[HN Gopher] Sega Saturn Architecture - A practical analysis (2021)
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Sega Saturn Architecture - A practical analysis (2021)
Author : StefanBatory
Score : 265 points
Date : 2024-03-26 09:51 UTC (13 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.copetti.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.copetti.org)
| tosh wrote:
| The Sega Saturn had quite a few gems (e.g. Panzer Dragoon Saga,
| Shining Force III, Burning Rangers, Dragon Force I & II, ...)
| that were never ported or re-made afaiu.
|
| edit: oh, and of course Saturn Bomberman
| thevagrant wrote:
| Panzer Dragoon made it to 1st gen Xbox iirc.
|
| Saturn and following on, the Dreamcast were quite good and
| deserved more success.
| SuperNinKenDo wrote:
| Panzer Dragoon Orta did, along with (I believe emulated) copy
| of the original Panzer Dragoon embedded inside, but not Saga.
| dagw wrote:
| Sega created a Panzer Dragoon game for the Xbox (great game),
| but the original Panzer Dragoon games never got ported as far
| as I know
| fredoralive wrote:
| The first game had a PC port, which was later included as a
| bonus in Panzer Dragoon Orta.
| bdw5204 wrote:
| The original Panzer Dragoon games were remade for modern
| consoles a few years ago. Saga still hasn't been ported
| though.
| Grazester wrote:
| When you unlock Pandora's box in Orta you can play the
| original game...the PC port version that is
| hnlmorg wrote:
| That's not PD Saga though
|
| Saga was a totally different game to the 2 rail shooters
| that preceded it
| Grazester wrote:
| Oh I know it wasn't Saga. I own every Panzer Dragoon
| game(but not the remake of the original that came out on
| the Switch and Playstation 4 however).
| nolok wrote:
| The Dreamcast was great, but while the Saturn had some great
| game the console itself was really not "quite good" beside as
| a tech curiosity. It suffered greatly from being two consoles
| smashed in one.
| boudin wrote:
| I don't think it was the case for Panzer Dragoon Saga (the
| RPG) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panzer_Dragoon_Saga
| tetraca wrote:
| Panzer Dragoon (the rail shooter) might have but not Panzer
| Dragoon Saga (the RPG). That was never re-released and the
| source code was lost.
| SuperNinKenDo wrote:
| I assume the complexity of the platform contributed to games
| being rarely ported off of it. In fact, the only games I know
| to exist on it and other platforms, are ports to the Saturn,
| never the other way around, although maybe someone can correct
| me.
|
| From what I understand, emulating the platform is still tricky
| to this day, although there have been some significant advances
| in the last 10 years.
| tosh wrote:
| Also, if I remember correctly the source code for Panzer
| Dragoon Saga apparently got lost.
|
| Re ports from Saturn to other systems: I think Grandia and
| Lunar Silver Star Story were initially developed for the
| Saturn and later ported to the Playstation.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grandia_(video_game)
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar:_Silver_Star_Story_Compl.
| ..
| fredoralive wrote:
| NiGHTS into Dreams was ported to PlayStation 2, and thence
| onto PC, PS3 and Xbox 360.
|
| Technically Tomb Raider was out on Saturn in Europe a few
| weeks before PlayStation and PC, but that's really being
| silly.
|
| Edit: Forgot I'd already mentioned Panzer Dragoon for PC
| elsewhere, but there was Sonic R for PC as well, as with
| Panzer Dragoon, later ports of Sonic R are based on the PC
| version AFAIK.
| Tanoc wrote:
| There was a port of Castlevania: Symphony Of The Night made
| just for the Saturn that never left Japan that included new
| areas, new items, and a Maria mode. So far as I know nobody's
| been able to merge the PlayStation or PS Classics version
| with the content unique to the Saturn version because they're
| too disparate. There's a few SNK games with content unique to
| the Saturn like that as well, like Ragnagard and World Heroes
| Perfect that people want ports of. Or at least the unique
| content merged into re-releases.
| zilti wrote:
| Tomb Raider was ported off the Saturn to other platforms
| Narishma wrote:
| I'm pretty sure it was developed as a multi-platform game
| from the start. It only released on the Saturn a couple of
| weeks earlier than the PC and PS1.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| Yeah. I think the fact that the Saturn rendered quads instead
| of triangles made ports really challenging as well.
|
| Plus, the Saturn just wasn't that successful. Games like
| Panzer Dragoon Saga are legendary but only within niche
| circles.
| flykespice wrote:
| Don't forget Virtual Hydlide, if you ignore the absymal
| framerate
| cubefox wrote:
| This might be the most complex hardware architecture of a home
| console ever.
| pjmlp wrote:
| Dreamcast and PS 3 are also quite close in complexity.
| msk-lywenn wrote:
| I think you mean PS2 and PS3. Dreamcast was rather easy. One
| might even say, a dream to program for.
| masklinn wrote:
| PS2 was the tail end of the bespoke hardware, and Sony gave
| their chips very marketing names, but I don't remember the
| hardware being especially strange. The SDK being ass would
| be a different issue.
| msk-lywenn wrote:
| Well the two vector coprocessors (vu0, vu1) each talking
| to a different processor (cpu or "gpu") was quite weird,
| imho.
| mairusu wrote:
| The PS2 was infamous to develop for. Most of the
| bottleneck came from the vector units. Most middleware
| eventually made working around the strange hardware much
| easier.
|
| When asked if they were weary about developing on PS2,
| due to its reputation of it being tough to code for, Sega
| devs famously laughed and replied that they already
| mastered the Saturn - how much harder could it get?
| SunlitCat wrote:
| I wonder how many games utilized Windows CE (which was a
| thing for it) on the Dreamcast.
| Grazester wrote:
| Not a whole lot. If you wanted to extract the full power
| of the system then you needed the native SDK. Sega Rally
| 2 was ported using CE and it has frame rate issues it
| really shouldn't have an this is attributed to CE
| ac2u wrote:
| I guess they had a porting job to do since the arcade
| hardware Sega Rally ran on wasn't Naomi(which was
| basically a souped up Dreamcast), and they figured if
| they used WindowsCE then they could use DirectX and get a
| PC port out of the same efforts.
|
| But yeah, for a flagship title they should have went for
| a port with the official SDK.
| Grazester wrote:
| Naomi games ported over to the Dreamcast just fine. It
| was essentially a Dreamcast with more memory if I'm not
| mistaken. Sega Rally 2 used the Model 2 board.
| tuna74 wrote:
| Sega Rally 1 used Model 2, Sega Rally 2 used Model 3.
| mairusu wrote:
| The goal was to prove to third-party developers that it
| was trivial to port an existing Windows game to
| Dreamcast. It was sort of a tech demo for the industry.
|
| The end result though was... demonstrating the Windows CE
| overhead.
| p_l wrote:
| Not having developed for them, PS2 seemed the hardest of the
| latter generations, with PS3 having issues but at least not
| being designed with hand-written assembly in mind.
| geon wrote:
| The ps3 cell processor with the 8 "synergistic processing
| element" co-processors was definitely weird.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cell_(processor)
| masklinn wrote:
| The ps3 was incredible, not so much in what it could do as
| in what IBM managed to make Sony pay for.
| kernal wrote:
| IBM also made Microsoft pay for the Xenon in the Xbox
| 360.
| breadmaster wrote:
| And they had Nintendo paying 'em in that generation (and
| the one before) too.
| masklinn wrote:
| Xenon is a pretty standard SMP design, having 3 cores is
| basically the height of its oddity. It was a fine early-
| multicore CPU for consoles.
|
| The Cell was very much not that, the SPEs were
| unnecessarily difficult to use for a console and
| ultimately a dead end though they made for great
| supercomputing elements before GPGPU really took off
| (some people built supercomputers out of PS3s clusters as
| that was literally the cheapest way to get cells).
|
| The Cell supposedly cost 400 millions to develop, a cost
| largely borne by Sony. MS got IBM to retune the PPE for
| Xenon, but they'd likely have made do with an other IBM
| core as their base had that not existed.
| kernal wrote:
| This claim that the SPEs were difficult to use and
| maximize may have been true in the early years, but all
| of the major engines were optimized to quickly abstract
| them. Naughty Dog, a key contributor to the PS3 graphics
| libraries had optimized them so much that porting PS3
| games to the PS4 was "hell" in their words.
|
| >I wish we had a button that was like 'Turn On PS4 Mode',
| but no," Druckmann said. "We expected it to be hell, and
| it was hell. Just getting an image onscreen, even an
| inferior one with the shadows broken, lighting broken and
| with it crashing every 30 seconds...that took a long
| time. These engineers are some of the best in the
| industry' and they optimized the game so much for the
| PS3's SPUs specifically. It was optimized on a binary
| level, but after shifting those things over, you have to
| go back to the high level, make sure the systems are
| intact, and optimize it again. "I can't describe how
| difficult a task that is. And once it's running well,
| you're running the [versions] side by side to make sure
| you didn't screw something up in the process, like
| physics being slightly off, which throws the game off, or
| lighting being shifted and all of a sudden it's a
| drastically different look. That's not improved any more;
| that's different. We want to stay faithful while being
| better."
| tapoxi wrote:
| "The Race for a New Game Machine" is an interesting book on
| the development of Cell, if the author comes off a little
| annoying at times. It was a neat idea to offload certain
| operations to the SPEs (glorified vector processors) but
| they all had their own RAM and communicated via a bus, so
| you really needed to optimize for it.
| brezelgoring wrote:
| TIL the PlayStation 3 is used (on a grid/cluster of 16) as
| a viable alternative to Supercomputers by Physics
| researchers, this grid calculates how black holes collapse
| (!). I assume this is a cost-cutting measure by the
| researchers, and it makes me think how much more expensive
| a 'supercomputer' is and why, if it can be suitably
| replaced by the console with no games.
| xcv123 wrote:
| That continued with researchers using cheap gaming GPUs
| for simulations. Today a single Nvidia 4090 GPU exceeds
| the performance of that PS3 cluster.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| I think they may have done that because Sony used the PS3
| as a loss leader?
| masklinn wrote:
| The Jaguar was pretty out there.
|
| The thing had two custom RISC chips which could be used as CPU
| (one with additional GPU capabilities and the other with DSP)
| _plus_ a 68000 devs were not supposed to use.
| MBCook wrote:
| Plus the custom chips were buggy!
| JohnBooty wrote:
| I always wonder what the Jaguar would have been like if not
| crippled by buggy hardware. Probably still a failure but I
| bet the games would have ran better.
|
| You know what's also funny? I've never heard anybody
| complaining about the Saturn being buggy.
|
| It's legendarily _hard_ to code for, but seems like it was
| at least pretty solid.
|
| Even the Genesis was sort of "buggy." I think there was one
| particular design choice that crippled digital sound
| playback. Also the shadow/highlight functionality is kind
| of weird, not sure if "buggy" is the right word, but weird.
| alexisread wrote:
| The best thing Atari could have done was release it at
| launch with the CD, that would have made it much cheaper
| for devs to launch a game - ROM order pricing would kill
| many devs. Bundling an SDK would have helped massively as
| well.
|
| There are lots of quirks with the hardware which point to
| Atari interfering with the development - the 68K was
| never supposed to be there (and an 020 would have
| uncrippled the bus by allowing it to run at full speed,
| see the arcade board), not using the dual RAM buses,
| having an object processor (Flare majored on DSP and
| Blitter, the object processor looks like a
| 5200/7800/Amiga/Panther throwback mandated by Atari)
| necessitated having a 2-chip solution where 1-chip would
| have been faster to develop and better.
|
| Having said that, the Jag VR looked amazing for the time.
| glimshe wrote:
| The Sega Saturn had a pretty complicated hardware architecture. I
| can understand that scaling out the game "work" into multiple
| CPUs and dedicated processors makes sense from a cost-benefit
| perspective, but I'm sure this contributed to the Saturn's
| relatively poor sales.
|
| Many people said that ultimately it was hard for companies to
| justify the investment in learning it all to make games that
| fully utilize the hardware. Somehow this reminds me of Sid
| Meier's saying that the player must have fun, not the game
| developer - and in this case, perhaps the hardware designers were
| having too much fun!
| ZaoLahma wrote:
| Growing up in the 90s, it was bizarre to witness the downfall
| of Sega. Here the Mega Drive (Genesis) was almost as successful
| as the SNES. Everyone either had a Mega Drive or played it
| regularly with friends. It was a very popular piece of
| hardware.
|
| Then the generation after everyone had a Playstation, and I
| knew of only one kid who ended up with the Saturn. It's so
| strange considering that the Saturn was released several months
| ahead of the Playstation here.
|
| I dont't know if it was due to the Saturn being seen as the
| inferior option at the time, pricing, availability or some
| other factor, but the Playstation absolutely killed it. After
| that Sega was gone.
| Solvency wrote:
| i'm 38 and grew up with this lineage:
|
| NES, Genesis, PSX/N64, PS2/XBOX, PS3/XBOX360, XboxOne.
|
| I was fanatic about Genesis because of the big title games
| like Mortal Kombat, Sonic, etc.
|
| I VORACIOUSLY read gaming mags and the hype around the PSX
| was massive. It utterly dwarfed Sega. And seeing the first
| image of Cloud starting up at the Shinra tower captivated me.
| The games they were touting were just incredible looking.
|
| I was just a kid and marketing won me over.
| MBCook wrote:
| Sega's colossal screwup of the launch with a high price,
| pissing off huge retailers, and then months of no games was
| a total disaster.
| giantrobot wrote:
| > pissing off huge retailers
|
| In the US Sega provided early release units to several
| retailers but notably skipped Best Buy, Walmart, and KB
| Toys. KB Toys was so mad they didn't carry Saturn stuff
| at all from that point.
|
| At the time KB Toys was a pretty major retailer for video
| games, they'd have a presence in malls where a Babbages,
| EB, or Software Etc (retailers that got early release
| Saturns) wouldn't be found.
|
| Sega's early release of the Saturn was one of the dumbest
| own-goals in video games. The Saturn was already going to
| have a serious struggle against the PlayStation for other
| reasons, fucking over retailers did absolutely nothing to
| help Sega.
| ajmurmann wrote:
| This! I grew up in Europe around the same time. Me and my
| small friend group hyped ourselves up for the Saturn. We
| were frustrated how Sega dropped the ball on marketing.
| Initially there were a few bad ads showing the mediocre
| Daytona USA and then nothing. Meanwhile Playstation ads
| were everywhere and were very well done.
|
| As always bad console sales resulted in a vicious cycle of
| fewer attention from 3rd-party devs resulting in even fewer
| console sales.
| jandrese wrote:
| Sony rushing to release the Saturn before the PSX was a
| mistake IMHO. Not only did it beat Sony to market, it beat
| its own games to market. But mostly it just cost too much,
| especially compared to the PSX.
| wk_end wrote:
| It wasn't just the Saturn (though issues surrounding its
| release definitely didn't help) - Sega already looked kind of
| like bunglers after neither the Sega CD nor 32X really caught
| on.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| I think the missing link in tale is the failure of the SegaCD
| and 32X, which really poisoned Sega's core fans in the years
| before the Saturn.
|
| A lot of diehards (like me) felt really burned by those
| failures.
| Keyframe wrote:
| I remember people at first buying playstation since they
| could buy cheap pirated games with the swap trick and all
| fengb wrote:
| In retrospect, it makes a lot of sense. Genesis was huge in
| NA/Europe, but it was considered somewhat of a failure in
| Japan.
|
| Sega has always floundered with its home consoles -- they
| released 3 competitors to the NES after all. Genesis ended up
| being more of a one-trick pony than any indication of
| longterm success.
| Narishma wrote:
| > In retrospect, it makes a lot of sense. Genesis was huge
| in NA/Europe, but it was considered somewhat of a failure
| in Japan.
|
| Ironically, it went the opposite way for the Saturn. It was
| pretty successful in Japan (slightly ahead of the N64) but
| a complete failure elsewhere.
| masklinn wrote:
| > I can understand that scaling out the game "work" into
| multiple CPUs and dedicated processors makes sense from a cost-
| benefit perspective
|
| IIRC it was not that, the Saturn was the most expensive to
| manufacture of the big three, and the need to price match the
| PS made it a financial disaster for Sega.
| nolok wrote:
| The article describe it as if the design was surprising with how
| many chips there were etc, but it's important to understand the
| context : complete lack of synergy and "fight for dominance"
| between the Japan and USA team, SEGA JP was making a 2D console,
| SEGA US was making a 3D console, the JP team was about to win
| that fight and then the PSX appeared so they, essentially, merged
| the two together.
|
| You end up with a 2D console with parts and bits of an unfinished
| 3D console inside it. It makes no sense.
|
| For a tech enthousiast and someone who loves reading dev
| postmortem, it's glorious. For someone who likes a clean design,
| it's irksome to no ends. For mass gamers of that era, where the
| big thing was "arcade in your living room" it's a disapointement,
| and SEGA not knowing which side to focus on didn't help at all.
|
| The wikipedia article has a lot more details [1]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_Saturn
| flipacholas wrote:
| If you check the other articles about the PlayStation [1] and
| the Nintendo 64 [2], you'll see that the design of a 3D-capable
| console in the 90s was a significant challenge for every
| company. Thus, each one proposed a different solution (with
| different pros and cons), yet all very interesting to analyse
| and compare. That's the reason this article was written.
|
| [1] https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/playstation/
|
| [2] https://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/nintendo-64/
| nolok wrote:
| Oh I was not criticizing the article per se, my apologies if
| it came out as such, I just thought this piece of information
| was important to understand why they ended up with such a
| random mash of chips.
| flipacholas wrote:
| Ah no worries! From my side I was only trying to explain
| more about the origins of the article, since I see it often
| mentioned/speculated in many forums.
|
| By the way, I'm always open to criticism !
| (https://github.com/flipacholas/Architecture-of-
| consoles/issu...)
| polpo wrote:
| Thanks for the link - just opened an issue concerning the
| font weight and text color on the site.
| christkv wrote:
| I do wonder what would have happened if the N64 had included
| a much bigger texture cache. It seemed the tiny size was it
| biggest con.
| rightbyte wrote:
| Wasn't the thing you put in the slot infront of the cart a
| ram extension slot?
|
| I think you can play Rogue Squadron with and without if you
| want to compare.
|
| Or do youe mean some lower cache level?
| skhr0680 wrote:
| that pack added 4MB extra RAM, OOT and Majora's Mask are
| like night and day thanks to it.
|
| The N64 had mere kilobytes of texture cache, AFAIK the
| solution was to stream textures, but it took awhile for
| developers to figure that out
| mrguyorama wrote:
| The other big problem with the N64 was that the RAM had
| such high latency that it completely undid any benefit from
| the supposedly higher bandwidth that RDRAM had and the
| console was constantly memory starved.
|
| The RDP could rasterize hundreds of thousands of triangles
| a second but as soon as you put any texture or shading on
| them, the memory accesses slowed you right down. UMA plus
| high latency memory was the wrong move.
|
| In fact, in many situations you can "de-optimize" the
| rendering to draw and redraw more, as long as it uses less
| memory bandwidth, and end up with a higher FPS in your
| game.
| mips_r4300i wrote:
| That's mostly correct. It is as you say, except that
| shading and texturing come for free. You may be thinking
| of Playstation where you do indeed get decreased fillrate
| when texturing is on.
|
| Now, if you enable 2cycle mode, the pipeline will recycle
| the pixel value back into the pipeline for a second
| stage, which is used for 2 texture lookups per pixel and
| some other blending options. Otherwise, the RDP is always
| outputting 1 pixel per clock at 62.5 mhz. (Though it will
| be frequently interrupted because of ram contention)
| There are faster drawing modes but they are for drawing
| rectangles, not triangles. It's been a long time since
| I've done benchmarks on the pipeline though.
|
| You're exactly right that the UMA plus high latency
| murders it. It really does. Enable zbuffer? Now the poor
| RDP is thrashing read modify writes and you only get 8
| pixel chunks at a time. Span caching is minimal. Simply
| using zbuf will torpedo your effective full rate by 20 to
| 40 percent. That's why stuff I wrote for it avoided using
| the zbuffer whenever possible.
|
| The other bandwidth hog was enable anti aliasing. AA
| processing happened in 2 places: first in the triangle
| drawing pipeline, for inside polygon edges. Secondly, in
| the VI when the framebuffer gets displayed, it will apply
| smoothing to the exterior polygon edges based on coverage
| information stored in the pixels extra bits.
|
| On average, you get a roughly 15 to 20 percent fillrate
| boost by turning both those off. If you run only at
| lowres, it's a bit less since more of your tender time is
| occupied by triangle setup.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| I was misremembering about instances involving the
| zbuffer and significant overdraw as demonstrated by Kaze
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GC_jLsxZ7nw
|
| Another example from that video was changing a trig
| function from a lookup table to an evaluated
| approximation improved performance because it uses less
| memory bandwidth.
|
| Was the zbuffer in main memory? Ooof
|
| What's interesting to me is that even Kaze's optimized
| stuff is around 8k triangles per frame at 30fps. The
| "accurate" microcode Nintendo shipped claimed about 100k
| triangles per second. Was that ever achieved, even in a
| tech demo?
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| So Kaze is hitting 240k tris/second right?
| christkv wrote:
| Did you see the video of the guy who super optimized
| Mario 64 to run at 60 fps
| https://youtu.be/t_rzYnXEQlE?si=MpucGm0r_5KN-Nc_
| Grazester wrote:
| This should have been no struggle for Sega. They basically
| invented the modern 3D game and dominated in the arcade with
| very advanced 3D games at the time. Did they not leverage Yu
| Suzuki and the AM division when creating the Saturn? Then
| again rumor has it they were still stuck on 2D for the home
| market and then saw the PlayStation specs and freaked and
| ordered 2 of everything in the Saturn.
| VyseofArcadia wrote:
| In interviews IIRC ex-Sega staff has stated that they
| thought they had one more console generation before a
| 3D-first console was viable to the home market. Sure, they
| could do it right then and there, but it would be kind of
| janky. Consumers would rather have solid arcade-quality 2D
| games than glitchy home ports of 3D ones. Then Sony decided
| that the wow factor was worth kind of janky graphics
| (affine texture mapping, egregious pop-in, only 16-bit
| color, aliasing out the wazoo, etc.) and the rest is
| history.
|
| Nintendo managed largely not-janky graphics with the N64,
| but it did come out 2-3 years after the Saturn and
| Playstation.
| jandrese wrote:
| "Not janky" is a weird way of describing the N64's
| graphics. Sure Mario looked good, but have you seen most
| other games on that platform?
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Well it had a proper Z buffer so textures didn't wiggle.
| Now the fog, draw distance, and texture resolution
| combined with blurring were terrible.
|
| It was basically the haze console.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| Hope it's okay that I just reply to everyone
|
| Wiggling is down to lack of precision and lack of
| subpixel rendering, unrelated to Z buffering. Z buffers
| are for hidden surface removal, if you see wiggling on a
| single triangle floating in a void, it's not a Z buffer
| problem.
|
| When you see models clipping through themselves because
| the triangles can't hide each other, that's the lack of Z
| buffer.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Thanks for clarifying. I knew I was getting something
| wrong, but can never remember all the details. IIRC PS1
| also suffered from render order issues that required some
| workarounds, problems the N64 and later consoles didn't
| have.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| Yeah. I'm not what one would call a graphics snob, but I
| found the N64 essentially unplayable even at the time of
| its release. With few exceptions, nearly every game
| looked like a pile of blurry triangles running at 15fps.
| jordemort wrote:
| I always felt like N64 games were doing way too much to
| look good on the crappy CRTs they were usually hooked up
| to. The other consoles of the era may have had more
| primitive GPUs, but for the time I think worse may have
| actually been better, because developers on other
| platforms were limited by the hardware in how illegible
| they could make their games. Pixel artists of the time
| had learned to lean into and exploit the deficiencies of
| CRTs, but the same tricks can't really be applied when
| your texture is going to be scaled and distorted by some
| arbitrary amount before making it to the screen.
| VyseofArcadia wrote:
| It will always be easy to make 3D games that look bad,
| but on the N64 games tend to look more stable than PS1 or
| Saturn games. Less polygon jittering[0], aliasing isn't
| as bad, no texture warping, higher polygon counts
| overall, etc.
|
| If you took the same animated scene and rendered it on
| the PS1 and the N64 side by side, the N64 would look
| better hands down just because it has an FPU and
| perspective texture mapping.
|
| [0] Polygon jittering caused by the PS1 only being
| capable of integer math, so there is no subpixel
| rendering and vertices effectively snap to a grid.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| You can do subpixel rendering with fixed-point math https
| ://www.copetti.org/writings/consoles/playstation/#tab-5..
| .
|
| I thought the problem was that it only had 12 or 16-bit
| precision for vertex coords, which is not enough no
| matter whether you encode it as fixed-point or floating-
| point. Floats aren't magic.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| Compare it to the Playstation, which could not manage
| proper texture projection and also had such poor
| precision in rasterization that you could watch polygons
| shimmer as you moved around.
|
| The N64 in comparison had an accurate and essentially
| modern (well, "modern" before shaders) graphics pipeline.
| The deficiencies in it's graphics were not nearly enough
| graphics specific RAM (you only had 4kb total as a
| texture cache, half that if you were using some features!
| Though crazy people figured out you could swap in more
| graphics from the CARTRIDGE if you were careful) and a
| god awful bilinear filtering on all output.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| Fun trivia for readers, it isn't even normal 4-tap
| bilinear filtering, it's 3-tap, resulting in a
| characteristic triangular blurring that some N64
| emulators recreate and some don't. (A PC GPU won't do
| this without special shaders)
|
| https://filthypants.blogspot.com/2014/12/n64-3-point-
| texture...
| cubefox wrote:
| > well, "modern" before shaders
|
| Interestingly, the N64 actually had some sort of
| precursor in form of the RSP "microcode". Unfortunately
| there was initially no documentation, so most developers
| just used the code provided by Nintendo, which wasn't
| very optimized and didn't include advanced features. Only
| in the last years did homebrew people really push the
| limits here with "F3DEX3".
|
| > and a god awful bilinear filtering on all output.
|
| I think that's a frequent misconception. The texture
| filtering was fine, it arguably looks significantly worse
| when you disable it in an emulator or a recompilation
| project. The only problem was the small texture cache.
| The filtering had nothing to do with it. Hardware
| accelerated PC games at the time also supported texture
| filtering, but I don't think anyone considered disabling
| it, as it was an obvious improvement.
|
| But aside from its small texture cache, the N64 also had
| a different problem related to its main memory bus. This
| was apparently a major bottleneck for most games, and it
| wasn't easy to debug at the time, so many games were not
| properly optimized to avoid the issue, and wasted a large
| part of the frame time with waiting for the memory bus.
| There is a way to debug it on a modern microcode though.
| This video goes into more detail toward the end:
| https://youtube.com/watch?v=SHXf8DoitGc
| nebula8804 wrote:
| Janky is literally the PSX's style due to its lack of
| floating point capability
|
| [0]:https://youtu.be/x8TO-nrUtSI?t=222
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| No, it's due to limited precision in the vertices. If you
| had 64 bit integers you could have 32.32 fixed-point and
| it would look as good as floating-point.
| RicoElectrico wrote:
| What did take so long for Nintendo?
| skhr0680 wrote:
| A heroic, and ultimately unnecessary considering the
| mundane reasons that slowed the N64 down, attempt to
| consumerize exotic hardware.
|
| The hardware was actually pretty great in the end. The
| unreleased N64 version of Dinosaur Planet holds up well
| considering how much more powerful the GameCube was.
|
| /edit
|
| Nintendo were largely the architects of their own misery.
| First, they set expectations sky high with their "Ultra
| 64" arcade games, then were actively hostile to
| developers in multiple ways.
| VyseofArcadia wrote:
| I'm not 100% sure of the specifics, but Nintendo took a
| pretty different approach from Sony or Sega at this time.
| Sony and Sega both rolled their own graphics chips, and
| both of them made some compromises and strange choices in
| order to get to market more quickly.
|
| Nintendo instead approached SGI, the most advanced
| graphics workstation and 3D modeling company in the world
| at the time, and formed a partnership to scale back their
| professional graphics hardware to a consumer price point.
|
| Might be one of those instances where just getting
| something that works from scratch is relatively easy, but
| taking an existing solution and modifying it to fit a new
| use case is more difficult.
| MBCook wrote:
| The cartridge ended up being a huge sore spot too.
|
| Nintendo wanted it because of the instant access time.
| That's what gamers were used to and they didn't want
| people to have to wait on slow CDs.
|
| Turns out that was the wrong bet. Cartridges just cost
| too much and if I remember correctly there were supply
| issues at various points during the N64 era pushing
| prices up and volumes down.
|
| In comparison CDs were absolutely dirt cheap to
| manufacture. And people quickly fell in love with all the
| extra stuff that could fit on a desk compared to a small
| cartridge. There was simply no way anything like Final
| Fantasy 7 could have ever been done on the N64. Games
| with FMV sequences, real recorded music, just large
| numbers of assets.
|
| Even if everything else about the hardware was the same,
| Nintendo bet on the wrong horse for the storage medium.
| It turned out the thing they prioritized (access time)
| was not nearly as important as the things they opted out
| of (price, storage space).
| VyseofArcadia wrote:
| Tangentially related, but if you haven't already, you
| should read DF Retro's writeup of the absolutely
| incredible effort to port the 2 CD game Resident Evil 2
| to a single 64MB N64 cartridge:
| https://www.eurogamer.net/digitalfoundry-2018-retro-why-
| resi...
|
| Spoilers: it's a shockingly good port.
| nebula8804 wrote:
| >There was simply no way anything like Final Fantasy 7
| could have ever been done on the N64.
|
| Yes but I don't see how a game like Ocarina of time with
| its streaming data in at high speed would have been
| possible without a cartridge. Each format enabled unique
| gaming experiences that the other typically couldn't
| replicate exactly.
| favorited wrote:
| Naughty Dog found a solution - constantly streaming data
| from the disk, without regard for the hardware's
| endurance rating:
|
| > Andy had given Kelly a rough idea of how we were
| getting so much detail through the system: spooling.
| Kelly asked Andy if he understood correctly that any move
| forward or backward in a level entailed loading in new
| data, a CD "hit." Andy proudly stated that indeed it did.
| Kelly asked how many of these CD hits Andy thought a
| gamer that finished Crash would have. Andy did some
| thinking and off the top of his head said "Roughly
| 120,000." Kelly became very silent for a moment and then
| quietly mumbled "the PlayStation CD drive is 'rated' for
| 70,000."
|
| > Kelly thought some more and said "let's not mention
| that to anyone" and went back to get Sony on board with
| Crash.
|
| https://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/02/06/making-
| crash-ba...
| rmckayfleming wrote:
| Not just dirt cheap, the turn around time to manufacture
| was significantly lower. Sony had an existing CD
| manufacturing business and could produce runs of discs in
| the span of a week or so, whereas cartridges typically
| took months. That was already a huge plus to publishers
| since it meant they could respond more quickly if a game
| happened to be a runaway success. With cartridges they
| could end up undershooting, and losing sales, or
| overshooting and end up with expensive, excess inventory.
|
| Then to top it all off, Sony had much lower licensing
| fees! So publishers got "free" margin to boot. The
| Playstation was a sweet deal for publishers.
| mairusu wrote:
| Nintendo did not approach SGI. SGI was rejected by Sega
| for the Saturn - Sega felt their offering was too
| expensive to produce, too buggy at the time despite
| spending man hours helping fix hardware issues,, and had
| no chance to make it to market in time for their plans.
|
| For all we know, Nintendo had no plans past the SNES,
| except for the VirtualBoy. But then again, the VirtualBoy
| was another case of Nintendo being approached by a
| company rejected by Sega...
| ac2u wrote:
| It's been years since since I read the book "Console Wars",
| but if memory serves me correctly SGI shopped their tech to
| SEGA first before Nintendo secured it for the N64.
| JohnBooty wrote:
| This should have been no struggle for Sega. They basically
| invented the modern 3D game and dominated in the arcade
| with very advanced 3D games at the time
|
| Way different challenges!
|
| The Model 2 arcade hardware cost over $15,000 when new in
| 1993. Look at those Model 1 and Model 2, that's some
| serious silicon. Multiple layers of PCB stacked with chips.
| The texture mapping chips were from partnerships with
| Lockheed Martin and GE. There was no home market for 3D
| accelerators yet; the only companies doing it were folks
| creating graphics chips for military training use and high
| end CAD work.
|
| https://sega.fandom.com/wiki/Sega_Model_2
|
| https://segaretro.org/Sega_Model_1
|
| Contrast that with the Saturn. Instead of a $15,000 price
| target they had to design something that they could sell
| for $399 and wouldn't consume a kilowatt of power.
|
| Although, in the end, I think the main hurdle was a failure
| to predict the 3D revolution that Playstation ushered in.
| RetroTechie wrote:
| > The Model 2 arcade hardware cost over $15,000 when new
| in 1993. Look at those Model 1 and Model 2, that's some
| serious silicon.
|
| That's an even bigger miss on Sega's part then.
|
| Having such kit out in the field, should have given Sega
| good insight into the "what's hot, and what's not" for
| (near-future) gaming needs.
|
| Which features are essential, what's low hanging fruit,
| what's nice to have but (too) expensive, performance <->
| quality <-> complexity tradeoffs, etc.
|
| Besides having hardware & existing titles to test-run
| along the lines of "what if we cut this down to... how
| would it look?"
|
| Not saying Sega should have built a cut-down version of
| their arcade systems! But those could have provided good
| guidance & inspiration.
| mairusu wrote:
| But they had the insight. And the insight they got was
| that 3D was not there yet for the home market, it was
| unrealistic to have _good_ 3D for cheap (eg. no wobbly
| textures, etc), as it was still really challenging to
| have good 3D on expensive dedicated hardware.
| m45t3r wrote:
| > you'll see that the design of a 3D-capable console in the
| 90s was a significant challenge for every company.
|
| While this is true, I still think that the PlayStation had
| the most interesting and forwarding looking design of its
| generation, especially considering the constraints. The
| design is significantly cheaper than both Saturn and Nintendo
| 64, it was fully 3D (compared to Saturn for example), using
| CD as media was spot-on and also having the MJPEG decoder
| (that allowed PlayStation to have not only significantly
| higher video quality than its rivals, but also allowed video
| to be used for backgrounds for much better quality graphics,
| see for example Resident Evil or Final Fantasy series).
|
| I really wanted to see a design inspired in the first
| PlayStation with more memory (since the low memory compared
| to its rivals was an issue it seemed, especially in e.g.: 2D
| fighting games where the amount of animations had to be cut a
| lot compared to Saturn) and maybe some more hardware
| accelators to help fix some of the issues that plagued the
| platform.
| dymax78 wrote:
| >For mass gamers of that era, where the big thing was "arcade
| in your living room" it's a disapointement....
|
| One exception to this is the shmup genre. The Saturn was
| inundated with Japanese Shmups and many are perfect (or near
| perfect) arcade ports.
| wk_end wrote:
| 2D fighters, as well. The port of SFA3 on Saturn trounces the
| PS1 release, for example.
| ndiddy wrote:
| This is largely incorrect. The Saturn was entirely a Sega of
| Japan design. There's an interview
| (https://mdshock.com/2020/06/16/hideki-sato-discussing-the-
| se...) with the Saturn hardware designer that gives some
| perspective into why he chose to make the hardware the way he
| did. Basically, he knew that 3D was the future from the
| response the PSX was getting, but besides AM2 (the team at Sega
| that did 3D arcade games like Virtua Fighter, Daytona USA,
| etc), all of Sega's internal expertise was on traditional 2D
| sprite-based games. Because of this, he felt the best
| compromise was to make a console that excelled at 2D games and
| was workable at 3D games. I think his biggest mistake was that
| he underestimated how quickly the industry would switch to
| mainly focusing on 3D.
|
| The actual result of Sega's infighting was far more stupid IMO.
| Sega of America wanted a more conservative design than the
| Saturn using a Motorola 68020 (successor to the 68000 in the
| Genesis) which would have lower performance, but developers
| would be more familiar with the hardware. After they lost this
| fight, they deemed the Saturn impossible to sell in the US due
| to its high price. SOA then designed the 32X, a $200 add-on to
| the Genesis that used the same SH2 processors as the Saturn but
| drew graphics entirely in software and overlayed them on top of
| the Genesis graphics. The initial plan was that the Saturn
| would remain exclusively in Japan for 2-3 years while the 32X
| would sell overseas. Sega of America spent a ton of money
| trying to build interest for the 32X and focused their internal
| development exclusively on the 32X. However, both developers
| and the media were completely uninterested in it compared to
| the Saturn. After it became evident that the 32X wouldn't hold
| the market, Sega of America rushed the Saturn to market to draw
| attention away from the 32X, but had to rely exclusively on
| Japanese titles (many of which didn't fit the American market)
| because they'd spent the past year developing 32X titles (the
| 32X had more cancelled games than released ones). All of this
| ended up confusing and pissing off developers and consumers.
| masklinn wrote:
| So _that_ is the background for the 32X. Thanks.
|
| I was on team N and I was always confused by the weird
| accessories of the Genesis, and the 32X's timing always was
| one of the most confusing bits, but I'd never actually looked
| into it.
| MBCook wrote:
| I generally was too. There were some fun games on the 32X,
| but I bought it at fire sale prices after it failed.
|
| Unfortunately the combination of the 32X mistake plus the
| rushed Saturn launch just annoyed all partners, retail and
| development. It's likely a big reason the Dreamcast did so
| poorly.
|
| It was a nice system but Sega was already on their back
| foot, not many people trusted them, and piracy was way too
| easy. Their partner in MS wasn't helpful. And then the PS2
| was coming...
| SpecialistK wrote:
| The DC was doing well, but the bank account was already
| overdrawn.
|
| Piracy wasn't a big factor, since very very few people
| had broadband and CD-R drives in 2000. The attach rate
| was reportedly better than average. And the MS thing was
| just the availability of middleware that a few games
| used.
| MBCook wrote:
| As the console continued on, if we assume it lived a full
| five years or something, piracy would have gotten worse
| as more and more CD burners became commonplace.
|
| Didn't they have to pay MS a small license fee for each
| unit? I'm assuming that was a drag too. Not one that
| killed it, but just another little kick.
| SpecialistK wrote:
| The MilCD exploit was already patched in the last
| hardware revisions (VA2) so I imagine it would be a bit
| like the Switch (IIRC) where early models are vulnerable
| to exploits and more desirable on the second-hand market.
|
| I'm not sure what the agreement with Microsoft was, but
| it was probably on a per-game basis if the developers
| wanted to use Windows CE.
| MBCook wrote:
| Oh I didn't know it was patched in hardware.
|
| I knew it was per game whether the software actually used
| the windows CE stuff. I'm really not sure it was ever
| used much at all. I know the first version of Sega rally
| used it but it performed so poorly they had an updated
| version that didn't that they put out later to fix the
| issues. And I'm not sure the bad version even came to the
| states.
| masklinn wrote:
| > the rushed Saturn launch just annoyed all partners,
| retail and development.
|
| Oh yes that I definitely knew about, the rushed Saturn
| launch out of nowhere, as well as its early retirement to
| make room for the Dreamcast, soured a lot of people.
|
| A shame too, the Dreamcast deserved so much better. It
| was a great system, and pretty prescient too, at least on
| the GPU side: Sega America wanted to go with 3dfx, Sega
| Japan ultimately went with PowerVR, 3dfx turned out to be
| a dead end, while PowerVR endured until fairly recently
| (if mostly in the mobile / embedded / power efficient
| space).
| to11mtm wrote:
| I think PowerVR was a good choice even at the time.
|
| In my teens, my older brother worked at a computer shop
| and back then was a hardware geek, and a Matrox M3D, and
| frankly compared to something like a Rush or Riva 128 the
| M3D was pretty good outside of some blending moire. That
| I'm talking about visual vs perf says something... and
| Dreamcast got the version AFTER that...
|
| The biggest thing was their Tile based deferred
| rendering, which made it easy to create an efficient GPU
| with a relatively low transistor count.
|
| Also, 3dfx pattern of 'chip per function', aside from
| it's future scaling issues, would have been a higher BOM.
|
| -----
|
| All of that said, ever wonder what the video game scene,
| or NVidia would be like today, if the latter didn't derp
| out on their shot at the Dreamcast in an SEC filing,
| which caused them to be relegated to the video chip for
| the Pico?
| VelesDude wrote:
| Credit to the PVR in Dremacast (and the entire design of
| DC), it was a very efficient processor considering the
| pricing limitations of the unit. I do love that the
| Saturn absolute sucked at transparency effects and the
| PVR was the complete opposite. Just throw the geometry at
| it in any order (per tile) and it would sort it out and
| blend it with no problem.
|
| It was efficient but the performance was definitely the
| lowest of all consoles that generation.
| to11mtm wrote:
| 32x murdered Sega's goodwill. Then the cost of the Saturn
| led to the legendary "$299" Sony E3 conference... Then
| Bernie Stolar and his hate for JRPGs...
|
| > Their partner in MS wasn't helpful.
|
| The MS thing was actually an important PR olive branch
| after the Saturn.
|
| Saturn had a somewhat deserved bad rep for API/doc
| issues, and doing 3D was extra painful between the VDP
| behavior and quads...
|
| Microsoft was flouting around DirectX at the time, Even
| with it's warts at the time it was accepted by devs as
| 'better than what we used to deal with!'.
|
| All of it was an attempt to signal to game developers;
| 'Look we know porting stuff to Saturn _sucked_ , our API
| is better, but if you're worried, you are doing more PC
| ports now anyway, so this is a path'.
|
| If _anything_ , I'd say the biggest tactical 'mistake'
| there was that in providing that special Windows CE,
| Microsoft probably got a LOT of feedback and
| understanding of what console devs want in the process,
| which probably shaped future DirectX APIs as well as the
| original XBox.
|
| > PS2 was coming
|
| If the PS1 "$299" conference was the sucker punch, PS2's
| "Oh it's also a DVD Player" was the coupe-de-grace. I
| knew a LOT of folks that 'waited' but DVD was the winning
| factor.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| Some consider the original Xbox as a sequel to the
| Dreamcast because it reused some of the principles and
| had some of the same people working on it. Heck, even the
| original chunky Xbox controller looks more like the
| Dreamcast and lesser known Saturn 3D controller than it
| does like modern Xbox controllers.
| phire wrote:
| Now that's a good interview.
|
| _> I think his biggest mistake was that he underestimated
| how quickly the industry would switch to mainly focusing on
| 3D._
|
| I think his mistake was a bit more subtle than that. Because
| he didn't have any experience in 3D or anyone to ask for
| help, he didn't know which features were important and which
| features could be ignored. And he ended up missing roughly
| two important features that would have bought the Saturn upto
| the standard of "workable 3D".
|
| The quads weren't even that big of a problem. Even if the
| industry did standardise on triangles for 3D hardware, a lot
| of the artist pipelines sick with quads as much as possible.
|
| The first missing feature is texture mapping. Basically the
| ability to pass in uv coordinates for each vertex (or even
| just a single uv offset and some slopes for the whole quad).
| The lack of texture mapping made it very hard to export or
| convert 3D models from other consoles. Instead, artists had
| to create new models where each quad always maps to an 8x8
| texel quad of pixels.
|
| The second missing feature is alpha blending, or
| semitransparent quads. The Saturn did support half-
| transparency, but it only worked for non-distorted sprites,
| and you really want more options than just 50% or 100%.
|
| With those two features, I think the Saturn would have been a
| workable 3D console. Still not as good as the playstation,
| but probably good enough for Sega to stand its ground until
| the Dreamcast launched.
| mmaniac wrote:
| > The quads weren't even that big of a problem. Even if the
| industry did standardise on triangles for 3D hardware, a
| lot of the artist pipelines sick with quads as much as
| possible.
|
| > The first missing feature is texture mapping. Basically
| the ability to pass in uv coordinates for each vertex.
|
| These two situations are fundamentally related. Most 3D
| rasterizers including the Playstation use inverse texture
| mapping, iterating over framebuffer pixels to find texels
| to sample. The Saturn uses forward texture mapping,
| iterating over the texels and drawing them to their
| corresponding framebuffer pixels.
|
| The choice to use forward mapping has some key design
| consequences. It isn't practical to implement UV mapping
| using forward mapping, and quads are also become a more
| natural primitive to use.
|
| > The second missing feature is alpha blending, or
| semitransparent quads. The Saturn did support half-
| transparency, but it only worked for non-distorted sprites,
| and you really want more options than just 50% or 100%.
|
| I don't consider this to be a significant problem. The
| checkerboard mesh feature provides a workable pseudo-half-
| transparent effect, especially with the blurry analog video
| signals used at the time.
|
| Side note but forward mapping is also the reason why half-
| transparency does not work for distorted sprites. Forward
| mapping means that the same pixel may be overdrawn. If a
| half-transparent pixel is blended twice, the result is a
| corrupt pixel.
|
| VDP2 can also provide half-transparent effects in various
| circumstances - this video provides a comprehensive look at
| various methods which were used to deliver this effect.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f_OchOV_WDg
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| I'm surprised forward texture mapping can work at all.
| What happens if the quad is too big? Does it have gaps?
|
| Forward texture mapping sounds like something I would
| have imagined as a novice before I learned how inverse
| texture mapping worked.
| mmaniac wrote:
| It'll draw the same texel multiple times if it has to.
| One of the Saturn's programming manuals describes in
| limited detail how it will attempt to avoid leaving any
| gaps in polygons.
|
| > _Polygons contain diagonal lines that may result in
| pixel dropout (aliasing). When this occurs, holes are
| anti-aliased. For this reason, some pixels may be written
| twice, and therefore the results of half-transparaency
| processing as well as other color calculations cannot be
| guaranteed._
|
| https://antime.kapsi.fi/sega/files/ST-013-R3-061694.pdf
| to11mtm wrote:
| > The quads weren't even that big of a problem. Even if the
| industry did standardise on triangles for 3D hardware, a
| lot of the artist pipelines sick with quads as much as
| possible.
|
| AFAIK the problems lie in things like clipping/collision
| detection. Now that you have four points instead of three,
| there is no guarantee that the polygon is a flat surface.
| cubefox wrote:
| That's interesting. I always wondered why "polygons"
| generally ended up being triangles. I guess this is of
| the reasons.
| VelesDude wrote:
| Youtube channel Gamehut once mentioned that you could do 8
| levels of transparency on the 3D provided you had no
| Gouraud shading on the quad. As such it was almost never
| used and I believe they used it merely to fade in the
| level.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| Saturn did support alpha blending on quads (quads are
| ostensibly just sprites). The problem was the blending
| became uneven due to the distortion. Ie distortion caused
| the quads to have greater transparency on some parts and
| lesser transparency on others. This was largely due to
| developers skewing quads into triangles.
| luma wrote:
| I bought the Saturn on the US launch day and never clearly
| understood why, for the first maybe 6 months, there were only
| a handful of titles available. Interesting back story!
| mouzogu wrote:
| > Sega of America rushed the Saturn to market
|
| interesting. i always thought this was an order from SOJ.
| SpecialistK wrote:
| It was. Kalinske tried to push back, but for some reason
| after all of his success at SoA, SoJ kept undercutting him
| in the mid 90s with the 32X and early Saturn launch.
| spxneo wrote:
| This is why I love HN. Busting esoteric misconceptions with
| detailed knowledge of industry and history. It makes sense
| why developers hated the Saturn and PSX came out on top.
| Developer experience is king!
| VelesDude wrote:
| While this is an entirely "in retrospect this would have been
| the best plan!". The youtube channel Video games esoterica
| had an interesting idea on an alternatives path Sega could
| have taken.
|
| Namely, lean in hard on 32X for about a year or two to try
| and slow demand for Ps1 with cheaper hardware. Release the
| Neptune (Genesis with inbuilt 32x). They then take up
| Panasonics deal and use the M2 platform to be the Saturn.
| Release that in 1997 with specs far beyond Ps1/N64.
|
| Neat idea but this is all just fantasy stuff at this point.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| It also didn't help that Sony poached a lot of studios with
| exclusivity deals.
|
| The fact that the Saturn was harder to develop for, had a
| smaller market share and Sony were paying studios to release
| on the PlayStation, it's no wonder Sony won the console wars
| that generation.
| phire wrote:
| I've looked into it, and from what I can tell, the "3D was
| added late to the Saturn design" narrative is flawed.
|
| It's commonly cited that VDP2 was added later to give it 3D
| support. But VDP2 doesn't do 3D at all, it's responsible for
| the SNES "mode 7" style background layers. If you remove VDP2
| (and ignore the fact that VDP is responsible for video scanout)
| then the resulting console can still do both 3D just fine (Many
| 3D games leave VDP2 almost completely unused). 2D game would
| take a bit of a quality hit as they would have to render the
| background with hundreds of sprites.
|
| If you instead removed VDP1, then all you have left are VDP2's
| 2D background layers. You don't have 3D and you can't put any
| sprites on the screen so it's basically useless at 2D games
| too.
|
| As far as I can tell, the Saturn was always meant to have both
| VDP1 and VDP2. They were designed together to work in tandem.
| And I think the intention (from SEGA JP) was always for the
| design be a 2D powerhouse with some limited 3D capabilities, as
| we saw on the final design.
|
| I'm not saying there wasn't arguments between SEGA JP and SEGA
| US. There seems to be plenty of evidence of that. But I don't
| think they munged the JP and US designs together at the last
| moment. And the PSX can't have had any influence on the
| argument, as the Saturn beat the PSX to market in Japan by 12
| days.
| karmakaze wrote:
| Is this the PSX[0] you're referring to? I had no idea this
| existed, or what impact it had on gaming consoles.
|
| _Edit (answered): "Why is PlayStation called PSX? Wishing to
| distance the project from the failed enterprise with Nintendo,
| Sony initially branded the PlayStation the "PlayStation X"
| (PSX)."_
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PSX_(digital_video_recorder)
| Luc wrote:
| PSX was used to refer to the PlayStation before it was
| released, and it stuck.
| gxqoz wrote:
| The latest episode of the excellent video game history podcast
| They Create Worlds (https://www.theycreateworlds.com/listen)
| does a good job debunking some of these myths.
| thearrow wrote:
| Nice analysis! I still have an original Sega Saturn I've owned
| since 1996 that I fire up occasionally for a nostalgia bomb. The
| thing still runs perfectly, same as the day I unboxed it! They
| may have ended up with quite a complex hardware architecture, but
| you've gotta love the reliability of the older consoles. The same
| cannot be said of the more modern consoles I've had over the
| years - burning themselves up or failing in other ways.
| itomato wrote:
| The diversity in consoles reminded me of the diversity in home
| computers in the waning glory days before PC domination.
|
| Some of the same OEMs and publishers made it through until today.
|
| I'd like to see an infographic and may be so motivated that I
| make one.
| Aissen wrote:
| I love Copetti's work (and have previously used it with
| citation), but it always feels too high-level. But since I know
| how much work it is to write those, it always feels unfair to ask
| for more. Anyway, thank you Rodrigo if you're reading this !
| PUSH_AX wrote:
| My favourite technical breakdown/hack of the Saturn:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jOyfZex7B3E
| hbn wrote:
| Speaking of awkward Sega architecture, MattKC recently did a
| video[1] on his second channel about the 32X, which if you don't
| know was a weird module that slotted into the cartridge slot of
| the Genesis to enable it to play a separate lineup 32-bit games.
|
| Since it was essentially 2 consoles working in tandem, it was
| another situation where you had 2 CPUs working together to pump
| out a video image. He tried to wire up his own video cables and
| found you could cut out the video signal from one machine and
| only get the output rendered from the other. The 32X itself would
| pump out 3D rendering while the Genesis would supply 2D graphics
| for e.g. menus, HUD, sprites, etc.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rl9fjoolS2s
| gamepsys wrote:
| > Consequently, the VDP1 is designed to use quadrilaterals as
| primitives, which means that it can only compose models using
| 4-vertex polygons (sprites).
|
| This gave the 3D Sega Saturn games a more boxy look than PS1
| counterparts. Comparing Resident Evil on Saturn and PS1 is a good
| side by side to see the difference. The overall result is that
| Sega Saturn games have a unique aesthetic in 90s 3D gaming.
|
| It's also worth highlighting that the Sega Saturn's emulation is
| far behind other platforms. Perhaps it's the lack of success in
| the west, paired with the complex architecture.
| wk_end wrote:
| Saturn emulation is very solid at this point. But yeah, for a
| long time it was quite poor.
| breadmaster wrote:
| Yes, it's really quite good right now, and very accessible
| under programs like OpenEmu. I have a Saturn hooked up to a
| CRT still, but the emu doesn't feel very different these
| days.
| segasaturn wrote:
| Saturn Emulation is definitely possible but the amount of
| complexity in the hardware means that it's much more resource
| intensive than its 32-bit contemporaries:
|
| https://mednafen.github.io/documentation/ss.html#Section_int.
| ..
|
| >Mednafen's Sega Saturn emulation is extremely CPU intensive.
| The minimum recommended CPU is a quad-core Intel Haswell-
| microarchitecture CPU with a base frequency of >= 3.3GHz and
| a turbo frequency of >= 3.7GHz(e.g. Xeon E3-1226 v3), but
| note that this recommendation does not apply to any
| unofficial ports or forks, which may have higher CPU
| requirements.
|
| Those minimum specs are about the same as what's required to
| emulate a Wii via Dolphin, two generations ahead of the
| Saturn!
| spxneo wrote:
| Best alternative to emulation, im not sure where FGPA is but it
| gives me a peace of mind to just mod the console to support SD
| cards filled with every single game released for that console,
| picking up the original game from ebay if I really like the
| title and show support
|
| Its such a hassle to take out the CD from its plastic casing
| with rubber gloves to preserve value and put it back in each
| time but you don't want to trade original game experience with
| emulation
| flykespice wrote:
| Nowadays Console hardware has gotten boring, lacking the great
| diversity of the previous generations. It's basically a PC
| motherboard repurposed.
| donatj wrote:
| As a lover of the Sega Saturn, I really believe the use of quads
| over tris really contributed to the Saturn's unique look.
| busfahrer wrote:
| I love Copetti's architecture articles, especially the one on
| PS1, such an interesting early not-quite-3D architecture.
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