/vr/ - Retro Games

[Anonymous No.2351195]

How?

[Anonymous No.2351196]

Forgot the fucking link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foZUcPQAMvg

[Anonymous No.2351202]

I feel like Shenmue would have been half the game it was if it ended up on the Saturn. Not dissing the Saturn, but the Dreamcast seemed to be almost built around the expectations of Shenmue in a way (not fan reception, more hardware expectation), and it just clicked.

[Anonymous No.2351208]

>>2351202
I agree that it's almost certainly better off as a Dreamcast game, but god damn I find the Saturn version fascinating. I wish it would leak. VF3 too.

[Anonymous No.2351242]

Shenmue and VF3 would've been the games that could've pushed Saturn to where it was supposed to be. They were some of the only games that truly harnessed what the Saturn was capable of. Unfortunately for Sega, the Saturn was in a really bad place everywhere except for Japan and the greedy bastard Bernie Stolar wanted to drop it and push the Dreamcast to be completed earlier. Stolar essentially costed us the beauty of Sega with his fucking bullshit business decisions and his unwillingness to work with Sega Japan in order to bring all of those games to the States. It sucks, but I still have my Genesis, Saturn, and Dreamcast to revel in.

[Anonymous No.2351252]

I love how you can see stuff from Shenmue 2 in that trailer. God damn they really were ambitious if they intended to include Yokosuka and Hong Kong in one Saturn game.

[Don Rumata !!rYqzYYFAejo No.2351259]

Suzuki and his team had access to Sophia dev kits, which had some advancements compared to normal ones. And the programmers on staff were very experienced at this point, able to crank this much out of the architecture via assembly coding and tricks learned while making ports of games like VF2. I'm surprised they managed to coax so much out of the Saturn given that it was over-designed by panicky executives. Problems come down to facial expressions once again.

[Anonymous No.2351276]

>>2351259
>Sophia dev kits
I'm not seeing much (useful) information on this anywhere, what exactly is it?

[Anonymous No.2351278]

>>2351242
>the greedy bastard Bernie Stolar wanted to drop it and push the Dreamcast to be completed earlier.

Stolar was the yes-man for Sega of Japan, and they were already thinking of replacing the Saturn as early as 1995 (they went to nvidia asking for a possible gpu that could run VF3 and be ready for launch in 1996).

He could have brought over some more games, but at most they could give only about a year more for the Saturn.

[Anonymous No.2351281]

>>2351242
>Still blaming Bernie Stolar

Sega was stupid enough to hire him and they were stupid enough to keep him in charge even when they knew the Saturn was tanking in America.

[Anonymous No.2351297]

>>2351242
>They were some of the only games that truly harnessed what the Saturn was capable of.
Seems to be a recurring theme in failed or under-performing consoles.

Ease of development >>>>>>>>> raw power

[Anonymous No.2351305]

>>2351297
Sony threw away ease of development with PS2/PS3.

[Anonymous No.2351315]

>>2351305
The PS2 and PS3 were still very powerful, though.

Saturn was underpowered AND difficult to program.

[Anonymous No.2351324]

>>2351315
Underpowered? But look at all them chips! I count atleast 20 processors.

[Anonymous No.2351326]

>>2351297
PS2 pretty much goes against that trend.

-Not enough VRAM to make developers comfortable
-A less comprehensive built-in 3D feature set than the N64. Yes. Really. (Had to brute force things to get around that)
-The Emotion Engine was a multi core processor that would constantly stall if the different specialized cores didn't have well synchronized passing of data to each other
-Programming both vectors units in the Emotion Engine was a task akin to programming custom N64 microcodes and almost as difficult
-Initial documentation was terrible

I guess it really shows that difficulty of programming isn't as pivotal as people think. It's just one of many factors contributing to a console's success or failure.

[Anonymous No.2351335]

>>2351324
Even if you can get everything to work together in perfect unity, the graphics hardware is still very weak.

The only way you could get games to look impressive was to abuse the background processor to do special effects. And that thing was extremely situational in a 3d game.

[Anonymous No.2351343]

>>2351315
N64 is probably a better example of a console that was difficult to program but powerful in that generation.

The untapped potential of custom microcodes is just ridiculous.

[Anonymous No.2351347]

>>2351335
BUT ITS GOT BLAST PROCESSING

[Anonymous No.2351349]

This crappy dance game was a prototype to test animations.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2E3C_D-7Io
>>2351259
A dev kit with better newer tools and documentation. Something Sega should have made available for developers in the beginning.

[Anonymous No.2351351]

>>2351349
Why did you post the chibi one? It looks better with the full sized model.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eeO3bWcvheU

[Anonymous No.2351353]

>>2351315

PS2 was dwarfed by its two main competitors in terms of power and not too impressive against the Dreamcast either, and the PS3 isn't much more powerful than the 360.

[Anonymous No.2351359]

>>2351347
Funny thing is it actually does, with the genesis's processor being in the saturn.

[Anonymous No.2351361]

>>2351351
AM2 fucking loved SD chibi.

[Anonymous No.2351384]

>>2351195
Buttery smooth 4 fps.

[Anonymous No.2351387]

>>2351343
Not that guy, but I think of the N64 much as the PS2: difficult to program, massive gap between theoretical and achievable performance, plus key aspects of even theoretical performance left wanting. Difference is the PS2 ended up with more momentum behind it, but let's not forget the N64 was a mainstream success.

[Anonymous No.2351390]

>>2351384
You know they were going to actually release this game right? I doubt the FPS would of been that low. Not to mention the only footage we have of the game is rather poor.

[Anonymous No.2351393]

>>2351390
It is a mystery

[Anonymous No.2351556]

>>2351393
Lets just ask yu suzuki.

[Anonymous No.2351568]

>>2351196
>1:50
What the hell isn't that scene from Shenmue 2

just how much of this did they have completed on the saturn?

[Anonymous No.2351582]

>>2351390
>would of

[Anonymous No.2351634]

>>2351259
>Suzuki and his team had access to Sophia dev kits, which had some advancements compared to normal ones.

The Sophia sets were the earliest and poorest development kits from mid-1994. The most advanced development kits were the Cartdevs, which were up to rev. C. They were still not as good as Sony kits, which could do things like profile the hardware usage of the machine, allowing you to see bottlenecks and such.

Biggest problem with Saturn development wasn't the devkits though, but the dev libraries. The initial libraries were slow for doing 3d and barely used more than the main cpu - and many games used those libraries and got poor performance. The few devs that created their own libraries all ended up making games that looked and ran way smoother (AM2, Lobotomy, the Panzer Dragoon guys, Travellers Tales, Scavenger...).

They did improve on the development libraries a great deal, but by the time they did so (1996), publishers started pulling out.

[Anonymous No.2351635]

>>2351242
>Bernie Stolar
>Bastard

Saturn was 99.9% dead when Stolar came to SOA. It was evident after doing the price drops, aggressive/edgy "Plaything" commercials, 3-Free game bundle, and developing easier dev-kits. Quit hating him because he was right

[Anonymous No.2351637]

>>2351326
I think the reason the PS2 worked out was that even just using the provided libraries at their most basic, easiest to use level you got 720x480 with (for the time) hi-res textures which was a marked improvement over the PS1. This gave developers time to get to grips with the crazier parts of the architecture and realise some fairly big improvements later.

If you give developers an easy start, they'll build on it steadily.

[Anonymous No.2351639]

>>2351635
In North America btw

[Anonymous No.2351650]

>>2351343
Can you elaborate on the microcodes,please ? Sounds interesting.

[Anonymous No.2351651]

>>2351343
>The untapped potential of custom microcodes is just ridiculous.

True. It was sadly way ahead of its time. Even when PC hardware got shaders it was a long time before games used them for anything more than cheesy bump mapping effects and the like. I think it was Doom 3 that got devs to realise that shaders weren't just for "special effects", they were supposed to be the alpha and omega of rasterisation.

Hell, the GameCube featured proper fragment shaders but most devs STILL were content to stick to stock rasterisers.

[Anonymous No.2351656]

>>2351568
>just how much of this did they have completed on the saturn?
More than what was on shenmue 2 even. I believe they had the whole story written.

[Anonymous No.2351669]

>>2351650
Not that guy, and I can't give you any detailed technical information, but the basics are that a GPU at the time like in the PS1 was "fixed function." You gave it 3 (x,y) coords plus 3 (u,v) textures coords, colours, transparency, etc. and it rendered the polygon. The way it rendered was fixed in the silicon.

The N64 didn't do that. The GPU took a special program that we call the microcode that would provide rendering functions. The one that nintendo provided would behave like say a 3dfx voodoo would with bilinear filtered, perspective correct, alpha blended, z-buffered, etc. polygons. But if you replaced the microcode with a custom module you could do anything. e.g. hardware cell shading, normal mapping, etc.

The trick was that Nintendo didn't document it properly, and they didn't want developers messing with it. They were worried that they'd just go in and turn off filtering, z-buffering, etc. to increase performance and make the N64 look like a PS1/Saturn. The lazy port problem.

I don't know what made them cave in the end, but they did and that's why late N64 games had a sudden quality boost.

[Anonymous No.2351671]

>>2351637
PS2 worked out because they figured out how to use it.

If you just used it as you would any other machine (ie. you were porting from PC or Dreamcast or even PS1), you were texturing from vram only and not touching the vector coprocessors - essentially using only about 10% of the machine.

Tons of early PS2 games used 240p or 480i. 480p only became a standard later, when they figured out how to get around the machines limitations, by using the vector processors.

[Anonymous No.2351697]

>>2351671
correction:
>PS2 worked out because they figured out how to use it.

PS2 worked out because it was out on the market long enough so figured out how to use it.
Plus it had competition with more powerful hardware, so they had to try pushing the graphics on the system.

[Anonymous No.2351735]

>>2351671
>Tons of early PS2 games used 240p or 480i.
Did the 480i/480p difference matter to the PS2? Usually even when interlaced the hardware will render the full 480 per frame and the interlacing is a job for the video encoder. If the hardware only rendered alternating 240 lines then a dropped frame would mean the display would "de-rez". Many PS2 games exhibited this artefact and I always wondered if it was a software problem or just some quirk of the graphics hardware.

[Anonymous No.2351751]

>>2351656
>written
that doesn't mean that they had gotten that far in creating the game it's self, Also, in games like this developers tend to work on small chunks at a time, and usually not in order of the story, so what parts of the story it shows could have no baring on how far they were into actually making the game.

[Anonymous No.2351763]

>>2351671
>If you just used it as you would any other machine (ie. you were porting from PC or Dreamcast or even PS1), you were texturing from vram only and not touching the vector coprocessors - essentially using only about 10% of the machine.
That's what I meant. Even at 10% the PS2 was "good enough" for the early days. Meant even low-rent studios could make some good screenshot fodder without too much hassle. Had the PS2 required the vector units to be well managed just to get anything displayed I imagine it wouldn't have stolen so much of the Dreamcast's thunder out the gate.

Compare PS3 vs. 360. The PS3 required you to work the Cell to keep pace with the 360 which was a challenge many devs weren't ready for. Hell, most still aren't, if it wasn't for middleware levelling the playing field the PS3 might not have held on during the rocky years.

[Anonymous No.2351778]

>>2351697
No, it was mostly marketing, if "challenge from more powerful hardware" had any influence on it's success at all sega would be rolling in money about now. And as far as the Dreamcast goes, the odd defeatist attitude sega seemed to have at the time didn't help matters, after the genesis era it seemed like if another company was doing better than them they would just give up for some reason rather than fight back, and really in the end that is actually what killed sega.

[Anonymous No.2351793]

>>2351778
SEGA always had this weird way of dealing with competition. They'd release a console and back it 100%, then when their competitors system was doing better in the market they'd release new hardware. Nintendo invested in games, SEGA churned hardware.
The DC was really the first time SEGA invested heavily in software for a single platform. Lots of internal teams dedicated to new IP.

[Anonymous No.2352231]

>>2351735
>Did the 480i/480p difference matter to the PS2?

In 480i the machine is essentially rendering 240 lines per frame (it just skips drawing every 2nd line). 480p renders 2x as many lines, so it needs bigger framebuffer, uses more fillrate, etc.

>If the hardware only rendered alternating 240 lines then a dropped frame would mean the display would "de-rez".

The video encoder would still give you 60 interlaced frames per second, it's just that the machine wouldn't draw different contents on every single one of them. I don't know what you mean about that de-rez artefact.

>>2351778
The challenge was put on the game studios, who had to push the titles on each hardware more, to stand up against the competition. This would have been true even if there weren't any other consoles on the market.

>>2351793
Sega was all about knee jerk reactions. It was an arcade mentality: if the competition one-upped them in that scene, they could come out with a new hardware that was better.

But this did not work on the console market, and they never figured it out until the Dreamcast, and it was too late by then.

[Anonymous No.2352238]

>>2351735
>Did the 480i/480p difference matter to the PS2?

It mattered because every Dreamcast game was 480p out of the box (except for the handful of games that had VGA disabled), while most PS2 games had awful jaggies and ran in 240p or 480i and looked like ass compared to the DC.

Plus in PAL land, they did PAL60 as a standard too, first console to have this option selectable in-game in many titles.

[Anonymous No.2352268]

I remember when Shenmue was claimed to have a world as large as Earth itself. The amount of hype it generated was crazy, shame it had to come out on a doomed console. I had a DC when it was still in the running, but there were just way too many straight arcade ports and not enough decent console games. There were also a lot of just plain shitty games from third-party devs, same with N64 really.

I really can't imagine how Shenmue would run on a Saturn. I'm guessing this was a tech demo of sorts, before the devs had to factor in things like performance or how it would fit on a disc. This thing would have needed 10+ Saturn CD's at least I'm sure.

[Anonymous No.2352290]

>>2351195
>>2351196
I have my doubts too, how come fighters megamix and burning rangers looked nothing like that? This is most likely just some animation test.

[Anonymous No.2352295]

>there will never be a Shenmue 3

[Anonymous No.2352341]

>>2351671
>Tons of early PS2 games used 240p
What games? I only know ICO.

[Anonymous No.2352364]

>>2352295
Thank god.

I'd probably kill myself waiting all these years for Shenmue 3 just for it to end on a cliffhanger.

[Anonymous No.2352393]

>>2351650
Easiest (if not 100% accurate) way to describe N64 microcodes is that they are like pixel/vertex shaders written in an assembly-like language that operates on the N64's GPU.
>>2351669
The biggest reason Nintendo didn't support microcodes initially was because the development kit had no proper tools to deal with it, and so programming and debugging it essentially had to all be done by hand. Nintendo didn't want to provide technical support to developers over it.

Pretty silly really. Here they paid for a programmable GPU, and yet they treated it like a fixed function unit due to paranoia.

[Anonymous No.2352614]

Why is Ryo so sexy?

[Anonymous No.2354132]

>>2351305
The PS3 had its shit kicked in by the 360, which came out earlier, was cheaper, had better versions of multiplats, and had worthwhile exclusives such as Halo or Gears. Some third parties were even threatening to pull support from the PS3, that's how fucking bad it did. This forced Sony to change how to market the console, they could no longer hold onto hype and brand name being the sole driving forces behind sales.

Then the Xbox One happened.

[Anonymous No.2354136]

Testing

[Anonymous No.2354182]

>>2352290
these clips are from some arcade architecture probably
Theres no way in hell the saturn could run 1/10 of disc 1 of shenmue

[Anonymous No.2354562]

>>2354182
An arcade system with the same rendering quirks as the saturn? I find that hard to believe. If it was something different it would look much better. Yu Suzuki has confimed the game was running on the saturn.

[Anonymous No.2354567]

>>2354182
AM2 were experimenting with an add-on that would push the Saturn's polygon pushing power for the VF3 port, but Shenmue is running on a stock Saturn.

[Anonymous No.2354586]

>>2352341
The only other one I recall was Disgaea, but only cause that was one of the maybe ten PS2 games I played.

[Anonymous No.2354596]

>>2351793
>>2352231

Yeah I was gonna say, Sega's mentality on arcades really screwed them for consoles. It made sense to constantly innovate in hardware for arcade because there was a need to stay ahead and basically custom-build a new hardware to a game every few years at least.

Everybody else had the 'stable platform' thing figured out early on. Sega almost seems like they just did stuff because their hardware R&D division was bored.

[Anonymous No.2354610]

>>2354132
To be fair, the first time MS shot themselves in the foot was with the huge and dramatic shift toward Kinect and its ilk. Nintendo baited the hook and MS bit hard. That was about the time that the system became rebranded as 'shooters and kinect'. You're definitely right that the boner was a huge blunder. However, this isn't really relevant to retro stuff.