Why’d the Saturn have a cartridge port?

[Anonymous No.6616729]

[Anonymous No.6616737]

>>6616729
There were several different uses for it. The big ones were the RAM expansion carts, but there were also Memory carts, and two games required their own ROM carts as well.

[Anonymous No.6617918]

Respect. Genesis was a good idea. Genesis is a good idea. Saturn is a good idea.

S E G A
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A

[Anonymous No.6617928]

Would backwards-compatibility with the superior Genesis have saved the Saturn from being a laughably pathetic failure?

[Anonymous No.6617931]

Memory carts are the default use case. RAM carts were kind of an extra-special application that never even made it out of Japan.

[Anonymous No.6617940]

>Saturn? More like Uranus!

[Anonymous No.6617949]

[Anonymous No.6617956]

>>6617918
>>6617940
YoUR gay anus


S U C K
U
C
K

[Anonymous No.6618028]

>>6617928
i was under the impression that saturn did play genesis games. guess im taking it off the list lol.

[Anonymous No.6618042]

>>6616729
Always wondered if that was a hold-over from an earlier stage of development, when it might have been cart-based or had MD/32x compatibility.

[Anonymous No.6618048]

>>6616729
the Saturn could've been quite successful if it was backwards compatible with MD/CD/32x

[Anonymous No.6618049]

>>6618028
Technically it can. There's a fuckton of Genesis ports.

[Anonymous No.6618085]

>>6616729
They were planning to allow devs to either release cart-based or CD-based games but axed the former because they were afraid it would be easier to pirate games with.

[Anonymous No.6618224]

>>6618042
It was. I don't have the article right off the bat but it's been documented Sega at least toyed with the idea very early during the development of Saturn.

[Anonymous No.6618226]

>>6618224
The backwards-compatibility or cartridges in general?

[Anonymous No.6618368]

>>6618085
This pretty much hits the nail on the head. There's nothing stopping the Saturn from running a game from a cartridge, Sega just didn't allow it because of piracy concerns. So it instead became used for RAM Expansions, The Netlink Modem, The Backup RAM Cartridge, and ROM Cartridges to be used alongside a CD-ROM.

[Anonymous No.6618526]

>>6618226
I tried looking for the article and can't locate it. If I remember correctly it said they considered backwards compatibility but dropped it pretty quickly.

[Anonymous No.6619238]

sega shouldve just blended the 32x and saturn development into one
>hey you could get this add-on for your genesis+segaCD thatll let you play saturn games!
>OR you can buy this new sexy all-in-one console with a cartridge slot for genesis backwards compatibility
>SEGA DOES WHAT NINTENDONT

[Anonymous No.6619250]

>>6617928
>>6618028
>>6618048
>>6618049
Never ever succeed. Stop examining dumb idea. It doom from the start. Admit fool.

[Anonymous No.6619263]

>>6619238
>Nintendoes what Genesisn’t
>two hardware don’t go well
Into one? If they did back than. The fail console price skyrocketed.

[Anonymous No.6620027]

>>6618368
> didn't allow it
there was nothing to stop an entire game being loaded from ROM. this is exactly what they did with the arcade hardware. they forced everyone to use CD-ROM on saturn because it was cheaper to manufacturer. piracy had nothing to do with anything. all those discs were bootlegged.

[Anonymous No.6620116]

>>6617931
They did, just once

[Anonymous No.6620174]

>>6620116
Ah yes Kof '95, which came out in 1997 in Europe. Sega sure knew how to localise video games.

[Anonymous No.6620431]

>>6618042
It was also an overcompensation for a mistake they made with the Mega Drive. The CD and the 32X were clunky and difficult to work with due to the MD expansion not having the right features for a device of that calibre.
So they packed the Saturn expansion slot with pins and gave it access to as much of the system bus as they could.

[Anonymous No.6621716]

>>6620431
It's interesting to think how much more capable the Sega CD in particular could've been if it just had the ability to push a few more damn colours over the expansion slot.

[Anonymous No.6621718]

>>6616729
Because it wasn’t the future of gaming

[Anonymous No.6621746]

The Saturn has a 68000 CPU for rudimentary things (the Genesis's main CPU), just like the Genesis had a Zilog Z80 (the Master System's main CPU) for minor tasks. For whatever reason they just never pulled the trigger on backwards compatibility for the Saturn even though it would have been a slam dunk as a marketing tactic.

>>6621716
Agreed. The Sega CD was engineered wrong. They threw in a better CPU but the Genesis was not lacking in horsepower--it beat the SNES by a wide margin. What it needed was a bigger color palette. And since games were primarily marketed in magazines, the screenshots of Sega CD games ended up not looking that much better than a random Genesis title. Had they ditched the raw horsepower in favor of a better PPU the Sega CD could have potentially walloped the SNES in the late 90s and made the 32X completely unnecessary.

[Anonymous No.6621807]

>>6621746
>the Sega CD could have potentially walloped the SNES in the late 90s
sega cd came out in 1992 bruh

[Anonymous No.6621832]

>>6621807
I know. But I think it would have taken a couple of years because in the early 90s a Genesis/Sega CD combo would have been way too expensive to compete with the SNES.

[Anonymous No.6621914]

>>6621832
but after 1995 nobody would care if the sega cd could outdo the SNES
the N64 would be right about to launch

[Anonymous No.6621958]

>>6621914
I'm not going to pretend I know how it would play out but part of what fucked Sega is that around 1995 they didn't know what the fuck they were doing. It was throw shit at the wall and see what sticks. A solid Sega CD would have meant no 32X and possibly given the Saturn a little more breathing room instead of pushing it out in early 1995 with no games. The SNES was still going strong up until sometime in 1997. Sega had nothing to put up against games like Chrono Trigger, Yoshi's Island and Mario RPG. Meanwhile imagine a Sega CD that could push SNES colors or better. Now imagine Lunar: Eternal Blue, Snatcher, and Popful Mail taking full advantage of that.

[Anonymous No.6621981]

>>6618049
no, i mean as in, it has the cartridge port on it right? the saturn itself? if it can literally fit genesis games (which i dont know myself , i don't own a saturn) does it play them or does it boot to nothing? im very confused.

[Anonymous No.6622012]

>>6621981
The Saturn's cartridge port is not the same as the Genesis's. They won't fit.

[Anonymous No.6622020]

>>6622012
To add to that, I suspect the plan was to make it compatible but once they fell through they probably changed the pinout so people wouldn't fuck up their Genesis carts/Saturns by trying to make it play Sonic 3. This left the Saturn with the weird quirk of having a fully functional cartridge port that mostly served as a glorified memory card slot with all but a few exceptions.

[Anonymous No.6623298]

>>6621746
> backwards compatibility
you stupid fucking retards on this board with your dangerously high level of dunning-kruger syndrome always believe
> oh, if it has the same cpu then it's not that hard to make it backward compatible
except saturn wasn't designed to be compatible with genesis. graphics and sound hardware are completely different. shut the fuck up.

[Anonymous No.6623338]

>>6621958
Snes was game over by 96, I wouldn't say dead but all the triple A titles stayed in Japan to force the next gen hardware to sell. Even game mags pretty much started skipping hard as if the past 5 years didn't happen. One even refused to cover harvest moon and just talked shit about it instead. It was a weird transition but once you got a taste of the psx or 64 or even sat you didn't really look back unless you missed a game

[Anonymous No.6623341]

>>6621981
That's what she said

[Anonymous No.6623345]

>>6623298
You tell em bud straight from the horse's mouth, bunch of faggots

[Anonymous No.6623347]

>>6616737
This doesn't answer WHY it was there. You're explaining HOW it was used, which wasn't the question.

To answer the actual question, I don't think a definitive reason is known, but speculation is they interned to make it backwards compatible, then balked due to cost, but kept the slot for memory cards. I think RAM expansions weren't part of the design, developers realized the I/O of the slot was sufficient to support a RAM expansion.

[Anonymous No.6623350]

>>6618085
Citation needed.

[Anonymous No.6623807]

>>6623347
I take the opposite stance to you. I'm sure it's an I/O expansion slot first and the similarity to a typical cartridge slot is just because it's more convenient to have it on top than to have sidecars and bottom slots. They would very likely have ALWAYS intended an adapter to make Genesis carts fit because it was known by the time of the 32X and SVP that the genesis cart design was too simplistic, so it's extremely likely someone would have built a better slot from the get-go and relied on simple passthrough adapters like the power base convertor for attaching the old carts.

And at the risk of being accused of suffering from "Dunning-Kruger Syndrome", the Saturn hardware has more similarities to the Genesis than it has differences. If someone tasked me with getting raw Genesis binaries to run on a Saturn I've got a pretty good idea of how to do it. You've got all the hardware you need plus 2 SH-2s to fill in the gaps. It would be a software emulator backed by hardware and running at hard realtime instead of simulated time so it would "feel" like real hardware rather than a PC emulator.
It would be a hell of a long post so I'm not going to type it all out. For all we know someone at SoJ put forward a proposal very similar to what's in my head and it was rejected because of some business decision. Like how we know there was an early DC design that incorporated Saturn compatibility but SoA said don't waste time and money since only japan cares about the saturn. Well, SoJ could easily have made the same argument about Genesis compatibility since the MD didn't sell great in Japan.

[Anonymous No.6623851]

>>6623338
I'm an N64 babby, but I can distinctly remember Super Mario RPG still being covered and talked about into 1997.

[Anonymous No.6623891]

>>6623298
The Saturn's architecture was being revised until the damn thing was almost on store shelves. Much like how the SNES was originally planned for NES support but then that got scrapped the same could easily have been the case for the Saturn before they felt the need to go with incompatible hardware.

[Anonymous No.6623894]

>>6623338
>It was a weird transition but once you got a taste of the psx or 64 or even sat you didn't really look back unless you missed a game
That wasn't really true though. The Saturn and the PSX, especially the Saturn, had really middling early games. What were people playing? Battle Arena Toshinden and Jumping Flash? Fun games but it wasn't so outrageously revolutionary that people forgot about the SNES.

[Anonymous No.6623895]

>>6623891
What are the pros/cons of backwards compatibility like that? Seems like a win/win if the consoomer can still buy older games for a newer console.

[Anonymous No.6623954]

>>6623895
The con is that the architecture has to be compatible so you get a bit handcuffed at the engineering phase. That's why a lot of planned backwards compatibility gets scrapped during development. Sega had a habit of building backwards compatibility into it's hardware though. The Japanese Master System is backwards compatible with the SG-1000, both the Genesis and Game Gear are backwards compatible with the Master System.

[Anonymous No.6623979]

>>6623807
Citation needed for the Dreamcast backwards compatible bit.

I think we're saying the same thing about the cartridge slot, but you're convinced it was an intentional expansion port, whereas I am not. More evidence of why I'm not is the actual expansion port that exists on the back of the console :p

Regarding genesis on Saturn.. slow down a little. The 68k used in the Saturn doesn't have the same instruction set, and you're missing all the custom silicone. The Saturn uses the 68k for sound. So your idea is to emulate the missing instructions, sound, and everything else on the SH2s? On a console that isn't even designed to accommodate genesis cartridges? Good luck.

[Anonymous No.6624423]

>>6623979
I can't find it... Basically it was a mock-up prototype thing with saturn controllers and a comment saying that Saturn compatibility was considered by SoA said no. I'll keep looking, but it may have been total bullshit.
WRT the 68k, I didn't know it was missing instructions. If it has a BAD_INSTRUCTION IRQ then you could trap and emulate, but if it doesn't then, no, I'm out of ideas.

[Anonymous No.6624473]

>>6623979
>>6624423
Ah, I found it. Sorry, turns out he said "probably" and "maybe" a lot more than I remember:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=291&v=yia0jHPFfA4&feature=emb_logo

[Anonymous No.6624478]

>>6624473
That Adam guy is a retard.

[Anonymous No.6624639]

>>6623979
I think we're saying the same thing about the cartridge slot, but you're convinced it was an intentional expansion port, whereas I am not. More evidence of why I'm not is the actual expansion port that exists on the back of the console :p

Yeah, the Saturn feels like a hodgepodge of half-ideas. It has two separate expansion ports but both were barely used for anything. And the handful of things it was used for applied to maybe 8 games total. There certainly was no need for a full sized ROM cart slot solely for what it was used for. Any suggestions for what the original plan was is obviously conjecture but it can be educated conjecture.

[Anonymous No.6624675]

>>6620116
Eurofag here, I had X-Men Vs Street Fighter and it also had the RAM card

[Anonymous No.6625405]

>>6624473
>>6624478
This is conjecture at best. No sources provided, and there's no mention from anyone who was at Sega at that time that Saturn backwards compatibility was ever on the table.

[Anonymous No.6625717]

>>6625405
It is a guess, sure, but it's also an educated guess based on the quirks of the Saturn's final architecture and Sega's own history with backwards compatibility. Absent the convenience of having a Sega engineer to talk to, it's an idea that holds water given the facts we do know.

[Anonymous No.6626131]

>>6625717
There's no logic to anything Adam Koralik is saying. At all.

[Anonymous No.6626265]

>>6616729
Same reason your PC has "cartridge ports"

[Anonymous No.6626342]

>>6622012
>>6622020
my god thats disappointing man. i actually cant believe the saturn doesnt play genesis. it literally has a cartridge slot and they said fuck it because piracy... but sega was already on their way down the shitter man.. the 32x was fucking garbage. we gave up after that shit.