I am forever fascinated by the Saturn architecture. I love how it's full power was never really realized during its commercial life. That makes all the Saturn games fans are creating now so interesting.
I don't think you could "fix" the Saturn without including the 32x into the equation. To me there were two possible routes: 1- Never release the 32x, and make the Saturn with a single SH2 CPU (maybe with a higher clock speed?) alongside a better GPU, make sure it's retrocompatible with the Megadrive. Aim for a 299 USD release price, with no surprise launch. 2- Release a simpler 32x with a single SH2 CPU and a little more ram for 100 USD, then TAKE CARE of it with several game releases for at least two years. Also release the Neptune at the same time, for 150-200 USD. Delay the Saturn for a worldwide release at the end of 1995 or even 1996. By then, it must include a single SH3 CPU and a much more powerful GPU, perhaps the first Voodoo chip or a cheaper variant of it. A 399 USD price tag would be more acceptable, given the Saturn would be noticeably more powerful than both the PSX and the N64, essentially an early Dreamcast. Of course, neither option would work without silky smooth relations between usamerican and japanese divisions, and this means a decent Sonic game at launch. Sonic Xtreme concept wasn't good enough, it would've been seen as a lesser game compared to SM64 or even Crash Bandicoot. SM64 was HUGE, and to compete with it Sega basically needed Sonic Adventure three years before.
yeah i made a small addendum vid where I mentioned how the 32x basically crippled the saturn by making it so SOA had basically nothing to release by the time the Saturn launched in the west. So I'd definitely go with option #1. I don't think you could really aim for a 299$ price, maybe 350$? Arguably, they could've put an MJPEG decoder similar to the one in the PS1 inside of VDP-2 and then just removed the SH-1 CPU in the CD-rom subsystem along with the MPEG card attachment and future pnals, instead replacing it with a cheaper CPU, maybe also cutting the CD ROM cache from 512KB to something like 64KB or 32KB, while removing the 68EC000 sound CPU and controlling the yamaha chip directly with the slave SH-2.
@@Kurriochi I said 299 referencing the infamous roasting by Sony at the PSX announcement. But, thinking about it, had Sega released the Saturn for 299, then Sony would've had the PSX announced for 249, and so on. I guess another huge mistake by Sega was announcing AND launching the Saturn before the PSX, playing the underdog when in fact Sony was the newcomer. Wasn't the 68EC000 there for Megadrive retrocompatibility (similarly to the Z80 for Master System), then Sega ditched the idea? Retrocompatibility would've been a good selling point, and the hardware was right there. Just watched the addendum video. Yes, the 32x also took precious resources out of the Saturn. A third route I didn't mention would've been to release a beefed-up SVP cartridge with "lock-on", and maybe calling it "32X" (perhaps pretentiously). With a 50 USD release price, and allowing several games to take advantage of the extra hardware without biting into Saturn's development.
Your design changes would jack up the cost of a Saturn significantly. Changing the silicon to add division, doubling the memory, all that stuff is expensive.
You could make the saturn much cheaper by moving the slave sh2 to replace the sh1, so that this sh2 has direct access to the cd and dac (also make the A bus 32bit so the cart port is also 32bit). You can then remove the scsp, 68k, mpeg subsystem, sh1, and partition the ram to say 1mb sdram for each sh2. Agree on the dsp and fwd texturing, the ram savings above could pay for the extra vram and dsp ram.
A delay of around 10 months would put the release 9 months after the PS and 9 months before the N64 so there would be a nice gap there for Sega. I would then just have a single faster SH chip clocked higher preferably 57.2mhz or higher with 8kb cache instead of 4 with 2mb sdram and the ability to do MJPEG in software and have 1 hitachi chip acting as cd controller and audio chip. The SH1 was on a 16 bit bus and the 68000 had a 16 bit bus so having the SH1 do both but on a 32 bit bus would be fine. Double the audio ram to 1mb and reduce cd rom ram to 128k. Also just have a single VDP with full access to its bus instead of shared with another VDP and with 1.5 mb ram all to itself but doing backward rendered quads but clocked higher mabee at 42.9mhz and being able to do at least 1 textured, shaded pixel per cycle so much higher fillrate & bandwidth than the Saturns VDP1 had and doing all of this on the 0.5 micron process instead of 0.7/8. Also Get rid of the internal save ram to save money but increase the cache of the DSP. Even if it didn't have division the extra cache would help. Something like that should have been affordable around September 1995 in Japan compared to November 1994. Then launch early/mid 1996 in the US & europe for $300. It wouldn't be hugely better then the Playstation but it would be alot better/easier to program for 3d gaming than Saturn and would have either solved the Saturns problems or greatly reduced them to the point that they wouldn't be a big deal. Remember I'm just looking at sticking to the Saturns personality design instead of the more obvious changes like triangles instead of quads and audio compression.
You lost me at "just add division" to the specialized compute silicon. Division support for such a device would drastically increase transistor count, which would have had knock on effects in development time, cost, and heat, thus affecting speed.
Here's my proposed fix for the Saturn. HEWLETT PACKARD PA-RISC 7150 at 125MHz and VoodDoo1 graphics chipset. Each gets 1MB of dedicated RAM/VRAM. Easy to program, fp GTE from the CPU, and the whole chipset would cost about $40-50 each for the chips and memory (by 1996 when sales when into full swing), so you'd have a $199 Saturn that could blow the doors completely off the N64 and PS1 combined. If you have to use HITACHI's SH, just use two in total with no extra SH1, SCU-DSP, etc, I would just use a pair of SH2s with their own 1MB of RAM, letting the software decide how much SH2 power to dedicate to audio, geometry transforms, controlling the CD-ROM, etc. Then 1MB shared by the two VDP graphics chips. The whole machine would cost about $100 less to make and be much easier to program. As important, the simpler machine would be about as powerful as the PS1 in practice. For that matter, I strongly believe that SoJ was wrong to reject the Kalinske-SONY offer of going in 50/50 on the PS1. That would've netted SEGA about $7-10 billion. Then use the VCD slot in back for some future graphics card for traditional 3D graphics expansion. There were 5-6 such accelerators considered by SEGA.
Voodoo 1 wasn't available until the end of 1995. So, either delay the Saturn launch, or use another GPU. Also, I don't think a 199 USD launch price was doable, even when Sega's finances were still healthy to subsidize production, the first Voodoo card was released for 299 (dropped its price quickly though). I think 399 was fine given the extra muscle it would get. The GPU upgrade on the VCD slot is actually a neat idea, but also the 32x fiasco killed expansions. People wouldn't be willing to spend money for an expansion card, especially not on a Sega console.
@@sovo1212 Saturn needed 2-3 major advantages over PS1: cost/performance, backward compatibility with 1200 Genesis and Sega CD games, or the ability to get on the Web out of the box. Even a mainline Sonic game out of the box would've made a difference. Also, VooDoo 1 was started in 1994, and fab capacity was available before the Saturn was.
@@MaxAbramson3the PlayStation does a lot right. I only know graphics, but Jaguar already had z buffer and less banding. Full 24 bit RGB support would be something. Jaguar could avoid the PlayStation wobble on polygons(see Doom ). Saturn wobbles a little. I never heard any complaints about psx audio.
Actually it was even later. The Voodoo 1 wasn't launched until late 1996. Even with an exclusive contract, Sega couldn't of got something that powerful ready for a console launch in 1995 especially not at $200 and 1mb ram wouldn't of been enough for something as powerful as the Voodoo
There is another problem with transparencies on the Saturn. The VDP1 can draw semi-transparent sprites/polygons, but only on a layer that uses 15 bit color. The VDP2 can apply semi-transparency between layers, but only if the layer containing semi-transparent pixels uses an indexed color mode, ie 8 bit color. The obvious problem here is that you cannot do both at the same time, you can either be drawing your semi-transparent thing onto a 15 bit layer or an 8 bit layer, and in either case it won't always look right. The PS1 solution is to not have a VDP2 and only have one layer. You can do that on a Saturn, but it's a huge waste of the power of the machine.
Indexed color mode is not 8bit color. Indexed color mode is 4bpp or 8bpp with a color depth of 5 bits per channel or even 8 bits per channel. VDP1 sprites can also be transparent in indexed color modes.
@@knight0fdragon The issue is that if you are drawing onto a buffer that uses an indexed color mode, using semi transparency could create colors that do not exist in the palette. And if appropriate colors do exist, finding them in the palette is a non-trivial operation.
Just curious, how do games like Cotton 2 have multiple layers of transparencies without any issues? I’m sure there is some kind of trick I’m missing, but I’m prettt blown away that there are several layers of overlapping transparencies on a console often derided for not being able to handle them
The most impressive thing I notice from the Saturn is the high resolution compared to the ps1. Sometimes the games looked so much clearer and smooth. It’s a shame it didn’t do better, cause I love the system Also, I love the ideas here. It was a perfect storm that lead to its western failure, but some of these things could’ve helped
To put some context into all of this - Sega passed on the oportunity of Using the N64 Chip. By 1993 they knew SONY would do a 3D focused console , hence the addition of the extra processors to compensate. They could had scaped it and do a 1996 lauch with a decent 3D Focused architecture instead. I guess Sega had a profitable 3D Arcade bussiness and they didnt believe home 3D games would have such a demand. It was latter corrected with the Dreamcast , but the damage was already done. Between the 32x and awfull Saturn support they killed the bussiness.
Other options as well. Sega was working with nvidia prior to the saturn NA launch. Which is the nv2 project. Where they could've had a much capable Quad based console. Also, sega could've waited for yuzuki and Lockheed martin team to create model 2 or 3 gpu cost reduction chipset based console. Plus, buying atari jaguar 2, 3do chipset or looked into pc 3d card companies such as power vr and 3dfx.
Or made the Dreamcast as a $99 addon using the PA-RISC 7100 and VooDoo chipset, overlaying 3 million textured polygons per second on top of Saturn backgrounds.
@@edotsuki1979 The Dreamcast is _not_ why Sega failed just because it was their final console. It was a great system that was well received at launch and beloved by its owners, but it was dealt an apocalyptically bad hand. It's a long story, but mismanagement and conflicts between Sega's Japanese and American branches are what did their console division in. The Dreamcast was when they finally got their act together, but it had to deal with the fallout from years of bad PR from the 32x and Saturn. Many people were soured on Sega as a console brand, and the PS2 was just around the corner. It tried its best, but the Dreamcast wasn't enough to turn things around.
@edotsuki1979 The saturn was a phenomenal system, but it sold 4 million units INTERNATIONALLY. More units were sold in JAPAN than the rest of the world Much of Saturn's library stayed in japan and the saturn was poorly marketed, supported, and distributed in western markets I think all sega had to do even with all the 32x and CD add on mistakes was release the console when it was originally supposed to be released at 300$ They wouldn't have defeated Sony but they didn't need to, a saturn that sold 20-30 million units would be more than enough to make sega a profitable company
5:07 correction. They had Motion JPEG. Both the Saturn and PS1 require an add on for Mpeg-1 decoding, both of which handle Xtended-VCD 2.0 perfectly fine without CD-i. However the PS1's add on didn't work, until someone can fix or recreate the add on, the PS1 is kinda stuck with basically nothing, although it'd be interesting to be able to make MJPEG CDs to go against the Saturn's built in Cinepak format without needing Mpeg VCD in either case.
Not the first time I misread mjpeg as mpeg and vice versa. Between the video's making and now I've considered Sega mkghtve been better off by integrating an mjpeg decoder in VDP2 and then just not going with the mpeg expansion card system and maybe like, using a 68EC000 and 64K of disk cache in the CDROM subsystem instead of the more complex SH-1 and 512K they used in our time. But oh well
Many people often like to write off VDP 2 as "useless" for 3D. But I've heard some say that VDP 2 can be used to render walls somehow which sounds like a pretty big deal. If that were the case, I'd use that like crazy. The Saturn is a system that demands every part is used to the fullest. Especially when it comes to 3D. And while the PS1 was certainly made more convenient for 3D, the Saturn was, at least on paper, supposedly more powerful when it came to 3D as well. But we could never actually get to see this due to its complexity. Except maybe... Burning Rangers??? I'd kill for a Saturn version of Silent Hill.
I think what you are referring to are some specific perspective tricks used in games like last bronx. At a guess maybe it could have been used for a Wolfenstein like effect though?
Silent hill would have been a great game for the SS, leveraging the VDP for the immense floors. There're games that are simply out of reach of PS1, like Dragoon, just like there are others that are out of reach of SS like Destruction Derby or Soul Edge.
SEGA had state of the art arcade technology like Model 1 and Model 2, they could concentrate on bringing a Sega Model 1.5 system to power the console. The cartridge slot should be used for backwards compatibility and the CD ROM should also play Sega CD titles. Saturn had 68000 CPU etc. Sega made many bad business decisions. 😢
Okay let’s fix the Saturn .!!! My ultimate input 1. Cut $100 off release the price * remove internal memory *remove pack in title •Memory card sold separately •Jam packed demo disk pack-in 2. Work on the 3d titles for release. But 3dize loved ip’s for release year with the best graphics and most refined gameplay 1.shinobi 4 2.phantays star 5 3.shinning force 3 4.sonic 4 (Sonic adventure) 5.alexx kid in miracle world 6.outrun 2 (outrun cost 2 coast) 7. Eternal champions 3 (just copy mk & sf gameplays with ki graphics ) 8. Dynamite heady 2 (3d)
These hardware changes are interesting. I wonder if they can be implemented in FPGA on MiSTer and then maybe some patches for already available games that suffered from mesh transparencies. Something along the lines of how CD music is being patched into Snes games using MSU1 for flash carts and emulators
The Yamaha Soundchip was good but had not enough RAM for a good Midi SampleSetup, the PS1 was for this better with the ADPCM 4:1 compression and the Sony Reverb was much better too.Only few games used the FM Synthesis on the Saturn, but this sounds amazing. Streaming audio was bad too on Saturn, most in Mono and 8 or 16bit with 22khz. Laters with ADX and Duck Codecs it was better, but Sony had the best streaming audio quality with the ADPCM Codec and in Stereo!
..and I was amazed by the quality of musics in the SotN saturn version...waaay better than the ps1 version, I was shocked, really...so much clearer and deeper
I don't know, it was proven multiples time that the hardware wasn't the most problematic issue with the Saturn but the lack of proper dev kit and documentation. I mean, ok, this kind of setup wasn't what dev were used to at the time, but I do believe that with the right tools they would've been able to draw out the potential of the system way better.
The main thing Sony did right in this generation was to create the Dual Shock controller. Not only having a much better analog stick than the N64, they had 2 and revolutionized 3D gaming with it. If you adjust L2 and R2 into triggers, you can literally still use it to this day. The C buttons on the N64 helped it counter but nothing comes close to dual thumb sticks.
In my opinion, someone who was alive during this time and lived in that generation of consoles, the Saturn showed more hardware prowess than the PlayStation, just later in its life cycle. The real hiccup was Sega of Japan, and sega of America working against each other.
We can you move the 2nd SH-2 to the subsystem and put the scu dsp while adding SH-2 ram in it or unify main ram. Moving the scu dsp ram to the SH-2 cd/sound cpu. Reduce the cd ram to 256 or 128 kb. Plus, replacing the vdp1 with a faster nvidia nv1, yamaha ygv611 or a beefed up 32-bit standard 32x/Sega cd/genesis dma channel like VDP. Or even add a custom SH-2 based coprocessor inside the VDP.
I would have quadrupled the cache inside each of the SH-2's... 4KB each to 16KB each. This cache was CRITICAL for getting the most out of the dual CPU setup. I understand it would have been hard for SEGA to do, being Hitachi developed the SH-2. But they did work closely together. Improving transparency effects on VDP-1 and double the VRAM for it I agree with entirely. Other than simplifying the architecture of the hardware, I think overall that would have fixed the Saturn hardware wise. Saturn's problems were mostly non-hardware (tech. spec.) related.
Great video completely agree simpler hardware, better development tools, no Sega of America and Sega of Japan in fighting, later lunch date and cheaper opening price could have saved teh Saturn, which would have saved the Dreamcast and thus Sega would still maybe be producing consoles today... A suggestion from a video by Sega Lord X I'd suggested would be backwards compatibility with Sega Genesis/Mega Drive games via the memory slot, either make an add-on compatible with the Cartridges or my own person recommendation make the Slot Cartridge size to begin with... after all one of my huge loves for the PS2 was it backward compatibility with PS1 games, I got to upgrade my hardware but keep all my games, same of first models of the PS3. Just my thoughts on the matter.
The issue was, the marketing Sony litteraly buy more commercial presence on TV, it was before internet being a thing they also do the same on sponsorship and news paper, second reason they build themself there own CD Rom without having to pay the patent because they own the patent of CD with Phillips, they have a computer division able to build the CPU and other co processor , make there hardware cheaper than Sega and last the third party dev kit was well made because they don't have a huge software division so they make sure any developer can build game on there system , Sega have a huge game software division but must buy most of there hardware chip outside so it cost more, but people forget the relative succes of Dreamcast it was an amazing hardware and software design easy to develop far better than PS2 only the X box was better.
Ok so we'll need somebody to come up with a mod chip to make this correction, and we need game developers to do some fun ports to put this PS1 vs Saturn to rest!
1) SEGA's developers were more comfortable using quads instead of tris. 2) I try to change the least amount of things possible, so making the quads use inverse texture mapping instead of forward mapping is simpler than just completely reworking how the console renders stuff. This fixes the two main problems with the Saturn's 3D rendering: transparency issues and large quads killing the performance.
Bottom line.. Saturn should have been focused on 3D like the PS1 was. The saturn started out with a focus on 2D.. but SEGA after seeing what the PS1 could do, made changes in the end.. it didn't help things.
Well, it's more complex than that... Both consoles were built for 3D, it's just that SEGA believed 2D would be much more important than it actually was - once they realized how big 3D would be, it was kinda too late. That's why they threw in a second SH-2 and stuck with forward texture mapping.
Did you know As far back as 2002, Yes SATURN is the first video game system I'VE ever heard of , " That there is chip sets' that Developers never tapped into!, Then after I heard that it was the original xbox before saying about the same thing! GENESIS 32 is the same! Makes me wothere's chips in every system developers never tapped into! Let me add this here .... Duke Nukem 3-D SEGA SATURN... Best home port yet.This is where they took advantage of it.... Game over sorry P.C. SEGA has this!
Quads don't cause problems with overlapping points or cause additional cpu drain when compared to triangles. Yuji Naka doing hard time for essentially buying shares in a company he knew was due a big contract isn't justice. It might seem like he sabotaged the Saturn but I really don't think so. SoA had years to get a game together and what happened was they asked for him to release his Nights engine (also used in Burning Rangers) so they could make something in 6 months in time for Christmas and he said "no". But he didn't fuck up that project by trying to make Sonic stationary inside a giant fish eye lens. How did that even get a working demo, it's so stupid. They would have made a Sonic game in 6 months on the Nights engine that would have done more harm than good. Yuji was trying to save the company, not sabotage it. Sega should have been pushing Nights, not Sonic Xtreme. Yeah it was 2 years after release but I think it's a better game than Mario 64 which launched at the same time.
You know, in the video I specifically explain how quads themselves weren't the issue and how instead it was the implementation of texel->pixel rendering (forward texture mapping) that caused slowdown with large quads and overdraw (transparency) issues. I even said that I'd keep the Saturn using quads, just change the mapping from T->P to P->T
@@Kurriochi 2:00 "however, it [saturn] used quads, leaving us with the transparency issue, due to overlapping points..." quads are not the cause of the transparency issue.
"you could count a quad as two triangles, but that could cause alot of inaccuracies for many reasons. For instance, one giant quad taking up the entire screen could massively tank the frame rate. Meanwhile, two polygons [triangles] just wouldn't." I really would like an explanation here.
oh, that's cause the texel to pixel drawing method the saturn used(forward mapping, the wrong way of doing it), would cause a ton of redraws as one texel would ask itself "ok what pixels am I a part of?" and as the image got larger and larger, that check had to be done more and more times and the same pixels had to be re-drawn more and more times, causing tons of overdraw which slowed the game down significantly as the GPU had to draw the same pixel multiple times and it also messed with transparency cause any alpha the texel had would be applied several times. If a two texels with a transparency value of 0,2 were drawn twice, now you had a pixel with a transparecy of 0,4, which is why this was only done with fully flat quads, where there was no overdraw. Nowdays we use inverse texture mapping that lets one pixel do a single check of "what texel do I belong to?" and it would've fixed all of the issues, but back then both of these methods were essentially competing against eachother.
No. They were already selling the console for $400 in America, and that was in 1995. Adding more hardware would have been way too much. They certainly should have done some things, but focusing on hardcore 3d performance wasn't it.
I've heard most/if not all of this before, with the exception of how to fix it. For me the obvious question is the following. Would it even feasable to add that much extra ram to the system without making the system extremely expensive? I mean we could end up with something almost at 3DO pricing then because ram isnt cheap. Right? 🤔 Good video btw 👍
Adding 128K would've cost at most a a few bucks, not counting how bulk orders can get the price down cheaper or how you could embed the RAM inside of the SCU-DSP, it wasn't a lot of RAM in 1994. Adding another 512kb of VRAM to VDP-1 would've probably meant you'd need to redesign it quite a bit as the memory seems to be embedded, however even with just 512kb of VRAM, changing the quad rendering T->P to P->T would've still been worth it.
@@Kurriochi Ok i get what you're saying. I'm still sceptical tho, there must be a reason why not both sega ,Nintendo and Sony did not put more memory in. Sure they got money for those extra sales for expansion cart and the sega ram cart etc etc. But they all could have sold that anyway because developers would sooner or later use the ram already inside. I mean if this meant in segas case as you state just a couple of bucks... Then why didnt they just do it? They had the arcade market and must had known exactly how beneficial that extra 512kb must have been. The saturn is after all based to some extent on their arcade hardware. At least that was their intention at some point. And those Arcade machines were very expensive i think maybe one single model 2 was around the 14.000 dollars mark back then. Sure there is a whole lot more than just a board. We have cabinet and monitor aswell. But the mainboard was not cheap, this was state of the art tech back then. And the more i think about it, there are so much console hardware over the years that really would have benefited from more ram.
@@unrealdevonIf you’re skeptical with the pricing side of things, then do you think having no DSP altogether but still having the VDP1 improvements would result in a faster & easier-to-develop Saturn than what we got in this timeline? (I don’t believe the YMF292 changes would be as significant even if the change to ADPCM would ultimately help, because Sega was using regular PCM in their arcade boards anyway)
@@unrealdevonYou could make the saturn much cheaper by moving the slave sh2 to replace the sh1, so that this sh2 has direct access to the cd and dac (also make the A bus 32bit so the cart port is also 32bit). You can then remove the scsp, 68k, mpeg subsystem, sh1, and partition the ram to say 1mb sdram for each sh2. Agree on the dsp and fwd texturing, the ram savings above could pay for the extra vram and dsp ram.
You need to work on your UA-cam voice if youre going to make it as a gamer channel. Your voice needs to be easily comprehensible by everyone. And I'm not talkint about your accent. You need to make it so your voice stands out and your words dont muddle into each other. This is natural progression for many channels that start. You'll notice a difference in the narrators speaking style as time goes on.
I see a bit those discussion pointless. As then one can go to the others same gen consoles and “fix” those as well. And where do we draw the limit of the “fix” nah the hardware is what it is and what it was and the interesting thing is to with modern tools and knowledge try to push it as much as possible today (imo)
Not true Nintendo 64 and Gamecube where Very powerful for the time Nintendo didn't start this concept with there consoles until the Wii with handhelds yes they've always been under powered.
The PS2 was not known for ease of development. It was, however, known for a huge install base that simply couldn't be ignored. As the 2600 proved, that last factor was really important.
sort of yes, but only if the transparent object is fully 2D, and even then I remember there were issues with other objects being behind the transparent object. There's a second thing where you can use "colour calculation registers" to make the furthest away quads drawn by VDP1 "fade" into the background drawn by VDP2 (like in Sonic R and maybe panzer dragoon saga(?)).
how to fix the saturn: make it a cheaper version of the model 2 board. you have already fucked up with your costumers, you are going to lose money one way or the other, you have already completely fucked up in your design in timing. just say fuck it and make it a cheaper version and so be it dual 2d/3d processing would never work because it requires brainpower on the devs part and sega not being an idiot and actually providing proper tools to code and documentation now if i were the one in charge of sega, i'd just cancel the 32x, move all game production including 3rd party there to the saturn (which i would name 32x) and delay the saturn to be released in late 95 in all 3 major regions, strike a deal with 3dfx to have a voodoo analogue in the console and put a goddamned hitachi sh2 for 2d there, since sega already fucked themselves with signing the deal in the first place. but put an sh2 dedicated EXCLUSIVELY for 2d and 2d only and not have it interfere with anything 3d. this would also mean mpeg decoding and both chips having 2mb totaling 4mb systemwide and no internal memory should be enough to guarantee the system would be the failure it turned out and sega could still make money selling memory cards and ram expansions this strategy would see sega coming 2nd and nintendo getting totally fucked because sega would be competing against them not sony and they'd much better and more games at lauch plus nintendo only survived because it picked up the scraps and fed on saturns corpse as the system was non-existent in the us and europe in 97
The Model 2 was extremely complex internally, a main CPU, two sub-CPUs, a sound CPU and 2 sound chips, 1.1MB of RAM, 6MB of VRAM, a 54MB ROM, a very complex graphics system, 5 Fujitsu TGPs, it's overall insane. Also, you'd probably get a 25% graphical boost just by using inverse texture mapped quads instead of the forward mapped quads they used - this would've fixed transparency too and other tidbit issues. Oh also ADPCM would be extremely useful on the sound system, basically letting you store 2MB of MIDI data instead of 512KB audio RAM due to the 4:1 compression. Also if you wanted to speed up geometry even more, adding 128k of RAM to the SCU-DSP would help way more. Remember, the GPUs are basically rasterizers, so their power was limited more by what you feed them, not by their "raw power".
I think going with a 3rd party like NEC (PowerVR) or 3DFX/NV and using a proper 3D chip would've made it much easier for Sega than trying to design everything in-house, but that's how Sega always did it until the Dreamcast, even Sony did this up until the PS4. The PS3 was a nightmare to develop for because Japanese companies were very eccentric (being kind here) in their hardware design.
Wayyyy !! back in 1992 SEGA keeped mouthing off in 1993 about the specs of SATURN , After That SONY showed off it would have super 3D power CPU the PS1 would have , SEGA I repeat my self , in 1993 SEGA had time to put a better CPU , video chips , 3D chips not what they did , They just add a second VDP chip and even messed up SEGA!!
So, if all were pushed to their absolute limits, can it do better visuals than PS1 and N64 or not? And, if it can, I'd love to see some links to footage, please. :) Note: I suppose I should clarify that I mean 3D, because we already know the Saturn was a beast when it came to 2D.
If we're talking "absolute limits" with the tools and knowledge we have today, the n64 clears both of those systems. The issue is that the Saturn died "too young" before devs could really get the hang of it and the N64 was bogged down by slow RAM and cartridges so much it's kinda hard to compare the games that came out in that era, because they were all internally a bit too different just to compare. For the "best looking games", I'd argue it goes like this: Saturn: Panzer Dragoon II Zwei, Burning Rangers, Quake, Panzer Dragoon Saga and Sega Rally Championship. N64: Perfect Dark, Beetle Adventure Racing and Rogue Squadron PS1: Alien Resurrection, Racing Lagoon, Gran Turismo 2, Driver 2 and Silent Hill 1. At least from my experience.
@@Kurriochi when it comes to hardware. Nope it don’t really have a concept of that. But can you use the 2D sprites and distort them so what you see is a 3D game? Of course you can. That is what all 3D games on Saturn does. My point is to do a 2D game or a 3d game on Saturn from the VDP point of view is exactly the same. It’s more down to more calculation stress on the SH2 A 3D game who draws 300 distorted 2D sprites and a 2D games that draws 300 distorted 2D sprites is exactly the same for the VDP. It do not have any concept of 3D. It just want to get its 2D cords for each point in a sprite and then draw it (and what a beast to draw such it is :) )
Hindsight .... This video isnt really helpful Howabout working out how we can use the cart or vcd expansion slot to improve the hardware .. Or some future code that can make the chips work together better I could have made a video saying ... change hardware to be same as ps1 and be done or .. ADD MORE RAM
i did not watch your video the Saturn does not need to be fixed unless literally broken and there is absolutely no mistake if so why would over a thousand games be released
One thing: The Saturn didn't have a GPU. Nothing had a GPU until Nvidia invented a 3d chip which not only rendered 3d polygons but also was capable of internally doing hardware transform and lighting, the Geforce 256, which created a new hardware category that did not exist prior -- 3d chips prior to that effectively drew shaded textured polygons but didn't have hardware t&l.
Yeah I know they were just rasterizers back then and the geometry was calculated on the CPU or coprocessor, but it's much easier to just call them GPUs as they did still handle drawing graphics + it just makes more sense for people who don't know as much about these systems.
Kurriochi, your video is filled with misinformation, outright blatant LIES, wrong information on how Sega Saturn VDP1 Quadrilateral polygon rendering works and more... you even went as far as to say that a "big" quad will cause slowdown... this is just lies... Also as far as PORTING from Sony PlayStation to Sega Saturn and vice versa, the fact is that PS1 uses a different architecture than Sega Saturn and VICE VERSA... that means that game programmers have to actually LEARN the respective hardware and write NATIVELY programmed game code to each hardware... the problem is most third party devs have a tendency to do the LEAST amount of effort... and as to why this is true... if a PS1 game dev team or mediocre or average skill were to port their game to Sega Saturn, do NOT count on them to actually bother to write optimized code to the Sega Saturn hardware... again can you understand that? oh you don't and you blame the Sega Saturn hardware? ok... how about the SAME game dev teams who made games on PS1 and were tasked to make a Nintendo 64 version or even original game... why does their game feature graphics that resemble PS1 graphics but a bit smoother and why does their game made on ROM Cartridge have SLOW loading or a frigging loading pause? Especially when they never bothered to use the actual N64 hardware and the game does not even match other natively exclusive N64 games... Oh wait, you still don't believe? ok why then do their Sega Dreamcast ports look and play and sound just like a high resolution PS1 game? That goes for Soul Calibur as well because Namco originally made that game for the Namco System 12 Arcade hardware which was just a Sony PS1 for arcade use with additional ram to increase polygon count... why does Mortal Kombat Gold have crap 3d graphics on Dreamcast? why do some of the third party racing games and other types of games basically look like high resolution PS1 graphics games? As for Yuji Naka being the "problem" WTF are you talking about? you are using those books written by Sega of America 90s staff fanboys right? do you not see a problem there? wake up! Also Yuji Naka was one of the founding and CREATIVE members who created Phantasy Star and Sonic the Hedgehog as well as the FM sound add on for Sega Mark III in Japan and the Sega Saturn NiGHTs into Dreams analog pad... what did "Sonic X-Treme" development team contribute or CREATE? Why the hell does the "Sonic X-Treme" dev team have any credibility rights when talking about the Sega Saturn? please explain... Also as far as "sabotage" that award goes to Tom Kalinske, Joe Miller and a lot of staff that were working as management at Sega of America in the 1990s decade... in FACT it was Tom Kalinske himself who put pressure on Sega headquarters in Japan (aka his bosses who hired him) to create a MegaDrive 32, or MegaDrive Mars which became the 32X... that was fully created by Tom Kalinske selling the sales pitch and Joe Miller being the hardware engineer who worked at Sega of America in the 90s... also Why the hell does 90s Sega of America need a hardware engineer? Sega of America was a subsidiary branch, NOT a manufacturing branch. Also the Sega Dreamcast was created by pressure coming from Bernie Stolar and Sega of America itself in the 90s... it was Sega of America's 90s management who pushed for 3DFX to become the graphics chipset supplier without the authorization from Sega Enterprises LTD in Japan.. because Sega of America's staff was trying to go OVER the bosses who hired them in Japan to make a 3DFX powered Dreamcast or next gen system... that turned into a mess when documents leaked in 1997 and as a result of the way Sega of America's management wrote the contract to 3DFX, the latter filed a lawsuit and Sega Enterprises LTD Japan had to PAY 3DFX an undisclosed settlement amount. Finally you claimed around the 5:00 timestamp that the "Sony PlayStation has a built in MPEG decoder processor" this is FALSE, PlayStation NEVER had a built in MPEG decoder, if it did the Sony PlayStation would have retailed for an additional $200 dollars meaning that the Western launch would have been $600 dollars and Steve Race and Bernie Stolar who worked at S.C.E.A. would not be able to go over their Japanese headquarters bosses;s heads and cut prices like they did in 1995 when the PS1 was supposed to retail for around $380 USD as an equivalent to the Japanese retail price. You also mention that the Sega Saturn processors need to be programmed in custom assembly but Sony PlayStation can be programmed in C language... this is not true at all. While the Sega Saturn SCU-DSP does require assembly programming code and the study of the documentation tools that document was translated and distributed by Sega of America where they included an ERROR in translation telling professional programmers the WRONG information... so why does the Sega of America fanboy written books never questioned these translation errors? For Sony PS1, the documentation tools were made by companies Sony hired to create them in C language which took a while... meanwhile if you really wanted to actually learn how to use the Sony PlayStation hardware, you NEEDED to learn to program in assembly, why? because that is what Namco was doing and what Polyphony Digital did for TWO YEARS before they finished Gran Turismo 1 which was written in pure assembly programming code.
Big quads cause slowdowns not due to the quads themselves but because of the forward texture mapping the Saturn used. In forward texture mapping, each texel asks itself "what pixels do I belong to?", while in inverse texture mapping, the mapping literally everything else including the 3DO (which used quads) used, this isn't the case. In inverse texture mapping, each pixel asks itself "what is the first texel I belong to?" and that way you only have to write data to each pixel once, skipping the tons of overdraw that happened on the Saturn. This overdraw, by the way, is what caused both the transparency issues and slowdowns due to large quad sizes. The PS1 and Saturn were different systems, sure, but the main issue the Saturn posed were just as bad for native devs, especially early on. SEGA dropped the ball on software support, and it doesn't matter "which part of SEGA did it?" cause the hardware itself was made by the JP branch and not the US branch. Also yes Yuji Naka did do bad things, he is currently literally in jail for insider trading, and also he did really hate the US development team. Read into it. (also i'm not a fanboy of a specific branch of a 90s console company geeze) The documentation for the SCU-DSP is less of an issue vs the actual difficulty of using the damn thing - it was very difficult (and I'm unsure if it was even intentional) to decouple it from the main CPU. That's why I proposed giving it 128k of memory. The PS1, did use a video decoder, the MDEC. psx-spx.consoledev.net/macroblockdecodermdec/ I also specifically stated the SCU-DSP had to be written in ASM, not the entire system. In my script, I only use the words "assembly" when mentioning the SCU-DSP. Ports being "better off" on the original console they were made for has almost always been the case, especially when the limitations of these platforms were similar enough, yet different enough. Also yeah the dreamcast did have a decent portion of games that felt just like N64 games in 480p, but like, what does that have to do with anything I stated in the video? I try to argue with exclusives when explaining the graphical power of a console anyways, not ports. Also you talked a lot about SOA and SOJ and how one was evil and not the other one... Their infighting, caused by a lack of respect from SOJ towards SOA started this whole mess and the perpetuation of that infighting killed their console business, and also they still hadn't learned from their mistakes years and years afterwards (it's why they took half of 06's dev team to work on a wii game without extending the time the devs had to finish 06 or anything - it's why the game released like it did).
I am forever fascinated by the Saturn architecture. I love how it's full power was never really realized during its commercial life. That makes all the Saturn games fans are creating now so interesting.
How much would an extra 512k of memory cost back then 😳. My guess is a ton
I don't think you could "fix" the Saturn without including the 32x into the equation.
To me there were two possible routes:
1- Never release the 32x, and make the Saturn with a single SH2 CPU (maybe with a higher clock speed?) alongside a better GPU, make sure it's retrocompatible with the Megadrive. Aim for a 299 USD release price, with no surprise launch.
2- Release a simpler 32x with a single SH2 CPU and a little more ram for 100 USD, then TAKE CARE of it with several game releases for at least two years. Also release the Neptune at the same time, for 150-200 USD. Delay the Saturn for a worldwide release at the end of 1995 or even 1996. By then, it must include a single SH3 CPU and a much more powerful GPU, perhaps the first Voodoo chip or a cheaper variant of it. A 399 USD price tag would be more acceptable, given the Saturn would be noticeably more powerful than both the PSX and the N64, essentially an early Dreamcast.
Of course, neither option would work without silky smooth relations between usamerican and japanese divisions, and this means a decent Sonic game at launch. Sonic Xtreme concept wasn't good enough, it would've been seen as a lesser game compared to SM64 or even Crash Bandicoot. SM64 was HUGE, and to compete with it Sega basically needed Sonic Adventure three years before.
yeah i made a small addendum vid where I mentioned how the 32x basically crippled the saturn by making it so SOA had basically nothing to release by the time the Saturn launched in the west.
So I'd definitely go with option #1.
I don't think you could really aim for a 299$ price, maybe 350$? Arguably, they could've put an MJPEG decoder similar to the one in the PS1 inside of VDP-2 and then just removed the SH-1 CPU in the CD-rom subsystem along with the MPEG card attachment and future pnals, instead replacing it with a cheaper CPU, maybe also cutting the CD ROM cache from 512KB to something like 64KB or 32KB, while removing the 68EC000 sound CPU and controlling the yamaha chip directly with the slave SH-2.
@@Kurriochi I said 299 referencing the infamous roasting by Sony at the PSX announcement. But, thinking about it, had Sega released the Saturn for 299, then Sony would've had the PSX announced for 249, and so on. I guess another huge mistake by Sega was announcing AND launching the Saturn before the PSX, playing the underdog when in fact Sony was the newcomer.
Wasn't the 68EC000 there for Megadrive retrocompatibility (similarly to the Z80 for Master System), then Sega ditched the idea? Retrocompatibility would've been a good selling point, and the hardware was right there.
Just watched the addendum video. Yes, the 32x also took precious resources out of the Saturn. A third route I didn't mention would've been to release a beefed-up SVP cartridge with "lock-on", and maybe calling it "32X" (perhaps pretentiously). With a 50 USD release price, and allowing several games to take advantage of the extra hardware without biting into Saturn's development.
Your design changes would jack up the cost of a Saturn significantly. Changing the silicon to add division, doubling the memory, all that stuff is expensive.
You could make the saturn much cheaper by moving the slave sh2 to replace the sh1, so that this sh2 has direct access to the cd and dac (also make the A bus 32bit so the cart port is also 32bit). You can then remove the scsp, 68k, mpeg subsystem, sh1, and partition the ram to say 1mb sdram for each sh2.
Agree on the dsp and fwd texturing, the ram savings above could pay for the extra vram and dsp ram.
A delay of around 10 months would put the release 9 months after the PS and 9 months before the N64 so there would be a nice gap there for Sega. I would then just have a single faster SH chip clocked higher preferably 57.2mhz or higher with 8kb cache instead of 4 with 2mb sdram and the ability to do MJPEG in software and have 1 hitachi chip acting as cd controller and audio chip. The SH1 was on a 16 bit bus and the 68000 had a 16 bit bus so having the SH1 do both but on a 32 bit bus would be fine. Double the audio ram to 1mb and reduce cd rom ram to 128k. Also just have a single VDP with full access to its bus instead of shared with another VDP and with 1.5 mb ram all to itself but doing backward rendered quads but clocked higher mabee at 42.9mhz and being able to do at least 1 textured, shaded pixel per cycle so much higher fillrate & bandwidth than the Saturns VDP1 had and doing all of this on the 0.5 micron process instead of 0.7/8. Also Get rid of the internal save ram to save money but increase the cache of the DSP. Even if it didn't have division the extra cache would help.
Something like that should have been affordable around September 1995 in Japan compared to November 1994. Then launch early/mid 1996 in the US & europe for $300. It wouldn't be hugely better then the Playstation but it would be alot better/easier to program for 3d gaming than Saturn and would have either solved the Saturns problems or greatly reduced them to the point that they wouldn't be a big deal. Remember I'm just looking at sticking to the Saturns personality design instead of the more obvious changes like triangles instead of quads and audio compression.
You lost me at "just add division" to the specialized compute silicon. Division support for such a device would drastically increase transistor count, which would have had knock on effects in development time, cost, and heat, thus affecting speed.
Here's my proposed fix for the Saturn.
HEWLETT PACKARD PA-RISC 7150 at 125MHz and VoodDoo1 graphics chipset. Each gets 1MB of dedicated RAM/VRAM. Easy to program, fp GTE from the CPU, and the whole chipset would cost about $40-50 each for the chips and memory (by 1996 when sales when into full swing), so you'd have a $199 Saturn that could blow the doors completely off the N64 and PS1 combined.
If you have to use HITACHI's SH, just use two in total with no extra SH1, SCU-DSP, etc, I would just use a pair of SH2s with their own 1MB of RAM, letting the software decide how much SH2 power to dedicate to audio, geometry transforms, controlling the CD-ROM, etc. Then 1MB shared by the two VDP graphics chips. The whole machine would cost about $100 less to make and be much easier to program. As important, the simpler machine would be about as powerful as the PS1 in practice. For that matter, I strongly believe that SoJ was wrong to reject the Kalinske-SONY offer of going in 50/50 on the PS1. That would've netted SEGA about $7-10 billion.
Then use the VCD slot in back for some future graphics card for traditional 3D graphics expansion. There were 5-6 such accelerators considered by SEGA.
Voodoo 1 wasn't available until the end of 1995. So, either delay the Saturn launch, or use another GPU. Also, I don't think a 199 USD launch price was doable, even when Sega's finances were still healthy to subsidize production, the first Voodoo card was released for 299 (dropped its price quickly though). I think 399 was fine given the extra muscle it would get.
The GPU upgrade on the VCD slot is actually a neat idea, but also the 32x fiasco killed expansions. People wouldn't be willing to spend money for an expansion card, especially not on a Sega console.
@@sovo1212 Saturn needed 2-3 major advantages over PS1: cost/performance, backward compatibility with 1200 Genesis and Sega CD games, or the ability to get on the Web out of the box. Even a mainline Sonic game out of the box would've made a difference.
Also, VooDoo 1 was started in 1994, and fab capacity was available before the Saturn was.
@@MaxAbramson3the PlayStation does a lot right. I only know graphics, but Jaguar already had z buffer and less banding. Full 24 bit RGB support would be something. Jaguar could avoid the PlayStation wobble on polygons(see Doom ). Saturn wobbles a little. I never heard any complaints about psx audio.
Actually it was even later. The Voodoo 1 wasn't launched until late 1996. Even with an exclusive contract, Sega couldn't of got something that powerful ready for a console launch in 1995 especially not at $200 and 1mb ram wouldn't of been enough for something as powerful as the Voodoo
There is another problem with transparencies on the Saturn. The VDP1 can draw semi-transparent sprites/polygons, but only on a layer that uses 15 bit color. The VDP2 can apply semi-transparency between layers, but only if the layer containing semi-transparent pixels uses an indexed color mode, ie 8 bit color. The obvious problem here is that you cannot do both at the same time, you can either be drawing your semi-transparent thing onto a 15 bit layer or an 8 bit layer, and in either case it won't always look right.
The PS1 solution is to not have a VDP2 and only have one layer. You can do that on a Saturn, but it's a huge waste of the power of the machine.
Indexed color mode is not 8bit color.
Indexed color mode is 4bpp or 8bpp with a color depth of 5 bits per channel or even 8 bits per channel. VDP1 sprites can also be transparent in indexed color modes.
@@knight0fdragon The issue is that if you are drawing onto a buffer that uses an indexed color mode, using semi transparency could create colors that do not exist in the palette. And if appropriate colors do exist, finding them in the palette is a non-trivial operation.
Just curious, how do games like Cotton 2 have multiple layers of transparencies without any issues? I’m sure there is some kind of trick I’m missing, but I’m prettt blown away that there are several layers of overlapping transparencies on a console often derided for not being able to handle them
@@opaljk4835 my guess is that they're using "framebuffer" tricks like drawing each type of transparency every other frame
The most impressive thing I notice from the Saturn is the high resolution compared to the ps1. Sometimes the games looked so much clearer and smooth. It’s a shame it didn’t do better, cause I love the system
Also, I love the ideas here. It was a perfect storm that lead to its western failure, but some of these things could’ve helped
what did the Saturn do to leave you heartbroken or unsatisfied the console gave birth to over a thousand games for you
To put some context into all of this - Sega passed on the oportunity of Using the N64 Chip. By 1993 they knew SONY would do a 3D focused console , hence the addition of the extra processors to compensate.
They could had scaped it and do a 1996 lauch with a decent 3D Focused architecture instead.
I guess Sega had a profitable 3D Arcade bussiness and they didnt believe home 3D games would have such a demand.
It was latter corrected with the Dreamcast , but the damage was already done. Between the 32x and awfull Saturn support they killed the bussiness.
Other options as well. Sega was working with nvidia prior to the saturn NA launch. Which is the nv2 project. Where they could've had a much capable Quad based console.
Also, sega could've waited for yuzuki and Lockheed martin team to create model 2 or 3 gpu cost reduction chipset based console.
Plus, buying atari jaguar 2, 3do chipset or looked into pc 3d card companies such as power vr and 3dfx.
Or made the Dreamcast as a $99 addon using the PA-RISC 7100 and VooDoo chipset, overlaying 3 million textured polygons per second on top of Saturn backgrounds.
i maybe feel it was the Dreamcast who doomed Sega?, Saturn gave birth to over a thousand games does anyone know how much Sega loss because of the 32X?
@@edotsuki1979 The Dreamcast is _not_ why Sega failed just because it was their final console. It was a great system that was well received at launch and beloved by its owners, but it was dealt an apocalyptically bad hand.
It's a long story, but mismanagement and conflicts between Sega's Japanese and American branches are what did their console division in. The Dreamcast was when they finally got their act together, but it had to deal with the fallout from years of bad PR from the 32x and Saturn. Many people were soured on Sega as a console brand, and the PS2 was just around the corner. It tried its best, but the Dreamcast wasn't enough to turn things around.
@edotsuki1979 The saturn was a phenomenal system, but it sold 4 million units INTERNATIONALLY. More units were sold in JAPAN than the rest of the world
Much of Saturn's library stayed in japan and the saturn was poorly marketed, supported, and distributed in western markets
I think all sega had to do even with all the 32x and CD add on mistakes was release the console when it was originally supposed to be released at 300$
They wouldn't have defeated Sony but they didn't need to, a saturn that sold 20-30 million units would be more than enough to make sega a profitable company
5:07 correction. They had Motion JPEG. Both the Saturn and PS1 require an add on for Mpeg-1 decoding, both of which handle Xtended-VCD 2.0 perfectly fine without CD-i. However the PS1's add on didn't work, until someone can fix or recreate the add on, the PS1 is kinda stuck with basically nothing, although it'd be interesting to be able to make MJPEG CDs to go against the Saturn's built in Cinepak format without needing Mpeg VCD in either case.
Not the first time I misread mjpeg as mpeg and vice versa.
Between the video's making and now I've considered Sega mkghtve been better off by integrating an mjpeg decoder in VDP2 and then just not going with the mpeg expansion card system and maybe like, using a 68EC000 and 64K of disk cache in the CDROM subsystem instead of the more complex SH-1 and 512K they used in our time.
But oh well
I love videos about specs i don't get =)
Sucks because when you do, its extremely interesting
Many people often like to write off VDP 2 as "useless" for 3D. But I've heard some say that VDP 2 can be used to render walls somehow which sounds like a pretty big deal. If that were the case, I'd use that like crazy. The Saturn is a system that demands every part is used to the fullest. Especially when it comes to 3D. And while the PS1 was certainly made more convenient for 3D, the Saturn was, at least on paper, supposedly more powerful when it came to 3D as well. But we could never actually get to see this due to its complexity. Except maybe... Burning Rangers??? I'd kill for a Saturn version of Silent Hill.
I think what you are referring to are some specific perspective tricks used in games like last bronx. At a guess maybe it could have been used for a Wolfenstein like effect though?
Silent hill would have been a great game for the SS, leveraging the VDP for the immense floors. There're games that are simply out of reach of PS1, like Dragoon, just like there are others that are out of reach of SS like Destruction Derby or Soul Edge.
SEGA had state of the art arcade technology like Model 1 and Model 2, they could concentrate on bringing a Sega Model 1.5 system to power the console. The cartridge slot should be used for backwards compatibility and the CD ROM should also play Sega CD titles. Saturn had 68000 CPU etc.
Sega made many bad business decisions. 😢
Okay let’s fix the Saturn .!!! My ultimate input
1. Cut $100 off release the price
* remove internal memory
*remove pack in title
•Memory card sold separately
•Jam packed demo disk pack-in
2. Work on the 3d titles for release.
But 3dize loved ip’s for release year with the best graphics and most refined gameplay
1.shinobi 4
2.phantays star 5
3.shinning force 3
4.sonic 4 (Sonic adventure)
5.alexx kid in miracle world
6.outrun 2 (outrun cost 2 coast)
7. Eternal champions 3 (just copy mk & sf gameplays with ki graphics )
8. Dynamite heady 2 (3d)
the increase in memory like you stated... would actually DOUBLE the cost of the hardware... you dont know as much as you think you do
This hurts my heart. If only!
These hardware changes are interesting. I wonder if they can be implemented in FPGA on MiSTer and then maybe some patches for already available games that suffered from mesh transparencies.
Something along the lines of how CD music is being patched into Snes games using MSU1 for flash carts and emulators
That was my thought, but you would have to write new software to work that way
1:34 I'm glad you noticed that. I heard floppy disks are going out of production soon as Japan needs to start moving away from it.
The Yamaha Soundchip was good but had not enough RAM for a good Midi SampleSetup, the PS1 was for this better with the ADPCM 4:1 compression and the Sony Reverb was much better too.Only few games used the FM Synthesis on the Saturn, but this sounds amazing. Streaming audio was bad too on Saturn, most in Mono and 8 or 16bit with 22khz. Laters with ADX and Duck Codecs it was better, but Sony had the best streaming audio quality with the ADPCM Codec and in Stereo!
did you listen to Thunderforce V on both systems? somehow the Saturn sounds a bit better
Also listen to the tengu man stage theme from mega Man 8 on both, the Saturn version is way better.
..and I was amazed by the quality of musics in the SotN saturn version...waaay better than the ps1 version, I was shocked, really...so much clearer and deeper
i can say i loved the transparency of saturn ... but it only works in CRT tho
Watching this while going through deadly alcohol withdrawals and norovirus combined. Yay..🎉
I don't know, it was proven multiples time that the hardware wasn't the most problematic issue with the Saturn but the lack of proper dev kit and documentation. I mean, ok, this kind of setup wasn't what dev were used to at the time, but I do believe that with the right tools they would've been able to draw out the potential of the system way better.
Yeah, I even stated so in the video, but the software difficulties were also partially caused by hardware issues like the ones I mentioned.
Would be neat if devs make a wrapper for the DSP assembly so that we could "easily" use it.
buddy your videos are so entretaining
I understood about 3% of this video.
The main thing Sony did right in this generation was to create the Dual Shock controller. Not only having a much better analog stick than the N64, they had 2 and revolutionized 3D gaming with it. If you adjust L2 and R2 into triggers, you can literally still use it to this day. The C buttons on the N64 helped it counter but nothing comes close to dual thumb sticks.
In my opinion, someone who was alive during this time and lived in that generation of consoles, the Saturn showed more hardware prowess than the PlayStation, just later in its life cycle. The real hiccup was Sega of Japan, and sega of America working against each other.
We can you move the 2nd SH-2 to the subsystem and put the scu dsp while adding SH-2 ram in it or unify main ram. Moving the scu dsp ram to the SH-2 cd/sound cpu. Reduce the cd ram to 256 or 128 kb. Plus, replacing the vdp1 with a faster nvidia nv1, yamaha ygv611 or a beefed up 32-bit standard 32x/Sega cd/genesis dma channel like VDP. Or even add a custom SH-2 based coprocessor inside the VDP.
I would have quadrupled the cache inside each of the SH-2's... 4KB each to 16KB each. This cache was CRITICAL for getting the most out of the dual CPU setup. I understand it would have been hard for SEGA to do, being Hitachi developed the SH-2. But they did work closely together. Improving transparency effects on VDP-1 and double the VRAM for it I agree with entirely. Other than simplifying the architecture of the hardware, I think overall that would have fixed the Saturn hardware wise. Saturn's problems were mostly non-hardware (tech. spec.) related.
Should have localized Death Crimson.
Great video completely agree simpler hardware, better development tools, no Sega of America and Sega of Japan in fighting, later lunch date and cheaper opening price could have saved teh Saturn, which would have saved the Dreamcast and thus Sega would still maybe be producing consoles today...
A suggestion from a video by Sega Lord X I'd suggested would be backwards compatibility with Sega Genesis/Mega Drive games via the memory slot, either make an add-on compatible with the Cartridges or my own person recommendation make the Slot Cartridge size to begin with... after all one of my huge loves for the PS2 was it backward compatibility with PS1 games, I got to upgrade my hardware but keep all my games, same of first models of the PS3.
Just my thoughts on the matter.
The issue was, the marketing Sony litteraly buy more commercial presence on TV, it was before internet being a thing they also do the same on sponsorship and news paper, second reason they build themself there own CD Rom without having to pay the patent because they own the patent of CD with Phillips, they have a computer division able to build the CPU and other co processor , make there hardware cheaper than Sega and last the third party dev kit was well made because they don't have a huge software division so they make sure any developer can build game on there system , Sega have a huge game software division but must buy most of there hardware chip outside so it cost more, but people forget the relative succes of Dreamcast it was an amazing hardware and software design easy to develop far better than PS2 only the X box was better.
Ok so we'll need somebody to come up with a mod chip to make this correction, and we need game developers to do some fun ports to put this PS1 vs Saturn to rest!
with those hardware changes to the hardware that you are talking here the Saturn could have surpassed the PS1.
It already did in my heart 😂
Why not change the sega saturn basic geometric primitive to triangles instead of using quads?
1) SEGA's developers were more comfortable using quads instead of tris.
2) I try to change the least amount of things possible, so making the quads use inverse texture mapping instead of forward mapping is simpler than just completely reworking how the console renders stuff. This fixes the two main problems with the Saturn's 3D rendering: transparency issues and large quads killing the performance.
Why didn't they just put an android phone with a Saturn emulator inside the console? 😛
Bottom line.. Saturn should have been focused on 3D like the PS1 was.
The saturn started out with a focus on 2D.. but SEGA after seeing what the PS1 could do, made changes in the end.. it didn't help things.
Well, it's more complex than that...
Both consoles were built for 3D, it's just that SEGA believed 2D would be much more important than it actually was - once they realized how big 3D would be, it was kinda too late. That's why they threw in a second SH-2 and stuck with forward texture mapping.
Did you know As far back as 2002, Yes SATURN is the first video game system I'VE ever heard of , " That there is chip sets' that Developers never tapped into!, Then after I heard that it was the original xbox before saying about the same thing! GENESIS 32 is the same! Makes me wothere's chips in every system developers never tapped into!
Let me add this here ....
Duke Nukem 3-D SEGA SATURN...
Best home port yet.This is where they took advantage of it.... Game over sorry P.C. SEGA has this!
12:12 Skip to hear for the software part (Which is what I came for)
O mais irônico é que hoje essa arquitetura é onipresente.
Quads don't cause problems with overlapping points or cause additional cpu drain when compared to triangles. Yuji Naka doing hard time for essentially buying shares in a company he knew was due a big contract isn't justice. It might seem like he sabotaged the Saturn but I really don't think so. SoA had years to get a game together and what happened was they asked for him to release his Nights engine (also used in Burning Rangers) so they could make something in 6 months in time for Christmas and he said "no". But he didn't fuck up that project by trying to make Sonic stationary inside a giant fish eye lens. How did that even get a working demo, it's so stupid. They would have made a Sonic game in 6 months on the Nights engine that would have done more harm than good. Yuji was trying to save the company, not sabotage it. Sega should have been pushing Nights, not Sonic Xtreme. Yeah it was 2 years after release but I think it's a better game than Mario 64 which launched at the same time.
You know, in the video I specifically explain how quads themselves weren't the issue and how instead it was the implementation of texel->pixel rendering (forward texture mapping) that caused slowdown with large quads and overdraw (transparency) issues. I even said that I'd keep the Saturn using quads, just change the mapping from T->P to P->T
@@Kurriochi 2:00 "however, it [saturn] used quads, leaving us with the transparency issue, due to overlapping points..." quads are not the cause of the transparency issue.
@@iwanttocomplain and later on it's stated that the issue weren't the quads themselves but actually how they were rendered, 9:45 onwards.
"you could count a quad as two triangles, but that could cause alot of inaccuracies for many reasons. For instance, one giant quad taking up the entire screen could massively tank the frame rate. Meanwhile, two polygons [triangles] just wouldn't."
I really would like an explanation here.
oh, that's cause the texel to pixel drawing method the saturn used(forward mapping, the wrong way of doing it), would cause a ton of redraws as one texel would ask itself "ok what pixels am I a part of?" and as the image got larger and larger, that check had to be done more and more times and the same pixels had to be re-drawn more and more times, causing tons of overdraw which slowed the game down significantly as the GPU had to draw the same pixel multiple times and it also messed with transparency cause any alpha the texel had would be applied several times. If a two texels with a transparency value of 0,2 were drawn twice, now you had a pixel with a transparecy of 0,4, which is why this was only done with fully flat quads, where there was no overdraw. Nowdays we use inverse texture mapping that lets one pixel do a single check of "what texel do I belong to?" and it would've fixed all of the issues, but back then both of these methods were essentially competing against eachother.
No. They were already selling the console for $400 in America, and that was in 1995. Adding more hardware would have been way too much. They certainly should have done some things, but focusing on hardcore 3d performance wasn't it.
SEGA got what it deserved for being stingy
I've heard most/if not all of this before, with the exception of how to fix it.
For me the obvious question is the following.
Would it even feasable to add that much extra ram to the system without making the system extremely expensive?
I mean we could end up with something almost at 3DO pricing then because ram isnt cheap.
Right? 🤔
Good video btw 👍
Adding 128K would've cost at most a a few bucks, not counting how bulk orders can get the price down cheaper or how you could embed the RAM inside of the SCU-DSP, it wasn't a lot of RAM in 1994.
Adding another 512kb of VRAM to VDP-1 would've probably meant you'd need to redesign it quite a bit as the memory seems to be embedded, however even with just 512kb of VRAM, changing the quad rendering T->P to P->T would've still been worth it.
@@Kurriochi Ok i get what you're saying.
I'm still sceptical tho, there must be a reason why not both sega ,Nintendo and Sony did not put more memory in.
Sure they got money for those extra sales for expansion cart and the sega ram cart etc etc.
But they all could have sold that anyway because developers would sooner or later use the ram already inside.
I mean if this meant in segas case as you state just a couple of bucks... Then why didnt they just do it?
They had the arcade market and must had known exactly how beneficial that extra 512kb must have been.
The saturn is after all based to some extent on their arcade hardware.
At least that was their intention at some point.
And those Arcade machines were very expensive i think maybe one single model 2 was around the 14.000 dollars mark back then.
Sure there is a whole lot more than just a board. We have cabinet and monitor aswell.
But the mainboard was not cheap, this was state of the art tech back then.
And the more i think about it, there are so much console hardware over the years that really would have benefited from more ram.
@@unrealdevonIf you’re skeptical with the pricing side of things, then do you think having no DSP altogether but still having the VDP1 improvements would result in a faster & easier-to-develop Saturn than what we got in this timeline?
(I don’t believe the YMF292 changes would be as significant even if the change to ADPCM would ultimately help, because Sega was using regular PCM in their arcade boards anyway)
@@unrealdevonYou could make the saturn much cheaper by moving the slave sh2 to replace the sh1, so that this sh2 has direct access to the cd and dac (also make the A bus 32bit so the cart port is also 32bit). You can then remove the scsp, 68k, mpeg subsystem, sh1, and partition the ram to say 1mb sdram for each sh2.
Agree on the dsp and fwd texturing, the ram savings above could pay for the extra vram and dsp ram.
You need to work on your UA-cam voice if youre going to make it as a gamer channel. Your voice needs to be easily comprehensible by everyone. And I'm not talkint about your accent. You need to make it so your voice stands out and your words dont muddle into each other.
This is natural progression for many channels that start. You'll notice a difference in the narrators speaking style as time goes on.
I see a bit those discussion pointless. As then one can go to the others same gen consoles and “fix” those as well. And where do we draw the limit of the “fix” nah the hardware is what it is and what it was and the interesting thing is to with modern tools and knowledge try to push it as much as possible today (imo)
As Nintendo has proven time and time again, compute power doesn't matter. Fun games matter. Sega was simply horribly run.
Not true Nintendo 64 and Gamecube where Very powerful for the time Nintendo didn't start this concept with there consoles until the Wii with handhelds yes they've always been under powered.
Ps2 was less powerful than the Xbox and Gamecube and sold better because of support and ease of programming
The PS2 was not known for ease of development.
It was, however, known for a huge install base that simply couldn't be ignored. As the 2600 proved, that last factor was really important.
I don’t know. I’m thinking of Switching from PC because I can play Witcher 3 on 10 watts.
Wii was the first Nintendo console that was underpowered and it worked out for them.
Someone ELI5, can the Saturn do transparencies, yes or no?!
sort of yes, but only if the transparent object is fully 2D, and even then I remember there were issues with other objects being behind the transparent object. There's a second thing where you can use "colour calculation registers" to make the furthest away quads drawn by VDP1 "fade" into the background drawn by VDP2 (like in Sonic R and maybe panzer dragoon saga(?)).
how to fix the saturn:
make it a cheaper version of the model 2 board. you have already fucked up with your costumers, you are going to lose money one way or the other, you have already completely fucked up in your design in timing. just say fuck it and make it a cheaper version and so be it
dual 2d/3d processing would never work because it requires brainpower on the devs part and sega not being an idiot and actually providing proper tools to code and documentation
now if i were the one in charge of sega, i'd just cancel the 32x, move all game production including 3rd party there to the saturn (which i would name 32x) and delay the saturn to be released in late 95 in all 3 major regions, strike a deal with 3dfx to have a voodoo analogue in the console and put a goddamned hitachi sh2 for 2d there, since sega already fucked themselves with signing the deal in the first place. but put an sh2 dedicated EXCLUSIVELY for 2d and 2d only and not have it interfere with anything 3d. this would also mean mpeg decoding and both chips having 2mb totaling 4mb systemwide and no internal memory should be enough to guarantee the system would be the failure it turned out and sega could still make money selling memory cards and ram expansions
this strategy would see sega coming 2nd and nintendo getting totally fucked because sega would be competing against them not sony and they'd much better and more games at lauch plus nintendo only survived because it picked up the scraps and fed on saturns corpse as the system was non-existent in the us and europe in 97
The Model 2 was extremely complex internally, a main CPU, two sub-CPUs, a sound CPU and 2 sound chips, 1.1MB of RAM, 6MB of VRAM, a 54MB ROM, a very complex graphics system, 5 Fujitsu TGPs, it's overall insane.
Also, you'd probably get a 25% graphical boost just by using inverse texture mapped quads instead of the forward mapped quads they used - this would've fixed transparency too and other tidbit issues.
Oh also ADPCM would be extremely useful on the sound system, basically letting you store 2MB of MIDI data instead of 512KB audio RAM due to the 4:1 compression. Also if you wanted to speed up geometry even more, adding 128k of RAM to the SCU-DSP would help way more. Remember, the GPUs are basically rasterizers, so their power was limited more by what you feed them, not by their "raw power".
@@Kurriochi here is my thought process:
"we are going bankrupt anyways, fuck it"
I think going with a 3rd party like NEC (PowerVR) or 3DFX/NV and using a proper 3D chip would've made it much easier for Sega than trying to design everything in-house, but that's how Sega always did it until the Dreamcast, even Sony did this up until the PS4. The PS3 was a nightmare to develop for because Japanese companies were very eccentric (being kind here) in their hardware design.
Wayyyy !! back in 1992 SEGA keeped mouthing off in 1993 about the specs of SATURN , After That SONY showed off it would have super 3D power CPU the PS1 would have , SEGA I repeat my self , in 1993 SEGA had time to put a better CPU , video chips , 3D chips not what they did , They just add a second VDP chip and even messed up SEGA!!
What game is the music from in the start of the video??
Pherdrana drifts from Metroid prime 1 :b
Great video, thanks
So, if all were pushed to their absolute limits, can it do better visuals than PS1 and N64 or not? And, if it can, I'd love to see some links to footage, please. :)
Note: I suppose I should clarify that I mean 3D, because we already know the Saturn was a beast when it came to 2D.
If we're talking "absolute limits" with the tools and knowledge we have today, the n64 clears both of those systems.
The issue is that the Saturn died "too young" before devs could really get the hang of it and the N64 was bogged down by slow RAM and cartridges so much it's kinda hard to compare the games that came out in that era, because they were all internally a bit too different just to compare. For the "best looking games", I'd argue it goes like this:
Saturn: Panzer Dragoon II Zwei, Burning Rangers, Quake, Panzer Dragoon Saga and Sega Rally Championship.
N64: Perfect Dark, Beetle Adventure Racing and Rogue Squadron
PS1: Alien Resurrection, Racing Lagoon, Gran Turismo 2, Driver 2 and Silent Hill 1.
At least from my experience.
@@Kurriochi OK, thanks for the details.
2D or 3D it’s the same for Saturn. There is no 3d really. It’s just distorted 2D sprites.
there is definite 3D on the saturn
@@Kurriochi when it comes to hardware. Nope it don’t really have a concept of that. But can you use the 2D sprites and distort them so what you see is a 3D game? Of course you can. That is what all 3D games on Saturn does. My point is to do a 2D game or a 3d game on Saturn from the VDP point of view is exactly the same. It’s more down to more calculation stress on the SH2
A 3D game who draws 300 distorted 2D sprites and a 2D games that draws 300 distorted 2D sprites is exactly the same for the VDP. It do not have any concept of 3D. It just want to get its 2D cords for each point in a sprite and then draw it (and what a beast to draw such it is :) )
Hindsight ....
This video isnt really helpful
Howabout working out how we can use the cart or vcd expansion slot to improve the hardware ..
Or some future code that can make the chips work together better
I could have made a video saying ... change hardware to be same as ps1 and be done or .. ADD MORE RAM
i did not watch your video the Saturn does not need to be fixed unless literally broken and there is absolutely no mistake if so why would over a thousand games be released
Okay goldfish brain.
The fix for the Saturn was called the Dreamcast.
One thing: The Saturn didn't have a GPU. Nothing had a GPU until Nvidia invented a 3d chip which not only rendered 3d polygons but also was capable of internally doing hardware transform and lighting, the Geforce 256, which created a new hardware category that did not exist prior -- 3d chips prior to that effectively drew shaded textured polygons but didn't have hardware t&l.
Yeah I know they were just rasterizers back then and the geometry was calculated on the CPU or coprocessor, but it's much easier to just call them GPUs as they did still handle drawing graphics + it just makes more sense for people who don't know as much about these systems.
Kurriochi, your video is filled with misinformation, outright blatant LIES, wrong information on how Sega Saturn VDP1 Quadrilateral polygon rendering works and more... you even went as far as to say that a "big" quad will cause slowdown... this is just lies...
Also as far as PORTING from Sony PlayStation to Sega Saturn and vice versa, the fact is that PS1 uses a different architecture than Sega Saturn and VICE VERSA... that means that game programmers have to actually LEARN the respective hardware and write NATIVELY programmed game code to each hardware... the problem is most third party devs have a tendency to do the LEAST amount of effort... and as to why this is true... if a PS1 game dev team or mediocre or average skill were to port their game to Sega Saturn, do NOT count on them to actually bother to write optimized code to the Sega Saturn hardware... again can you understand that? oh you don't and you blame the Sega Saturn hardware? ok... how about the SAME game dev teams who made games on PS1 and were tasked to make a Nintendo 64 version or even original game... why does their game feature graphics that resemble PS1 graphics but a bit smoother and why does their game made on ROM Cartridge have SLOW loading or a frigging loading pause? Especially when they never bothered to use the actual N64 hardware and the game does not even match other natively exclusive N64 games...
Oh wait, you still don't believe? ok why then do their Sega Dreamcast ports look and play and sound just like a high resolution PS1 game? That goes for Soul Calibur as well because Namco originally made that game for the Namco System 12 Arcade hardware which was just a Sony PS1 for arcade use with additional ram to increase polygon count... why does Mortal Kombat Gold have crap 3d graphics on Dreamcast? why do some of the third party racing games and other types of games basically look like high resolution PS1 graphics games?
As for Yuji Naka being the "problem" WTF are you talking about? you are using those books written by Sega of America 90s staff fanboys right? do you not see a problem there? wake up! Also Yuji Naka was one of the founding and CREATIVE members who created Phantasy Star and Sonic the Hedgehog as well as the FM sound add on for Sega Mark III in Japan and the Sega Saturn NiGHTs into Dreams analog pad... what did "Sonic X-Treme" development team contribute or CREATE? Why the hell does the "Sonic X-Treme" dev team have any credibility rights when talking about the Sega Saturn? please explain...
Also as far as "sabotage" that award goes to Tom Kalinske, Joe Miller and a lot of staff that were working as management at Sega of America in the 1990s decade... in FACT it was Tom Kalinske himself who put pressure on Sega headquarters in Japan (aka his bosses who hired him) to create a MegaDrive 32, or MegaDrive Mars which became the 32X... that was fully created by Tom Kalinske selling the sales pitch and Joe Miller being the hardware engineer who worked at Sega of America in the 90s... also Why the hell does 90s Sega of America need a hardware engineer? Sega of America was a subsidiary branch, NOT a manufacturing branch.
Also the Sega Dreamcast was created by pressure coming from Bernie Stolar and Sega of America itself in the 90s... it was Sega of America's 90s management who pushed for 3DFX to become the graphics chipset supplier without the authorization from Sega Enterprises LTD in Japan.. because Sega of America's staff was trying to go OVER the bosses who hired them in Japan to make a 3DFX powered Dreamcast or next gen system... that turned into a mess when documents leaked in 1997 and as a result of the way Sega of America's management wrote the contract to 3DFX, the latter filed a lawsuit and Sega Enterprises LTD Japan had to PAY 3DFX an undisclosed settlement amount.
Finally you claimed around the 5:00 timestamp that the "Sony PlayStation has a built in MPEG decoder processor" this is FALSE, PlayStation NEVER had a built in MPEG decoder, if it did the Sony PlayStation would have retailed for an additional $200 dollars meaning that the Western launch would have been $600 dollars and Steve Race and Bernie Stolar who worked at S.C.E.A. would not be able to go over their Japanese headquarters bosses;s heads and cut prices like they did in 1995 when the PS1 was supposed to retail for around $380 USD as an equivalent to the Japanese retail price.
You also mention that the Sega Saturn processors need to be programmed in custom assembly but Sony PlayStation can be programmed in C language... this is not true at all.
While the Sega Saturn SCU-DSP does require assembly programming code and the study of the documentation tools that document was translated and distributed by Sega of America where they included an ERROR in translation telling professional programmers the WRONG information... so why does the Sega of America fanboy written books never questioned these translation errors?
For Sony PS1, the documentation tools were made by companies Sony hired to create them in C language which took a while... meanwhile if you really wanted to actually learn how to use the Sony PlayStation hardware, you NEEDED to learn to program in assembly, why? because that is what Namco was doing and what Polyphony Digital did for TWO YEARS before they finished Gran Turismo 1 which was written in pure assembly programming code.
Big quads cause slowdowns not due to the quads themselves but because of the forward texture mapping the Saturn used.
In forward texture mapping, each texel asks itself "what pixels do I belong to?", while in inverse texture mapping, the mapping literally everything else including the 3DO (which used quads) used, this isn't the case.
In inverse texture mapping, each pixel asks itself "what is the first texel I belong to?" and that way you only have to write data to each pixel once, skipping the tons of overdraw that happened on the Saturn. This overdraw, by the way, is what caused both the transparency issues and slowdowns due to large quad sizes.
The PS1 and Saturn were different systems, sure, but the main issue the Saturn posed were just as bad for native devs, especially early on. SEGA dropped the ball on software support, and it doesn't matter "which part of SEGA did it?" cause the hardware itself was made by the JP branch and not the US branch.
Also yes Yuji Naka did do bad things, he is currently literally in jail for insider trading, and also he did really hate the US development team. Read into it. (also i'm not a fanboy of a specific branch of a 90s console company geeze)
The documentation for the SCU-DSP is less of an issue vs the actual difficulty of using the damn thing - it was very difficult (and I'm unsure if it was even intentional) to decouple it from the main CPU. That's why I proposed giving it 128k of memory.
The PS1, did use a video decoder, the MDEC. psx-spx.consoledev.net/macroblockdecodermdec/
I also specifically stated the SCU-DSP had to be written in ASM, not the entire system. In my script, I only use the words "assembly" when mentioning the SCU-DSP.
Ports being "better off" on the original console they were made for has almost always been the case, especially when the limitations of these platforms were similar enough, yet different enough. Also yeah the dreamcast did have a decent portion of games that felt just like N64 games in 480p, but like, what does that have to do with anything I stated in the video? I try to argue with exclusives when explaining the graphical power of a console anyways, not ports.
Also you talked a lot about SOA and SOJ and how one was evil and not the other one... Their infighting, caused by a lack of respect from SOJ towards SOA started this whole mess and the perpetuation of that infighting killed their console business, and also they still hadn't learned from their mistakes years and years afterwards (it's why they took half of 06's dev team to work on a wii game without extending the time the devs had to finish 06 or anything - it's why the game released like it did).
Plus, the quads saturn used is not rasterizered Quad polygons like nv1 and 3do. But warped quads polygons.
Super video 👍
Simpler solution: remove VDP2 entirely or replace it with another VDP1. It's pretty much useless.
hi from Venezuela , so good video !! top 21 sega saturn in my channel !
Nossa só lamento por este Ditador Bandido da Venezuela, comunismo/socialismo que destrói um país e deixa na miséria a população
your knowledge is beautiful ,,,plz advise me what should i study to understand this easly ,,,thanks