

Anonymous Thu Dec 28 05:45:48 2023 No.10551353

>>10551331
I'm telling you that the port of Virtua Fighter 1 was underwhelming on Saturn and Remix was essentially an apology because it was a known issue. I showed you why. If you want to "nuh uh!" me that's up to you but I don't know what else to say. My ultimate point wasn't even to dunk on the Saturn. It was to show that Namco using PS1 based arcade hardware made this a non-issue when it came to porting their games. It took much less work and had better results. And that's just the Model 1. Once you get to the Model 2 it was way beyond what the Saturn could handle and the console ports all had major visual downgrades to a much greater degree than what was happening with System 11 ports to PS1.

Anonymous Thu Dec 28 05:49:37 2023 No.10551372

>>10551353
>I don't know what else to say
So say nothing then, the port was fine, didn't have any problems with it, none of my friends cared playing it, can't say I ever noticed a single problem with it, just like the other arcade ports on the saturn. The problem with the saturn was sega didn't keep the games coming to the usa, they sabotaged themselves.

Anonymous Thu Dec 28 06:06:00 2023 No.10551410
File: 645 KB, 1200x1150, needs moar chips.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

>>10535995
>Saturn designed and controlled by engineers with retarded economic sense
>PS1 designed by engineers, but (((economic sense))) won over, and even excluded an FPU to cut costs.
N64 was basically older hardware that had resolution and memory cost cutting.

Anonymous Thu Dec 28 06:12:39 2023 No.10551419

>>10551410
TL;DR
Nintendo is right, games are king, not hardware.
Atari Jaguar is even worse, where most publishers ignored the 2 proprietary ARM processors in favor of the Motorola "Controller."

It's incredible how bad this is, given how much more expensive hardware was in 1994, why was there so much waste.

Anonymous Thu Dec 28 11:42:42 2023 No.10551912

>>10551419
>most publishers ignored the 2 proprietary ARM processors in favor of the Motorola "Controller."

Atari being Atari had horrible developer support if any and so the devs had to make do with what the knew how to program. The devs of AvP even said something like “we didn’t know it could do that” for many instances when they were coding the game. They should have ported and improved AvP to other systems! It would have been cool.

Anonymous Thu Dec 28 13:30:24 2023 No.10552045

>>10549727
>So paradoxically enough, the saturn was much more powerful than its competition

Let's get this correct anon. Situational power is not good overall. If your machine only can show its true potential in the hands of someone that is both skilled and extremely patient enough to learn to code specifically for it, then it's not really a "much more powerful" machine. It's a "potentially more powerful" under very specific circumstances.

Also there's such a thing as too much power. Saturn did not need dual CPUs to achieve what was required for its generation. Other gaming systems achieved similar results with just 1 CPU.

Anonymous Thu Dec 28 13:37:55 2023 No.10552057

>>10551315
>It was a decent port.
You are missing the point here. The VF port was old looking, and did not showcase the power of the Saturn as a launch system. It looked incredibly inferior to the arcade version, and looked bad when compared to Fighting games on the Playstation. Western Gaming magazines ripped into the Saturn for its inferior VF port. You have to remember that competition was intense at the time between Sega, Sony, and Nintendo. Companies' lives were on the line and releasing a substandard VF port was not acceptable when Sony was devouring the market and you (Sega) needed to show the world that you could still be great gaming company with impressive 3D visuals.

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 28 13:44:17 2023 No.10552064 >>10551291 >All their arcade games were released just fine on the home console Cap

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 28 13:45:57 2023 No.10552065 >>10551912 >Atari being Atari had horrible developer support There are interviews where they said that Developers were locked out of producing for Atari Jaguar because of contracts with Nintendo and Sega.

Anonymous Thu Dec 28 13:55:56 2023 No.10552085

>>10551912
>>10552065
The Jaguar was prematurely launched and Motorola shipped them buggy RISC chips which made the dev kit ineffective. Not many 3rd party devs got to learn the system's hardware either because they were all obligated to the japanese companies. Atari didn't have the financial resource to bring in the game devs or even market the system sufficiently. It was a disaster on all fronts.

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 28 14:59:20 2023 No.10552234 If Sega Saturn was based on Model 2, then it would have won. Just like how Genesis was based on Arcade System 16.

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 28 17:50:11 2023 No.10552632 >>10552234 They don't even need Model 2. Sega Model 1 would crush Playstation or N64. Make Saturn based off Model 1.

Anonymous Thu Dec 28 17:58:22 2023 No.10552649

>>10552234
Model 2 hardware was bleeding-edge and too expensive but basing it on Model 1 would have been a smart move even if it meant the console would have to launch slightly later. Focusing the Saturn on 2D performance before panicking at the 11th hour and throwing in another CPU to turn it into a Frankenstein machine in response to the PlayStation displays a profound lack of foresight or awareness of the market. The 32X should have never happened either but here we are.

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 28 18:10:52 2023 No.10552682 >>10552632 How good was Model 1 compared to Playstation?

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 28 18:43:06 2023 No.10552736 >>10552649 The Saturn was being designed since 92, model 1 didn't exist yet.

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 28 18:57:41 2023 No.10552759 >>10551372 The game looked much worse than Toshinden and gave a very bad first impression about the console's capacities. And magazines did actually criticize the graphics and the characters disappearing from the screen.

Anonymous Thu Dec 28 19:05:28 2023 No.10552771

>>10552649
>The 32X should have never happened either but here we are.
The 32X could have been an adequate stopgap though to stop the bleeding while the Saturn stayed in the oven for a bit. We know the 32X had a decent port of Virtua Fighter and one of the reasons, if not the main reason, Sega rushed the Saturn to market ahead of the PS1 was because they desperately wanted to get Virtua Fighter in people's homes ASAP since it was practically a religion in Japan at the time and the Mega Drive was dead in the water over there. Had they released the 32X with Virtua Fighter alongside the Neptune for anyone who didn't already have a Mega Drive/Genesis, that would have pushed the boulder up the hill for a good year until the Saturn could launch in late 1995 with Virtua Fighter 2. That would have solved everyone's problem and gotten the Japanese and American branches more in sync.

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 28 19:12:58 2023 No.10552787 >>10536065 This is a fully 3D platform type game https://youtu.be/cOvJPzjWjP0?si=HBjZbHTD_SoTjSfl

Anonymous Thu Dec 28 19:17:57 2023 No.10552804

>>10552632
>>10552682
Model 1 wasn't designed to texture or Gouraud shade, both essential features for modern 3D. The Saturn couldn't properly blend Gouraud and texturing at the same time which really hindered its ability to render playstation-like graphics.

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 28 19:19:33 2023 No.10552808 >>10552649 Look into hardware specs of model 1 and 2, they have tons of chips instead of a graphic unit. Maybe I am wrong but looks like only big brain programmers on asm could utilize this hardware and it could not be repurposed as a console

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 28 19:26:58 2023 No.10552825 >>10552804 >Model 1 wasn't designed to texture or Gouraud shade Model 1 can literally do both.

Anonymous Thu Dec 28 19:31:38 2023 No.10552834

>>10551224
Tomb raider is a classic example of poor source control. There's umpteen versions of the engine scattered across all the platforms it was released on and they all have weird additions and omissions that can only be explained by random chunks of code getting lost and forgotten about by whatever coder happens to be working on whatever build.
Chances are the Saturn guy made a special bit of water code for the Saturn to make up for the lack of caustics, added vertex wobble and then the guy who did the PS1 version based it on the PC, got the caustics fine because the PS1 can do that easy, but he didn't have the vertex wobble code and didn't think to do it.
A similar example is the Quake water. Software rendering has a sine wave wobble raster effect that was removed from almost all 3D accelerated versions. Is the 3dfx not much more powerful than software? Yes, of course it is, but carmack couldn't be bothered simulating the raster wave with polygons so he didn't. Modern OpenGL builds put it back in.

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 28 19:33:56 2023 No.10552837 >>10552825 Yeah people forget that Virtua Fighter is a Model 1 arcade game.

Anonymous Thu Dec 28 19:37:40 2023 No.10552843

>>10551315
It's clear they didn't know what they were doing. The Saturn requires polygon clipping because it doesn't gracefully handle polygons extending outside the screen area. This is trivial math any idiot could have got from any "how to 3D" text file off any BBS or "3D game in 21 days" book but VF1 Saturn just chooses not to render the whole quad if even a single vertex goes off the screen leading to holes in the geometry at the screen edges.
Sheer amateur hour stuff.

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 28 19:43:04 2023 No.10552851 >>10552843 How do you clip polygons on Saturn without UV mapping? t. 3D novice

Anonymous Thu Dec 28 19:43:25 2023 No.10552853

>>10552825
Then why are all model 1 games flat shaded? Gouraud is 4 independent colors blended across the face of the polygon, not just lit flat polygons.

From system16:
Video : Shading Flat Shading, Diffuse Reflection, Specula Reflection, 2 Layers of Background

It didn't have no 2D texture support, but it was very rudimentary. VF used large numbers of polygons to achieve stuff that could have been a single texture on other hardware and you don't do that when you have a robust texture mapping system.

Anonymous Thu Dec 28 19:47:11 2023 No.10552865

>>10552851
We're talking about VF here, they didn't need UV mapping for flat polygons.
But for the sake of argument if you did need to clip textured polygons you do what every other Saturn game had to do. You try to make the degenerate polygon as small as you can. Clip the larger polygon to the nearest 8x8 tile and let the small degenerate areas warp.

Anonymous Thu Dec 28 19:53:57 2023 No.10552884

>>10535995
>Never the console
>Never drew a dime
>Never had a good game outside Japan or that utilizes 3D capabilities
>Tanked the buyrate of Dreamcast so hard it caused Sega to stop making consoles
>Difficult to develop or emulate due to complicated architecture and use of quads
>Only the 3rd best-selling 5th generation console worldwide
>Only the 3rd best when it comes to 3D rendering performance
>Jannetty to PlayStation even later on in Japan
>Launch Daytona USA port so badly optimized Sega Rally guys had to code a better port
>Sonic game development shafted so badly that FIVE Genesis Sonic games have to be ported
>High reliance on arcade ports
>Every decent first-party Saturn game with international release had a PC port, further questioning relevance of Saturn
>Online services used by nobody
>Porn games literally allowed in Japan in pitiful attempt to get salarymen dimes, causing a ROM site to list a stripping game the most downloaded Saturn game at one point
>Existence pretty much erased from Sega's official history books outside Japan as a result of tanking Sega's console chances

>>	Anonymous Thu Dec 28 19:55:52 2023 No.10552889 >>10536546 Runs better, loads faster, and is more accurate on the Saturn. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9_zKATAm4vs

Anonymous Fri Dec 29 01:28:49 2023 No.10553653

>>10551372
>the port was fine
Anon, even Sega focused websites like Sega Retro admit the first version had problems. Sega didn't make the Remix version for literally no reason

https://segaretro.org/Virtua_Fighter#Versions
>On the Saturn, Virtua Fighter has issues rendering 3D content, with flickering polygons overlapping in odd ways (some of which occasionally disappear entirely), and animation issues, including an infamous bug where certain characters' feet to point in the wrong direction during their winning poses. The jerky camera of the arcade version is also carried over from the arcade game, and in some situations can behave worse than its arcade counterpart. Similar technical issues would be witnessed in Daytona USA, also created in parallel with the hardware.
>By the time of the Western release in mid-1995, Virtua Fighter compared unfavourably to other early Saturn/PlayStation fighting games, such as Battle Arena Toshinden. In response, Sega released Virtua Fighter Remix shortly before the Winter launch of Virtua Fighter 2, which addresses some of the concerns and textures the 3D models. Virtua Fighter Remix quickly became the de facto version of Virtua Fighter, being the new console pack-in and the basis for Virtua Fighter PC.

The first version looks like a fucking Atari Jaguar game compared to Virtua Fighter 2

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 29 01:57:35 2023 No.10553704 >>10553653 >The first version looks like a fucking Atari Jaguar game The first version looks like the Arcade game?

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 29 02:11:58 2023 No.10553728 >>10553704 >The first version looks like the Arcade game? Pretending to be an idiot isn't funny?

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 29 02:13:33 2023 No.10553731 >>10553728 www.youtube.com/watch?v=o7HQ2vspMHA

Anonymous Fri Dec 29 02:14:42 2023 No.10553736

Anon here. I'm well aware the Virtua Fighter Saturn port looks awful, but I deeply enjoyed messing with Sega fans, and having you reply to my posts. So I pretended to disagree. But my fun has run its course. Thank you for the amusement. It has been highly enjoyable.

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 29 02:26:48 2023 No.10553752 >>10553704 The arcade game has polygons constantly flickering and disappearing?

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 29 02:29:24 2023 No.10553760 >>10553752 Looks like you're moving the goal posts do you do that a lot?

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 29 02:39:01 2023 No.10553786 >>10553752 >The arcade game has polygons constantly flickering and disappearing? Maybe your eyes to need to be checked?

Anonymous Fri Dec 29 03:08:53 2023 No.10553869

>>10539493
>As for the tools, we literally have Sega's entire SDK that they gave to developers. The C libraries date back to 1993 and 1994 and are actually pretty good.
Then why do have devs on the record complaining what a pain in the shitter it was to use their SDKs then retard?

Anonymous Fri Dec 29 04:01:06 2023 No.10553981

>>10552736
>The Saturn was being designed since 92, model 1 didn't exist yet.
sup 'tard
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtua_Racing
>Virtua Racing or V.R. for short, is a Formula One racing video game developed by Sega AM2 and released for arcades in 1992. Virtua Racing was initially a proof-of-concept application for exercising a new 3D graphics platform under development, the "Model 1". The results were so encouraging that Virtua Racing was fully developed into a standalone arcade title.

Anonymous Fri Dec 29 04:28:06 2023 No.10554048

>>10552045
>Saturn did not need dual CPUs to achieve what was required for its generation. Other gaming systems achieved similar results with just 1 CPU.
Sega wanted a more powerful CPU to improve the Saturn's 3D performance after seeing the PS1 but Hitachi couldn't provide one fast enough. They suggested using a second SH-2 since one of the features was that it supported a master/slave configuration. Had Sega not been adamant about getting into a foot race with Sony to get the Saturn first to market they probably could have had a more powerful single CPU ready by fall 1995.

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 29 04:51:20 2023 No.10554110 >>10554048 They should have waited like Nintendo did with the N64. I have no idea why Sega was obsessed with beating Sony to market and trying to be "first". At the time, Sony was an untested brand in the gaming market.

Anonymous Fri Dec 29 04:59:05 2023 No.10554124

>>10554110
>I have no idea why Sega was obsessed with beating Sony to market and trying to be "first". At the time, Sony was an untested brand in the gaming market.
Because the Mega Drive was tanking in Japan and Kalinske was bullshitting about the unsold stock back in America. It wasn't so much to beat Sony, it was to produce a home console that was profitable.

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 29 05:08:32 2023 No.10554148 >>10553736 >Anon here lol stop larping. As if Anon would post here.

Anonymous Fri Dec 29 05:08:38 2023 No.10554149

>>10554110
There was a kernel of logic to it. SoJ had a problem because the Mega Drive was toast in Japan and they had nothing to replace it. Meanwhile their arcade division was making money hand over fist with games that couldn't be ported to console since there wasn't a console. So in their minds they needed to get the Saturn out as quickly as possible. SoA famously didn't want the Saturn right away because the Genesis was still kicking and they wanted to continue supporting it. I said above that the 32X could have solved everyone's problem by filling the gap. Shitcan the Nomad and CDX because those served nobody's interests. Launch the 32X and the Neptune simultaneously. Use the 32X as the platform for those early Model 1 games like Virtua Racing and Virtua Fighter. It would probably sell decently well in Japan if it were the exclusive way to own that game, at least well enough to justify support from fall 1994 through fall 1995. SoJ is happy because they get their best games in people's homes. SoA is happy because it gets to keep pumping out Genesis shit. And then the Saturn launches Fall 95 with Virtua Fighter 2. Sony would have about a year head start but you'd have that time to shore up your hardware to be more impressive as well as iron out any issues with launch library, available stock, cost, and all the other issues that plagued the early Saturn that spoiled it's first impression in the west.

Anonymous Fri Dec 29 05:17:07 2023 No.10554169

>>10554149
Different anon here. I actually grew up back then with a Genesis. If I were buying a 32x, then I would need more than 2 years of life to justify the purchase to my parents. The price of the 32x may have been "cheaper" but it was still a big commitment at $159.99 dollars with no pack in games. $159.99 could go towards the cost of an N64 or PS1. So the 32x can't be a "filler" system. They need to commit to it for a full cycle of 3 to 4 years.

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 29 05:17:39 2023 No.10554170 >>10554149 >Launch the 32X and the Neptune simultaneously. What is the fucking point of having both? I don't get it

Anonymous Fri Dec 29 05:19:46 2023 No.10554184

>>10554149
>Launch the 32X and the Neptune simultaneously
An even bigger waste of money
>SoA is happy because it gets to keep pumping out Genesis shit
Nigger SoA was in deep shit because they had tons of Genesis inventory sitting in their warehouse because retailers got sick of holding onto their unsold stock.

Anonymous Fri Dec 29 05:31:54 2023 No.10554213

>>10554169
I mean, you wouldn't have to retire it day and date with the Saturn launch but even if you did, it would have served it's purpose. What really fucked things up was releasing the 32X and Saturn nearly simultaneously. And then rushing the Doom port so it sucked balls while waiting too long to port Virtua Fighter to it, and instead rushing the SATURN port so it sucked balls. The whole thing was like Attention Deficit Disorder on a corporate scale. The right pieces were all there to have a competent plan. But instead of organizing what they had available they instead just threw everything all around the room like impatient chimpanzees.

If you want a comparison, the Virtual Boy was arguably Nintendo's 32X. But nobody really holds it against them in the same way because what Nintendo did was ultimately a smart move. The Virtual Boy was really just a thing they put out to fill the void left by the N64's delay. Yes, it sold like ass and people made fun of it. But when the N64 came out nobody was thinking about the Virtual Boy. It was rapidly retired and then out of sight, out of mind. I'm not saying Sega should have AIMED at doing something like that with the 32X. Ideally it would have done well enough to get adequate support for an extra year or so after the Saturn's launch. But the point is that even if it didn't then it would have still done it's job. One potential use of the 32X is as a middle-of-the-road platform for a lot of those 2D arcade games that were too much for 16-bit systems but didn't really need a fully next-gen machine. All those Neo Geo and CPS2 games, for example. Everyone loves them on Saturn but really the 32X could have done them with reasonable fidelity. Street Fighter Alpha would certainly be doable. Throw in arcade accurate ports of TMNT and The Simpsons (if Konami and Acclaim could have worked it out) and you have a pretty good library.

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 29 05:32:59 2023 No.10554217 >>10554170 Because if someone doesn't own a Genesis/Mega Drive they can buy the combo unit instead of the two separately.

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 29 07:26:19 2023 No.10554404 >>10554217 Couldn't they just sell it as a bundle?

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 29 11:34:17 2023 No.10554725 >>10536537 saturn came out in 1994. PS came out in 1995

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 29 13:16:42 2023 No.10554967 >>10554404 That's also an option, true.

Anonymous Fri Dec 29 13:38:07 2023 No.10555002 [DELETED]

File: 494 KB, 400x225, giphy-3320183804.gif [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

One game, I don't know why
The N shiity 4 doesn't have more to try
Keep that in mind, i designed this rhyme to explain to troonkind, what you already know.
Games are a valuable thing:
The ps1 has a variety of genres to sing
But the tendies just play 1 till the end of their days
Speed runners tick life away, it's so unreal
Then he trooned out down below,
Tossed his dick right out the window
Tryin' to hold on, didn't even know
He wasted his cock just to buy some rope

I invited everyone inside, and even though i tried to boot the ps1, he refused to start.
What it meant to me will eventually be
A memory of a time when i tried so hard

He trooned so hard, and speed runned so far
But in the end, it doesn't even matter
Ocarina, the only game
But in the end, it doesn't even matter

One game, I don't know why,
You keep playing ocarina when there's more to try.
Keep that in mind, I designed this rhyme
To remind myself how you trooned so hard.
In spite of the way you were mockin' me,
Ignoring the ps1 exclusive properties.
Remembering all the times fought with me
I'm surprised you're so gay.
Things are still the way you were before
Still a dude you just don't have a dick anymore.
Not that you ever tried them back then,
But it all comes back exclusives in the end

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 29 13:41:21 2023 No.10555010 >>10536256 The genesis shits on snes, tg16, and amiga

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 29 13:51:31 2023 No.10555027 >>10555002 this is pretty rich coming from a snoy

Anonymous Fri Dec 29 14:22:21 2023 No.10555075 [SPOILER]

File: 494 KB, 400x225, giphy-3320183804.gif [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

One game, I don't know why
The N shiity 4 doesn't have more to try
Keep that in mind, i designed this rhyme to explain to troonkind, what you already know.
Games are a valuable thing:
The ps1 has a variety of genres to sing
But the tendies just play 1 till the end of their days
Speed runners tick life away, it's so unreal
Then he trooned out down below,
Tossed his dick right out the window
Tryin' to hold on, didn't even know
He wasted his cock just to buy some rope

I invited everyone inside, and even though i tried to boot the ps1, he refused to start.
What it meant to me will eventually be
A memory of a time when i tried so hard

He trooned so hard, and speed runned so far
But in the end, it doesn't even matter
Ocarina, the only game
But in the end, it doesn't even matter

One game, I don't know why,
You keep playing ocarina when there's more to try.
Keep that in mind, I designed this rhyme
To remind myself how you trooned so hard.
In spite of the way you were mockin' me,
Ignoring the ps1 exclusive properties.
Remembering all the times fought with me
I'm surprised you're so gay.
Things are still the way you were before
Still a dude you just don't have a dick anymore.
Not that you ever tried them back then,
But it all comes back exclusives in the end

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 29 16:49:08 2023 No.10555449 >>10555075 I HATE your song, but I'll pretend I like it. Otherwise, the kids at my school won't talk to me. I thought you were gone, but you came back again. Whatever! In the end, it doesn't even matter.

Anonymous Fri Dec 29 17:36:03 2023 No.10555556

>>10554169
The N64 was still two years away at this point. Admittedly we didn't know that at the time but back then it seemed like the thing took forever to come out considering the hype. Honestly that year long delay probably hurt the N64 a ton. Had it come out in 1995 as planned it would have landed when the PS1 was still in it's early longbox phase, before major hits like Tomb Raider and Crash Bandicoot started showing up.

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 29 18:15:24 2023 No.10555662 >>10555010 >The genesis shits on snes, tg16, and amiga Quoted for TRUTH

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 29 18:46:49 2023 No.10555734 >>10555556 I don't think that could have saved nintendo

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 29 19:51:07 2023 No.10555859 >>10553653 Sega Retro is full of shit though. I had VF1 on my Saturn and I don't remember any of those bugs they detail there. Maybe the japanese first release had those bugs. and Remix looked worse, it had textures but it had no lightning.

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 29 20:03:16 2023 No.10555884 >>10555859 Yes anon everyone is full of shit except the memories of a fanboy.

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 29 20:07:09 2023 No.10555891 >>10554725 Actually PSX >JP: December 3, 1994 NA: September 9, 1995 SATURN >JP: November 22, 1994 NA: May 11, 1995

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 29 22:11:44 2023 No.10556156 >>10555859 Lets see you provide video then of your fixed version. You must have a rare as hell variant I'm sure everyone would be interested in seeing ripped.

Anonymous Fri Dec 29 22:17:23 2023 No.10556175
File: 408 KB, 698x545, Untitled.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

>>10555859
>and I don't remember
Anon, anyone can go on youtube and look at gameplay captured from real hardware and see that there are indeed problems. What you remember from when you were 8 years old doesn't mean anything when people have easily accessible information and proof about something

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5b3aDAH9adc&t=26s

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 29 22:38:50 2023 No.10556234 >>10556175 So where’s the proof?

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 29 22:40:02 2023 No.10556236 File: 47 KB, 622x622, ce6.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>10556234 What the fuck.

>>	Anonymous Fri Dec 29 23:04:20 2023 No.10556313 >>10556236 Where is the proof of bugs and it not looking like the arcade game

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 30 00:59:29 2023 No.10556576 >>10554184 >Genesis inventory sitting in their warehouse I wonder how many of those are still out there

Anonymous Sat Dec 30 01:11:01 2023 No.10556597

>>10554184
That inventory was returned because retailers thought Sega was shafting them by leaving them out of the Saturn launch (when in reality they didn't have the inventory to sell to everyone), so they threw out all their garbage on the spot.
32x having a shelf life of half a fucking year didn't help either.

so if you properly launch a 32x + neptune and then a Saturn with hardware that didn't suck in 1996, neither of these things would have been a problem.

Anonymous Sat Dec 30 01:30:03 2023 No.10556640

>>10556175
What exactly in this video shows buggy graphics, I don't see characters having their feet showing up backwards, polygon clipping/flickering/overlapping happened in every game for both Saturn and Playstation, the "disappearing polygons" happens for like 2 frames when the arena loads and btw VF2 also has that. Don't see much camera problems either.

Anonymous Sat Dec 30 01:42:41 2023 No.10556653

>>10554184
>Nigger SoA was in deep shit because they had tons of Genesis inventory sitting in their warehouse because retailers got sick of holding onto their unsold stock.

That's not what happened. Many chain stores (like KB Toys) returned all their Sega merchandise because of the dumb surprise Saturn launch. They were fed up with Sega not being business friendly to retailers, and making half-baked products. Sega lost all the goodwill they earned from the success of the Genesis, and the Saturn was the last straw for retailers. Many stores refused to carry any Sega merchandise ever again.

The failure here is SoJ forcing a surprise launch of Saturn. Not only was the system poorly thought out, but a ton of games were not ready for the early launch. Many Retailers didn't have any Saturns in stock either. If SoJ wanted to do an early launch, then they should have prepped for one. Very stupid and burned many bridges with retail companies.

Anonymous Sat Dec 30 02:13:33 2023 No.10556689

>>10556597
This is another thing. Sega drove its reputation into the dirt by releasing a new contraption every few months. The Nomad and CDX were both stupid and expensive and nobody bought them. Then the Saturn launch was a catastrophe where they sprung it on everyone, screwing several major retailers. Fixing the basic strategy would have gone a long way.

>>	Anonymous Sat Dec 30 06:44:04 2023 No.10557090 I think Sega nailed their brand. Disappointment.

Anonymous Sat Dec 30 15:23:28 2023 No.10557787

>>10556689
The CDX and Nomad were pretty cool since they gave you added functionality (one was a portable CD player, the other was a handheld with hardware that finally did not suck, shame about the battery usage). If you want "retarded new contraption of the month", look at the Sega CD, Laseractive, X-Eye, Pico, Activator, or having second models for the Genesis, Sega CD, Game Gear (and in europe for the Master System). All of those were unnecessary, sold badly, and split their focus.

Anonymous Sat Dec 30 15:50:20 2023 No.10557861

>>10557787
Sega only needed 1 console and 1 handheld (maybe). No more than that. No add-ons either.

>The CDX and Nomad were pretty cool
From an engineering perspective they were neat. If someone gave one to me, then I would be grateful and enjoy it. But from a business perspective of someone running Sega, they were a bad idea. It split the limited resources of the company.

Sega did not have infinite money. They were an arcade company that happened to also make consoles as a side hustle. Then they accidently struck it big with the Sega Genesis release in America and Europe. But even then, their arcade division made more money. Sega should have focused on keeping expenses in check like Nintendo does. They were not a mega giant hardware company like Sony.

>Sega CD, Laseractive, X-Eye, Pico, Activator, or having second models for the Genesis, Sega CD
>All of those were unnecessary, sold badly, and split their focus.

Don't forget the Mega Jet. A Sega Genesis for airplanes. Airlines didn't really buy them. They sold a few to Japan Airlines for first class customers, but that's it. No other airline bought them afaik. So it wasn't worth the investment for Sega to make it.

Anonymous Sat Dec 30 19:49:51 2023 No.10558460

>>10557787
The CDX was stupidly expensive for a portable CD player though. You could have gotten a Discman for like $100 at the time. The CDX meanwhile was around $400 and much bigger than a typical portable CD player to boot. Nobody was going to be carrying around a heavy ass portable CD player that was also 4x as expensive and probably more fragile. And the battery usage in the Nomad made it automatically a laughing stock. Everyone instinctively knew that the thing would get 2 hours battery life max, which was appalling for a portable. But you're right. If those were the only two things Sega did it wouldn't have been as bad but added to everything else on your list it ended up diluting the brand. Every day there was some new contraption that even a 10 year old could recognize as either being totally redundant, having a critical flaw, or both. The Saturn's terrible launch was only part of the story. It was the biggest part but if you look at what Sega was doing in 1994/1995 it was utter chaos. Even down to the games themselves, the Genesis had a string of random ass new IPs that they barely acknowledged again before moving on. They were constantly throwing shit at a wall and seeing what would stick and consumers instinctively recoiled at how unreliable it seemed. Nintendo and Sony both had a clear strategy.

Anonymous Sat Dec 30 20:50:22 2023 No.10558632

>>10558460
>Sega was doing in 1994/1995 it was utter chaos. Even down to the games themselves, the Genesis had a string of random ass new IPs that they barely acknowledged again before moving on. They were constantly throwing shit at a wall and seeing what would stick and consumers instinctively recoiled at how unreliable it seemed.

It's funny you say that because even today, Sega is still run like a weird monkey house. You would think that a bankruptcy would fix things. But nope. Very odd decision making, and Japanese Executives being out of touch with the Western market. Casting YouTubers (with no voice acting experience) to voice your game characters is an absolute disaster.

Anonymous Sun Dec 31 00:24:19 2023 No.10559101

>>10558460
>a string of random ass new IPs that they barely acknowledged again before moving on

Many popular Genesis IPs got at least 2 games. Sonic, Ecco, Streets of Rage, Eternal Champions, Columns, Shinobi, Shining Force, just from the top of my head.

>>	Anonymous Sun Dec 31 07:30:13 2023 No.10559831 >>10559101 Most of those are earlier. I'm talking about stuff like Ristar, Comix Zone, even Vectorman. Yes there were a few sequels here and there but the franchises stopped cold very abruptly.

>>	Anonymous Sun Dec 31 14:21:20 2023 No.10560498 >>10552085 >Jaguar My most favorite obscure console system. Had games on it like doom with a couple of maps exclusive to the system and fighting games like kasumi ninja. Side scrollers played nice too. Imo, it was ahead of its time.

>>	Anonymous Sun Dec 31 14:23:33 2023 No.10560503 File: 1022 KB, 1600x1600, 1703978407687288.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>10560498 Forgot pic

Anonymous Sun Dec 31 23:38:21 2023 No.10561834
File: 627 KB, 1205x1920, Tomb Raider Saturn vs PS1 Lara's House.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

>>10546748
> Tomb Raider's draw distance

See pic related for some clearer examples

>>10549563

>>10547231
>people will post the Mega Man X4 spotlights with no further elaboration

The thing that bugs me the most about retards posting the Megaman mesh transparencies isn't the fact that they look like actual transparencies when played on a CRT TV over a composite connection like 99.99% of people in the mid 90s were using (instead of using emulator shots, which they always use), but the cold hard fact is if you walk literally ten feet to the right in X4 you'll see a literal tunnel made of transparent glass.

Anyone who unironically posts this image is a cherrypicking retard.

>>	Anonymous Sun Dec 31 23:41:36 2023 No.10561847 >>10561834 >the fact that they look like actual transparencies when played on a CRT TV over a composite connection ...until the second that they overlap.

Anonymous Sun Dec 31 23:41:39 2023 No.10561848
File: 384 KB, 1198x918, Tomb Raider Saturn vs PS1 The Colosseum.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

>>10561834
Another example of the draw distance differences between the two versions. It would be interesting to see how much of the performance improvements the PS1 version had over the Saturn were due to scaling back the rendered geometry (as opposed to the PS1 having a significantly more straightforward CPU and GPU setup).

Anonymous Sun Dec 31 23:47:35 2023 No.10561858
File: 3.04 MB, 1280x720, Megaman X4 Saturn.webm [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

>>10561847
True, but let's be honest here, no one noticed or cared that the searchlights you see for one and a half seconds at the very beginning of the game (and then never see again) looked a little weird when they overlapped back in 1997.

The Saturn version also has some exclusive visual effects, the most obvious being the heat wave background effect in Magma Dragoon's stage that the PS1 version is lacking. This is not counting the various other technical differences, like the PS1 version not being able to loop music tracks properly.

Anonymous Sun Dec 31 23:56:24 2023 No.10561880
File: 38 KB, 320x240, 16068520-alien-trilogy-sega-saturn-episode-1-the-colony-science-labs-satu[1].png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

>>10561847
>>10561858
>>10539903

That is what Megaman X4 actually looks like when played on actual hardware and not an emulator. You see the overlap for a split second at the very beginning of the level and that is it.

Using emulator shots of Saturn games with transparencies is particularly retarded as modern Saturn emulators have the ability to turn mesh transparencies into true transparencies (not just by blurring, like the hardware itself counted on). The only person still seeing mesh transparencies with no way to fix the problem are people playing Saturn games on actual hardware either using S-Video or some form of RGB connections, and those people are such hardcore Segafags that they don't care.

Using Megaman X4 is double retarded because there are other games that have a significantly more egregious use of mesh transparencies (and are even multiplat so they can be compared against the Playstation version), specifically games like Resident Evil (the water in the plant room, especially bad in the flooded lab with the sharks), or games like Alien Trilogy (pic related) or Die Hard Arcade that feature a lot of glass. Using those would require actually playing the games for a few minutes instead of just firing it up and taking a screenshot the second the game starts though.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 1 00:47:00 2024 No.10561991 >>10561848 >>10561834 I always find this funny when people use it as an argument Let's see the performance

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 1 02:13:03 2024 No.10562179 >>10547037 What is this fat slob yammering on about? Where's the decadence in renaissance paintings or Greek sculptures? People do watch movies. What on earth is he on about?

Anonymous Mon Jan 1 03:15:31 2024 No.10562275

>>10559831
Comix Zone had a Saturn sequel planned but management said no. Ristar was a typical crappy sonic team one shot. Vectorman got a sequel on the Megadrive, and a planned PS2 sequel that got through several iterations (first it looked like the original game, then as a Halo-like TPS) and got shot down because it was always a trash game.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 1 03:32:12 2024 No.10562321 >>10556653 Not really how it went, Sega didn't have enough Saturns manufactured at the time it came in USA, retailers got mad because they COULDN'T sell the Saturn we it actually mattered.

Anonymous Mon Jan 1 03:49:48 2024 No.10562354

>>10562321
That was just the final nail in the coffin. They were also mad that Sega dropped some new hardware every few months that got dropped completely when the next feature-of-the-month came out. Kalinske flooded the market and drove the brand into the fucking ground.

Anonymous Mon Jan 1 03:57:04 2024 No.10562364

>>10562321
True but it was even worse than that. The surprise launch also fucked retailers who did get Saturns to sell because they weren't ready. There were no printed materials, no advertisements ready, not even shelf space reserved for it. Then you had other retailers who hadn't placed orders yet because they thought the launch was months away so they saw their competitors selling merch ahead of them. Back then in the brick and mortar days executive buyers (the people conventions like E3 and CES really were for) would have quite a bit of power. And Sega pissed off every single one of them.

Anonymous Mon Jan 1 04:06:49 2024 No.10562382

>>10562354
>They were also mad that Sega dropped some new hardware every few months

> Genesis released in Japan in August of 1989
> Sega CD released in Japan in December of 1991
> 32X released in Japan in December of 1994

Console --> 2 years --> addon --> 3 years --> addon is a pretty big difference from "every few months" you fucking retard.

Anonymous Mon Jan 1 04:36:32 2024 No.10562416

>>10562321
>retailers got mad because they COULDN'T sell the Saturn we it actually mattered.

This is not how retail works. This guy
>>10562364
pretty much has it. Even ignoring the whole promotional side of things, which takes a lot of prep and money, shelf space is all planned out and spoken for, and usually negotiated with suppliers, months in advance. All of that stuff is planned, usually at the district level, over a long period using a bunch of personal relationships between store and district managers, and their contacts with suppliers. Sega just called up the retailers with zero notice and said "LOL GONNA NEED YOU TO CLEAR OFF A BUNCH OF SHELF SPACE FOR US RIGHT NOW CHIEF"
That fucks stores hard, because the retailing layouts are planned months in advance and usually specific companies and suppliers have negotiated specific areas and at least a specific percentage of display space. Now all of that goes out the window, and in order to get Saturns onto shelves, managers had to call companies who'd negotiated deals with them and ask them if they could just break that arrangement a little bit with no notice in order to benefit a third party (or even competitor). That alone is a huge hassle and damages relationships with other companies. Retail was furious and that's why entire chains just said "fuck you, Sega" and refused to carry the Saturn.
Then you get into print advertising, TV spots, having big displays designed and printed up, etc etc, all of which had been done and paid for, for a September date.
I went into Toys R Us on launch day and they had a pile of Saturns and one used TV with Virtua Fighter playing, just sitting on a folding table because they didn't have any actual displays printed or shelf space to put them on.

Anonymous Mon Jan 1 04:40:43 2024 No.10562424

>>10562382
>32X released in Japan in December of 1994
In the US the 32X was released in November, the same day Japan released the Saturn. People knew the 32x was going to be abandoned because the Sega CD had only a handful of good games and it was quickly abandoned, of course nobody was going to support the 32X.

Anonymous Mon Jan 1 04:48:30 2024 No.10562440

>>10562424
I bought a 32X because I genuinely could not believe those assholes would just drop it after a few months, and I wanted to keep my Genesis library. I figured it'd be a good budget companion to my Saturn for a year or two.
I bought a PlayStation. Imagine just deciding to fuck your early adopters like that. They should've just incorporated a 68000 in the Saturn design, thus allowing Genesis backwards compatibility through the cart slot

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 1 04:56:53 2024 No.10562449 >>10562382 You're ignoring all the random Genesis variants.

Anonymous Mon Jan 1 05:05:46 2024 No.10562462

>>10562440
To be fair, the 32x was made has a budget alternative to the Saturn (because that ALWAYS works) and depending of when you bought it it was pretty cheap, sadly nobody really supported it.
> allowing Genesis backwards compatibility through the cart slot
Personally I think there was no way to make the Saturn a huge success in the US, Sony made the right choice by focusing on only allowing 3D games on the PlayStation early years, the Saturn 3D graphics, usually, were inferior to the PlayStation and sprites were considered obsolete by the normies.
>>10562449
And the Game Gear, but at least sega tried to keep it alive.

Anonymous Mon Jan 1 05:13:41 2024 No.10562474

>>10562416
It's honestly amazing that adults with careers in the business thought that would be a success instead of a shitshow. It's the kind of thing a 14 year old imagines because, sure, it sounds cool that the thing you thought was months away can be bought right now. But a 14 year old kid isn't obligated to understand the nuances of the business. Fucking Sega executives are. Even if they thought consumers would like it, the people you're actually working with to get the product to those consumers are also pretty important to keep happy.

Anonymous Mon Jan 1 05:18:45 2024 No.10562487

>>10562462
>Sony made the right choice by focusing on only allowing 3D games on the PlayStation early years, the Saturn 3D graphics, usually, were inferior to the PlayStation and sprites were considered obsolete by the normies.
The story that the guys from SGI called up Kalinske saying they had a design for a consumer CPU that'd be perfect for a game console, Kalinske ran it up to Japan and got told no, they were going with the Hitachi clusterfuck, so the chip ended up being the core of the N64, is just depressing. So many chances to get it right and they literally made the worst choice at every possible step
I'm still mad about the 32X and I never bought another Sega anything. Who fucks their most enthusiastic customers right before you need them to shell out for the next system?

>>10562474
I can't get over how Sega was tired of getting their ass kicked by Nintendo, so they hired this guy Kalinske from Mattel, and they hated what he told them to do but went with his ideas, and became the #1 video game company because of them. But then all that success he delivered made them look bad so they hated him and froze him out of the decision making process, and then they promptly torched their relationships with retailers, third party developers and consumers and drove the company directly into the grave.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 1 05:21:03 2024 No.10562494 >>10562449 No, I'm not, because the "random Genesis variants" are all the exact same system. Releasing a Genesis 2 that plays every game a Genesis 1 does is not "abandoning" the Genesis 1. For fuck's sake, anon. Use your head.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 1 05:27:08 2024 No.10562507 >>10535995 They just fucked up the pricing . Had they sold it for 299 things would have been different. Also all the infighting at sega Japan vs US corp didn't help matters.

Anonymous Mon Jan 1 05:31:03 2024 No.10562515
File: 1.90 MB, 4000x2252, 20231219_212555.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

>>10535995
collecting for this thing is still fun. Often times theres better deals are on the Japan region disks.. afterburner 2 is a super scaler that could not have looked at good on either the PS1 or the N64. The saturn gets a perfect arcade port.

Anonymous Mon Jan 1 05:39:35 2024 No.10562520

>>10562440
> They should've just incorporated a 68000 in the Saturn design, thus allowing Genesis backwards compatibility through the cart slot
Yes, because apparently the genesis contains a 68000 and nothing else. Also, the Saturn already contained a 68k cpu, but the genesis is far more than just a cpu.

Anonymous Mon Jan 1 05:40:16 2024 No.10562524

>>10562474
It's not a terrible idea, all they had to do was contact the retailers months in advance, that way Sega was going to have a huge moment at E3 and the retailers could happily stock the Saturn.
>>10562487
Sega's real failure was, what I like to call, the sega civil war, both sega of japan and sega of america hated each other and that's the reason why they released half baked products. However, I'm impressed the sega Saturn turned out to be such a charming system and it's success in Japan shows that even with all it's flaws it's still a good system, sadly, we almost got a great system but corporate drama got in the way.
>>10562515
Quick question, is it better to buy a model 1 or a model 2 Saturn (both japanese), A guy near me is selling both and I'm not sure which one to pick.

Anonymous Mon Jan 1 05:48:18 2024 No.10562535

>>10562524
>Sega's real failure was, what I like to call, the sega civil war, both sega of japan and sega of america hated each other and that's the reason why they released half baked products
Japanese business culture is so weird. The egos are almost unimaginable. It must've driven them insane to have the gaijin be right, even though that's what they hired him for

>>10562520
It would've been pretty simple to do at the blank-sheet stage. It clearly wasn't a priority

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 1 05:50:06 2024 No.10562540 >>10562487 >But then all that success he delivered made them look bad so they hated him Sounds like Carlos Ghosn type situation

Anonymous Mon Jan 1 05:51:43 2024 No.10562542

>>10562524
Well, you can't go wrong with either but the model 1 has an advantage of having an access light led. It's simply a little led that flashes to show the optical drive is loading stuff.

This access led is missing on the model 2.

The advantage of the model one's access led is that the flashes can be helpful for performing a disk swap trick. This is useful for flashing a pseudo saturn Kai rom onto an action replay cart. Nowadays though, it's easy to just buy a pseudo saturn Kai cart already made off Ali express or wherever. The usefulness of model one access led is a little more limited lately.

I actually modded my model 2 to have the second led to enable me to do the disk swap trick but this was before you could buy pseudo saturn Kai carts.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 1 05:54:28 2024 No.10562547 >>10562542 Good to know, I assume there is no issues with ODE like Fenrir, right? (Not sure if I'm going to mod it)

Anonymous Mon Jan 1 05:55:00 2024 No.10562550

>>10562540
thinking about Kalinske smuggling himself out of a country in Sonic The Hedgehog luggage

>>10562524
>Quick question, is it better to buy a model 1 or a model 2 Saturn (both japanese

Model 1 has better sound, a factory lowpass filter that they cut on the later models. Model 2 looks cooler

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 1 05:57:40 2024 No.10562554 >>10535995 They bet on Hitachi and System 32 style graphics and lost. GTE was just better at spitting polygons out, as janky as they were, and Silicon Graphics shit in N64 was basically a prototype for modern graphics.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 1 05:57:43 2024 No.10562556 >>10562535 >It would've been pretty simple to do at the blank-sheet stage. It clearly wasn't a priority Yes, but it would still be extra dead weight burning up precious silicon budget.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 1 05:59:38 2024 No.10562560 >>10562550 Wearing a Sonic mascot costume - the perfect disguise

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 1 06:01:39 2024 No.10562565 >>10562556 That's the thinking that put them out of the console business 2bh lol, actually the dead weight might've forced them to go with a non-retarded architecture

Anonymous Mon Jan 1 06:07:48 2024 No.10562579

>>10562524
>Sega's real failure was, what I like to call, the sega civil war, both sega of japan and sega of america hated each other

That's not exactly true. Sega of Japan put a very successful CEO in charge of Sega of America. He made the Genesis successful in North America. They sold 30 million Sega Genesis. (Japan only sold 3 million and was considered a failure in its own country).

Then Sega of Japan started tightening its rules and dictating how to market and sell Sega products outside of Japan. Normally I'm fine with that. Sega of Japan is the head office. They make the rules.

HOWEVER Sega of Japan had ZERO idea how to market Sega products outside of Japan. The Japanese Executives were also not properly aware of the different rules and regulations of doing retail business in other countries.

(For example in America, you are required to have several million reserve units of a retail product in storage in case there is a surge in demand. Every company had to do this. Even Nintendo, Sony, etc. They all had to keep a reserve stock in storage even if it's not a popular item anymore.)

Anyway, Japanese Executives started making decisions that didn't work. Bizzarre Saturn marketing campaign (white bald lady), and ordering a surprise early Saturn launch. This frustrated Sega of America AND Sega of Europe. It also damaged retail relations even further. Sega already had a rocky relationship with retailers since they were known for not supporting their products for very long after release (Game Gear, Sega CD, Nomad, CDX, Sega 32x, etc). All very short lives.
Surprise launch of the Saturn was the last straw. Many businesses boycotted selling Sega products.

> However, I'm impressed the sega Saturn turned out to be such a charming system and it's success in Japan shows

Saturn was only mildly successful in Japan. Every where else in the world it was a massive failure. It cost Sega hundreds of millions of dollars and put them in deep financial debt.

Anonymous Mon Jan 1 06:22:53 2024 No.10562615

>>10562579
>Saturn was only mildly successful in Japan.
Not so sure about that, I could be wrong but I'm sure it out sold the N64 and was able to hold decent sales for most of it's live. Sure it wasn't a huge success but considering that the mega drive was a flop in Japan and the playstation dominated the market it did pretty well.

Anonymous Mon Jan 1 06:26:36 2024 No.10562625 [DELETED]

>>10562547
>I assume there is no issues with ODE like Fenrir, right?

I'd assume it's fine but personally im not familiar with the fenier drive emulator. I'd just try to be sure to buy the right one should there be any difference between the fenrir drives. Maybe they have different ones for different versions of the saturn?

The led mod for the model2 is pretty simple. There's a few pads right on top the optical drive. With the system powered on with the disk loaded you can feel around on the pads until you find the bouncy voltage signal. Old style multimeter with analog gauge work better for finding the bouncy pads. That's where the led goes.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 1 06:32:36 2024 No.10562634 >>10562615 Sega relied mostly on its wildly successful arcade reputation in Japan to push the Saturn. Everyone in Japan wanted to see Virtua Fighter 1 arcade on Saturn.

Anonymous Mon Jan 1 06:33:10 2024 No.10562635 [DELETED]

>>10562547 #
>I assume there is no issues with ODE like Fenrir, right?

I'd assume it's fine but personally im not familiar with the fenier drive emulator. I'd just try to be sure to buy the right one should there be any difference between the fenrir drives. Maybe they have different ones for different versions of the saturn?

The led mod for the model2 is pretty simple. There's a few pads right on top the optical drive. With the system powered on with the disk loaded you can feel around on the pads until you find the bouncy voltage signal. Old style multimeter with analog gauge work better for finding the bouncy pads. That's where the led goes. I believe there is a youtube video (not mine) that shows this process on the model2.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 1 06:49:21 2024 No.10562660 >>10562634 Makes sense, Saturn japanese library is full of arcade games, especially fighting games.

Anonymous Mon Jan 1 06:53:10 2024 No.10562662

>>10562579
>HOWEVER Sega of Japan had ZERO idea how to market Sega products outside of Japan.
The weirdest thing for me is that they understood this, which is why they hired Kalinske away from Mattel in the first place. And then he was right, and they hated him for doing the job they hired him to do

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 1 07:05:33 2024 No.10562679 >>10536050 >Mario 64 is worse than every SNES Mario hahahahahaha >and Crash and Spyro are worse than every Genesis Sonic game HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 1 07:10:37 2024 No.10562691 >>10562579 Game gear had 5 years of life span, that's their second most lasting console unless we count the Master system in yuropoor and Brazil.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 1 07:11:51 2024 No.10562692 >>10562679 Mario 64 is leaps and bounds above the SNES games but classic Sonic is easily better than Crash/Spyro

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 1 07:16:55 2024 No.10562704 >>10562579 >They sold 30 million Sega Genesis Is the correct plural of Sega Genesis "Sega Genesises" or "Sega Geneses"?

Anonymous Mon Jan 1 07:19:56 2024 No.10562707

>>10562679
>hahahahahaha
Not that anon but it's true. I played Mario 64 as a kid having grown up with SNES Mario, and the graphics were very jarring. You did get used to it though and it was moderately fun in its own way but felt way easier and more cartoonish that SMW.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 1 07:20:02 2024 No.10562708 >>10562494 The XEye, CDX and Nomad, anon.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 1 07:25:15 2024 No.10562717 >>10562708 None of these 'invalidated' the earlier versions, because the earlier versions still worked in the exact same way and had the exact same functionality.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 1 07:25:40 2024 No.10562718 >>10562615 >I'm sure it out sold the N64 Only by about 300,000 units

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 1 07:26:55 2024 No.10562721 >>10562717 But they did piss off retailers because Sega kept selling them merch that nobody wanted.

Anonymous Mon Jan 1 07:42:31 2024 No.10562754

>>10562707

I played Mario 64 as a kid having grown up with SNES Mario and always having good gaming PCs, and that shit was like those videos where colorblind people see the full spectrum for the first time. I'll never forget figuring out that you could just gently push on the stick and Mario would sneak past the sleeping chomps without waking them up

Anonymous Mon Jan 1 07:43:00 2024 No.10562756

>>10562691
>Game gear had 5 years of life span, that's their second most lasting
Yeah but the 2nd half of its life Sega heavily slowed down releases for it, and eventually closed its hand held division within Sega. Retailers do not like when companies abandon products like that.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 1 07:46:04 2024 No.10562760 >>10562754 I guess my particular type of autism preferred the more precision movements of SMW

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 1 08:06:39 2024 No.10562782 >>10562760 fair, they're definitely different games

Anonymous Mon Jan 1 11:53:03 2024 No.10563097
File: 80 KB, 640x480, 1703710601521725.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

>>10561834
>Anyone who unironically posts this image is a cherrypicking retard.
- First of all, I wasn't the original retard who said The Saturn does 2D better than the psx when it cannot even display two sprites overlapped. Apparently, the Saturn is much better as long as you ignore real life examples, because measuring in a vacuum it's more valuable than considering what actually happened.
- Second, it is not just one cherrypicked example, the article contains more examples >>10549976.
- Third, the article has all the elaboration you need which you ignored yet called everyone else a retard while trying to deflect criticism by saying real examples are now "cherrypicked".

Do not bother, 30 years later you won't change history no matter how many real cases of Saturn fuck ups you diminish. Stop being such a retarded fanboys.

>B-but I didn't notice it!, therefore it never happened! Reset the count!

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 1 12:19:50 2024 No.10563147 >>10563097 It actually can overlap sprites with transparencies but only the background layer.

Anonymous Mon Jan 1 14:37:52 2024 No.10563380

>>10562382
good, now use the US release dates, since we are talking about US retailers, and add the dates for the game gear (+tv tuner, battery pack, car charger, magnifier glass), pico, two models of sega cd, x eye, laseractive, 6 button pad, activator, sega channel, 32x, menacer light gun (used by TWO games in total one of them was on the Sega CD), Sega Power Strip, every other bullshit peripheral I forgot, and the pack-in combo deals.

>>10562494
>but they are all the same system
That only matters for developers. For retailers you have to stock all of those variants in numbers and put them on the shelf so people can see them and buy them. You have to run print ads and TV ads for them, send product guides to retailers and whatnot. And then most of them don't sell AT ALL because the market wasn't adults buying five new things every month, it was kids who were allowed to pick one or two things by their parents for their birthday/xmas/when they do good at school/when they collected enough allowance or mowed enough lawns. Basically every two or three months only. And nobody bought a fucking Game Gear TV Tuner in favor of Earthworm Jim or Mortal Kombat.

Sega flooded the retail chains with junk that sold poorly. So why waste store space for all that when they could just fill the shelves with playstations instead, which people are actually buying?

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 1 14:38:56 2024 No.10563382 >>10562550 >Model 1 has better sound, a factory lowpass filter that they cut on the later models. Model 2 looks cooler He was asking Saturn, not Genesis. For Saturn the model 1 looks cooler and the hardware is all but identical.

Anonymous Mon Jan 1 14:41:15 2024 No.10563385

>>10562615
>I could be wrong but I'm sure it out sold the N64

N64 was also a failure in Japan. It was literally saved by the US sales where it sold in the tens of millions. Except that Nintendo did not start fucking their american branch in the ass because they did their job better.

Anonymous Mon Jan 1 14:46:11 2024 No.10563397

>>10562754
>I'll never forget figuring out that you could just gently push on the stick and Mario would sneak past the sleeping chomps without waking them up

I'll never forget why people made a big fucking thing out of this, because the sleeping piranha plants had a limited range. You could run around them easily. Sneaking was useless in the game.

And literally every publication, magazine, demo, tv spot, everything pointed out that you could sneak as a groundbreaking feature of the next-gen analog stick. So literally nobody had to figure that shit out, we all knew it before we even played the game.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 1 14:47:23 2024 No.10563402 >>10562704 Mega Drives

Anonymous Mon Jan 1 19:18:43 2024 No.10564005

>>10563380
>And nobody bought a fucking Game Gear TV Tuner in favor of Earthworm Jim or Mortal Kombat.
I swear to God this thing was nowhere to be found in my area because I actually did want it. For whatever reason a lot of places weren't stocking a lot of Game Gear accessories and eventually my aunt just bought me a dedicated portable TV. I guess that's some anecdotal evidence stores were getting fed up with Sega.

Anonymous Mon Jan 1 20:08:08 2024 No.10564108

>>10564005
It was a niche accessory. Game Gear wasn't doing great and Nintendo was dominating the market. Plus Sega was being a spaz with releasing a ton of accessories, add-ons, revised hardware, etc. Sega couldnt just stick to 1 console and 1 handheld. Nope. So stores were very selective about what Sega merchandise they carried.

To get the TV tuner, you probably had to bust out the phone book and look up game stores in your area. Then call each one on the phone to ask about it until you found a store that carried one (which would often be far away and your parents would think you're crazy for wanting to drive that far and say no). Or go to your local indie game, and ask them to special order it and pay a deposit.

>>	Anonymous Mon Jan 1 20:24:21 2024 No.10564141 >>10535995 It was just very mesy to progra, the Saturn could do a lot of cool but complex stuff, but also could do similar no so cool but easier to progra stuff. Guess what most dev studios did under thight time/budget ?

Anonymous Tue Jan 2 00:43:15 2024 No.10564765

>>10562179
Hey, anon! Saw your post just now, sorry. The fat dude is Jean Renoir, a French film director. The picture I posted, not made by me, is based on an old interview he gave. When I first saw the image (not on 4chan), there was also a link to the interview. I didn't include it in my post, so it's my fault the lack of context.

The director's intent is about technology, but he throws the word technique a few times, giving the impression that, by your example, a Greek sculpture would suck because the technique used was very polished. That's not what the interview was about. Technology, or, to put it better, human laziness is the problem he discourse about. When you have all the best tools at your disposal, and an easy way to accomplish something, you take that route and call it a day. For mundane chores, that's indeed the best option. For art, however, things quickly become derivative and your lack of passion or artistic feeling shows off. When the technique is primitive, you really have to exert yourself to impress and end up with a good result; thus, artists from the old have to be real good to cause some impact. If we have perfected techniques at our disposal, anyone can get a "good enough" result, overflowing the market with insipid creations and overshadowing better artistic efforts.

tl;dr: to produce good art, an artist shouldn't rely only on technology, but also on his creativity, effort and passion.

Anonymous Tue Jan 2 00:56:43 2024 No.10564798

>>10564765
There's a theory that abstract and impressionist art became way more common after the invention of photography because prior to that you really wanted to replicate what you could see. But afterwards, once you could photograph whatever you wanted, art evolved to be more fanciful and imaginative because now you wanted to be able to capture the stuff that you couldn't otherwise see.

Anonymous Tue Jan 2 03:56:22 2024 No.10565212

>>10564798
Makes sense. It's really hard to stand out if your work is more of the same. Going with an alternate way has more chance to make your work significant. Surely, that alone isn't enough. We all have already seen lame attempts that try to be different just for the sake of being different. Taking the risk to annoy some people on this board, I'd say game developer Treasure falls into this category quite nicely. When their founding members were working at Konami, they were bummed to be forced to create polished, though derivative games. When freed from that company, they vowed to never be creatively stuck again. Their Mega Drive days were blessed with a healthy balance of innovation and polish. When ideas began running out, and feeling indebted to their previous oath, they fell into desperation and started to throw around many random ideias and gimmicks, just to differentiate themselves, with low regard to gameplay. This kind of stunt never works out, and Treasure ended up having to reinsert themselves into the corporate wheel.

>>	Anonymous Tue Jan 2 18:08:09 2024 No.10566526 >>10563385 N64 had several million seller games in Japan.

>>	Anonymous Wed Jan 3 04:34:01 2024 No.10568247 Why does nobody ever talk about the fact that the PS1 can't handle 2D coming from a console made in the late '80s? The ps1's 2d is so bad it can't properly handle half games for the neo geo.

>>	Anonymous Wed Jan 3 04:43:22 2024 No.10568271 >>10568247 because it's not rendering the same way It does 2D the best way it can

>>	Anonymous Wed Jan 3 04:53:33 2024 No.10568306 >>10568247 Metal Slug X is very impressive on the PS1 and I doubt it could even be accomplished on the Saturn without a ram cart.

>>	Anonymous Wed Jan 3 04:57:23 2024 No.10568309 >>10545798 >too much effort for western code shitters >says this on an x86/ARM device

>>	Anonymous Wed Jan 3 04:59:10 2024 No.10568316 >>10568306 well that's just bullshit

>>	Anonymous Wed Jan 3 04:59:25 2024 No.10568318 >>10568306 The Saturn handled both 1&2 which the PlayStation struggled with just fine.

>>	Anonymous Wed Jan 3 05:02:42 2024 No.10568328 >>10536607 >Yet some of the system's biggest games released near the end How many of these were in the Saturn's top 10 bestsellers

>>	Anonymous Wed Jan 3 05:34:35 2024 No.10568402 File: 167 KB, 1406x791, 28stolar-01-videoSixteenByNineJumbo1600.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>10535995 >Why was the Shiturn so technologically behind the PS1 and N64? The mind boggles

>>	Anonymous Wed Jan 3 10:46:45 2024 No.10569072 >>10568402 The Saturn actually had textures rather than the N64's Vaseline smears.

>>	Anonymous Wed Jan 3 11:46:39 2024 No.10569197 >>10569072 Textures are a crutch for both bad programmers and bad players.

>>	Anonymous Wed Jan 3 11:58:19 2024 No.10569217 >>10569072 another one that only knows these systems through emulation

>>	Anonymous Wed Jan 3 12:05:56 2024 No.10569231 File: 20 KB, 320x224, Virtua_Racing_Saturn,_Tracks,_Alpine.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google] >>10569197 flat shaded polygon bros...

>>	Anonymous Wed Jan 3 16:04:27 2024 No.10569624 >>10568318 >The Saturn handled both 1&2 which the PlayStation struggled with just fine. The Saturn only had Metal Slug 1, not 2, and it was the worst port of the game with near constant slowdown and up to 1 frame of input lag.

>>	Anonymous Wed Jan 3 16:18:25 2024 No.10569662 >>10569624 Still better than PS1 which couldn't even load half the arcade sprites

Anonymous Wed Jan 3 17:45:18 2024 No.10569863
File: 2.01 MB, 1641x2200, 1649187194892.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

>>10561858
Mega Man X4 started development on Saturn if the early magazine coverage is anything to go by which would explain some things. Clearly the PS1 is able to loop music but they probably did a slapdash port to get both versions shipped same day.

Anonymous Wed Jan 3 19:09:32 2024 No.10570105

>>10569863
Nta, sorry for barging in. Interesting pic. See the top left picture and you'll see the unblended dithering of the spotlight. Why am I bringing this up? Because young players think (even here in this very thread) that all we had was shitty TVs and composite/RF cables. It's far from the truth. Even 4th-gen consoles could do s-video out of the box, and, whoever could, used them. Dithering was frowned upon, and I clearly remember reviews like Toshinden complaining that the Saturn used meshes for Ellis pants, compared to the transparency provided by the PS1.

Look, I prefer Saturn over PS1 any day of the week, but composite became bad as soon as you had access to something better. Some people might look at the RGB fad from mid-00s and think that's when it started, but s-video dates way back in the 90s and it was available to whoever had a compatible TV. It was just not included in the console's box, but it wasn't hard to find in stores. And, personally, I swallowed the dithering and used s-video whenever I could, because everything else was improved.

>>	Anonymous Wed Jan 3 19:28:53 2024 No.10570151 >>10570105 >Because young players think (even here in this very thread) that all we had was shitty TVs and composite/RF cables We did. Not everyone had s-video at their disposal you larper.

Anonymous Wed Jan 3 19:45:03 2024 No.10570198

>>10570151
Wrong. YOU didn't. Don't talk for me. It wasn't a luxury item. At most, you could say there were availability issues, because not every store carried them. On the other hand, they weren't rare either, just a matter of not giving up the first time you didn't find one.

Anonymous Wed Jan 3 19:52:07 2024 No.10570215

>>10570105
I think what happened is there are two camps. The first one played on their family's main living room TV, which in the 90s was likely 19"-24" and may have even had S-Video. Then you had the people who played exclusively on hand me downs, which were often 13" TVs from the 80s that may have only had RF. I was one of those kids who had several TVs but they were all tiny and had a bunch of RF Units daisy chained.

Anonymous Wed Jan 3 20:12:37 2024 No.10570268

>>10570215
That was also my case, a very simple TV in my room (thankfully, in color). However, our living room TV was way better... after a while. I saw a console through s-video for the first in 1996, the older brother of a friend had one, I remember it was a Hitachi TV. In 1997, my mother wanted to upgrade our living room TV, and I "tricked" her into believing that any device with s-video was of far superior quality and thus we should get one. We eventually got a Philips one and I went nuts after s-video cables, until I could finally play using them. It sucked that I couldn't use the TV anytime I wanted, but, when I could, the improvement was clear as day. That was my preference until 6th-gen came along and I switched to component cables (and a new TV; mine this time, LG brand, with component input, but no s-video).

All that being just an average middle-class teenager. I remember richer people having even fancier TVs, in the early 90s (though I never played on them).

>>	Anonymous Wed Jan 3 22:09:30 2024 No.10570598 >>10568318 with the help of a ram cart, sure.

Anonymous Wed Jan 3 22:20:16 2024 No.10570625

>>10570598
The Saturn did have a native advantage because VDP2 had it's own VRAM, which did a lot of the heavy lifting. It's why you see examples in this thread of Saturn games having extra background effects that are missing on PS1. If you compare games that didn't use any RAM expansion at all like Street Fighter Alpha 2 it still has more frames of animation and faster loading than the PS1. But, yes, the 1M and 4M RAM carts did do a lot of heavy lifting. But it's worth pointing out that Sony did include an expansion port on the PS1 but it was too slow for additional RAM. So it's not like it's unfair to take the RAM carts into consideration just because the PS1 can't get one of it's own. It certainly could have had Sony been more forward thinking.

Anonymous Wed Jan 3 22:25:16 2024 No.10570641

>>10570625
> If you compare games that didn't use any RAM expansion at all like Street Fighter Alpha 2 it still has more frames of animation and faster loading than the PS1.
The difference is a lot less dramatic without the aid of additional RAM.

I do agree that Sony should made possible and released a RAM cart. It's the main cause for 2D ports suffering, not any lack of processing power.

>>	Anonymous Wed Jan 3 22:30:04 2024 No.10570652 >>10570641 But why shouldn't we take into consideration that the Saturn is RAM expandable and the PS1 isn't? That's a clear advantage.

>>	Anonymous Wed Jan 3 22:32:19 2024 No.10570657 >>10570652 We should, but it does lessen its importance. If the base Saturn were capable of those games, that would be much more damning.

>>	Anonymous Wed Jan 3 22:38:11 2024 No.10570664 >>10541332 >wobble groove detected

Anonymous Wed Jan 3 22:38:47 2024 No.10570667

>>10570657
RAM was expensive though. That's why it was always the main bottleneck across all three machines. Most of the time it wasn't a lack of raw horsepower that defined these games. On some level it was, like if there was crippling slowdown, but that was game to game. System wide though? It was always RAM. The N64's muddy textures, was technically RAM related, too. It had plenty of system RAM, especially with the expansion pak, but it was crippled with a pitiful 4k texture cache, which couldn't be improved on.

I think of it the same way as cart-side hardware on the NES and SNES. Sure, the base machines were nothing to write home about but designing it so that you could put shit into the games that needed it and drive additional performance is itself a benefit. If you ask people why they buy desktops instead of laptops the fact that the can upgrade them is a pretty big advantage.

Anonymous Wed Jan 3 22:47:01 2024 No.10570681

>>10570667
> Most of the time it wasn't a lack of raw horsepower that defined these games.
In 3D games that was often a problem for Saturn. That, or the programmers being unable to tap into the available horsepower.
In 2D games either console was up to the task with any differences like muh transparencies or muh heatwaves being ultimately minor.

>I think of it the same way as cart-side hardware on the NES and SNES. Sure, the base machines were nothing to write home about but designing it so that you could put shit into the games that needed it and drive additional performance is itself a benefit.
Was that an intentional aspect of the Famicom's design or just a happy accident? I don't think it's appreciated enough just how much longevity was added to the console by exposing the CHR bus to cartridges and letting mappers go ham.

Anonymous Thu Jan 4 00:17:03 2024 No.10570863

>>10570681
>Was that an intentional aspect of the Famicom's design or just a happy accident?
Probably a little of column A, a little of column B. They knew the system could be expanded beyond stock right away considering they released stuff like Family BASIC. What they likely didn't know was just how dramatic a difference it would make down the line as ROM prices plummeted and mappers took full advantage. Originally the FDS was supposed to take over with Super Mario Bros. being among the last cartridge games but then ROM prices dropped unexpectedly and the FDS became obsolete compared to what could be done with new chips. This obviously would have influenced the SNES design. Nintendo deliberately chose a CPU that was underpowered even by 1990 standards to save money on the base unit specifically because they knew they could offload horsepower to the carts that needed it. Meanwhile they splurged on a quality PPU because that's something that needed to be internal and couldn't be done cart-side without doing some wacky 32X shenanigans with a separate A/V out.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 4 00:18:23 2024 No.10570870 >>10536030 It had plenty of 3d games. I reject your question.

>>	Anonymous Thu Jan 4 04:49:08 2024 No.10571440 https://youtu.be/uNV3bR0nQ-I?si=1te3V7rB-NPxmhBl https://youtu.be/2NutximpPxw?si=yiCOAXGY9ZZwPLh6 Hey, where's your musical intro, PS1? This also applies to Frost Walrus.

>>	Anonymous Fri Jan 5 01:02:51 2024 No.10573407 >>10570870 True but most sucked compared to PS1 and N64 3D games.

>>	Anonymous Fri Jan 5 02:46:59 2024 No.10573650 >>10535995 it was just too hard to develop on saturn. ps1 is piss easy to develop for https://youtube.com/watch?v=wckIE-XNgvM this destroys every ps1 game

Anonymous Fri Jan 5 12:03:23 2024 No.10574648

>>10535995
>everybody is creating polygon machines
>sega: lol lmao here is a sprite machine, just use quads (aka sprites) to simulate 3d polygon projection
>but... lighting? textures? transparency? how can we make these with sprites?
>sega: lol lmao just fake it bruh you don't need this
Tbqh Saturn is kinda based in how it gave zero fucks but at the end it was pretty cringe and an epic fail it would have been uberbased if it was a voxel based machine

Anonymous Fri Jan 5 13:13:16 2024 No.10574746

>>10574648
There is very little difference fundamentally between how the ps1 and the Saturn render graphics. The Saturn's quads are not as useful as the ps1's triangles. But that does not make the Saturn 3d "fake" in comparison to the ps1. Also, the sprite polygon distinction is nonsense, both machines render polygons by definition.

>>	Anonymous Fri Jan 5 18:53:30 2024 No.10575474 https://youtu.be/RvRG_v8XpC0?si=oJ23ZIHfcIbOyG0E Just more John Burton being a Saturn programming genius.

Anonymous Fri Jan 5 20:23:47 2024 No.10575649
File: 44 KB, 640x396, 307822_front.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

>>10535995
Everything people wanted on Saturn was already on SEGA CD
>new Sonic game
>cartridge slot for Genesis games (CDX)
>other SEGA IP's like Streets of Rage and Golden Axe (released on compilation disc)
>other classic 16-bit games (Final Fight, Mickey Mania, Earthworm Jim, etc.)
It was literally Saturn but better. Dreamcast was the console Saturn should've been. You can pretty much skip from SEGA CD to Dreamcast without missing much

>>	Anonymous Fri Jan 5 21:59:29 2024 No.10575876 >>10535995 Saturn chads, we have to vote Saturn games on /v/'s poll. We can't let Ocarina of Time win again https://strawpoll.com/7rnzmwe6dyO

Anonymous Fri Jan 5 22:11:48 2024 No.10575891

>>10575649
>You can pretty much skip from SEGA CD to Dreamcast without missing much
It's funny you say that because that's what happened to me. I went from Sega Genesis to Dreamcast.

Anything Sega in between those two consoles did not exist to me.

I didn't even do it on purpose either. It was like one day I had a Genesis. Then I got an N64 for Christmas and put my Genesis in a box. My friends got a Playstation 1, and we went to each other's houses to share games.

Sega 32x, Sega Saturn, etc did not exist in my life. I didn't even know the names of those systems until years later. I forgot Sega existed at all until Dreamcast came out.

>>	Anonymous Fri Jan 5 22:12:33 2024 No.10575892 >>10575876 Find the best porn game on the system and start a campaign so GameFAQs has to put it on the front page.

>>	Anonymous Fri Jan 5 22:13:34 2024 No.10575893 >>10575892 Wait nevermind. I don't know why I thought you linked a GameFAQs poll.

Anonymous Fri Jan 5 23:45:53 2024 No.10576109

>>10535995
Coz it originally wasn't going to be a 3d focused console until part-way through R&D when they saw the specs for Sony's upcoming PS1.

PS - The saturn library is a hell of a lot better than the N64's. People are finally starting to realise this.

>>	Anonymous Sat Jan 6 00:08:20 2024 No.10576162 >>10576109 What even is there on N64? >Mario >Zelda 1 and 2 >Goldeneye >Rogue Squadron

>>	Anonymous Sat Jan 6 00:08:36 2024 No.10576165 >>10576109 The Saturn has a larger amount of interesting games but while the N64 library is tiny, nothing on the Saturn comes close to Oot or SM64

>>	Anonymous Sat Jan 6 01:02:55 2024 No.10576291 >>10574648 The most based of all would be if it used blitters.

Anonymous Sat Jan 6 01:58:05 2024 No.10576408

>>10576109
>People are finally starting to realise this.

Most Saturn games have an hour of gameplay. Panzer Dragoon Saga, their response to FF7, can be finished in a weekend. People are just buying Saturn shit because they are considered luxury items at this point, with the pricetags doubling every few years.

>>	Anonymous Sat Jan 6 01:59:39 2024 No.10576410 >>10574746 >There is very little difference fundamentally between how the ps1 and the Saturn render graphics. The only thing they have in common is using a framebuffer. Saturn does everything else differently.

Anonymous Sat Jan 6 02:11:33 2024 No.10576453

>>10576162
>>10576165
I hate N64 because I grew up with NES, SNES, and spinach-colored GameBoy. Nintendo just was not able to yakuza any games that I could enjoy for it so they really let me down hard.

Switched to Sega Genesis/CD, and Saturn and found an amazing library of games that I still play along with NES (I can’t believe how much fun these games still are), SNES (rarely nowadays, but it has some fun games like Secret of Evermore that I still need to beat), and GameBoy.

GameCube is better than N64 too!

>fuk N64! I hate it!

>>	Anonymous Sat Jan 6 02:17:59 2024 No.10576472 >>10576410 The details are different, but fundamentally they both do the same thing.

Anonymous Sat Jan 6 02:21:55 2024 No.10576491

>>10576408
>FF7

…is shit. I know you guys like it but I had it new back in the late 90s. Played it for three or four hours. That’s it and I’ve never gone back to it. The story is dumb. It’s so different from FF1 (NES) and FF3 (SNES) that I grew up with and adored. Even a friend of mine said you gotta keep playing it to get to a good part. But FF1 and FF3 were never bad so why does FF7 have a shitty beginning presentation? Conversely, …

I actually did have Panzer Dragoon Saga a year or two later and while you can (and I did) beat it in a weekend, it was more fun than FF7. Saga Frontier 1 on psx is better than FF7 and has better stories!

FF7 = hype and hentai sales for TittyFaku , Aeris, and that ninja chick

>>	Anonymous Sat Jan 6 09:30:42 2024 No.10577115 File: 106 KB, 720x653, Screenshot_2024-01-06_032901~2.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]

>>	Anonymous Sat Jan 6 12:21:53 2024 No.10577320 >>10577115 Awesome https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lAcjeK7ceA see, this shit would've been great back in the day

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/vr/ - Retro Games