I'll never forget the days back in '98 when I first convinced my parents to buy me a 3D accelerator. I had the demo of Half Life and I had to play it in 320x240 in software, I enjoyed every second of it, but it looked so bad. Once I got the full version of the game I finally got my 3DFX Voodoo Banshee and I was able to play it in 640x480 with all the bells and whistles and I almost shit myself. It was so mind blowing.
Man, I miss the 90s. So many cool stuff I could only read about because they were out of my reach, and still having a blast just reading about it. I have a job now and can afford many things, but I'll never derive that same kind of satisfaction.
I enjoy having a great gaming PC now that will run anything I throw at it but I do wish I could enjoy it like I would if I was still a child. I also could not afford any good PC hardware in the 90s. I spent hours drooling over the screenshots and the specs in geeky magazines of the time. I only recently purchased Unreal in Steam. It seems so primitive but I guess for the time it was truly amazing.
zfoxfire Believe me, Unreal was the coolest thing ever. Load Quake II and then Unreal and you'll see how much of an advancement it was. Graphics, AI, music, level design, everything about it was amazing. It certainly was the Crysis of its time. The funny thing its that I first played it with an slow K6-2 333mhz without a 3d card and it ran at around 20 fps. Now that I think about it I realize I would have had a way better experience playing at 320x200. But once you tried 640x480 you couldn't go back 😉.
I know 98 was the only time I ever had a top of the line machine, I came into money then and got a micron $3600 PC, 266mhz, 64mb ram, riva 128 voodoo2, it was the best at the time, unreal ran well on it and quake 2 those were the days, the guys at school were so jealous and drooling over my high end PC, one day I hope to get a PC like that again when. I have like 3500 again lol
Man, the background research Clint does in these oddware videos is friggin awesome. I had no idea something like this for Win95 even existed but just after a few minutes, I know everything about it. Amazin.
I used to carry around one of those huge PC magizines when I was in elementary and JR high. I'd just over the adds for new lightning fast IBM 486s. The black ones. I'd make parts list in my notebooks planning builds I couldn't afford and my parents weren't going to buy. I still do the same thing now as an adult difference being I can afford to build these PCs. anyway, this channel brings back a lot of memories and I really enjoy your enthusiasm for and knowledge of all of this old hardware. It was a great period to be interested in PCs. Keep it up, brother.
This video best encapsulates how we all felt when 3D acceleration hit the market. It's hard to explain to people today. Better resolution, better frames, and better textures was mind blowing at the time. It didn't seem logical, based on what we were used to. I think my Monster 3D was $99, pass through card, and that was a transformative experience.
If you think rendering quads in hardware is weird. You should see how the PS1 did it. It did not use perspective divide, it used affine texture mapping only, it did not have a floating point unit (!) and it did not use a Z-buffer (!!!); it transformed triangles into 2D and clipped them into smaller triangles before rendering, making sure that there was zero overdraw.
+MrAmir yes, the positions of vertices was effectively being truncated down to an integer... Sort of. It never existed as a floating point, so it was doing math that you'd typically expect to do with floating points, so you'd get these swimming vertices. The best example I can think of is "Space Griffon VF-9", a rather poorly aged mech fps, it was basically a corridor shooter so the walls went very close to the screen, you could watch them crinkling up around the corners.
+James Lewis They're not just twitchy. The playstation also couldn't do perspective correct texturing, only affine transforms, so textures could warp weirdly in some situations.
I know. I have Syphon Filter 1 that was a PS1 title, and I used to play it on my PS2 all the time, and lots of weird shit happened with the textures and models and such, especially if they were up close to the camera and even more so if they're on the side of the screen.
It was actually $450 when it first launched, which comes to about $700 in today's money, for a card that only ever had SIX GAMES made for it. It was early to the party, but just a handful of months later for that kind of cash you could've instead gotten a much nicer soundcard and a 3D graphics card compatible with _hundreds_ of games, which is the big reason this didn't sell!
Lazy Game Reviews I remember this thing. It couldn't compete with the 3dfx cards that were exploding on the scene around the same time for half the price. The Saturn games just seemed like a gimmick with not much appeal to me at the time.
Sound Canvas in GS mode is amazing especially the later SC-88 series. Although Yamaha's XG fomat is technically much more capable and Yamaha's sounds are sometimes better, hardly anything took advantage of it because it was so expensive.
I just started my collection, and it made me realize how much more fascinating and whimsical gaming used to be. No, i'm not using nostalgia goggles, it really was. The hardware evolution was much more exciting and interesting to learn and be a part of. Every step forward felt huge, videogames were on par with current technology. The technical limitations inspired true creativity. The Saturn could've completely changed the course of gaming history if Sega decided for a change to not fuck up everything.
@@6581punk not anymore, I remember trying the original Oculus rift where you stood still and the resolution hurt my eyes, but now VR (if you dont suffer from motion sickness) is really comfortable to play and I can go hours without feeling any side effects
@@LGR well that sucks, got me all excited about being able to play any Saturn game but I guess there's a reason this died even before the Saturn did! Would be awesome if this played then ask imports, backups... But oh well. It's no 3DO Blaster! Lol
Can you try and get hold of the 3DO sound blaster card sometime Clint? Always been fascinated by those. I was at a computer show in 1994 when they were previewing them too!
***** They're insanely rare and expensive, even more so than this card. But I'm certainly keeping an eye out for one, and maybe I can get someone to loan me theirs! It's one I've wanted to cover for about as many years as this.
Lazy Game Reviews I think it was down to them being so ridiculously expensive, that it was cheaper to just buy a standalone 3DO. But I do remember them showing off Need for Speed and FIFA at the event and it just looked like the future of gaming!
Awesome episode, and I love the way you presented it. I can totally imagine the wonder people must have had to see their favorite games rendered so excellently. I remember when we got our first CGA monitor upgrade, Space Invaders in 4 colors! Amazing! :)
Dude, where the hell did this come from? I was completely not aware that something like this ever once existed. It's friggin' strange beyond measure. I'm a huge fan of SEGA myself. I certainly learned something odd today...
Oh man gotta love the early days of computing - what sold me on this card was the rendered ball on the back showing how smooth things were going to be after installation lol, i also had fun installing it in my $2000 NEC Pentium 90 with 8 megs of ram - in a weird way i miss that computer, one of my first experiences playing a music CD, MP3 file, playing Star Trek the Final Unity, getting online using a friends University dial up account, talking to someone far away for the first time using mIRC, letting family members come over to type papers for school, that computer just transported me to a different world for the first time :-) Thanks for the vid.
My first experience with 3D accelerators was when I borrowed Matrox Mystique from my friend and played Tomb Raider with 3d-acceleration patch for that card. Dark Forces 2 was quite amazing too because it ran so smoothly and at higher resolution, there simply was no turning back to choppy low res gaming. Next I had that famous Voodoo1 4MB + Tseng Labs ET6000-combo and I thought that I had reached the peak of modern gaming technology and never need to upgrade again, how wrong was I lol. Next came Voodoo Banshee 16MB etc. etc.
Wow this is like the holy grail for graphics cards collectors, and to find it in the original box with all the goodies intact, is just amazing. Thank you for this great video !
Raptor3388 It really is, I was amazed when I saw David got one of these in such complete condition. Had to get in touch right away and see if I could get hold of it for a video!
That's a great experience for sure, but the other thing for me was my Voodoo 3500 TV video card that had a huge thing for the video coming out of it! That's what this reminded me of. I would of loved to own that NV1 though.
Oh I had one of these cards! I remember the Direct X problems. I was just happy when I could normal games on it again. Yeahs! That was awful! Then I bought a Voodoo or ATI Rage. I think. One or the other. I remember buying it solely for the Sega games.
On a side note, Virtua Fighter PC, Expert release, works fine on a 64-bit Windows 10 computer. Just adjust from Fast to Smooth in options. So, does the Edge version in this video work on any other cards?
I remember saving a lot of money to buy this card expecting it would work with more games in the future. Then I bought a 3dfx and matrox mystique 220. Finally settling on nvidia rivaTNT. As a young teen it was becoming way to expensive buying graphic cards to keep up for gaming all the time. I then got the ps1 and never looked back.
Yes with Computers to get higher res and fps you need to keep spend more money. With game Consoles it is done with dedicated GPU's, Graphics CPUs. Interesting that the old DOS games like Screamer, Jazz JackRabbit, Mortal Kombat 2 looked better than the consoles of that time lol.
The improvements in technology now are just not as impressive... the difference between 4k and 1080p, along with the difference between 120fps and 60fps are about all we have to look forward to. A lot of people argue over whether it's a really improvement and some swear by it. But we didn't have to argue like that back then because the improvements were obvious and huge.
I don't get why some people argue about frame rates and get irritated over certain games not being 60fps like Kirby Star Allies for example (apart from the menus which are 60fps). But Kirby is meant to be a bit more floaty; I don't see 60fps would be some kind of improvement.
@@rockapartie Though a lot of games don't depend on realistic graphics (and I like more artistic, stylised-looking games anyway), more accurate physics simulations are always welcome.
@@1Thunderfire You do realize Kirby is a platformer, a long-running one at that, which has played at 60 frames per second ever since the original 8-bit games, right?
@@PlusInsta 60 frames since the original? I didn't know that 60 frames was possible then but honestly 60 frames isn't a huge deal for me as long as you don't notice noticeable slowdown (though I know some did have that problem with the Parallel Mage Sisters battle).
The Diamond Edge 3D is the missing link! Thank you Clint (your name is Clint, right?). It all makes sense now! that's why SEGA ported so many of those Saturn games to PC in the late 90s. That's why Nvidia's first card used quads instead of traditional polygons! Now I know!
Quads are a type of polygon, 4-gon if you will where as triangles are 3-gons. Problem with quads is they are hard to rasterize because there's not guarantee that all 4 points exist in the same plane :-\ What SEGA really used instead of polygons were quad patches, this was a way of representing a surface for evaluation, rather than storing all of the actual points that make up the surface.
Yes! So I wasn't crazy after all. I remember reading about this device in a game magazine in the 90's but couldn't find a trace of it, so I thought it probably never made it past the prototype phase. I thought it'd play all Saturn games though, but it's awesome either way.
I had a Roland Sound Canvas Card (SCC) in my 386 back in the day along with a regular sound card and a pretty good set of speakers. I would run the game's music through the SCC and sound f/x through the regular sound card. Sounded great.
Thank you man, you really made my day when I saw you driving backwards..... I did just the same because it IS "A LOT OF FUN" to me as well. HA HA HA... I can't stop watching your videos. It really helps me get through an 8 hour shift when my shop is slow.. I have tab after tab of what I will be watching next.
OMG, this is a blast to the past. I remember a local supermarket selling this. (yes you read this correctly, a freaking supermarket) I remember back in the day that I liked the idea of integrating console hardware with computers... but that idea left the building pretty fast when the Nvidia TNT2 cards hit the market and turned consoles obsolete. *pc master race comments incomming!!!!*
Amazing card for the collector value alone. So much nostalgia attached. I'm still rocking a nice msdos box with genuine awe64 gold, viper v550 and 16 mb of edo ram. Totally overkill for running the classics. and for everything not running, there's always DOSBox without the space inbetween ;)
Hey thanks my friend for peaking my interest as i a Huge fan of anything Saturn, and seeing this reminded me of when i had this in my old PC when my dad got it for me. lost it as i got older and totally forgot about it till i saw this older video, also nice Saturn Unit looks in great shape. :) nave a great day man.
Hah! I worked at Diamond back in the day-- I still have the Sega Saturn arcade stick that somebody broke the handle off of at E3 while playing Panzer Dragoon. ;-)
Man, that whole feeling of going from a "game you're very familiar with" to a WHOLE new experience with a new video card... I can't even put into words how *awesome* it was when I did that back in the day with my Voodoo 3 and, specifically, Starsiege: Tribes... That was my very favorite game for a long time and I played it online constantly back around the early 2000s, and going from this chunky low-fps beast with individual 'pixels' visible on the textures (though as far as I knew that was simply the way the game was meant to run, period) to this gorgeous, ultra-smooth, 60-fps masterpiece with dynamic lighting coming off the weapon shots and textures that looked like they were from a full console generation later in comparison (seriously was very much like comparing a PS1 game to a PS2 game)... That's an experience like no other. I suppose I had a similar feeling when I went from having to play Team Fortress 2 on "n64 mode" using scripts to force the graphics lower than normally possible just so I could have an edge as I used to be pretty competitive at it, to going to a video card powerful enough to run it just as smooth on higher graphics settings, but I don't think anything will ever quite compare to that feeling back then with Tribes. It was seriously like getting a whole new game, like a sequel or remake, to a game I put hundreds of hours into both pre- and especially post- 3d accelerator.
+Isiah Folio (Asdfguy86) It was absolutely not intended as an insult! But I find it funny people are sometimes genuinly shocked when a RUclips replies. I see lots of them do it, actually, especially the RUclipsrs that do it as a hobby. Sorry if I offended you!
Thank you for doing oddware. This video has good audio and great commentary and visuals. Very entertaining, I can't believe they supported 1600x1200. Did the Diamond Edge 3D card allow the computer to read regular Saturn disks or did you have to purchase specific game disks? I loved Panzer Dragoon, it's up there with the greats of Saturn like Galactic attack, NiGHTS and Astal for me. When I woke up this morning to check youtube, and I saw this video, I just can't tell you how happy I was. You made a fellow gamer very happy. Thank you for your dedication to your viewer base. I'm not what anyone would consider a RUclips addict, but I follow your uploads pretty religiously :)
As a SimCity 3000 fan, I definitely got the reference at the beginning with the Power Grid music from the game. I have never seen such combo like this, video card with audio card, amazing! Unfortunately it didn't support OpenGL.
5:37 lol that song.. i also often used to play those .mid tracks to compare soundblaster cards, there was also a game that used that track.. what was it again xD
Gotta love how they faked the reflections too. Perpendicular billboards underneath the polygons, that always stuck out to me even back when the game was new
WOW I knew the 3DO - console could be purchased as a PC Card in the early mid 90's but a sega Saturn... oh is this card sweet. I wonder if there was any mod or hack to play normal Saturn games via the CD-drive.
I was one of people who kinda anticipated to see this review ever since you had the random junk video of stuff you got as gifts or whatever, and talked about this card as you had one loose then. Very great you got one complete in a box, overall very cool, especially the technical differences of rendering to conventional rendering and so on.
When it break it down, the card wasn't that expensive. $249 - $49.99 (Panzer) - $49.99 (NASCAR) - $49.99 (Virtua Fighter) - $29.99 (Controller) = $69.04. SO for $70 you got a sound card and video card.
I remember getting my first 3dfx open-gl or whatever it was called back in the day. You had to daisy-chain it to your old video card with a really short monitor cable...but man, the difference it made in Quake and other games that supported it was totally amazing!
Why? I play Morrowind in my modern machine, with no graphics mods other than tweaks to run it at 1080p and it looks the same as it did back in the day, even better as I do not have to turn the draw distance down so it is smooth on a 1 Ghz Celeron.
Man, this brings back ancient memories. I remember buying a new pc which had this Diamond Edgde 3D card pre-installed. I even remember buying a second Sega Saturn gamepad so I could play Virtua Fighter with my kid brother. After a couple of years I replaced it with a different video card (since I couldn't find any other games that were supported and it was quite slow with non supported games) and then added a Diamond Monster card that supported 3DFX. Even though it was surpassed by OpenGL and DirectX, for a brief period of time 3DFX was a thing and I owned a lot of games that supported it.
What a package! 3D acceleration, Sega Saturn controller inputs, 2 Saturn controllers, sound card, and Sega PC games (pun slightly intended) to boot! I miss the 90s
I want to use Saturn controllers on PC, but Saturn controllers can get expensive (especially the Japanese ones aka US/Euro model 2) and those USB converters are like $20.
Nascar racing hit my deep in the nostaliga...played on a win 95 acer pc. Not related to the Sega side but still.... So many of your videos make me think back.....thank you sir
Man Ionno how people seem to have forgotten this but even around the late 90's you could get monitors with resolutions well above 1080p. Those 2500x1800 crts.
2:33 Video Random Access Memory is not a type of hardware. VRAM is just video memory, GDDR, DDR, SGram, or Fram are types of hardware chips, Vram is just a name for a concept.
It's Rare, But You can only Play SEGA PC games not Saturn Format. I have one. I cant play Regular Sega Saturn Game. It's Just a 3d card build with a Sound Card and PC Game Pad Converter for the PC.
Well, if you were in JAPAN, there would be a lot more options for games.... Sadly, most of them didn't see an overseas release... which is probably why the system bombed.
TheStolken One of the most common misconceptions in gaming. Do your research and you'll find that there's plenty of good games for the Saturn, it's arguably better than the Nintendo 64, depending on your gaming taste. It performed better than N64 in Japan and many of the best games are exclusive to Japan. Saturn was a 2D power house and had great shoot em ups and fighting games as a result where as practically everything on N64 is polygonal, so many of it's greatest games have aged a lot more poorly and have been made obsolete by newer games (in other words Xbox/Xbox 360 era console FPS games>N64's FPS library, Here Comes the Pain>No Mercy, later 3D platformers had less camera problems, OoT is hella overrated and so on).
90sgamer92 I have to agree, I've got dozens of fantastic games for the Saturn. Only reason I don't have more is that they're a bit uncommon to find and can be rather expensive!
used this card on a p1 until 2001,3 versions of windows it ran,and still managed to play games beyond the systems specs...not bad for a pre build homeshopping computer...
A bit of digging around reveals that Virtua Fighter, Virtua Cop, Sonic 3D Blast, Sonic R, Sega Rally Championship, Sega Touring Car Championship, Sega Worldwide Soccer, Bug!, Bug Too!, Daytona USA, and Last Bronx were all released on the PC by Sega. There are almost certainly others. Many seem to have been developed outside of Sega. I'm not sure if they were all ported in such a way to have made use of the features of this card or not.
MarkTheMorose Sonic 3D Blast PC wasn't exactly a straight port. It's mostly like the Saturn version as far as I know, but features completely redesigned Special Stages, and they weren't anywhere near as cool as the ones in the Saturn version.
Wow, this truly looks amazing! Never thought I'd see the original Virtua Fighter look so good. It would be insane to actually do this with the Saturn discs themselves rather than just the PC ports.
The Sega Saturn was the best console ever to me. It rendered colors so beautifully. I didn't not know it used squares. That's bizarre. What I will say is that the Saturn rendered colors beautifully, and had great sound. Also, the development kit was about to be revamped by Yu Suzuki later to be more powerful than the N64. Which would have been beautiful. Ah, well.
I'll never forget the days back in '98 when I first convinced my parents to buy me a 3D accelerator. I had the demo of Half Life and I had to play it in 320x240 in software, I enjoyed every second of it, but it looked so bad. Once I got the full version of the game I finally got my 3DFX Voodoo Banshee and I was able to play it in 640x480 with all the bells and whistles and I almost shit myself. It was so mind blowing.
Sometimes I just shit myself
It was awesome when I played with my first 3d vodoo card, but after that it was all the same in 3d cards the only difference was better graphics.
That was the first card I got too that worked properly
I remember the same. Trying out Half Life and Starfleet Command in 3D instead of software mode was just a complete revolution
Put a PCI GeForce 6200 into an old Dell Dimensions L1000R, the graphics upgrade was like adding a supercharger to a stock pinto lol
Man, I miss the 90s. So many cool stuff I could only read about because they were out of my reach, and still having a blast just reading about it.
I have a job now and can afford many things, but I'll never derive that same kind of satisfaction.
I enjoy having a great gaming PC now that will run anything I throw at it but I do wish I could enjoy it like I would if I was still a child. I also could not afford any good PC hardware in the 90s. I spent hours drooling over the screenshots and the specs in geeky magazines of the time.
I only recently purchased Unreal in Steam. It seems so primitive but I guess for the time it was truly amazing.
zfoxfire Believe me, Unreal was the coolest thing ever. Load Quake II and then Unreal and you'll see how much of an advancement it was. Graphics, AI, music, level design, everything about it was amazing. It certainly was the Crysis of its time. The funny thing its that I first played it with an slow K6-2 333mhz without a 3d card and it ran at around 20 fps. Now that I think about it I realize I would have had a way better experience playing at 320x200. But once you tried 640x480 you couldn't go back 😉.
I know 98 was the only time I ever had a top of the line machine, I came into money then and got a micron $3600 PC, 266mhz, 64mb ram, riva 128 voodoo2, it was the best at the time, unreal ran well on it and quake 2 those were the days, the guys at school were so jealous and drooling over my high end PC, one day I hope to get a PC like that again when. I have like 3500 again lol
mike smith You no longer need that much money for a top of the line PC these days.
you can build something that'll 60fps pretty much everything on ultra settings for a lot less than 3600.
Man, the background research Clint does in these oddware videos is friggin awesome.
I had no idea something like this for Win95 even existed but just after a few minutes, I know everything about it. Amazin.
I used to carry around one of those huge PC magizines when I was in elementary and JR high. I'd just over the adds for new lightning fast IBM 486s. The black ones. I'd make parts list in my notebooks planning builds I couldn't afford and my parents weren't going to buy. I still do the same thing now as an adult difference being I can afford to build these PCs. anyway, this channel brings back a lot of memories and I really enjoy your enthusiasm for and knowledge of all of this old hardware. It was a great period to be interested in PCs. Keep it up, brother.
I wouldn't have been able to understand those magazines during JR high. you were quite a young talent. 😆
This video best encapsulates how we all felt when 3D acceleration hit the market. It's hard to explain to people today. Better resolution, better frames, and better textures was mind blowing at the time. It didn't seem logical, based on what we were used to. I think my Monster 3D was $99, pass through card, and that was a transformative experience.
Woah that Space Cadet pinball shirt is incredible Clint!
+Snack Saloon ^childhood tbh
That was a great technical look at 3d acceleration. I just watched the 3DO Card video, and this was a nice companion piece.
If you think rendering quads in hardware is weird. You should see how the PS1 did it. It did not use perspective divide, it used affine texture mapping only, it did not have a floating point unit (!) and it did not use a Z-buffer (!!!); it transformed triangles into 2D and clipped them into smaller triangles before rendering, making sure that there was zero overdraw.
Is that why ps1 graphics looked so "shaky"? Compared to the n64
+MrAmir yes, the positions of vertices was effectively being truncated down to an integer... Sort of. It never existed as a floating point, so it was doing math that you'd typically expect to do with floating points, so you'd get these swimming vertices. The best example I can think of is "Space Griffon VF-9", a rather poorly aged mech fps, it was basically a corridor shooter so the walls went very close to the screen, you could watch them crinkling up around the corners.
+Phos9 So that explains why textures are so damn twitchy on PS1 games I guess :/
+James Lewis They're not just twitchy. The playstation also couldn't do perspective correct texturing, only affine transforms, so textures could warp weirdly in some situations.
I know. I have Syphon Filter 1 that was a PS1 title, and I used to play it on my PS2 all the time, and lots of weird shit happened with the textures and models and such, especially if they were up close to the camera and even more so if they're on the side of the screen.
so for 250 bucks you got an nvidia graphics card with a midi capable soundcard, 2 saturn controllers and 3 games. that doesn't sound too bad.
It was actually $450 when it first launched, which comes to about $700 in today's money, for a card that only ever had SIX GAMES made for it. It was early to the party, but just a handful of months later for that kind of cash you could've instead gotten a much nicer soundcard and a 3D graphics card compatible with _hundreds_ of games, which is the big reason this didn't sell!
yeah, it's a shame it could not handle other 3D standards as well. that would have made it a lot less niche.
Lazy Game Reviews I remember this thing. It couldn't compete with the 3dfx cards that were exploding on the scene around the same time for half the price. The Saturn games just seemed like a gimmick with not much appeal to me at the time.
Remember that back in the days that 250 dollars could also buy you a house.
two hice
Wow, the GM of that Roland is fucking fantastic. That slap bass almost sounds completely real.
The Roland MT-32 is amazing. 8-bit Keys made a review of it where it was used with MIDI-keyboards.
I know. For 90's MIDI music it sounded absolutely stunning
Sound Canvas in GS mode is amazing especially the later SC-88 series. Although Yamaha's XG fomat is technically much more capable and Yamaha's sounds are sometimes better, hardly anything took advantage of it because it was so expensive.
@@Logan912 a bit like with the OPL3 chip. More capable than the OPL2, but few if any games made of if the extra channels.
"It was actually about twice the price of alot of other competing 3D cards."
Of course.. it has an Nvidia chip.. they still do that today :P
But do modern nvidia cards add sound capability and controller ports and come with multiple games while offering ridiculous amounts of video memory?
@@HappyBeezerStudios I hope you don't expect me to have an answer to that.. after 7 years. 😆
I just started my collection, and it made me realize how much more fascinating and whimsical gaming used to be. No, i'm not using nostalgia goggles, it really was. The hardware evolution was much more exciting and interesting to learn and be a part of. Every step forward felt huge, videogames were on par with current technology. The technical limitations inspired true creativity. The Saturn could've completely changed the course of gaming history if Sega decided for a change to not fuck up everything.
That's how VR could have been, the next evolution in gaming. Except its uncomfortable and makes your eyes hurt.
@@6581punk not anymore, I remember trying the original Oculus rift where you stood still and the resolution hurt my eyes, but now VR (if you dont suffer from motion sickness) is really comfortable to play and I can go hours without feeling any side effects
Hardware in the 90s was all over the place. In some way I miss it.
I love these reviews. I remember seeing this in magazines. The comparisons were great, especially the ones with the midi playback. Super job.
So to clarify it only played those three specific games it came with? There was no Saturn emulation capability for actual Saturn discs?
Correct, it only played the converted Saturn games made specifically for this hardware.
nemt I believe mine also came with toshinden and virtua cop. But that's about it.
@@LGR holy crap.
@@LGR well that sucks, got me all excited about being able to play any Saturn game but I guess there's a reason this died even before the Saturn did! Would be awesome if this played then ask imports, backups... But oh well. It's no 3DO Blaster! Lol
"Diamond... did not deal in... those people."
Hahaha, hilarious. That music on that Roland card, man. Awesome with my headphones on.
Very interesting! The side-by-side comparisons were quite telling.
Can you try and get hold of the 3DO sound blaster card sometime Clint? Always been fascinated by those.
I was at a computer show in 1994 when they were previewing them too!
***** They're insanely rare and expensive, even more so than this card. But I'm certainly keeping an eye out for one, and maybe I can get someone to loan me theirs! It's one I've wanted to cover for about as many years as this.
Man, I've been seeing you a lot in the comment section lately, maybe it's just coincidences on top of more coincidences.
hah; i was about to post just that!
I remember reading about the 3do-blaster...
Just talked about that on the first part of RetroUnlim Live, of course LGR's video popped up in the conversation!
Lazy Game Reviews
I think it was down to them being so ridiculously expensive, that it was cheaper to just buy a standalone 3DO.
But I do remember them showing off Need for Speed and FIFA at the event and it just looked like the future of gaming!
Awesome episode, and I love the way you presented it. I can totally imagine the wonder people must have had to see their favorite games rendered so excellently. I remember when we got our first CGA monitor upgrade, Space Invaders in 4 colors! Amazing! :)
Dude, where the hell did this come from? I was completely not aware that something like this ever once existed. It's friggin' strange beyond measure. I'm a huge fan of SEGA myself. I certainly learned something odd today...
Your content is amazing!! Keep up the good work i love it. I'm back tracking through some of your older content. It's great!
Oh man gotta love the early days of computing - what sold me on this card was the rendered ball on the back showing how smooth things were going to be after installation lol, i also had fun installing it in my $2000 NEC Pentium 90 with 8 megs of ram - in a weird way i miss that computer, one of my first experiences playing a music CD, MP3 file, playing Star Trek the Final Unity, getting online using a friends University dial up account, talking to someone far away for the first time using mIRC, letting family members come over to type papers for school, that computer just transported me to a different world for the first time :-) Thanks for the vid.
My first experience with 3D accelerators was when I borrowed Matrox Mystique from my friend and played Tomb Raider with 3d-acceleration patch for that card. Dark Forces 2 was quite amazing too because it ran so smoothly and at higher resolution, there simply was no turning back to choppy low res gaming. Next I had that famous Voodoo1 4MB + Tseng Labs ET6000-combo and I thought that I had reached the peak of modern gaming technology and never need to upgrade again, how wrong was I lol. Next came Voodoo Banshee 16MB etc. etc.
Greetings from Venezuela! Nice videos, love them all... Instant subscribe.
Thank you!
Wow, that's pretty friggin' cool! I never knew these particular 3D accelerators existed back then, let alone in such a cool all-in-one package!
MIDI can be a pain to compare, as some mid files were written for specific sound cards.
Wow this is like the holy grail for graphics cards collectors, and to find it in the original box with all the goodies intact, is just amazing. Thank you for this great video !
Raptor3388 It really is, I was amazed when I saw David got one of these in such complete condition. Had to get in touch right away and see if I could get hold of it for a video!
this made me dig my saturn out and get hold of an old controller, the arcade games were brilliant, especially fighting vipers
My dude! Your vocal processing is always great lol
Having a dongle hanging out of the back, as well as plugging in your joystick. Man that sounds like a wild night.
That's a great experience for sure, but the other thing for me was my Voodoo 3500 TV video card that had a huge thing for the video coming out of it! That's what this reminded me of. I would of loved to own that NV1 though.
Thank you for watching? I thank you for your hard work to deliver this fantastic video! Greaat job. Channel subscrived
+Jorge Carvalho I appreciate it :)
Clint...this is magnificent.
Oh I had one of these cards!
I remember the Direct X problems. I was just happy when I could normal games on it again. Yeahs! That was awful!
Then I bought a Voodoo or ATI Rage. I think. One or the other.
I remember buying it solely for the Sega games.
On a side note, Virtua Fighter PC, Expert release, works fine on a 64-bit Windows 10 computer. Just adjust from Fast to Smooth in options.
So, does the Edge version in this video work on any other cards?
really good presentation thanks - especially appreciated the smoothly edited sound quality comparison
I remember almost getting this card back in the day. I loved the idea of having Saturn controllers for PC. We ended up with a Matrox instead.
Once again I must give props for the excellent T-shirt selection. And the Diamond Edge review is equally awesome.
I remember saving a lot of money to buy this card expecting it would work with more games in the future. Then I bought a 3dfx and matrox mystique 220. Finally settling on nvidia rivaTNT. As a young teen it was becoming way to expensive buying graphic cards to keep up for gaming all the time. I then got the ps1 and never looked back.
Yes with Computers to get higher res and fps you need to keep spend more money. With game Consoles it is done with dedicated GPU's, Graphics CPUs. Interesting that the old DOS games like Screamer, Jazz JackRabbit, Mortal Kombat 2 looked better than the consoles of that time lol.
I would have totally bought one of these back then. They are before my time, but still pretty impressive for what it could do at the time.
The improvements in technology now are just not as impressive... the difference between 4k and 1080p, along with the difference between 120fps and 60fps are about all we have to look forward to. A lot of people argue over whether it's a really improvement and some swear by it. But we didn't have to argue like that back then because the improvements were obvious and huge.
Jeremy Andrews interesting to think of.
I don't get why some people argue about frame rates and get irritated over certain games not being 60fps like Kirby Star Allies for example (apart from the menus which are 60fps). But Kirby is meant to be a bit more floaty; I don't see 60fps would be some kind of improvement.
@@rockapartie Though a lot of games don't depend on realistic graphics (and I like more artistic, stylised-looking games anyway), more accurate physics simulations are always welcome.
@@1Thunderfire You do realize Kirby is a platformer, a long-running one at that, which has played at 60 frames per second ever since the original 8-bit games, right?
@@PlusInsta 60 frames since the original? I didn't know that 60 frames was possible then but honestly 60 frames isn't a huge deal for me as long as you don't notice noticeable slowdown (though I know some did have that problem with the Parallel Mage Sisters battle).
My god, you could make a fortune doing voiceovers for advertisements. you have the perfect voice for it!
The Diamond Edge 3D is the missing link! Thank you Clint (your name is Clint, right?). It all makes sense now! that's why SEGA ported so many of those Saturn games to PC in the late 90s. That's why Nvidia's first card used quads instead of traditional polygons! Now I know!
Quads are a type of polygon, 4-gon if you will where as triangles are 3-gons. Problem with quads is they are hard to rasterize because there's not guarantee that all 4 points exist in the same plane :-\ What SEGA really used instead of polygons were quad patches, this was a way of representing a surface for evaluation, rather than storing all of the actual points that make up the surface.
MrGencyExit64 OK, Triangle polygons.
MrGencyExit64 Same issue for quads today..except the HARDWARE has gotten WAYYYYYY better..
Dude! Thanks for bringing me back through memory lane with that Packardbell Legend!
This video needs shown to people with integrated graphic pc's...
time accurate integrated graphics or Current integrated graphics? Integrated graphics has stepped up significantly these recent years.
HD Graphics 4000, watching it on it.
Integrated graphics isnt that imo..as for casual gamer..its decent
Ryzen 5 2400G. Just sayin'.
Graphci chips take up the ram and when it comes time fore a new gpu you would need to pay for one
I've never seen your videos before, but this is RIGHT up my alley so a subscribe has been very deservedly earned today!
I'd never heard of this before. Nice!
That is an outrageously beautiful piece of kit. Love it.
Yes! So I wasn't crazy after all. I remember reading about this device in a game magazine in the 90's but couldn't find a trace of it, so I thought it probably never made it past the prototype phase. I thought it'd play all Saturn games though, but it's awesome either way.
I had a Roland Sound Canvas Card (SCC) in my 386 back in the day along with a regular sound card and a pretty good set of speakers. I would run the game's music through the SCC and sound f/x through the regular sound card. Sounded great.
The first few seconds, I instantly noticed Simcity 3000 music, :D just wanted to mention that.
Thank you man, you really made my day when I saw you driving backwards..... I did just the same because it IS "A LOT OF FUN" to me as well. HA HA HA... I can't stop watching your videos. It really helps me get through an 8 hour shift when my shop is slow.. I have tab after tab of what I will be watching next.
I just gave up and bought a Sega Saturn. Albert Odyssey is awesome so I'm glad I bought it.
Love the shirt. Love youtube as well for putting these old videos on top!
I love old technology, it was a time when computers were majestic and unforgiving, not the color coded puzzle boxes we have now :-(
OMG, this is a blast to the past. I remember a local supermarket selling this. (yes you read this correctly, a freaking supermarket) I remember back in the day that I liked the idea of integrating console hardware with computers... but that idea left the building pretty fast when the Nvidia TNT2 cards hit the market and turned consoles obsolete. *pc master race comments incomming!!!!*
Amazing card for the collector value alone. So much nostalgia attached.
I'm still rocking a nice msdos box with genuine awe64 gold, viper v550 and 16 mb of edo ram. Totally overkill for running the classics. and for everything not running, there's always DOSBox without the space inbetween ;)
Hey thanks my friend for peaking my interest as i a Huge fan of anything Saturn, and seeing this reminded me of when i had this in my old PC when my dad got it for me. lost it as i got older and totally forgot about it till i saw this older video, also nice Saturn Unit looks in great shape. :) nave a great day man.
Hah! I worked at Diamond back in the day-- I still have the Sega Saturn arcade stick that somebody broke the handle off of at E3 while playing Panzer Dragoon. ;-)
Haha, that is excellent.
Wow that is really awesome. That must have been really cool to experience working in the industry back then.
Man, that whole feeling of going from a "game you're very familiar with" to a WHOLE new experience with a new video card... I can't even put into words how *awesome* it was when I did that back in the day with my Voodoo 3 and, specifically, Starsiege: Tribes... That was my very favorite game for a long time and I played it online constantly back around the early 2000s, and going from this chunky low-fps beast with individual 'pixels' visible on the textures (though as far as I knew that was simply the way the game was meant to run, period) to this gorgeous, ultra-smooth, 60-fps masterpiece with dynamic lighting coming off the weapon shots and textures that looked like they were from a full console generation later in comparison (seriously was very much like comparing a PS1 game to a PS2 game)... That's an experience like no other. I suppose I had a similar feeling when I went from having to play Team Fortress 2 on "n64 mode" using scripts to force the graphics lower than normally possible just so I could have an edge as I used to be pretty competitive at it, to going to a video card powerful enough to run it just as smooth on higher graphics settings, but I don't think anything will ever quite compare to that feeling back then with Tribes. It was seriously like getting a whole new game, like a sequel or remake, to a game I put hundreds of hours into both pre- and especially post- 3d accelerator.
Wonder what a Sega PC disc does in a Saturn...
Not a thing, as you might imagine :)
Lazy Game Reviews Oml you actually replied!
+Isiah Folio (Asdfguy86) It's almost as if he is an actual human being! 😂😂
RickyRicardo80 Is that supposed to be used as an insult? If so, it didn't work. Usually popular RUclipsrs do not reply to their fans.
+Isiah Folio (Asdfguy86) It was absolutely not intended as an insult! But I find it funny people are sometimes genuinly shocked when a RUclips replies. I see lots of them do it, actually, especially the RUclipsrs that do it as a hobby. Sorry if I offended you!
OMG I have always wanted to see some direct capture video of this card as a Sega Saturn fan, thanks for this!
Fun fact: The last version of Sonic X-Treme got leaked.
The problem? It requires a NV1.
I was going to say this, please help the guy working in it (jollyrogerxp, or simply jollyroger at the sonic retro and assembler games forums).
He's actually been working on porting it to OpenGL and modern windows, as well as fixing up the code in general.
Cr4z3d Yup.
Im a 90s kid..i had most his stuff. Brings me back maaaaan..kudos mate!
Thank you for doing oddware. This video has good audio and great commentary and visuals. Very entertaining, I can't believe they supported 1600x1200.
Did the Diamond Edge 3D card allow the computer to read regular Saturn disks or did you have to purchase specific game disks? I loved Panzer Dragoon, it's up there with the greats of Saturn like Galactic attack, NiGHTS and Astal for me.
When I woke up this morning to check youtube, and I saw this video, I just can't tell you how happy I was. You made a fellow gamer very happy.
Thank you for your dedication to your viewer base. I'm not what anyone would consider a RUclips addict, but I follow your uploads pretty religiously :)
Thanks, I'm glad you appreciate it! And it only allowed you to play specific games designed for this card in particular.
What a coincidence seeing you here, Glenn from 5 years ago.
@@KokiriKidLink I'm an OG LGR Fan! :)
As a SimCity 3000 fan, I definitely got the reference at the beginning with the Power Grid music from the game.
I have never seen such combo like this, video card with audio card, amazing! Unfortunately it didn't support OpenGL.
DAMN i love your voice man!!! big thumbs up!
5:37 lol that song.. i also often used to play those .mid tracks to compare soundblaster cards, there was also a game that used that track.. what was it again xD
Jeroen Verbaarschot whats the name of the song tho
gamertrash ahhh i suddenly remember, i think it was a file named passport.mid
on windows 95/98
ah i finally found an original file download link...
cookwithkevin.com/midi/netsynth.php?action=downloadsong&id=844
Thanks!
At 14:17 the software rendered dragon actually looks like it has a lot higher texture resolution...
Gotta love how they faked the reflections too. Perpendicular billboards underneath the polygons, that always stuck out to me even back when the game was new
I never knew this card existed, great video!
WOW I knew the 3DO - console could be purchased as a PC Card in the early mid 90's but a sega Saturn... oh is this card sweet. I wonder if there was any mod or hack to play normal Saturn games via the CD-drive.
I was one of people who kinda anticipated to see this review ever since you had the random junk video of stuff you got as gifts or whatever, and talked about this card as you had one loose then. Very great you got one complete in a box, overall very cool, especially the technical differences of rendering to conventional rendering and so on.
When it break it down, the card wasn't that expensive. $249 - $49.99 (Panzer) - $49.99 (NASCAR) - $49.99 (Virtua Fighter) - $29.99 (Controller) = $69.04. SO for $70 you got a sound card and video card.
+abyssea If you had to pay $249 to get it, then it cost $249.
Yeah, you didn't understand what I was getting at. That sucks.
No, I understood what you were getting at. I didn't agree. There's a difference.
@@shmupshmuppewpew5260 He's right though, and you're not, there's a difference...
I remember getting my first 3dfx open-gl or whatever it was called back in the day. You had to daisy-chain it to your old video card with a really short monitor cable...but man, the difference it made in Quake and other games that supported it was totally amazing!
I remember my first good 3d accelerator card , Morrowind was absolutely eye popping compared to it being barely playable beforehand...
Why? I play Morrowind in my modern machine, with no graphics mods other than tweaks to run it at 1080p and it looks the same as it did back in the day, even better as I do not have to turn the draw distance down so it is smooth on a 1 Ghz Celeron.
Man, this brings back ancient memories. I remember buying a new pc which had this Diamond Edgde 3D card pre-installed. I even remember buying a second Sega Saturn gamepad so I could play Virtua Fighter with my kid brother. After a couple of years I replaced it with a different video card (since I couldn't find any other games that were supported and it was quite slow with non supported games) and then added a Diamond Monster card that supported 3DFX. Even though it was surpassed by OpenGL and DirectX, for a brief period of time 3DFX was a thing and I owned a lot of games that supported it.
But does it have blast processing?
blast processing is a motherboard feature, not a video card one
What a package! 3D acceleration, Sega Saturn controller inputs, 2 Saturn controllers, sound card, and Sega PC games (pun slightly intended) to boot! I miss the 90s
You sir, have an awesome voice.
I love watching your videos Clint. keep up the good work bud!
I want to use Saturn controllers on PC, but Saturn controllers can get expensive (especially the Japanese ones aka US/Euro model 2) and those USB converters are like $20.
StrobeFlashLite
I run Saturn controllers on my PC. It's awesome!
Nascar racing hit my deep in the nostaliga...played on a win 95 acer pc. Not related to the Sega side but still....
So many of your videos make me think back.....thank you sir
70 people hate Quadratic Texture Mapping for rendering polygons.
I can't remember what I was flipping through, but I just ran across an ad for one of these and was wondering what the heck it is. Thanks dude!
0:52
Resolution of up to 1600x1200? WHAT? Back then?
From what I understand Quake even supported up to 1080p back in the day. You COULD do it, it was just expensive and very hard to do back then.
My SGI workstation could do that in 1990. It's always just a matter of how much you are willing to spend.
carmack had a 1080p screen in the early 90s
***** I suppose it was as effective as doing 4K today
Man Ionno how people seem to have forgotten this but even around the late 90's you could get monitors with resolutions well above 1080p. Those 2500x1800 crts.
only just come across this guy and he is the definition of a true gamer at heart! love his content, I'm hooked!
The graphics in Panzer Dragoon with Diamond Edge 3D enabled look almost Playstation 2 quality. Very very very impressive for the time.
Spider's Gaming Arcadia I know, right? In 1995, this was mind-blowingly good looking.
Lazy Game Reviews I'd say it's still mindblowing!
2:33 Video Random Access Memory is not a type of hardware. VRAM is just video memory, GDDR, DDR, SGram, or Fram are types of hardware chips, Vram is just a name for a concept.
It's Rare, But You can only Play SEGA PC games not Saturn Format. I have one. I cant play Regular Sega Saturn Game. It's Just a 3d card build with a Sound Card and PC Game Pad Converter for the PC.
I used to dream about the Diamond Edge 3d cards. There were some nice lower priced cards at the time that gave similar performance. Nostalgia.
I wish the saturn had more good games on it. There's practically only a handful of them.
I miss sega consoles.
:(
Well, if you were in JAPAN, there would be a lot more options for games.... Sadly, most of them didn't see an overseas release... which is probably why the system bombed.
TheStolken
One of the most common misconceptions in gaming. Do your research and you'll find that there's plenty of good games for the Saturn, it's arguably better than the Nintendo 64, depending on your gaming taste. It performed better than N64 in Japan and many of the best games are exclusive to Japan. Saturn was a 2D power house and had great shoot em ups and fighting games as a result where as practically everything on N64 is polygonal, so many of it's greatest games have aged a lot more poorly and have been made obsolete by newer games (in other words Xbox/Xbox 360 era console FPS games>N64's FPS library, Here Comes the Pain>No Mercy, later 3D platformers had less camera problems, OoT is hella overrated and so on).
90sgamer92 I have to agree, I've got dozens of fantastic games for the Saturn. Only reason I don't have more is that they're a bit uncommon to find and can be rather expensive!
welll that would qualify for the sega cd(sega genesis add-on)
TheStolken
Good one. The domestic titles are crap, go for the imports.
I owned this card back in the day, fun to see it again !
Where can I get that tshirt of space cadet?
Nowhere, I made it myself!
You should sell it on your LGR t-shirt store thing.
used this card on a p1 until 2001,3 versions of windows it ran,and still managed to play games beyond the systems specs...not bad for a pre build homeshopping computer...
Did that make any other pc version sega games, or is it just the 3?
A bit of digging around reveals that Virtua Fighter, Virtua Cop, Sonic 3D Blast, Sonic R, Sega Rally Championship, Sega Touring Car Championship, Sega Worldwide Soccer, Bug!, Bug Too!, Daytona USA, and Last Bronx were all released on the PC by Sega. There are almost certainly others. Many seem to have been developed outside of Sega. I'm not sure if they were all ported in such a way to have made use of the features of this card or not.
MarkTheMorose Battle Arena Toshinden also supported NV1 cards.
MarkTheMorose Sonic 3D Blast PC wasn't exactly a straight port. It's mostly like the Saturn version as far as I know, but features completely redesigned Special Stages, and they weren't anywhere near as cool as the ones in the Saturn version.
Don't forget Comix Zone and Ecco the Dolphin. I have both of those for Win95.
blueshogun96
I didn't know about about Ecco, but I had indeed forgotten about Comix Zone.
Wow, this truly looks amazing! Never thought I'd see the original Virtua Fighter look so good. It would be insane to actually do this with the Saturn discs themselves rather than just the PC ports.
That Graphics card must go pretty fast.
Like a blue hedgehog *wink wink*
Great vidja, I'm a huge fan of Saturn collecting, and it is cool to see this device existed. If I could get Powerslave, I'd be a happy camper.
Of course, J Smith driving the wrong way, crashing into other cars... Typical Jaden Smith behaviour.
The Sega Saturn was the best console ever to me. It rendered colors so beautifully. I didn't not know it used squares. That's bizarre.
What I will say is that the Saturn rendered colors beautifully, and had great sound. Also, the development kit was about to be revamped by Yu Suzuki later to be more powerful than the N64. Which would have been beautiful. Ah, well.
I want this so bad.
I remember seeing that card in the shop windows when I was a kid and not even understanding what it was.Great video
I love how the card claims photo-realism.
I always did the same thing driving backwards! 😂 I love that you did the same thing coming back to it