The Sega Saturn Thread

[Rogue Trooper]

Todays start of my 1 man mission to explain why Saturn fared differently to PS1, games wise begins here:

Programmer Steve Palmer (NBA Jam):

To learn to program the Saturn was to learn the machine.To learn to program the Playstation was to learn C. Learning C is much easier than learning the hardware of a new machine and with Saturn, there was a LOT of hardware to learn.

The same would have been true of the Playstation, except you did'nt need to learn how to talk to the hardware, the libaries took care of that.Segas approach was to release hardware documentation for every aspect of the Saturn, it was what coders were used to, but by this time, the industry had changed, the 'big boys' had moved in and it was a 'time is money' approach.

[Rogue Trooper]

Burning Rangers mentioned on chat box, nope, i had'nt forgotten about it, Sonic Team just wrote the code they needed for the Saturn to produce Playstation like transparency+filtering effects, realtime lighting, huge explosions etc, but personally feel game should have been written for Dreamcast launch title, as Saturn struggled with what was asked of it (same way PS2 did with Shadow Of The Col, N64 did with Perfect Dark etc).

IF Sonic Team, Lobotomy, Treasure, AM2, Team Andromeda etc could get stunning results from Saturn, then clearly hardware was'nt shite.

Just crying shame Sega rushed Daytona USA out, it helped create myth that Saturn was 'inferior' when running next to Ridge Racer on PS, plus i feel VF:Remix should have been THE VF game that was put out, not the plain polygon version, as again, putting it next to say Toh Shin Den on PS, the 'plain' version made it look like Saturn was inferior.

Anyone know WHY Sega handed Saturn Virtua Racing to Time Warner? i assume it was for same reasons Tantalus got given Manx TT and H.O.T.D, All Sega's teams tied up on other projects, but i'd have thought you'd have wanted your crews handling your flagship series?.

[Rogue Trooper]

Core Design:Created transparencies on the river sections of their game, Ninja, by using Saturn equiv.of SNES Mode 7. Used it to create 'floor' surfaces and depth cued objects as above or below, if objects were below, they had a pallate change.Plus, 1 of the magic weapons you picked up had a transparent blast effect.

Just because they did'nt use transparent stuff in Saturn Tomb Raider, did'nt mean it was impossible to do.

[Rogue Trooper]

Warp (talking about developing for Saturn):

'Saturns development tools were not very successful, worse than N64's.The Playstation was very successful because of it's libary and tools'.


So, again it seems that Sony went out of it's way to ensure the PS was an easy machine to code for, where as Sega just stuck with the concept of coding for the hardware.


What i've always found ironic is just how the situation was totally reversed the next generation, Dreamcast made as easy as possible to develop for, games could be easily ported over from PC etc, yet Sony mase the PS2 a very complex piece of kit.


Sony have always said the PS2 was designed in response to requests from developers who wanted to 'code to the metal', ie write their own routines, use hardware as they saw fit, hence the PS2 offerring that degree of flexibility (once you got everything working the way it should be) and that coders should not approach it in same way they had the 32 Bit Playstation etc.

But then you had developers like Oddworld who found it so frustrating to use, they jumped over to Xbox (thus making light of Ken Kutargi's arrogant comments about developers would always choose Sony platforms-'What type of creator would want to leave Sony?').

Middleware programmes like Renderware save the bacon for Sony on PS2 for a lot of 3rd party games (Criterion going as far as saying 'Use Renderware or die'), yet others developers started moaning that use of middleware and generic game engines was too restrictive, just put obstacles in the way.

So, what were Sega to do on any platform? as coders just do not seem to know what they want, European code shops seemed very different to US coders.

[dcultrapro]

I've always been very sad and disappointed with what happened to the Saturn and Dreamcast, both were incredible machines both were 2 of my absolute favourites and both failed miserably due to things beyond their control.

I got the Saturn in May '98, my 16th birthday. I had the Mega Drive and Master System and the Mega CD and really wanted to move up as I had seen a friend playing the Saturn. But I was horribly uninformed and knew nothing of console life cycles etc and I had no idea that Saturn was on its way out. So for 3/4 months I was blissfully ignorant and enjoying the wonders of the Saturn before I started to read in the Saturn Magazine that Sega was pushing Dreamcast and would discontinue the Saturn in 98 in the EU region.

It really broke my heart especially as I had just picked up Burning Rangers, Steep Slope Sliders and Panzer Dragoon Saga etc and I thought the Saturn was the greatest thing I had EVER owned.

I don't know much of the technical stuff about what it could or couldn't do but I always preferred the games on my Saturn to my PS1


definitely tempted to pick up some more top quality games for it

[Rogue Trooper]

I've always been very sad and disappointed with what happened to the Saturn and Dreamcast, both were incredible machines both were 2 of my absolute favourites and both failed miserably due to things beyond their control.

I got the Saturn in May '98, my 16th birthday. I had the Mega Drive and Master System and the Mega CD and really wanted to move up as I had seen a friend playing the Saturn. But I was horribly uninformed and knew nothing of console life cycles etc and I had no idea that Saturn was on its way out. So for 3/4 months I was blissfully ignorant and enjoying the wonders of the Saturn before I started to read in the Saturn Magazine that Sega was pushing Dreamcast and would discontinue the Saturn in 98 in the EU region.

It really broke my heart especially as I had just picked up Burning Rangers, Steep Slope Sliders and Panzer Dragoon Saga etc and I thought the Saturn was the greatest thing I had EVER owned.

I don't know much of the technical stuff about what it could or couldn't do but I always preferred the games on my Saturn to my PS1


definitely tempted to pick up some more top quality games for it

My humble aim with the developer quotes is to try and 'enlighten' folk to some of the reasons games either never made it or we're not all they could of been, trying to keep the tech.talk to a minimum in them, just explain ow developers viewed and approached the hardware and also explain to those who write off it's 3D+SFX abilities far too soon.

Whilst it's FMV playback was never going to match that of PS1, it was lot harder to code for, hope we, as a forum are showing just what a miss-understod piece of hardware it really was and what could be achived with it, in the right hands.

Great to see it's still held in such high regard by it's fans.


Some of the MCD, Saturn+DC failings though, sadly DO fall firmly at feet of Sega, choices they made etc.

Original Saturn Specs:(Work began on it in 1992, design wise, it was to be a 32 Bit, CD-Based console, capable of beating the 3DO)

16 Mhz Nec V60 CPU (1st 32 Bit microprocessor avaiable in Japan i think), where as Sony went for a 33 Mhz R3000A microprocessor, an improved version of a chip that Silicon Graphics had been using for a few years. Sony+it's engineers been working with this sort of chip for years, so knew what it could do.

Once Playstation Specs were annouced (dwarfing Saturns), Sega went mental, had emergency meeting, an away team of 27 handpicked Sega engineers put together to create a redesigned Saturn.

No time avaiable to do anything than use existing chips so twin 32 Bit Risc Chips in Parallel seen as quick and cheap solution to increase power.

Why the Hiachi Sh-2's? RUMOUR had it it was as a result of a favour from Sega Japan's boss to an old golfing buddy, but Sega USA had also approached Silicon Graphics, who'd come up with an different solution, a single chip, simplistic designwhich they felt COULD compete with chip in Playstation.

But Sega over ruled Sega USA in favour of the away-team, twin SH" approach.

3D Transparency on Saturn must be generated through software code, long story short:

The VDP 1 chip is primarily responsible for Sprite Generation, polygon generation could only be done by manipulation of the sprite engine.

The VDP 2 chip is Saturns background processor, special effects such as texture transparency, playfield rotation etc done here, Saturn just 'struggled' to generate these effects in a 3D enviroment.

IF you knew the Saturn hardware or had the necessary programming tools or had worked previousily on Parallel processing based hardware, Saturn WAS a powerful piece of hardware, as results have shown.

However, much like the Jaguar, where coders just wrote to the 6800 instead of using Jag's custom chips, many Saturn developers just used 1 of the 2 CPU's, thus limiting resources and possibilities.

[Rogue Trooper]

Talking of developers, good few European developers alleged that Sega of Japan kept the strongest libaries (coding tools) to themselves at 1st, leaving western teams to either use inferior tools which Sega did provide, or spend time+money creating their own, where as Sony with the Playstation provided third party developers with extensive tools and technical support from day 1.

Argonaut's general manager at the time backed up these claims, saying Sega never gave them the same level of support forSaturn that Sony did for Playstation, and as a result they had to spend a lot of time writing original software tools for Saturn development in areas of 3D, audio and even just accessing the CD.

Saturn programmers he said, felt isolated as they were a much smaller number than PC or Playstation programmers so had limited resources to turn to for advice.

How did Sega Japan respond? well they admitted things could have been better and yes hardware was complicated, but then went onto say, maybe European developers are using this as an excuse and maybe they don't have the time to match the achivements made by Sega's own teams, most companies are buisness driven and sometimes financial issues come before creative freedom.

So, again, i have to say Sega really did'nt help themselves at times with certain attitudes.

Oddly, the Mega Drive being something of a flop in Japan, oddly helped Sega with Saturn, unlike the US where Genesis had been huge.

Firstly, having to develop the 32X drained Sega Of America's resources and they had the task of trying to gather developer support for 32X and Saturn.(Something Sega Europe also faced)

Sega Japan however just courted developers like Game Arts, Warp, Treasure, Capcom and Climax, in order to get Saturn support.

[nakamura]

Out of interest, where are all of these quotes coming from?

[TL]

Martin Randall, who was a programmer at Imagitec Design, was telling me that the Saturn development kit was even worse than the Jaguar one! Which is really saying something!

He said that to do Saturn game they basically would have had to write a whole new development environment from scratch. They were originally supposed to do the Saturn version of Tempest 2000 but after a bit of early work they passed it over to High Voltage software in the US as they felt they couldn't do it justice because they didn't have the tools to work with.

[Rogue Trooper]

Out of interest, where are all of these quotes coming from?

Numerous interviews with coders which appeared in numerous magazines, NOT the internet.

As Laird will no doubt testify, i've built up a huge scrap book of interviews, magazines etc over the years, which i'm more than happy to share with folks, so been sending Laird photocopies of interviews, magazine scans etc over past few months+continue to do so.-Sent him another motherload yesterday in fact.

It's great to hear the people who worked on the hardware openly talking about it, being very candid about how they found the hardware, what happened to games they were working on etc, builds a much bigger and better picture than say going to a Saturn thread on RG and Saturn=crap type posts.

[Rogue Trooper]

Interview with HMV manager on a look back at the Saturn, had him saying he and other store managers, 'laughed Sega reps out of the stores' on the day the Playstation launched in the UK as they knew Sony had 'stolen the ground beneath it's rival'.

Also, Argonaut talked of how Saturn's demanding hardware had meant many developers found themselves in a situation where publishers were more than willing to cancel the Saturn version of a multi-platform title, IF it meant they could 'double-up' the number of coders working on the Playstation version of a game.

The risk of launching a Playstation version late and thus loosing sales, was seen as too great, ie potential Playstation sales would dwarf those 'lost' by not doing a Saturn version, they were not prepared to delay the PS version launch, whilst coding on the Saturn caught up.

Claim made that the rumour going around was this was what happened with Core's Tomb Raider 2 on Saturn.

Jez San himself, who really went to town on Sega after Red Dog bombed at retail (Totally unfair as game was mauled at review, pulled, re-coded, submitted again, mauled again) blamed Sega for poor marketing of titles during the DC days and said:

'Sega lost their way (with the Dreamcast), they had a great head start, but have blown their lead'They DON'T return phone calls or emails'.

[dcultrapro]

so has anyone here played Night Striker S or Titan Wars? Both look pretty awesome

I think I will be tempted to start doing my top 5 retro consoles series of videos soon for my channel, can't wait to do a Saturn

[Rogue Trooper]

Out of interest, where are all of these quotes coming from?

Out of interest, why the interest? 

They are factual, from multi-format magazines some during Saturn era, some in look back features, but all from coders etc with Saturn exp

[Rogue Trooper]

Laird:You mentioned Guardian Heroes getting unfairly treated in that video?.

Was often the case in he press at the time, magazines like Ultimate Future Games (1 of the few magazines i had entire collection of, but sent 99.9% of to recycling, as was an utter rag!) slamned the game for it's visuals.


IF ever a game was really miss-understood it was this, a game by a Jap.developer, where 2D was seen as anything but old hat, coded to take advantage of the sprite handling and sound capabilites of the Saturn hardware.

Real purist approach, case of substance over style.

[dcultrapro]

I loved Guardian Heroes but I haven't played it nearly enough, I managed to get a reasonably priced PAL copy. Sooo many awesome games on the saturn I really can't wait to do some more vids on it