I was one of the lucky kids who had a PS1, Saturn and N64. My Saturn was the console of choice. Even when I had friends come over it's what they wanted to play. We would try for an A rank in Nights. The second stage boss would cheat so bad! Good times.
The Saturn output 3d is on paper higher than the ps1, however we know how difficult it is to to program it. To say that the Saturn is designed as a 2d console is to misunderstand the true behind the vdp1 and vdp2 capabilities.
Also it had a shit ton of bottlenecks. Which made it impossible to use its potential based on paper specs, no matter how good the programmer is. The two SH-2s shared the same memory bus so they couldn't access RAM at the same time, instead it had to take turns which limited the effectiveness of having two CPUs. The VDP split made it very difficult to do some special effects. VDP1's texture mapping capabilities were poor, textures couldn't stretch across multiple polygons. Etc etc etc. Sega basically cobbled together some weird Frankenstein console that made it so hard.
Even back in 1999 when I got my Saturn for cheap shortly before the Dreamcast came out, I was surprised by how good the textures looked. Very clean. It blew my N64-kid mind.
I am 100% right there with you on the Saturn. Such a fascinating piece of hardware. I kind of miss the days when consoles were unique. Now, they're far more PC-like than not. I know that's better for developers and that's what really matters in the end, but it also makes the consoles a bit boring.
Good video. Interesting that you mention vdp2 as your favourite thing but for 3d, as in terms of building vast 3d worlds it was generally great but only for flat surfaces or backgrounds. Apart from PD, for me, vdp2 shone in use for 3d fighting game arenas, and in delivering amazing looking 2d games, like the capcom and snk fighters and shooters like darius gaiden and layer section (and radiant silvergun - albeit mix of 3d and 2d, the vdp2 effects are incredible).
There is a video made by the director of Traveller's Tales, who worked on Sonic R, showing a portion of the source code that was written in assembly, showing the DSP inside the SCU executing 6 instructions in parallel, which should not have been possible because Sega's own documentation said it could execute up to 4, not 6 - even the developer support that was given was full of errors.
I adored the Saturn and N64. I got the N64 at launch and a few years later the Saturn and it was then I sold my Playstation which I had also enjoyed but needed the money
Saturn and PS1 compare pretty well imo, Saturn is stronger in 2D while the PS1 outdoes the Saturn in 3D by a small, but noticeable amount. The N64 floors them both in terms of 3D, but was really a shit show when it came to 2D. That's what made these machines interesting though, they did different things better than the other.
Sega saturn last run as a mainstream console was in 1996. During the saturn run. Sega suppose to release sonic xtreme or sonic saturn (96), eternal champions (95), grand theft auto (97), shemue (98), vectoman 3 (97), virtua fighter 3 (1997), residents evil 2 (1998), scud race (97), sonic fighter (97), tomb raider 2 (97) and Turok (97). All of those games were all cancelled due to difficulties programming the saturn (lack of sdk, engines and tools), and infighting with Japanese and american branch. Japan cancelled eternal champions due to fear of outselling virtua fighter in the states. Same thing with sonic xtreme, developers wanted tobuse the knights engine and japan ceo got mad. During 1997 the sega saturn was officially dead outside of Japan. All of those games were all cancelled and some moved over to the dreamcast. Suprise launch and branches infighting killed the saturn outside of japan.
Eternal Champions would not have outsold Virtua Fighter in the USA, it was crap on the Mega Drive regardless of how hard SOA pushed it. Using the NiGHTS engine would not have made Sonic Xtreme any good, nor would it have been finished in time for the 1996 holiday season like Sega wanted. I would say the single thing that hurt the Saturn the most was handing off development of their biggest franchise to an inexperienced western team.
They were cancelled because the console was dead by then. As for VF3 and Scud Race, the Dreamcast was announced and VF3 would make its way there... I agree tho, the Saturn was far too difficult to develop for..
This just proliferates the false narratives around the saturn. The reason those types of games were cancelled (if they were ever even mooted in some cases) was due to the poor financial performance of the system in the west. Regarding the NiGHTS engine and sonic xtreme, that game was already in development hell, STI were nowhere near producing a decent finished game, and they lost all of 2 weeks in the NiGHTS engine debacle. Truth of the matter is that the team were not able to deliver, unfortunately. I'd do a bit of reading around to get the true picture before writing these types of comments.
@@metronome8471 describe to me how drawing quads (4 sided polygons) to a flat 2d screen as a representation of 3d is any different to the psx drawing triangles to a flat 2d screen as a representation of 3d, neither with a hardware z buffer. The shape of the polygons makes no difference.
Quads are what 3d modellers use to make their models before they're split into triangles and optimized. The Saturn just used them instead of triangles because it wasn't decided on which idea was better yet. Also, Castlevania symphony of the night is a 2D game made up entirely of triangles.
What does peak Saturn even look like? Because I had a Saturn, and there was never an RPG adventure game on Saturn that looked better than Vagrant Story on PS1, never a racing game that looked better than Gran Turismo or RType4. And plus, those dithered fake transparencies didn't look that great on CRTs either. I could see the difference between real transparencies as far back as on the SNES vs. Genesis. You had to be using some cheap RF connection to blur the screen enough that it was even passable as a transparency. And then Saturn came out and the Saturn dithering looked even worse than the Genesis, cause people were using higher quality CRTs by then and those fake transparencies just looked ugly, even back then on a CRT. That clip you were showing of the dithered looking waterfalls in Panzer Dragoon Saga looked bad man, and that game should be peak Saturn, right? You know how much better Panzer Dragoon Saga would have looked if it was built on PS1? It would have at least had true transparent waterfalls like the artists intended. It blows my mind how people praise the Saturn for having some hypothetical graphical power that it rarely if ever could achieve. I don't get it.
The Saturn, even though ultimately flawed, was a very cool system. But saying its peak graphical capabilities with Panzer Dragoon Saga was higher than N64's... just no. Compare it to Rogue Squadron and see how it falls short in every graphics category: textures, lighting, polygon count, quality & quantity of effects happening on screen, etc. Still a cool system with awesome 2D and arcade games though.
@@pukalo You're right, he didn't actually say it in this video. However he did say in his previous video that peak PS1 matched or even outclassed N64. Imo Saturn is not in the same ballpark as N64 when it comes to 3D graphics. 2D is an entirely different matter, Saturn is my favorite 2D console.
I'm a Sega fanboy but I'm not blinded by my fandom. The PS1 and N64 were simply better at 3D, both were designed from the get go to be 3D powerhouses. My favourite Saturn games are the ones that took advantage of it's unique hardware. They tended to be 2.5D or 2D games, though i did enjoy many 3D games on it as well.
It was stronger than PlayStation but weaker than the N64 Had more games than the N64 but half the games of PlayStation It really was a solid middle ground, if only it had been treated better in its time.
The Saturn didn't have a 3 button controller. It came standard with a 6 button + 2 shoulder button variant. Then the 3D pad added an analog stick and made the shoulders into analog triggers.
You're thinking of the original Mega Drive controller, which was entirely sufficient for the games being released at that time. Sega later released a 6-button pad for the MD, and refined this controller for the Saturn, which had 6 face buttons and 2 shoulder buttons, again, perfectly fine for the time. It wasn't until 1996 that analog control in 3D was a thing.
I was one of the lucky kids who had a PS1, Saturn and N64. My Saturn was the console of choice. Even when I had friends come over it's what they wanted to play. We would try for an A rank in Nights. The second stage boss would cheat so bad! Good times.
The Saturn output 3d is on paper higher than the ps1, however we know how difficult it is to to program it. To say that the Saturn is designed as a 2d console is to misunderstand the true behind the vdp1 and vdp2 capabilities.
Also it had a shit ton of bottlenecks. Which made it impossible to use its potential based on paper specs, no matter how good the programmer is. The two SH-2s shared the same memory bus so they couldn't access RAM at the same time, instead it had to take turns which limited the effectiveness of having two CPUs.
The VDP split made it very difficult to do some special effects. VDP1's texture mapping capabilities were poor, textures couldn't stretch across multiple polygons. Etc etc etc. Sega basically cobbled together some weird Frankenstein console that made it so hard.
Even back in 1999 when I got my Saturn for cheap shortly before the Dreamcast came out, I was surprised by how good the textures looked. Very clean. It blew my N64-kid mind.
I am 100% right there with you on the Saturn. Such a fascinating piece of hardware. I kind of miss the days when consoles were unique. Now, they're far more PC-like than not. I know that's better for developers and that's what really matters in the end, but it also makes the consoles a bit boring.
Good video. Interesting that you mention vdp2 as your favourite thing but for 3d, as in terms of building vast 3d worlds it was generally great but only for flat surfaces or backgrounds. Apart from PD, for me, vdp2 shone in use for 3d fighting game arenas, and in delivering amazing looking 2d games, like the capcom and snk fighters and shooters like darius gaiden and layer section (and radiant silvergun - albeit mix of 3d and 2d, the vdp2 effects are incredible).
There is a video made by the director of Traveller's Tales, who worked on Sonic R, showing a portion of the source code that was written in assembly, showing the DSP inside the SCU executing 6 instructions in parallel, which should not have been possible because Sega's own documentation said it could execute up to 4, not 6 - even the developer support that was given was full of errors.
Thank you for the info. There is no way saturn scu dsp instructions is faster than the ps1 GTE Coprocessor and N64 CPU.
I adored the Saturn and N64. I got the N64 at launch and a few years later the Saturn and it was then I sold my Playstation which I had also enjoyed but needed the money
Saturn and PS1 compare pretty well imo, Saturn is stronger in 2D while the PS1 outdoes the Saturn in 3D by a small, but noticeable amount. The N64 floors them both in terms of 3D, but was really a shit show when it came to 2D. That's what made these machines interesting though, they did different things better than the other.
everything just a pc now. sad.
Sega saturn last run as a mainstream console was in 1996. During the saturn run. Sega suppose to release sonic xtreme or sonic saturn (96), eternal champions (95), grand theft auto (97), shemue (98), vectoman 3 (97), virtua fighter 3 (1997), residents evil 2 (1998), scud race (97), sonic fighter (97), tomb raider 2 (97) and Turok (97).
All of those games were all cancelled due to difficulties programming the saturn (lack of sdk, engines and tools), and infighting with Japanese and american branch. Japan cancelled eternal champions due to fear of outselling virtua fighter in the states. Same thing with sonic xtreme, developers wanted tobuse the knights engine and japan ceo got mad.
During 1997 the sega saturn was officially dead outside of Japan. All of those games were all cancelled and some moved over to the dreamcast. Suprise launch and branches infighting killed the saturn outside of japan.
Eternal Champions would not have outsold Virtua Fighter in the USA, it was crap on the Mega Drive regardless of how hard SOA pushed it. Using the NiGHTS engine would not have made Sonic Xtreme any good, nor would it have been finished in time for the 1996 holiday season like Sega wanted. I would say the single thing that hurt the Saturn the most was handing off development of their biggest franchise to an inexperienced western team.
They were cancelled because the console was dead by then. As for VF3 and Scud Race, the Dreamcast was announced and VF3 would make its way there... I agree tho, the Saturn was far too difficult to develop for..
This just proliferates the false narratives around the saturn. The reason those types of games were cancelled (if they were ever even mooted in some cases) was due to the poor financial performance of the system in the west.
Regarding the NiGHTS engine and sonic xtreme, that game was already in development hell, STI were nowhere near producing a decent finished game, and they lost all of 2 weeks in the NiGHTS engine debacle. Truth of the matter is that the team were not able to deliver, unfortunately. I'd do a bit of reading around to get the true picture before writing these types of comments.
Saturn is still amazing.
Sega Rally still blows me away how inpressive it looks considering the Saturn is basically just a 2D powerhouse.
I mean, it's not just a 2d powerhouse. It did decent pseudo 3d just like playstation (and was designed with that in mind)
from my understanding those quads are silly sprites convincing you its 3D.
@@metronome8471 describe to me how drawing quads (4 sided polygons) to a flat 2d screen as a representation of 3d is any different to the psx drawing triangles to a flat 2d screen as a representation of 3d, neither with a hardware z buffer. The shape of the polygons makes no difference.
Quads are what 3d modellers use to make their models before they're split into triangles and optimized. The Saturn just used them instead of triangles because it wasn't decided on which idea was better yet.
Also, Castlevania symphony of the night is a 2D game made up entirely of triangles.
@@Kurriochi i suspect saturn using quads was more to do with sega having used quads in their model 1 and 2 boards
Let's go!
Go where? You aint going anywhere just by imitating Max Doody.
Saturn was the best of that era. I love that machine.
Hello fellow Divine Visitor.
What does peak Saturn even look like? Because I had a Saturn, and there was never an RPG adventure game on Saturn that looked better than Vagrant Story on PS1, never a racing game that looked better than Gran Turismo or RType4. And plus, those dithered fake transparencies didn't look that great on CRTs either. I could see the difference between real transparencies as far back as on the SNES vs. Genesis. You had to be using some cheap RF connection to blur the screen enough that it was even passable as a transparency. And then Saturn came out and the Saturn dithering looked even worse than the Genesis, cause people were using higher quality CRTs by then and those fake transparencies just looked ugly, even back then on a CRT. That clip you were showing of the dithered looking waterfalls in Panzer Dragoon Saga looked bad man, and that game should be peak Saturn, right? You know how much better Panzer Dragoon Saga would have looked if it was built on PS1? It would have at least had true transparent waterfalls like the artists intended. It blows my mind how people praise the Saturn for having some hypothetical graphical power that it rarely if ever could achieve. I don't get it.
The Saturn, even though ultimately flawed, was a very cool system. But saying its peak graphical capabilities with Panzer Dragoon Saga was higher than N64's... just no. Compare it to Rogue Squadron and see how it falls short in every graphics category: textures, lighting, polygon count, quality & quantity of effects happening on screen, etc.
Still a cool system with awesome 2D and arcade games though.
He didn’t say it was “higher”, it is simply different.
@@pukalo He literally said that at 6:40.
@@OriginalChrizum He still didn't say the Saturn's peak capabilities were higher than the N64.
@@pukalo You're right, he didn't actually say it in this video. However he did say in his previous video that peak PS1 matched or even outclassed N64. Imo Saturn is not in the same ballpark as N64 when it comes to 3D graphics. 2D is an entirely different matter, Saturn is my favorite 2D console.
I'm a Sega fanboy but I'm not blinded by my fandom. The PS1 and N64 were simply better at 3D, both were designed from the get go to be 3D powerhouses.
My favourite Saturn games are the ones that took advantage of it's unique hardware. They tended to be 2.5D or 2D games, though i did enjoy many 3D games on it as well.
It was stronger than PlayStation but weaker than the N64
Had more games than the N64 but half the games of PlayStation
It really was a solid middle ground, if only it had been treated better in its time.
That 3 button controller killed Saturn
The Saturn didn't have a 3 button controller. It came standard with a 6 button + 2 shoulder button variant. Then the 3D pad added an analog stick and made the shoulders into analog triggers.
Why do you say this? It's factually incorrect!
The OP probably confused the Saturn with the Genesis/MD.
You're thinking of the original Mega Drive controller, which was entirely sufficient for the games being released at that time. Sega later released a 6-button pad for the MD, and refined this controller for the Saturn, which had 6 face buttons and 2 shoulder buttons, again, perfectly fine for the time. It wasn't until 1996 that analog control in 3D was a thing.
Yep, just like how HDMI killed the Atari Jaguar...