/vr/ - Retro Games

[Anonymous No.2024332]

What went wrong?

[Anonymous No.2024354]

Couldn't make rudimentary meals with it.

[Anonymous No.2024358]

Poor marketing outside of Japan, it never managed to establish a foothold in North America.

Plus a lack of multiple wide appeal "must have" games like Twisted Metal, Resident Evil, Crash Bandicoot, SOTN, Gran Turismo, Final Fantasy etc for people to latch onto. This isn't to say that the Saturn has a bad library but it couldn't compete with the N64 or PS1 after 97-98

If the Saturn got the same releases in NA as it did in Japan it probably would have been a contender rather than having a quiet death outside of Japan.

[Anonymous No.2024365]

>>2024358
SOTN did came out for the Saturn, though only in Japan and with extra content from the Playstation version

[Anonymous No.2024381]

>>2024365

Try reading the third line

[Anonymous No.2024409]

>>2024332
Two processors

[Anonymous No.2024417]

>>2024332
Pretty much the definitive history of Saturn:
https://web.archive.org/web/20140628182636/http://www.eidolons-inn.net/tiki-index.php?page=SegaBase+Saturn&bl=y

[Anonymous No.2024418]

32X, Sega CD fucking killed Sega's rep. Plus Sega of America was insane

[Anonymous No.2024428]

Like every failed console, lack of gams.

[Anonymous No.2024435]

>>2024418
>Sega CD killed Sega's rep
>It was released a few months after Sonic the Hedgehog and before Sonic 2

Yeah, no.

[Anonymous No.2024438]

>>2024409
More like three cpus, a DSP, plus two GPUs.

>>2024418
>Plus Sega of America was insane
The problem was that Sega of Japan had zero long term plans, only knee-jerk reactions and "why aren't we as popular as Nintendo?" mentalities.

[Anonymous No.2024446]

>No Sonic game at a time when Sonic was huge

Gee, I'd certainly start there. And no, a port of a mediocre Genesis isometric kind-of game doesn't count.

[Anonymous No.2024447]

>>2024438
I thought the Saturn was atleast successful in Japan. Made profit, but bombed everywhere else

[Anonymous No.2024457]

>>2024332
Sega pissed of retailers and developers with a surprise launch, incompetent marketing, insane architecture that made the PS3's look sensible, and ludicrous restrictions on what could be published restricting the console's best games.

[Anonymous No.2024464]

>>2024447
It kicked the N64's ass there with plenty of RPGs, but it still was but a minnow to the PlayStation's shark.

[Anonymous No.2024468]

>>2024464
The Saturn was already on its last legs when Final Fantasy 7 came out. That game was responsible for the JRPG fad. They didn't move units before it came out.

[Anonymous No.2024470]

>>2024418

>was

[Anonymous No.2024712]

>>2024358

[Anonymous No.2024751]

The stupid surprise release hurt Sega's relationship with retailers. Even if Sega had a solid release in the US and Europe, the Saturn was hard to condense due to it's complex design. It would have suffered later on when Sony and Nintendo were implementing price cuts.

With the popularity and diversity of the PlayStation and the 3D power of the N64, the Saturn never really had a chance to be higher than third. It certainly could have done better, but not enough to conquer either competitor.

[Anonymous No.2024761]

using the saturn to its full potential is it the most powerful ?

[Anonymous No.2024830]

[Anonymous No.2024834]

What didn't?

[Anonymous No.2024960]

[Anonymous No.2024981]

>>2024761
The Saturn was the most powerful 2D machine in a generation obsessed with muddy polygons. "Power" in 5th gen is hard to pin down because all three systems have such weird architectures.

[Anonymous No.2025015]

>>2024354
Or use it as a drinks holder. It was doomed from the start with Amerifats.

[Anonymous No.2025054]

>>2024354
>>2025015

[Anonymous No.2025062]

>>2024428
the Saturn (even just counting NA releases)has a bunch of great exclusive games easily worth owning the console for. Unfortunately it just never really had that triple A title game to push consoles(MGS, OOT, etc).

[Anonymous No.2025070]

My life.

[Anonymous No.2025074]

>>2024332
absolutely nothing. best console of fifth gen because of focus on 2d rather than eye-bleeding 5th gen 3d.

[Anonymous No.2025079]

>>2024446
underrated opinion. i remember being a sonic mad kid when the saturn was released, but didn't want a saturn because it felt like there was no continuity from the games i loved on megadrive.

since s3+k sega have completely mishandled sonic to the point where now everyone but the most autistic of autists want him to die in (relative) dignity.

[Anonymous No.2025080]

Idiots cared more for an underpowered, gimmicky console and a toy console than a real game machine.

[Anonymous No.2025086]

It's a 2d behemoth, and does pretty ok 3d, it's just a bitch to program for. If Sega japan had given the US more support instead of feuding with Sega USA, Sega might still be in the console game.

[Anonymous No.2025087]

>>2025074
>tales from an alternate universe where the saturn didn't completely blow.

[Anonymous No.2025094]

>>2025079
I only started getting into Sonic in the Adventure saga, and I never could get into the original style games. To be honest I can't get into Sonic games after Heroes either, so it's probably just a mad case of being retarded on my end.

[Anonymous No.2025095]

Dark Savior is on my top 5 favorite games

No N64 game is on my top 5

So I'm more than happy with the Saturn's existence

[Anonymous No.2025096]

>>2025087
>being this uneducated about game library's

complete plebian. Don't you have some hardcore n64 gaming to get back to?

[Anonymous No.2025101]

It was a commercial failure in the US due to THREE major factors.

1. The release date. It was released mere months before the PS1 and was rushed to meet a deadline that developers simply could not accommodate. Developers started ditching the system in the US and stores like KB Toys and K-Mart butted heads with Sega over this decision.

2. Price. Sega launched the Saturn at $399 in the US. This was $100 more than the Sony Playstation. Adjusted for inflation the Saturn today would cost you $624.75 and the PS1 would cost you $468.56.

3. No games. NA Publishers had no faith that the system was going to be successful from the get go due to the rushed release and competition. Due to poor sales, Japanese publishing companies would not bring over a majority of titles due to lackluster sales.

[Anonymous No.2025103]

>>2024332
NiGHTS Into Dreams was a good game, but for the sake of the company and the gaming in general Yuji Naka and his team should have been forced to make a proper 3D Sonic game for the Saturn instead. By putting as much hype behind it as possible, Sega of America could break the Saturn back into the market and claim the second place in the market share. The Saturn didn't really have enough killer apps with mass market appeal besides Virtua Fighter, and Virtua Fighter was mostly popular in Japan.

[Anonymous No.2025119]

>>2024447
>I thought the Saturn was atleast successful in Japan. Made profit, but bombed everywhere else

It outsold the Playstation for a few years. Problem was that Sega quit the machine and switched to the Dreamcast as soon as possible, while the Playstation ended up getting AAA titles that made it sell loads of units not just in Japan but worldwide.

It was a "won the battle, lost the war" situation.

[Anonymous No.2025137]

sega of Japan screwed up big time, they were envious of SoA success with the Genesis and even SoE to an extent while they did poorly. so they decided from what i can tell to make SoA their bitch when the saturn came out. Sega made a lot of stupid decisions this is coming from a sega fan too. also not releasing many of the best 2D titles to keep up with the 3D hype of the 90s as much as I love the PS, it brought some crap i don't like about gaming today.

[Anonymous No.2025142]

>>2025101
3rd is wrong. The system had games, it was just that retailers didn't want to stock them so very few people managed to actually get their hands on them. There's evidence of this in Europe, where if you look at people selling their systems they all seem to have the same ten or so games:
Virtua Figher 1 & 2
Sega Rally Championship
Die Hard Trilogy
Quake
Wipeout
Athlete Kings
Daytona
Virtua Cop 1 & 2
Loaded

Curiously, these are all also 3D games.

Now back to the 3rd point, here's a list of Sega Saturn vs. PS1 quality titles up to mid-97:

PS1:
Twisted Metal 1 & 2
Tekken 2
King's Field 2
Crash Bandicoot
Tobal No. 1
Intelligent Qube
Suikoden
Soul Blade

Sega Saturn:
Panzer Dragoon
Panzer Dragoon Zwei
Mr Bones
Guardian Heroes
Dragon Force
Nights
Albert Odyssey
Darius Gaiden
Die Hard Arcade
Astal
Dragon Ball Z The Legend
Fighters Megamix
Iron Storm
Dark Savior
Virtua Fighter 2
Keio Flying Squadron 2
Mega Man 8 & X4 (superior versions)
Virtua On
Saturn Bomberman
Shining Holy Ark
Shining Wisdom
Shinobi Legions
Street Figher Alpha 2

So as you can see, the Saturn had a far superior line-up at the point where it was effectively on life support. This means that other factors are responsible for its failures outside of its library (Which is after all usually the case in NA, all about dat marketing). The PS1 started to get incredible exclusives from September '97 onwards which finally killed off the Saturn.

[Anonymous No.2025172]

>>2025142
>Now back to the 3rd point, here's a list of Sega Saturn vs. PS1 quality titles up to mid-97

That sure is a selective list. You ignored a ridiculous amount of Playstation games.

[Anonymous No.2025179]

>>2025172
I may have missed 1 or 2, but anyway, feel free to list them.

[Anonymous No.2025193]

I always saw Sega as Nintendo for grown-ups (not being condescending, you know what I mean). I feel like a Sega console today, with the same principles and ideologies from the past would have captivated a lot of people today.

[Anonymous No.2025196]

>>2025142
When you word it like that, of course the Saturn had a great lineup, however, by mid 97 it was practically dead with the PS1 and N64 basically dominating the market and things for the Saturn would only get worse, I mean I remember buying mine in 97 on clearance for $50 at Walmart and the only game I could find was Hydlide... Not saying it was a bad system but you're clearly trying to make it sound like the Saturn was on top of the world at this point when it clearly wasn't.

[Anonymous No.2025203]

>>2025196
>Not saying it was a bad system but you're clearly trying to make it sound like the Saturn was on top of the world at this point when it clearly wasn't.

wut

>>2025142
>So as you can see, the Saturn had a far superior line-up at the point where it was effectively on life support

[Anonymous No.2025204]

>>2025179
Not him but I'll throw in some:

SRW4S
Arc the Lad 1 and 2
Armored Core
Toshinden series
Blood Omen
Bushido Blade
Cool Boarders
Cyberia
Darkstalkers
Deception
FF7 and Tactics (how the fuck could you skip these)
Gex

My phone's dying but there's a few for ya

[Anonymous No.2025206]

>>2025203
tl;dr - The Saturn was dead by 97, good games does not equal success if nobody played them.

[Anonymous No.2025207]

>>2025203
An awesome lineup ain't the same thing as total market share, bro.

[Anonymous No.2025209]

>>2025204
This is why /vr/ is good, cheers to you m8

[Anonymous No.2025210]

>>2025204
I was avoiding imports, because they had no bearing on its Western library. Arc the Lad collection was one of the PS1's last NA releases.

Toshinden, Cyberia & Gex were on the Saturn.

Bushido Blade, FF7, Tactics & Armored Core were after mid-97, as said in the original post.

>>2025206
>>2025207
Right, but what does this have anything to do with my post? Did you even read it? The point was that it did not fail becase of its line-up.

Reading comprehension must be at an all-time low on this board.

[Anonymous No.2025216]

Sega dun goof'd when they made the Saturn $400 while the PlayStation was $300.

[Anonymous No.2025238]

>>2025204
Ok charging now

Hokuto no Ken
Hot Shots Golf
Jet Moto
KOF 95-97
Klonoa
Mechwarrior 2
Metal Slug
Monster Rancher
MK3/trilogy
Tactics Ogre
Persona
Policenauts
Resident Evil
Snatcher
Tomb Raider 1 and 2
Vandal Hearts
Wild Arms
Wipeout 2097

Plus tons of sports games that have probably sold tens of millions of units that I'm sure everyone on this board will dismiss.
>playing sports games

[Anonymous No.2025242]

>>2025210
>FF7 and Tactics past the cutoff

How is june and july not mid-97? Because it blows your list to pieces?

[Anonymous No.2025250]

>>2025242
FF7 was September, Tactics was 1998. Are you mentally handicapped?

>>2025238
As previously said, imports had no bearing on the NA market. If you wanted to compare Japanese lists, then the PS1 really would get blown out the water. Most of these NA titles you've listed were again either after mid-97 or also on the Saturn, like >>2024712, Tomb Raider, Wipeout 2 and Wild Arms.

Vandal Hearts was the only one missed, though this was released on the Saturn in Japan.

Again, mid-97 is not an arbitrary date. It's merely a snapshot within time where the Saturn had the best library yet was already dead in the West.

[Anonymous No.2025257]

>>2025238
>>2025250
Oh, and i'll give you Wild Arms too. I was thinking of Wing Arms. Anyway, point remains.

[Anonymous No.2025259]

>>2025257
Games don't start to exist the moment they're releases. Stuff like FF7 was hyped up way before mid-1997. In general, you don't buy consoles just for the games that are already sold but those that will be sold.

[Anonymous No.2025262]

I love my Saturn, that's it

[Anonymous No.2025263]

>>2025259
Not as much as you think. Before FF7's release, JRPGs were seen as very niche titles that didn't sell well.

[Anonymous No.2025264]

>>2025263
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t9pF9BJQBLo

these ads plus print ads in most major print publications plus campaigns were in full force in early to mid 1997. do you think the game accidentally sold out on release?

[Anonymous No.2025265]

hey ecchi guy if you're around pls post your saturn game list

[Anonymous No.2025272]

>>2025264
I imagine it sold out because the PS1's library was so mediocre up to that point. PS1 owners were desperate for a good game.

[Anonymous No.2025278]

>>2025272
Are you trolling?

[Anonymous No.2025284]

>Saturnfags deluding themselves once again

[Anonymous No.2025285]

Lets not forget that nintendo totally fucked up as well,sony just came in and mopped up the mess, they deserve all the success they got with the playstation.

I still love the saturn and n64 though and dont see any point in beating a dead horse by going over why the saturn failed for the millionth time.

[Anonymous No.2025289]

>>2025094
that was about the time i realised sonic was ruined. maybe it's a generational thing, but to me, sonic was just not built for 3D. or a voice for that matter. he lost all his credibility, and as hard as it may be to believe for some, back in the early/mid 90s he was seen as genuinely cool.

nowadays he's a fucking joke.

[Anonymous No.2025295]

>>2025289
I think they did a good job with sonic adventure but i agree that sonic worked best in 2d same goes for mario,mario is just as much of a joke as well today he looks like a badly rendered plastic toy,nothing like how he used to be.

[Anonymous No.2025335]

Sega designed a horrible Frankenstein's console and then had bad documentation and software support. Sony's machine had one processor, one GPU, and a pile of library code to do everything you wanted.

[Anonymous No.2025352]

>>2025335
I really admired how much freedom Sony gave to everyone interested in developing shit for their system. They be like 'just put games on it, I don't care'.

[Anonymous No.2025369]

>>2025335
Not entirely true. The documentation was extremely through and detailed nearly everything, and they had world class compilers as well (only the DSP was hard to develop for). The problem was that developers didn't want to touch assembly or make their own engine or optimize gfx to use the hardware, they just went with the lowest common denominator of functions and left it like that.

As for the Frankenstein console, the Saturn was conceived in the middle of a huge paradigm shift that, ironically, Sega themselves played a huge part of. They wanted the ultimate SNES killer, but then Virtua Fighter became a surprise hit and now they had to get that running on the machine without scratching all the work. And this was at the time when no one even knew exactly in what direction 3d games will take off in (triangles vs quads, that kind of thing).

Sony had no such baggage to tie them down, they designed the machine from ground up to push 3d graphics, plus they also nailed the exact direction the industry was going on.

[Anonymous No.2025383]

>>2025295

IMO, Mario worked fine in 2D and 3D for having a slower pace than Sonic. I can see Sonic 1 being trasformed in a 3D game, as it is more focused in platforming than going fast like the other titles. Even today, I think is impossible to make a really fast game where you're in control the whole time, I really hate 3D Sonic games because the game plays itself. "Hey, jump in that acceleration switch, then you'll see a cool animation where you aren't in the control of the character, so you can take out your hands of the controller and watch the game being played by CPU".

[Anonymous No.2025404]

>>2025352
>'just put games on it, I don't care'.

It wasn't like that until Bernie Stolar was fired. He didn't want anything 2D on the system, told Working Designs to fuck off, then they went and made games for the Saturn.

[Anonymous No.2025439]

>>2025369
I think you and many under estimate how much Nintendo influenced Sony.
The Saturn would had been great if SEGA and JVC weren't releasing high dollar consoles just a year before. Then the Saturn comes out with a $400 msrp at release. Ya it dropped down to match PlayStation's price but by then it was too late. It wasn't that SEGA didn't advertise the Saturn either. They did but the combination of Sony and Nintendo just blew any advertisement out of the water. I didn't know a lot about Saturn till just a few years ago. Wanted one as a kid but with the cost of the N64 and PlayStation I didn't own one.

[Anonymous No.2027203]

>>2025369
I wonder why the Playstation never included a hardware z-buffer. Would that have been really expensive? Games like Tarzan managed to use software z-buffering with little issue.

[Anonymous No.2027210]

>>2027203
It would've needed a lot of extra bandwidth and the gpu would've needed to be more complex than just a simple sprite plotter. Yeah, it would've been really expensive.

The amount of polygon shimming depended on how optimized the game code was (since sorting was done in software), I guess you mean that for Tarzan? Because the gpu had no such concept in it.

[Anonymous No.2027219]

>>2027203
>Would that have been really expensive?
The whole GPU is designed for 2D rasterization. It would have meant a significant redesign.

[Anonymous No.2027227]

>>2027219
On the other hand they wouldn't need the GTE anymore. But yeah, instead they would've needed more video memory and higher bandwidth.

[Anonymous No.2027258]

>>2027210
Maybe it wasn't a software z-buffer but something with similar effect. My memory of the article I read it in is faded.

[Anonymous No.2027269]

>>2027227
>On the other hand they wouldn't need the GTE anymore
Right, they would need something even more expensive which would handle real homogeneous coordinate transforms.

[Anonymous No.2027271]

We are in the 1992. Your team made the Genesis and now is time to move ahead.
You should make the next SEGA console for a release at the end of the 1994 in Japan.
Your team has made the best SEGA arcade Systems and now, after the System 32, you working on the model 1 with Lockheed Martin. But even if the arcade chip is powerful, it's expensive as fuck to make it.
Hayao Nakayama approaches you and he asks at your team to create the most powerful system of the next generation. the 3DO, at moment, is the standard.
Now, what you will do?

[Anonymous No.2027323]

Hardware was shit compared to PSX.

[Anonymous No.2027331]

>>2027271
>the 3DO, at moment, is the standard.

3do came out in late 1993.

It made sense for the Saturn to be based on the System32. It was the most powerful graphics solution they had, and they were up against the SNES. The Model 1 cost way too much and it was just an internal experiment for coders to learn 3d - and it wasn't until 93-94 that it REALLY became popular, after Virtua Fighter and the Model 2 being underway.

[Anonymous No.2027367]

>>2027331
I think the specs were already out.

[Anonymous No.2027452]

>>2027323
>Hardware was shit compared to PSX.
Wow what a fucking derp you are at least do some basic research jesus christ.

[Anonymous No.2027468]

SEGA-TA-TA

nothing. everything about it was beautiful :'3

[Anonymous No.2027486]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNEe04UwJ6Q

[Anonymous No.2027626]

>>2027269
Also, let's not forget that the GTE was strapped to the CPU, rather than being a discrete component that required ports to talk to (like the N64). Having the vertex transformations directly on the CPU was blazing fast and allowed the system to pump out polygons with no fill-rate limits.

[Anonymous No.2027667]

>>2027271
I would try to ask Evans & Sutherland to make a VLSI version of their TR3 technology or I would ask SGI to help us out.

[Anonymous No.2027689]

The beginning of the end with the Saturn started with the Sega CD and 32x. Sega essentially had 3 consoles in one generation and only one was worth a damn. I think that made the market jaded as fuck. Then there is the stuff that everyone else mentioned like the botched release, the price point, the lack of foresight regarding 3d, etc. The turmoil between SoJ an SoA exacerbated all of this.

[Anonymous No.2027692]

the 32x pissing people off and fucking over retailers by surprise releasing it. honestly, a lot of places just refused to carry it after that

[Anonymous No.2028143]

>>2025142
Dude, I'm a saturn owner and so many of those games you listed are trash.

Shinobi Legions? An awful, awful Shinobi game.
Mr Bones? Holy shit it is one of the worst games I've ever played, no bones about it.
Astal? Mediocre and would be forgettable if not for its graphics.
Iron Storm: slow and boring when you have Vandal Hearts or FFT on the horizon
MM8 and MMX4? Wow, multiplats, that'll light hearts on fire
Shining Wisdom is a shitpile of a game, as well. Mediocre Zelda clone at the time when OoT made most 32bit Zelda clones irrelevant.

If those are the games bolstering the Saturn's lineup, then no wonder it flopped. PS1 was getting all of the creative energies of Capcom, Konami, Square, etc., and Nintendo was releasing genre-defining classics. Saturn just couldn't compete with a lot of awkward half-2D half-3D games.

[Anonymous No.2028413]

>>2027271
>Now, what you will do?
Botch it, of course. Kutaragi knew that a cheap affine texture mapper would suffice because he had worked in broadcast graphics, not video games.

[Anonymous No.2029380]

>>2028413
>>2027667
>>2027331

Probably i would have ask at Nakayama another year of extra development for make a system based on System 32 and on the model 2. Maybe at first it would be expansive, but with declocked a little bit the model 2, the Saturn would be easy to develop and probably much powerful than the Ps1. Also extra year of development mean a year for the first parties to make games without bug.
Launch the console worldwide at the christmas of the 1995 with
>Japanese Bundle with Virtua Fighter 2 + 1
>American/European Bundle with Daytona USA or a improved Sonic CD's porting

[Anonymous No.2029382]

the Playstation's port of NBA Jam T.E was superior

[Anonymous No.2030676]

>>2024332
Better question, what went right?

[Anonymous No.2030689]

>>2030676
>Better question, what went right?

Almost everything in Japan - they just killed the machine way too early.

Which was understandable since they wanted to provide a more usable platform for 3d stuff, as Virtua Fighter was completely dominating the arcades and badly needed a port. But killing the machine after a little bit over 3 years just pissed off people again. In my opinion the machine had a shit load of power left unused, enough to keep going for at least one or two years, especially with the RAM carts. A cost-reduced version or a gfx upgrade cart also could've helped.

[Anonymous No.2030747]

>>2030676
Amazing library. Great controller. Built-in backup. Amazing fucking library.

[Anonymous No.2030808]

>>2028143
Nice cherrypicking of titles there bro. And get fucked, Mr. Bones is awesome.

[Anonymous No.2030841]

>>2024332
Quadrilaterals.

TL;DR: nvidia tripped it up. They should have gone with a powerVR, 3dfx or rendition GPU.

[Anonymous No.2030897]

The 32X made all sorts of lack of sense.

It used the same CPU as the saturn. Well, the same CPU set. Except, the 32x ran at 3/4 of the speed, so ... what ... were they binning them? That would have made sense, except they stopped making the 32x, so that nullified any capacity of that.

Must be why they bumped the saturn release date up 4 months. WTF? They should have just diverted the good SH-2's towards arcade machines.

Or they should have only put one SH2 in 32x's, maybe that would have been an optimal usage of binning.

[Anonymous No.2030908]

>>2030897
It was originally going to just be a framebuffer + video output, with the rendering hardware in each cartridge. They decided that wasn't efficient, so they slapped a pair of CPUs in it.

[Anonymous No.2030945]

SEGA of America. The same curse which would do Shenmue, AM2 and the Dreamcast in.

[Anonymous No.2030950]

Can I just say, the Saturn as a whole just looks seriously great? Aesthetic as fuck. Shame about the whole "full of crappy games" thing

[Anonymous No.2030970]

>>2030808
In the original list full of cherrypicked titles, I am pointing out the rotten ones.

Mr Bones is lousy. Cool soundtrack and cutscenes, but each level that is not a rhythm level is a chore to play. Mediocre platforming, some truly awful FMV levels (swimming, rolling logs, etc.) just make you want the thing to end.

When you are going to argue for a "far superior lineup" it's best not to mislead people with the bottom of the barrel trash like Mr. Bones, Shining Wisdom, and Shinobi Legions, and the so-so junk like Astal and Iron Storm.

I'd have at least said Gungriffon, which is a better game than all I listed above (and it's 7/10).

[Anonymous No.2031018]

>>2030950
>Shame about the whole "full of crappy games" thing
That's not an actual thing.

[Anonymous No.2031023]

>>2030970
Nobody said it would ever win any goty awards, but it's a very unique game with alot of charm. There needs to be more games where you play as a skeleton. You're free to your opinion though.

I just listed all the titles people would consider to be good, quality titles. Those PS1 games are hardly 10/10 masterpieces either. I think I did a pretty good job with the list, I guess Gungriffon could have been added but it's a pretty generic mech shooter.

[Anonymous No.2031098]

>>2025074
>>2027468
>>2030747
Oh yeah? What about all the games that didn't get ported to the Saturn. Like RPGs, and arcade games, even though it was an architecture massively tilted towards RPGs and arcade ports. Especially in America.

[Anonymous No.2031115]

So is there a significant difference between Models 1 and 2?

Also, how much should I expect a decent Saturn system to run me? I've really fallen in love with the system's library and dat godly controller so I'd really like to pick one up for a decent price if possible.

[Anonymous No.2031118]

>>2031018
It is, if you don't count imports. There are maybe 10-20 games in total for the English releases which are really good.

[Anonymous No.2031123]

>>2031118
>if you don't count imports
You can't just throw that rule in there... since when don't imports count

[Anonymous No.2031130]

>>2031123
Since they require you to read moonspeak, pay extra, and go out of your way to find out about them. That's if you can even get them and run them without region troubles.

[Anonymous No.2031131]

>>2031118
>if you don't count imports
There are a lot of consoles that look like shit if you just arbitrarily ignore 3/4 of their library.

[Anonymous No.2031141]

>>2031130
>Since they require you to read moonspeak, pay extra, and go out of your way to find out about them.

A 40$ (I think?) Action Replay lets you play almost all imports, and a lot of them don't need moonspeak; plus the most expensive US games are usually dirt cheap in JP versions (so you don't get to read the bullshit story in Guardian Heroes... who cares, you can still beat shit up).

"going out of your way to find out about them" is a bullshit argument on the internet, you can literally copy paste the game title into youtube to see what the game is about.

>>2031131
Yeah, but not too many where 3/4 of the library (which includes nearly all of the best games) was japan exlusive.

[Anonymous No.2031142]

>>2030841
>3dfx

They almost did it for the dreamcast, but they had to support NEC since it's a japanese company.

[Anonymous No.2031146]

>>2028143
>Iron Storm: slow and boring when you have Vandal Hearts or FFT on the horizon

But vandal hearts is on the saturn.

[Anonymous No.2031153]

>>2031130
You don't need to learn moonspeak to play shooters with a few silent FMVs. Most Nip-only games are even full of English text, like Dracula X and Dragon Ball Z Legends. Many of the RPGs have been fan-translated such as Shining Force 3 Parts 2 & 3, and Dragon Force 2.

[Anonymous No.2031163]

>>2031142
Actually, 3dfx fucked that up, they accidentally revealed that they were working on the Saturn 2 aka Black Belt, and SOJ got so mad that they backed right the fuck off.

[Anonymous No.2031164]

Why do people even care to continue this console war ?

Nowadays we have translations and easy methods to play saturn's games physically or not.

What the hell /vr/ enjoy the games and shut the fuck up.

[Anonymous No.2031169]

>>2031163

Oh, well too bad.
3dfx could've created something incredible since they had some of the best technology related to GPU at the time.

[Anonymous No.2031190]

>>2031169
For what it's worth, it was still a toss up between 3dfx and NEC, the public offering 3dfx released just made Sega go for NEC all the way.

And from what I recall, the PowerVR2 ended up way better than most Voodoo chips at the time (just not as well supported, so drivers held it back a lot)... What 3dfx had available around the same period would've been something like the Voodoo Rush, which wasn't exactly impressive.

[Anonymous No.2031204]

>>2025074
i totally fuckin agree. nothing went wrong. i still play mine almost every night. (its harder now with 2 kids)

[Anonymous No.2031208]

>>2024428
> lack of games
> some of the most highest priced most sought after titles
Correlation doesn't really work there though I'd agree Saturn is a billion times better if you know japenese. Stuff like psychic assassin and hyper duel put saga prices to shame. It was a fighter and shmups killer with all the best versions even sf alpha being the definitive version and precursors to marvel vs capcom. What really went wrong was adding 3d so late into its development in response to psx pushing 3d

[Anonymous No.2031219]

>>2031208
>he doesn't know

[Anonymous No.2031225]

>>2031146
Not much reason to care when it was never released in English (RPGs in a foreign language oh boy!). Apparently it didn't look as nice either.

[Anonymous No.2031226]

>>2031190

They could've used a GPU more similar to the banshee2\voodoo 3 even a SLI solution, and at that point it would have been a pretty remarkable upgrade.

[Anonymous No.2031234]

>>2031225

We are talking about the present, and it didn't had worse visuals; it even had added content since it was released an year after the ps1 version.

[Anonymous No.2031241]

>>2031226
It would've also cost 2-3x as much just for the card as an entire Dreamcast.

[Anonymous No.2031252]

>>2031234
If we are talking about the present, then there is still no reason to care because one of the primary enjoyment factors of an RPG is understanding what's going on. Especially in a story-heavy game like Vandal Hearts.

In that sense you can only enjoy the SS port of Vandal Hearts through the lens of the PS1 original.

[Anonymous No.2031262]

>>2031252

There's always the possibility of a translation.

[Anonymous No.2031276]

>>2031164
Because, they're still going on. Nintendobrats are still out there getting in people's faces, going on about what a unique and magical experience anything from the NES to gamecube was.

Do you have any idea what that's like? Trying to get out there and be social or just get by, and then you end up running into not just nintendobrats but also people with various other "cool", hyped up and on top of that moralistically-hyped-up projects/products/trends who are going to be manipulative and hostile towards things relating to the kinds of games closest to you, and other interests, and other lifestyle aspects? The point isn't to make a big deal of, say, the saturn, in this case, the point is to have some sense of how this kind of stuff plays out, so that you don't get your head spun around around this kind of stuff.

So you have to be able to sort these things out, and do it thoroughly, for when sick shits who obsess with vapid crap to appease being sick shits will fuck with you, you're going to really want to rip into their vapid shit and rip into them.

[Anonymous No.2031294]

>>2024332
Nothing.

It was a good system with lots of fun video games.

Oh, you're asking why it didn't make a lot of money in the US?

Why does that matter to you?

[Anonymous No.2031303]

>>2031294
Dead Dreamcast. That's why, duh!

[Anonymous No.2031316]

>>2030841
This.

You can tell real easily because that chipsed was FAR MORE of a DISASTER on the PC side.

[Anonymous No.2031321]

>>2031294
Because it was aborted early and we ended up with playstation everywhere.

[Anonymous No.2031323]

>>2031303


But the dreamcast was also a good system with lots of fun games. Why are you complaining?

[Anonymous No.2031326]

>>2031321
But the PlayStation was a good system with lots of fun games too. Why hate?

[Anonymous No.2031393]

>>2031326
Who said specifically playstation 1?

[Anonymous No.2031425]

>>2031323
>>2031326
Fuck you, I'm intellectually interested in this crap because growing up I've always had the wrong hardware and got nothing out of it but hate from everyone around me! Bastards,

[Anonymous No.2031468]

Oh I could do this shit all day. Focus on making a system great at 2D at a time where people ONLY wanted 3D, that surprise NA launch, most good games just straight up never came stateside, cost a shitton of money, no "real" sonic game on it, etc.

[Anonymous No.2031498]

>>2031130

>read moonspeak

I don't know a lick of Japanese and I can play most of my imports just fine

>pay extra

I can pay $40 for an action replay and $30 for a copy of burning rangers or pay $130 for a US copy of burning rangers. This is not the only example of this on the library.

>go out of your way to find out about them

There are a shitton of guides online about what saturn games to get and most of them don't shy from imports.

[Anonymous No.2031712]

>Selling a 2D console to a generation of kids that are seeing stuff like Toy Story and A Bug's Life in cinema's
Well shit SEGA, there's your problem.

[Anonymous No.2031903]

>>2031712
You realize that people have been seeing the entire world in 3D for much longer than any video games at all have been around, right?

Kids don't care whether something is 2D or 3D, they care that it's colorful and fantastic.

[Anonymous No.2031931]

>>2031712
Saturn had better 3D capabilities than the PSX, it used 4-sided figures instead of triangles and didn't have the shitty warping. The issue was nobody wanted to mess with dual processing that required assembly coding.

[Anonymous No.2031943]

>>2025404
That's just Sony of America, Sony of Japan allowed shit like LSD

>>2027452
But it is shit compared to the PSX.

[Anonymous No.2031950]

>>2031115
Bump for this

[Anonymous No.2031953]

>>2031943
But that's wrong. Saturn is notably stronger than PSX, just hardly anybody wanted to bother programming for it.
Mosr Saturn ports > respective PSX ports

[Anonymous No.2031973]

>>2031953
>But that's wrong. Saturn is notably stronger than PSX,
Notably stronger in that it struggled to do 3D and can't even do semi-transparency?

>Mosr Saturn ports > respective PSX ports
Like those 2D fighting games that use a RAM cart? Good one.

[Anonymous No.2032128]

>>2031712
But they had Bug and Bug Too!, both semi-3D, if only A Bug's Life had come out 2 years earlier it still wouldn't have sold

[Anonymous No.2032942]

>>2031973
>Like those 2D fighting games that use a RAM cart? Good one.

Go watch grandia, the saturn has double framerate,shadows for 3d objects, double resolution textures and some special effect.

The saturn was a monster from another planet that only few crazy programmers tried to push at the time.

[Anonymous No.2033183]

>>2030841
Quads made no difference that generation; the PS used GTE div quads. To make a triangle, you collapsed one vertex of a quad. same as Sat. The two systems we're pretty close in untextured poly throughput.

[Anonymous No.2033207]

>>2033183
>the PS used GTE div quads. To make a triangle, you collapsed one vertex of a quad. same as Sat.
Nigga what? PSX GPU rendered entirely triangles, and had actual support for texturing (i.e. free input texcoords) rather than just sprite scaling.

[Anonymous No.2033223]

>>2033183
Playstation could do both quads and triangles natively, without pixel overdraw, the GTE offloaded a lot of the required computations for 3d, and the polygon gpu reportedly has 3x more pixel fillrate.

>>2032942
>Go watch grandia, the saturn has double framerate,shadows for 3d objects, double resolution textures and some special effect.

Grandia used the mode7 floor effect that the Saturn had an entire GPU for, and could put shadows and transparencies on it at 0 cost. Playstation version had to brute force all of that with polygons.

That effect is extremely situational to use for 3d games. You can do nice water effects with it, though - for that generation, anyway.

The Playstation was MUCH more powerful for pushing polygons. Saturn was no slouch either, but it had less power and less features for polygon drawing, than the Playstation.

[Anonymous No.2033227]

>>2033223
>That effect is extremely situational to use for 3d games.
This. Saturn had a lot of neat hardware that no one ever used because it was basically for 3D effects in 2D games.

[Anonymous No.2033253]

>>2033227
That ground effect was a true perspective correct plane though, that could be scaled up to sick sizes, and you could more than one of them at the same time with some limitations. Best of all they offered completely free transparency and had their own extra memory.

Yeah, they were extremely situational, but if the situation called for it they could do things the Playstation would be extremely hard pushed to match. See all of Radiant Silvergun or even Sonic R.

[Anonymous No.2033264]

>>2032128
Man, Bug and Bug Too might be two of the worst sega games ever made. Horrendous. Even if the Saturn market skyrockets, those two games will STILL be down at the bottom of the barrel where they belong!

[Anonymous No.2033297]

>>2033253
Apart from those 2 mentioned and the Shenmue tech demo, which games do you think really pushed the Saturn visually?

[Anonymous No.2033309]

>>2025101
What could have saved the Saturn.

[Anonymous No.2033331]

>>2033297
Quake and Duke3d. Last Bronx was also impressive, even if it was a poor mans Soul Blade.
Burning Rangers had very advanced special effects, but had horrible polygon popping everywhere. Apparently it was STI who made those effects after the Sonic Xtreme fiasco, and BR was the only game that ended up using them.

There was also a tech demo that did bump mapping to a limited degree.

Shining Force III also used pushed a lot of special effects in the fight scenes, especially for the magic and summon effects.

Panzer Dragoon Zwei and Saga were beautiful as well.

there were probably many others, I haven't played that many Saturn games lately, only shmups and such.

[Anonymous No.2033348]

>>2031931
Better ... of course, that's why quadrilateral based GPUs became so common, right?

[Anonymous No.2033379]

>>2033183
It was an outsourced part, and it's not like they had a fancy cooperation deal like with the SH2's, it's not a question of Saturn gpu vs. PS1 gpu, it's a question of NV1 compared to all the other options. Even something like an ATI rage chip would have been better, at least it probably would have cost less.

Well, okay, they did have a deal to bring saturn games.controllers and so on to PC's, but what do we even have to show for that? They could have done that with any other gpu.

[Anonymous No.2033389]

>>2031931
>and didn't have the shitty warping
Yes, it most definitely did.

[Anonymous No.2033402]

>>2027689
I don't get why people seem to think this about the Sega CD. I'm guessing they think it came out relatively close to the launch of the 32X when it was actually launched way back in 1992 in the US. The 32X didn't come along until two years later.

[Anonymous No.2033409]

>>2033389
Correction: it had less of it than the Playstation.

>>2033402
Sega CD was a necessary evil IMO. It gave the engineers a lot of experience regarding CD tech and game development. The Saturn disc drive ended up way more powerful than the Playstations because of that.

[Anonymous No.2033413]

>>2025369
>>2031931
Everyone rips into the 32x relentlessly,, but at least it was an opportunity for familiarity and development tools for those dual, new architecture CPUs. They should have released the 32x as early as possible, AND made arcade machines wit; that cpu or two of them.

[Anonymous No.2033416]

>>2033409
>The Saturn disc drive ended up way more powerful than the Playstations because of that.

[Anonymous No.2033418]

>>2033409
And correct me if I'm wrong but I was under the impression that the Sega CD was fairly successful in the US market.

[Anonymous No.2033420]

>>2033409
>>2033416
And a dedicated CPU just for it!

[Anonymous No.2033425]

>>2033420
I don't see how this helps. Can you give me an application example?

[Anonymous No.2033438]

>>2033425
No, the Saturn had a little CPU just for controlling the CD drive.

[Anonymous No.2033445]

>>2033438
And one just for controlling sound, much like in all sorts of arcade machines. You'd think maybe they could have settled on one CPU for controlling sound and the CD drive?

[Anonymous No.2033472]

>>2033445
And it wasn't just a z80 like they typically had in old arcade systems, it was a 68k, 68EC000

[Anonymous No.2033483]

>>2033425
The disc drives in such consoles were extremely low level. You had to tell the main cpu to go and do a read, then stand by until the data is received, etc. Plus there was the data format that the drive returned, which had to be parsed, stripped of status codes if necessary, copied to memory, stuff like that.
This is why the Sega CD had to have its own 68k and memory, that's why the C64 floppy drive had its own CPU, and so on. Back in 1994 this meant a LOT of cpu power and memory almost entirely dedicated to the task, since hardware just wasn't that fast.

Saturn put an entire SH1 plus a custom asic handle all of that, all made by Hitachi. Sony had the advantage of a more compact in-house solution, but they also had their own microcontroller to drive everything, a M68HC05.

The Saturn drive was better because it had 4x buffer memory (could preload more stuff with less management), was more extensible (MPEG card, but they could've done WAY more), and the drives weren't made of shitty plastic that melted under their own weight and heat.

Check any of the cross platform Capcom games, all of them had way better loading times on the Saturn, even without using the RAM cart. Street Fighter Collection takes ages to load a single fight on the Playstation.

>>2033445
Wouldn't be fast enough in 1994.

[Anonymous No.2033487]

>>2033438
Yes. I know. How does this help?

[Anonymous No.2033667]

>>2033487
Why does it have to help? Since the Saturn had extra hardware to make sure the CD drive performs optimally, it's hard to credit experience with the sega CD for it.

[Anonymous No.2033713]

>>2033483
>Wouldn't be fast enough in 1994.
Well then, what if they used a 68EC020 or a higher clocked SH-1? It might not be all that cheaper initially, but the system did have problems being very unconsolidatable..

[Anonymous No.2033738]

>>2031393
The PS2 and PS3 and PS4 have all kinds of great games. Why don't you love video games?

[Anonymous No.2034859]

>>2030908
>with the rendering hardware in each cartridge
Holy fucking shit! Every game a super FX game, but even more extreme! Wow, how were they ever expecting to get away with that?

And yet, that was just a hair short of monumental brilliance!

They should have stuck to the plan ... and just included a slot for a 3d add on card!

[Anonymous No.2034892]

>>2030908
Huh? What did I just hear?

Someone please explain this to me. Frankly, I just don't believe it...

Now, I'm sure I'm just going to come off as an insolent, nitpicky hater who just can't get the true genious of sega, but...

[Anonymous No.2034897]

>>2034892
How the everloving FUCK were they planning on packing a graphics chip into one of these?!?!?

[Anonymous No.2034926]

>>2033713
Then on top of having to split your main code to work on both SH2s, you also have to split up your sound code so it can multitask efficiently.

And I'm not entirely sure if the 68020 was powerful enough, or if any single dedicated CPU would have enough interrupt lines to work that way to begin with. Also, having the sound cpu do the cd reading work, would mean that you could reprogram the chip that handles the copy protection.

[Anonymous No.2034952]

>>2034897
He was talking about the 32X.

[Anonymous No.2034998]

>>2034952
Well ... shit ... THAT ain't gonna turn funny. Bah!

[Anonymous No.2035029]

>>2024332
it went after the cowa duty crowd before there was such a thing and rather than localizing the library of god-teir Jap games, they struggled to port shit american games that also exsisted on the cheaper PS1

[Anonymous No.2035046]

>>2024332
1. released with no warning, pissing off big retailers, developers and mass confusion because no one knew what it was as it lauched with no build up.

2. Great 2D power house not so good at 3D which is what everyone wanted, 3D was the future (after the shit storm of games where no one knew how to 3D)

4. Confusing hardware layout, although smart idea how it worked but poor support/ training for devs made it had to use. (which theirs so many ports as an old processor was put in to be used for pointless basic tasks but everyone used it because it was easiest one to program.)

5. no sonic game worth playing (inb4 sonic jam interactive menu)

6. that cart slot for memory tricking us it would be backward compatible (which would of been awesome). So many kids made to look stupid because they thought the slot was for mega drive games. (not me though I was too kool)

[Anonymous No.2035061]

>>2035046
One, it did 3D just fine.
Two, I'd never even heard of a single person thinking it was backwards compatible until /vr/. Even if you only included it as a joke, it has to be as far from possible as a reason for its failure as anything. Why the fuck would you even care? If you have a huge collection of Genesis/MD games, then you probably already HAVE the console. I challenge anyone to point to a case of someone selling their MD because they thought they wouldn't need it when they got their Saturn, or someone who bought a bunch of MD games because they thought they'd be able to play them in their Saturn.

[Anonymous No.2035196]

>>2027486
the strongest mascot

[Anonymous No.2035212]

>>2035046
>(which theirs so many ports as an old processor was put in to be used for pointless basic tasks but everyone used it because it was easiest one to program.)

You mean the 68EC000 for sound and/or SH-1 for the CD drive?

[Anonymous No.2035218]

>>2035212
He probably means the 68K which is a pretty friendly CISC machine. SuperH is a pain in the ass to program, no matter which revision.

[Anonymous No.2035226]

>>2024332
No sports games.

In order for a console to do well in the US, you got to have EA or someone pushing out Basketball, Football, Baseball every year. Sony has that. Microsoft has been fighting for that. Without sports games support, you will not sell a console in the US. This is why SEGA
Sports started, but it was too little too late.

[Anonymous No.2035371]

>>2035046
>>2035218
They were able to do that? Damn, they should have just made the two processor setup an SH-2 and a 68030, it would have been the perfect twin for arcade machines.

[Anonymous No.2035401]

>>2035061
Most kids got the console bought by their parents, and it was not that uncommon to trade in all your games to get a shiny new console, as many families only had 1 machine in the household.

[Anonymous No.2035420]

>>2035371
I'm a programmer and I just threw up in my mouth. Thanks.

[Anonymous No.2035423]

>>2035212
>>2035218
All but maybe three games used standard, pre-supplied 68k libraries for playing sound effects and playing back MIDI songs with a sample bank. No software used it to run game code at all.
VF2 and Kids used their own 68k sound code, and Exhumed didn't even use the 68k, it was running the sound from the SH2s.

From what I heard, Sega had very good compilers for the SH2 so that wasn't an issue either - the problem was splitting the code to use both SH2s efficiently. This is where developer libraries improved upon a lot over time.

The real problem was still the VDP1 being anaemic compared to the Playstation. It could do 3d, just neither as fast or as pretty.

>>2035226
Saturn had shit loads of sport games, including almost everything from EA.
It was the Dreamcast that had no EA games.

[Anonymous No.2035438]

>>2035420
Hey! Why do you have to be such a fussy killjoy towards arcade machines?

To have the ultimate arcade port capability, the Sega Saturn should have been equipped with an SMP setup of highly symmetrical SH-2, 68030, i960, and v60 CPUs!!!111

[Anonymous No.2035446]

>>2035438
>SMP
But that's not symmetric multiprocessing. SMP is hard enough - asymmetric is nearly impossible without lots of time, and/or really simple problems, and/or modern tools.

[Anonymous No.2035456]

>>2024332
Nintendo and Sony's exclusives were just better (no sanic game, for example), Sony was literally buying up tons of third party games and 90% of the actually good games stayed in Japan. Not to mention that the multiplats that saw versions for the Saturn didn't look or play as well as the PS1 or N64 versions did (and they missed some key ones that COULD have saved their asses)

If they'd simply pushed the exclusives as hard as they did later with the DC and worked on getting more third party games, they could have contended. Even with inferior multiplats.

But no...

[Anonymous No.2035468]

It would probably have been better to cancel the Saturn and release a Sega console with Sega CD and 32x built in, there would have been tools that the devs already know how to use and backwards compatibility with Genesis games.

[Anonymous No.2035505]

>>2035438
>Why do you have to be such a fussy killjoy

Because /vr/.

[Anonymous No.2035517]

>>2035446
I think "highly symmetrical" is a syntactic incongruence anyway, like "very silent".

Though ironically the saturn did use asymmetrical multiprocessing in contrast to seemingly easy SMP used by others, with the video chipsets, while Voodoo1 soon after was capable of SLI, as with at least one Quantum card with SLI on a single board for the pro market (the predecessor to the more mainstream 24 meg voodoo2 beastling).

[Anonymous No.2035702]

>>2024332
Pretty much everything went wrong. The console was horribly mismanaged.

1. Overly complex architecture that was not cost efficient. Sega would have to match prices with the less costly PS1 and N64, causing them to lose millions.

2. It was very difficult to program, and the hardware had many quirks such as quad rendering and issues with transparencies. Launch games looked hideous and that rep stayed with the Saturn (even though its 3D could never match the PS1 and N64 it moved far beyond launch Daytona and Virtua Fighter).

3. Botched US launch. Surprise launch at $399 with no games, shot themselves in the foot.

4. No true Sonic game. Spinoffs like Sonic R don't cut it.

5. Terrible marketing outside Japan

6. Sega of Japan calling all the shots and ignoring the American and European branches.

7. Then Bernie Stolar came on the sinking ship and killed it for good.

[Anonymous No.2035747]

>>2024409
Two CPUs aren't necessarily a problem.

But with the Saturn, they were very limited in their ability to talk to each other or share memory or somesuch and there was also a dedicated CPU for sound, so no need to offload that.

[Anonymous No.2035794]

>>2035747

[Anonymous No.2036078]

>>2035438
>>2035446
I think symmetrical makes people think if even numbers of processors.

So the jokes about this that I would originally hear were of computers with 3 CPUs.

Then, with multi-cores, I got told that 3 cores was actually the most efficient option.

[Anonymous No.2036091]

>>2036078
>I got told that 3 cores was actually the most efficient option.

[Anonymous No.2036559]

>>2031141
>Yeah, but not too many where 3/4 of the library (which includes nearly all of the best games) was japan exlusive.


I think that may be one of the major problems. Back in the 90s, not a lot people had the skills, money, or patience to import the good Japanese games. Sega made one successful console, then went ahead and fucked it all up. Saturn and Dreamcast both should have been at least strong number 3 consoles, and Saturn might have been able to get past the N64 if Sega didn't fuck it up. A shame

[Anonymous No.2036679]

>>2035702
>7. Then Bernie Stolar came on the sinking ship and killed it for good.

He's just a scapegoat. In reality his job was to be SoJ's "yes-man", and then to set up the Dreamcast. Hence all the "Saturn is not our future" crap - he was already working on establishing a DC ecosystem.

That and his last task was specifically going against SOJ's wishes and releasing the DC at a lower price point, heavily contributing to its initial success.

[Anonymous No.2036684]

Strange architecture, SURPRISE LAUNCH for everyone (including the publishers), low RAM (that's the only explanation I can come up with for needing the 4M RAM cart).

[Anonymous No.2036717]

>>2036684
>Low Ram
>Saturn RAM:
CPU RAM: 2 MB
Video RAM: 1.54 MB
Sound RAM: 540 KB
CD-ROM Cache RAM: 512 KB
Battery Backup: 32 KB SRAM

>PS1 Ram
2 MB main DRAM
4 kB instruction Cache
1 kB non-associative SRAM data cache

[Anonymous No.2036726]

The saturn could have done a great 2d sonic title, it should have had one, or even 2.5d. I don't think it could handle a fully 3d sonic game.

[Anonymous No.2036894]

>>2036091
Well, yeah, that's what I got told. This was not too long after the idea of 3 CPUs was an easy joke.

The argument for that was quite reasonable:

Apps were typically only multithreaded for 2 cores. And in addition to that, a third core for background tasks was good. Or an app might have the intense stuff split relatively evenly between two cores and have light side tasks like sound assigned to the third.

[Anonymous No.2036906]

>>2025369
>>2030841
>>2033183
>>2033348
Quadrilateral based geometry not only made it less efficient/harder to program for, it also made ports from PCs all that much harder, that was a total nightmare considering that sega was fanatical about having a western style software selection.

Oh, and the CPU pair had that effect too.

[Anonymous No.2036912]

Where's the 5th gen specs comparison?

[Anonymous No.2036928]

>>2033348
actually quads are superior, just because triangles are more common doesn't mean they are superior. That is actually some of the stupidest reasoning ever. Quads are actually far more efficient too because 1 square polygon is essentially 2 triangles. Polygon models made with quads also tend to be far less jagged.

[Anonymous No.2036931]

>>2036928

How many quads could the Saturn push as opposed to the number of triangles the Playstation could push?

[Anonymous No.2036939]

>>2036931
I'm not sure how their GPUs stack up I was speaking about 3d rendering in general. Saturn was pretty beefy you have seen the saturn shenmue demo right?

[Anonymous No.2036945]

>>2036939

That was pretty impressive, but in a staged scene like that it's easier to reach peak performance.

[Anonymous No.2036949]

>>2036928
To actually rasterize a quad, you need to decompose it into triangles first - even on hardware which "natively" handles it. Consider how you're going to decompose it into spans - you're going to have twice as many cases as decomposing a triangle.

The Graphics Programming Black Book by Abrash is a good resource if you're interested in the low-level details of 3D rendering. It's oriented towards writing software code on the Pentium/etc, but the same basic algorithms are used in hardware - especially at that time.

[Anonymous No.2036979]

>>2036949
why is it that square poly models look more smooth? is it because of that rendering process

[Anonymous No.2037091]

>>2036906
>>2036928
There are both pros and cons for using quadrilaterals.

I think less distortion, and possibly easier hit detection would be a pro (the quote about NV1 having poor hit detection was referring to their 9-point curved quads, not normal quads, so don't quote it!). And in theory you also need to move less quads if a lot of your scenery is set up to use quads instead of triangles (since a quad = two triangles).
You can also do smooth curved shapes by putting the four corners of a quad in a bowtie shape, but that one is situational.

Disadvantages would be mainly the fact that every damn developer tool was based on triangles at the time, and the entire industry was going on in that direction as well. On the Saturn, they went around this by positioning 2 points of a quad on the same coordinates, but that needed textures to be edited, and it was kind of wasteful.

[Anonymous No.2037126]

>>2036949
>To actually rasterize a quad, you need to decompose it into triangles first - even on hardware which "natively" handles it.

The playstation had native commands for doing quads, but AFAIK, internally it was broken down to two triangles. That much is true.

For the Saturn, nothing was broken down to anything. It rendered quads line-by-line. I believe how it worked was this: it computed the two side coordinates which were furthest apart from each other horizontally, then for every pixel of the height, it drew a "line" to the opposing vertical coordinates direction.

This meant that pixels could be overdrawn, which wasted fillrate and caused transparency to apply on a pixel multiple times as it was overdrawn. It also made it possible to do smooth curves, but I don't know a released game from the top of my head that used it (MAYBE the cutscenes in Silhouette Mirage, but I'd have to debug that scene to check).

Actually I might be wrong on how the Saturn rendered stuff, since doing stuff that way would be incredibly inefficient, you'd have to address every pixel manually instead of being able to burst write a set of vertical pixels in one go.... but maybe that was another reason why the VDP1 was so much slower, despite being similar in function to the PSX GPU.

[Anonymous No.2037131]

>>2037126
>For the Saturn, nothing was broken down to anything. It rendered quads line-by-line. I believe how it worked was this: it computed the two side coordinates which were furthest apart from each other horizontally, then for every pixel of the height, it drew a "line" to the opposing vertical coordinates direction.
You just described span decomposition. When you're interpolating the horizontal coordinates to find the edge position at each line, you need to take into account where each vertex lies vertically as well. A triangle with neither a flat top nor a flat bottom, for example, will have one edge (left or right) with a kink in it, meaning you need to interpolate that as a piecewise function in two parts. Quads mean you have twice as many such cases to handle.

[Anonymous No.2037141]

>>2036939
>Saturn was pretty beefy you have seen the saturn shenmue demo right?

Saturn Shenmue was running at a VERY low frame rate, and we don't know how much actual gameplay was behind it.

Playstation could match that on polygon count alone (at the least). And it could also do higher quality textures and 4 different type of transparencies (polygon transparency ate fillrate like mad on both machines, BUT the PSX had way more fillrate to use).

The thing I'm wondering about the Shenmue footage the most, is how did they do those extremely realistic lightning effects in a few scenes?

[Anonymous No.2037148]

>>2036979
No, they're just modeled that way because an artist wanted it.

[Anonymous No.2037180]

>>2037131
>meaning you need to interpolate that as a piecewise function in two parts

By this you mean that you take a triangle and cut it horizontally in half, at the point of the middle-most coordinate, and then render it from top to bottom, left to right, as two triangles if need be, right? I'm only dabbling in triangle rendering techniques but I believe this is how it works.

Or, alternatively, they draw a "square" that encompasses the entire triangle and then draw everything top to bottom, left to right, skipping the pixels the triangle does not cover. This method seems less efficient to me.

>Quads mean you have twice as many such cases to handle.

But that's the thing, the Saturn didn't do this, it was most likely drawing pixels diagonally without breaking them down to vertical lines? The ability to draw bowties (and have pixel overdraw problems) would indicate this.

I'm not 100% sure if this is true, but it would explain why it had so shit fillrate.

[Anonymous No.2037197]

>>2037180
>By this you mean that you take a triangle and cut it horizontally in half, at the point of the middle-most coordinate, and then render it from top to bottom, left to right, as two triangles if need be, right?
Yes. I usually do the span decomposition first, dumping pairs of start/end X coordinates into an array (implicitly, one per line, with a start Y coordinate stored separately), and then iterate over that.

>I'm not 100% sure if this is true, but it would explain why it had so shit fillrate.
I don't know why they would go with this approach, as the span algorithm was well-known.

[Anonymous No.2037379]

>>2037197
>I don't know why they would go with this approach, as the span algorithm was well-known.

Reasons I can think of are
- it wasn't THAT well known in 1992-3 when they made it
- doing it this way would allow parts of the chip to be re-used (it had a draw command for drawing simple lines as well)
- it was meant to be drawing sprites and this approach fit in more logically with that. Or it was the only logical solution they could come up with, as their engineers only worked with sprites to that point.

Affordable, cheap consumer 3d drawing was still in its infancy at the time, and what there was, was software only. Remember, Voodoo cards came out in like 1996.

[Anonymous No.2038014]

>>2024358
>Plus a lack of multiple wide appeal "must have" games like Twisted Metal, Resident Evil, Crash Bandicoot, SOTN, Gran Turismo, Final Fantasy etc for people to latch onto. This isn't to say that the Saturn has a bad library but it couldn't compete with the N64 or PS1 after 97-98

Did they made the same stupid shit like with the Sega CD of focusing on gimmicky FMV interactive crap and dragon lair's wannabes.

[Anonymous No.2038274]

>>2024464
>It kicked the N64's ass
Yeah, about that...

The Saturn sold 9.5 million consoles across the world.

The N64 sold 32.93 million consoles across the world.(20.63 million in America only.)

I blame the Saturn's failure to simply Sega (America AND Japan) being directed by autistic tards at that time.
All of that potential for 2-d games was never truly used.

[Anonymous No.2038276]

>>2038274
to be fair the saturn did outsell the n64 in japan aka the only market sega didn't botch.

[Anonymous No.2038289]

>>2038276

Number of Sega Saturn units sold in Japan: almost 6 million. (There's not an exact number available.)

Number of N64 units sold in Japan: 5.54 million.

The numbers are almost matched, so I'm calling bull on your statement.

(And Sony sold over 102 million units, aka more than sega and nintenco combined.)

[Anonymous No.2038568]

>>2038289
How can you call bull on his statement when you posted the numbers that prove it? And why are you mentioning Sony, which had absolutely nothing to do with what he said?

[Anonymous No.2038864]

>>2038289
>The numbers are almost matched, so I'm calling bull on your statement.

Saturn sold 6 million in 4 years (1994 Nov to 1998 Nov). N64 sold 5.54 million in 6 years (1996 June to 2002 April).

The numbers are not an exact match, Saturn sold almost 50% better due to the timeframe involved.

[Anonymous No.2038880]

>>2038864
Saturn sold 9.5 million while the N64 sold 32.93 million.

It didn't sold better and deliberately cherrypicking just a fraction of the total sales to claim it did is simply stupid.

[Anonymous No.2039141]

>>2038880

The comparison in question was:
>Number of Sega Saturn units sold in Japan
vs
>Number of N64 units sold in Japan

Yes, we know the N64 sold better world wide, but we were comparing Japanese numbers not worldwide ones.

And the amount of TIME it was on the market for is also important when comparing the number of units sold. If you have a product on the market for a year and sell 10 million, then that product is a greater success than something that took 10 years to sell 10 million.

[Anonymous No.2039987]

>>2030945
this is so off-base it's not even funny

Genesis was successful and Sega became as huge as it did BECAUSE of Sega of America. Japan repeatedly got in the way and is largely responsible for their near demise and exit from the hardware business.

do some research, read interviews with Tom Kalinske for some insight into how completely fucking clueless SoJ is, even Stolar says the same things (but in more blunt terms)

[Anonymous No.2039992]

>>2031115
you're kidding, right?

there is a huge fucking difference, Model 2 is on a whole different level

[Anonymous No.2040000]

>>2031973
even if saturn didnt use the ram cart, the 2d ports would still be better

[Anonymous No.2040018]

>>2039992
>there is a huge fucking difference, Model 2 is on a whole different level

Yeah, model 2s are actually worse - some boards have slightly shaking video, and later ones have game incompatibility problems (only on like two titles but still).

Best are the early model 2s which still used model 1 guts.

[Anonymous No.2040114]

>>2040018
??? the cpu is totally different between 1 & 2 and the gpu on 2 is superior, what are you talking about

[Anonymous No.2040792]

>>2040114
>??? the cpu is totally different between 1 & 2 and the gpu on 2 is superior, what are you talking about

I don't think you are talking about the Saturn here, maybe you are confusing it with another console?

[Anonymous No.2041278]

>>2040114

Are you talking about the 3DO M2 ?

[Anonymous No.2041549]

I argue with my coworker about this all the time, the reason why it failed are boiled down to just a few stupid corporate moves by sega

[Anonymous No.2041573]

>>2024358
>>2024332
Does anyone have a must play saturn games?

I figure I should add a Sega system to my collection... I don't really nostalgia for the Genesis, and i do like the PS1 era quite a bit,.

[Anonymous No.2041746]

>>2040792
was talking about the arcade boards, whoops

[Anonymous No.2041961]

>>2041573
I liked Guardian heroes, Burning ranger and the panzer dragoon series, don't know anything else since I ran out of CDs to pirate the games

[Anonymous No.2041964]

>>2041573

Absolutely Dragonforce 1-2
Panzer dragoon
Mega man 8
Albert odyssey
Dark savior
Assault suit leynos 2

[Anonymous No.2042087]

Sega Japan only cared about getting a success in Japan, they had zero interest in the West.

With Nick Alexander and Tom Kalinske forced out, they set about fucking up everything. They somehow managed to lose to Sony in Europe, despite the fact that Sega fucking owned that region.

Its my belief that Sega wanted the Saturn to fail in the West, so SoJ could be top dog.

[Anonymous No.2042091]

>>2039987
Also, the SMS was successful in Europe because Mastertronic sorted out the fucking mess Sega Japan had made:

Sega-16: Mastertronic was Sega’s major distributor in England, Germany, and France, which helped the Master System greatly. Was this the reason why Sega bought the company in 1991?

Nick Alexander: In 1987 we bought a minority stake in Mastertronic. They needed to raise some cash to pay for the LCs for their first order of Master Systems and we wanted to be in the budget computer game business, which Mastertronic dominated. Sega delivered the shipment too late for Christmas so retailers cancelled their orders, and Mastertronic was tipped into a cash crisis which was resolved by our acquiring the rest of Mastertronic and merging it with Virgin Games to become Virgin Mastertronic, of which I was again Managing Director.

Sega had done the same thing to their other European distributors pushing the French one into financial crisis and the German one, part of Bertelsmann, to decide they did not want to work with Sega anymore. Sega asked us if we would take on these two territories as well, and as by now Nintendo’s first successful Christmas in the U.S. was clear, we agreed and did so from mid ’88. As Virgin we decided to market the Master System at an older, cooler, teenage user. Nintendo’s marketing was aimed more at a family audience with pre-teen kids.

[Anonymous No.2042178]

The Saturn went on stage after the 32X and SegaCD bombed, it couldn't get the stink off its self

[Anonymous No.2043841]

>>2038274
>All of that potential for 2-d games was never truly used.

>no Streets of Rage 4
>no Contra Hard Corps sequel
>no Sonic 4
>lackluster Shinobi Legions
>no Aleste sequel
>no Golden Axe Death Adder port
>no Phantasy Star sequel
>rest of Shining Force III left in Japan
>Thunder Force V also left in Japan
>Grandia too
>majority of shmups and Capcom's fighters didn't leave Japan, nor did the Neo-Geo games that saw Saturn ports
This kills the Saturn.

>>2025265
>>2041573
http://pastebin.com/t7NFpzbA