/vr/ - Retro Games

[Anonymous No.9195762]

The Saturn is such a "2D powerhouse" that its only real advantage over the PS1 hardware-wise is having more available ram to work with (only with the purchase of an external ram cart) and numerous serious architectural shortcomings like being incapable of opacity blending.

[Anonymous No.9195771]

bro, it sold 10 million units and had a transgender purple clown as its mascot. we get it, it was a failure.

[Anonymous No.9195783]

>>9195762
>that its only real advantage over the PS1 hardware-wise is having more available ram to work with (only with the purchase of an external ram cart)
No, it has more VRAM before any external RAM carts are added.
>and numerous serious architectural shortcomings like being incapable of opacity blending.
No. VDP2 can do that easily, including when mixing its VDP1 layer. VDP1 can also do it in the framebuffer but it's slow and limited so it's rarely done.

Also VDP2 is much faster and supports raster effects which the PlayStation doesn't.

[Anonymous No.9195784]

>>9195771
NiGHTs is male though

[Anonymous No.9195793]

>>9195783
>VDP2 can do that easily, including when mixing its VDP1 layer
VDP1 only supports 50% opacity and doesn't support blending at all, which means that a game like SOTN could essentially never look as good on Saturn as it does on PS1 without fundamentally changing the art direction.

[Anonymous No.9195798]

>>9195762
Nobody cares faggot, this is now a good Saturn thread.

I finally got around to buying a Multicontroller (Japanese ver. of 3D Control Pad) and after spending an afternoon cleaning and fixing it up I tested it out in a few games. I was surprised by how different the stick is compared to others, it's floaty the travel is a lot shorter with a very small deadzone. My only issue with it is the face button placement, doesn't matter if you're using the analog or d-pad here, your hands will be sitting asymmetrical and it makes me hold the controller at a higher angle.

[Anonymous No.9195801]

>>9195762
>incapable of opacity blending.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_ctL4rkTKo

[Anonymous No.9195807]

>>9195783
>VDP1 can also do it in the framebuffer but it's slow and limited so it's rarely done.
Yeah, the trade off is just extreme clipping, 50% reduced sprite resolution, being incapable of overlapping transparent objects, and taking up tons of computer resources.

[Anonymous No.9195808]

>>9195784
'he' inherits the gender of whatever character you choose before starting the game so he is quite literally a faggit tranny.

[Anonymous No.9195809]

>>9195762
>i have no idea about the actual hardware specs, but i'll open my dumb mouth anyway
Australio is that you?

[Anonymous No.9195810]

>>9195798
you will get used to it, but you'll find the d-pad to be worse than the standard pad. Still I quite like mine, it's fucking awesome for necronomicon, and the weighty throws of the stick make games like stellar assault SS feel so satisfying to fly around in. Still use it when you can, it will give you greater appreciation for the games that do use it.

[Anonymous No.9195816]

>>9195798
That said, the analog is a tremendous advantage for the games that use it. Not only can I play Sega Rally Championship Plus Netlink Edition with proper steering that works, I actually managed to get a decent time attack record for it. I have a bunch of other games I'm gonna test out with it, but I have my eyes set on beating Burning Rangers with the Multicontroller. Never finished that game since the digital pad is atrocious for that game so I dropped it. I'm also thinking of Powerslave since I've never played it before and fake youtube chodes have been manipulating the algorithm with videos about the new PC port.

[Anonymous No.9195818]

>>9195808
Just transition already, you're seeing trannies everywhere.

[Anonymous No.9195819]

>>9195807
IIRC Burning Rangers uses a completely separate technique which is to draw directly to VDP2 memory from VDP1. But yeah, as technically impressive as that game is the performance is disappointing.

[Anonymous No.9195820]

>>9195816
powerslave makes good use of the triggers too, this goes for all lobotomy fps games. Really, try Necronomicon with them too. The triggers for the flippers is so nice.

[Anonymous No.9195826]

>>9195818
>Just transition already
similar to how nights transitions from male to female at the player's whim?

[Anonymous No.9195857]

the resellers are NOT going to like this thread

[Anonymous No.9196012]

>>9195762
This should have been a 2D only console, 32X should have never been created. Saturn could have allowed backward compatibility with Genesis and CD so that they can still make money off Genesis games and Sega CD games while also having their most powerful 2D console yet. Then after a normal console cycle of Saturn they release Dreamcast as their first 3D competitor.

[Anonymous No.9196024]

>>9196012
>This should have been a 2D only console
lol it would have flopped even harder

[Anonymous No.9196039]

>>9196012
The CDX had most of those things, it just kind of slid under the radar. In the end what you basically had was an arms race between the upgraded Genesis consoles (CDX and Neptune) and the Saturn, and for better or worse the Saturn won out. I'm very curious to see what would've happened if they kept the Saturn in Japan and just let SoA move forward with the CDX and the Neptune instead.

[Anonymous No.9196043]

>>9196024
>>9196012
Sadly the normie faggots were dick riding ugly ass 3d at the time. The PC FX was a 32 bit 2D only system and flopped just as hard as hard as the sega 32x, despite the fact that the pc engine was a huge fucking success in Japan and outsold Sega. I too wish we got more games like Legend of Mana and Symphony of the Night and less games that look like Legend of Dragoon and Quest 64.

[Anonymous No.9196046]

>>9196039
The idiots in charge would have given us more stupid fucking FMV games and ugly ass 3D shit like virtua racing.

Sega could have ported every damn turbo cd game to the sega cd but they were obsessed with all the wrong fucking trends.

[Anonymous No.9196058]

>>9196043
the gaming landscape in 1995 wasn't at all like it is now. 2D games were considered simply obsolete. reviewers would literally dock points if a game was 2D or had 2D elements because literally - literally - no one in the west wanted 2D games. a 2D only Saturn would have been received about as well in 1995 as if Apple suddenly decided to cease production of all modern Macs to bring back the original Apple 1 from 1977.

[Anonymous No.9196061]

>>9196046
Yeah, pushing the FMV games was definitely a mistake. Would've been cool to see stuff like the Turbo CD's Double Dragon II port or a new OutRun game with proper scaling effects on SEGA CD.

[Anonymous No.9196215]

>>9196024
>>9196043
True to an extent but I am sure 2D would still have provided some significant enough niche. It wouldn't have outsold PS1 but I think it may have found a bigger audience then what we got. I still loved 2D games at that point and everyone I knew did to. As long as the games were good we never cared. Pokemon was a massive seller and that shit was on Gameboy so I don't want to hear that crap about kids only cared for 3D. Its that console manufacturers pushed it so hard as well but yeah the direction was heading there anyways so after 5th gen you'd have been crazy to not have a 3D console. There was at least still some room for some good 2D during the mid to late 90's and I am not gonna be sold otherwise.
>>9196039
I'd have loved this if it was powerful enough though giving us even more impressive games.
>>9196046
True shame.

[Anonymous No.9196285]

>>9196061
...double dragon? Really?
Yawn.

How about Shadowrun CD, Metal Slug, Bubblegum Crash, Beyond Shadowgate, Castlevania Rondo of Blood, Efera & Jiliora, Exile 2, Legend of Xanadu 2, Rayxanber 3, Valis 4, Xak 3, Ys 4 Dawn, Fray CD, After Armageddon: Eclipse, Street Fighter Alpha, Golden Axe Revenge of Death Adder?

[Anonymous No.9196291]

>>9196215
That's what the sega cd should have been used for, indeed. And the 32x shouldn't exist.

But the saturn would have flopped like the pc fx if it sent that route, even though i would have liked it. You know neo geo kept putting out games until like 2005 or someshit, and yet still only stops 1 million lifetime.

[Anonymous No.9196302]

>>9196039
> In the end what you basically had was an arms race between the upgraded Genesis consoles (CDX and Neptune) and the Saturn, and for better or worse the Saturn won out.
This was what hurt Sega a lot honestly. All these issues with where to go next after the Genesis and not being sure where gaming was heading towards as video acceleration hardware was gaining ground led to money being wasted and not enough of a focus on bringing out the best in any one of their post-Genesis systems being prototyped at the time.

>>9196291
I also agree with this. Saturn would have completely died if it couldn't do 3D at all, so even though the decision came in too late it still allowed the console to keep up in the polygon games department while also allowing for some pretty good 3D games as well (Sega Rally home port, NiGHTS, Powerslave)

[Anonymous No.9196360]

>>9196302
The belief that they needed to get their console out ASAP, is also misguided. The SNES came out 2 years after genesis and outsold it globally. The PS2 came out 2 years after dreamcast and we know how that went. PS3 came out 1 year after 360, and while it had to play catchup, it did pass it up by a couple million units in the end.

They should have let their competition show their hand and then they could have better responded to the market. This idea that they needed to rush to market and be first, 2 generations back to back, was dumb, ESPECIALLY when in tandem with their whole "hold over expansion" idea. They should have focused on CD 32X and then been the LAST to join the next gen, but with the best hardware at the best price point.

[Anonymous No.9196383]

>>9196043
Yeah, that's great, but problem is that by cutting out 3D you cut out or severely hamper entire genres. Gran Turismo was the most popular game on PS1, imagine competing against that with 2.5D racer. Platform games and action adventures managed to move to 3D, albeit not without growing pains, but the ones that didn't fuck up were selling like hotcakes, and you're going to compete against that with 2D stuff? First-person shooters were the new hotness, and while they're still haven't had a foothold on consoles, GoldenEye was pushing N64s almost as good as Mario did. Flight sim like Ace Combat just wouldn't have worked in 2D. And so on, and so on.

[Anonymous No.9196409]

>>9196285
>Shadowrun CD
How do you play this if you can't read japanese?

[Anonymous No.9196456]

>>9195793
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_mqtMtzBHZM

[Anonymous No.9196460]

>>9196383
As I saud, the pc fx failed.

You type like your arguing with me, and yet i said nothing that contradicts any of that. Derp.

[Anonymous No.9196464]

>>9196409
Sega fucking translates it

[Anonymous No.9196467]

>>9195762
I've seen plenty of people here say that dithering was a perfectly fine solution, but it really wasn't. With dithering you are limited to one percentage of opacity (50%), which means you cannot have a gradient mask over your transparencies. Plenty of PS1 games used gradient masks to let translucent objects fade out at the edges

[Anonymous No.9196469]

>>9196467

[Anonymous No.9196470]

>>9196467
Dithering is the reason the pc 98 looks so fucking cool

[Anonymous No.9196471]

>>9196470
Yes dithering is brilliant for increasing colour depth, but for transparency it is quite literally a half measure

[Anonymous No.9196486]

>>9196471
Bro, look at the image again. Look at the fabric in the middle.

[Anonymous No.9196491]

>>9196471
The wings are transparent

[Anonymous No.9196497]

>>9196491
no gradient masks

[Anonymous No.9196510]

>>9196467
The PS1 doesn't have full-on alpha, only per-face transparency and additive blending. This is something that the Saturn can't do (at least not without some performance-killing hacks). The N64 also can't do additive blending.

[Anonymous No.9196537]

>>9196360
Agreed and funny enough it didn't work fully for Microsoft either. 360 maybe people can say it arguably did work but because of their rush job they had a huge issue with hardware failures which cost them billions anyways. So that console ultimately should have been delayed. They also maybe only barely outsold PS3. The top selling console that gen was Wii not 360 or PS3. Then for Xbone what happened?

Well Sony allowed Microsoft to show their hand prior to E3. Tons of rumors and articles basically confirming what Microsoft originally wanted for Xbone. Sony predicted what they'd due during the E3 reveal so they wisely made PS4 the opposite that day both revealed. Rest is history. Microsoft showed their hand and got dominated last gen. Sega was just mismanaged and released way too much shit is the problem. Always trying to rush to market. Definition of quantity over quality and they paid for it. I like their stuff but so much on their history could have been way better.

[Anonymous No.9196569]

oh yeah delete the post talking about retro games even if fake ones just because muh rules and do nothing about the console war thread
yeah thanks jannies
also don't think i didn't see ya delete the aspect ratio preference thread earlier too, if you're gonna delete that then be consistent and delete the crt threads as well

[Anonymous No.9197321]

>>9196467
think we came full circle and modern games are using dithering for alpha to keep the framerate from tanking

especially remember ffxv had it

[Anonymous No.9197362]

>>9197321
At high enough resolution and maybe with some temporal blending it works pretty good.

[Anonymous No.9198669]

>>9195762
What is it about this system that makes people seethe? Makes me wanna power mine up after this gay game of thrones show is over tonight

[Anonymous No.9198676]

>>9198669
Fuck if I know. I feel like I’m re-living the 90’s with all these translations coming out.

[Anonymous No.9198681]

>>9198669
its permissible console wars for /vr/, you can't say anything about nintendo but this is OK.

[Anonymous No.9198703]

>>9197321
A lot of that comes from modern engines using deferred rendering where everything, even down to lighting, is a glorified screenspace effect. Because of the screenspace nature of Deferred rending, doing transparency is pain that'll quickly kill performance. It's also the reason why MSAA has been absent.
>>9197362
The problem is that temporal effects just ghost and blurr the shit out of the image to the point where the N64 looks crystal clear in comparison.

[Anonymous No.9200810]

>>9195807
he's just talking about standard vdp1 transparent quads, not the burning ranger render-to-texture trick. Also, the clipping is not required, the game had a rushed development schedule.

[Anonymous No.9200845]

>>9196061
>>9196046
I liked them though...

[Anonymous No.9201527]

>>9196012
>Saturn could have allowed backward compatibility with Genesis
What is this obsession with the Saturn and backwards compatibility. Backwards compatibility would involve pretty much grafting on an entire genesis, what would be the point. It would just make the Saturn even more shitty and expensive.

[Anonymous No.9201538]

>>9198703
Modern gpus are hardly more advanced than the PS1, they are still dumb triangle accelerators that have no understanding of 3d and as such completely shit the bed when anything is transparent. Its a damn shame the Dreamcast failed, because if it had won, we might live in a timeline where gpus can actually render 3d properly without hideous contortions.

[Anonymous No.9201553]

>>9201538
>least deluded segatard

[Anonymous No.9201568]

>>9195762
who fucking cares? fuck off.

[Anonymous No.9201673]

>>9195798
You did a really good job cleaning that up man.

[Anonymous No.9201679]

>>9201538

[Anonymous No.9201703]

>>9201679
Yes, a modern gpu can render transparencies. But it can't do it by itself. It just renders triangles in the exact order you submit them. You have to sort the triangles yourself, because the gpu is to retarded to do it itself.

[Anonymous No.9202298]

>>9201703
Yeah no, there's nothing it "can't do" by itself. It's engine problem, not hardware problem.

[Anonymous No.9202301]

>>9201703
Just write a shader for it c:

[Anonymous No.9202303]

3D hardware was just better than assembled 2D hardware back then. PS1 had things CPS3 couldn't do and Naomi mogged every 2D arcade board with Guilty Gear graphics

[Anonymous No.9202306]

>>9202303
>PS1 had things CPS3 couldn't do
What like?

[Anonymous No.9202307]

>>9196012
Saturn was a Sega System 32 with 3D hardware accelerator.

[Anonymous No.9202324]

>>9202298
The dreamcast can do it on its own, but so called modern hardware can't. The amount of contortions required for the engine to do it is absurd. And even then its never done quite right.

[Anonymous No.9202334]

>>9202324
Modern hardware can. Your GPU is far more programmable than you realise and I'm not talking about sorting the drawlist on the CPU.

[Anonymous No.9202347]

>>9202334
I know its possible to do it with shit-tons of absurdly complex and bloated shader code. But the end result is not great as these algorithms are all imperfect with various trade-offs. Modern DC emulators still struggle to emulate the 20+ year gpu of the dreamcast.

[Anonymous No.9202349]

>>9202347
>My low end phone got 60 fps in sonic adventure

how

[Anonymous No.9202350]

>>9202347
You can use the same algorithms if you want. In the end all you're doing is implementing the same architecture.

[Anonymous No.9202360]

>>9202350
Well obviously you can run any algorithm you want, but its going to run like treacle compared to specialized hardware.

[Anonymous No.9202363]

>>9202324
Nigger what, just open any old games with forward renderer. Half Life, GTA, whatever, transparency all works.

[Anonymous No.9202370]

>>9202360
Turns out this specialisation doesn't really matter and having more flexibility like the GCN or Xbox or even just more raw speed like the PS2 is far more useful.