The Sega Saturn, Nintendo 64 and Sony Playstation (1), have a special place in my heart. Notably, the Saturn, it was my first ever gaming console. My dad gifted one to me for my birthday in Aug 1995; days before the release of PS1. I remember asking for a PS1 for Christmas 1995 and distinctly remembering my dad responding "Two gaming consoles? I'm not so sure about that..."; I knew immediately wasn't gonna happen. Cut to December 1996, and I open a Sony Playstation on Christmas morning. "I remember you telling me two [consoles] was too much. What changed your mind?" "The Sony has really great commercials!" I cannot wait for your content about comparing the Saturn & Playstation. Tons of great games across all platforms during that time.
Sega saturn came from another world another planet. I loved my too even if I had only one demo CD with sega rally, pancer dragon, Baku Baku. I was so amazed to have game console with CD rotating inside 🙂 Nice times
I can assure you it’s not blind nostalgia. I only had the N64 at the time and yet I bought an old Saturn 2 months ago. There is something charming about it. I feel the same about Neo Geo.
I got and still have both but i had WAY more fun with my SEGA Saturn. 5 Virtua Fighter, 3 Panzer Dragoon games and the best controller EVER was enough reason for me to ♥ this fantastic system!
Great times. I remember my 10 year old self going to my local Best Buy with my dad in 1995. He was shopping around for a satellite dish and a new TV. He was comparing the Sony and the RCA models and talking to the salesman for about an hour. During this time I was having my kid mind blown playing on the PSX and Saturn kiosks they had setup in the store. My dad said we could get a "game system" as he called it, so I remember I was also comparing the PSX and the Saturn and going back and forth between the two. I wanted both but ended up with the Saturn since I had an infatuation with Sega arcade games at the time and loved the idea of having home ports of those games. I did eventually get a PSX in 1997 though.
I enjoyed the focus on arcade ports too, a lot which used super scaling which the saturn was great at and should have ported more of the CS1 sega games too. Virtua On was cool too.
At my first game dev job, it was just past this battle. I was still a PSX programmer, but learnt from the guys telling me how awkward the Saturn was to code multi CPU. Now a days it wouldn't have been as tough, but back then the architecture was very different.
Now this is something to look forward to. The 32-bit era is one of the best time periods in gaming history and I look forward to seeing these performance differences for multiplatform games. Will be much more interesting than the usual modern PS vs. Xbox stuff.
I have hundreds (thousands) of gaming magazines scanned onto my PC, including the UK Sega Saturn magazine. As Rich was the editor-in-chief for Sega Saturn magazine, it's neat to see him cover a lot of these games, including many of the titles mentioned here. I appreciate Rich also being a champion of Exhumed back in the day and was frequently singing its praises. It's good to be able to trace back these origins and see him talking about much of the same kinds of things all these years later.
Can't wait. The Sega Saturn IS my favorite console of all time. I played Dragon Force, Guardian Heroes and Iron Storm (daisenryaku) more than any other games growing up and I still go back and play them from time to time
Ohhh I'm very much looking forward to these comparisons. I absolutely love the Saturn and the PS1. There's something quite magical about early 3D games, at least to a millennial like me who grew up during that era. It's funny how easily I can return to these consoles and not feel like they're "a thing of the past" or that the graphics are "ugly" or "too low-res".
I remember the Saturn Capcom crossover fighting games with the 4mb cart being amazing. The PS1 version only let you control 1 character and you wasn’t able to swap.
As a lifelong Sega fan, I opted for Saturn instead of the Playstation, and while I thoroughly enjoyed it, I could see how some games looked better on my brothers Playstation. Tomb Raider and Resident Evil come to mind. I remember seeing his version of Resident Evil, especially the water scenes, and seeing the big difference. Still, I wouldn't go back and change my choice for nothing. I had so many great experiences on my Saturn that weren't available on any other consoles at that time.
I was there, 3000 years ago... On a more serious note, glad to see John call PS1 games ported to the Saturn for what they are (in comparison)...vastly inferior ports that made the Saturn look weak. So many other UA-camrs gave these awful ports a pass.
I have a Sega Saturn and it’s a great machine. But the original PlayStation was… well… better! Developers were given a powerful machine that was super easy to exploit. While the Saturn was also powerful… it was just too difficult to program.
I wouldn’t say they were poor ports, resident evil exhumed quake just to name a few were better versions on the Saturn plus the controller is much superior to ps1
I wish Daytona USA 1 would get a modern port for new systems, Daytona USA 2 got the "Sega Racing Classic 2" port in Like a Dragon Gaiden which was excellent, i just hope that if SEGA do it that Takenobu Mitsuyoshi's version of the theme is in there, Mitsuyoshi-san's version was so iconic and it was a shame that it couldn't be included in Sega Racing Classic 2
Love it. I once had a long conversation with an old Tantalus developer on one of the main gaming forums about this very subject. I learned a bunch that day. Also, IMO, Tantalus' ports are pretty solid as compared to other 3rd party, fully 3D Saturn games. Tantalus did a good enough job that Sega contracted them for the Manx TT Superbike port. I think that says something.
Don't forget to apply the cathode-ray tube mask. Both the Sega Saturn and the PlayStation used dithering, and the only way to get the intended visual experience from them is to keep the dithering effect with a CRT mask.
@@MicahtheDrumCorpsPseudoboomer Your profile picture is so tiny on my phone screen I thought it was two cheeks hanging out of a thong. Imagine my disappointment when I enlarged it to see a couple of brown eggs
Nothing to do with "CRT masks", it's composite video. And it's not "to keep the dithering effect". it's to conceal the dithering with said composite signal.
I don't care about the "intended visual experience", for me dithering is a charming thing games back then used to do, I don't _want_ or _need_ a CRT TV/Monitor, nor do I resort to using CRT filters in emulators. Give me my pixels raw, please. I'm not gonna have a stroke or explode by not seeing "what the developers originally intended" and this CRT Elitism needs to _stop._
@garaschneider4808 Yeah, that's what I meant to say, more like "keeping the optical illusion of transparency and wider color palettes with a CRT mask that emulates composite video". There's gotta be a combination of settings in the Retrotink 4K that achieves this with the lowest loss of graphical clarity.
Cool! I had a similar experience seeing the original panzer dragoon at a friend's house when I was a little kid. It was magical. Mario 64 was more magical but I saw panzer dragon first!
Sorry, but it was Mario 64 for me that blew me away but in terms of fighting games at the time virtua fighter 2 blow me away on the Saturn as well as Sega rally.
It's a shame that only Japanese Saturn owners got to enjoy so many great games, like shmups, fighting games, and even Capcom Marvel crossovers. Even though PlayStation had better marketing and more popular games, I have to say that the Japanese lineup of games could have helped Saturn succeed in the US and EU too. For me, Saturn holds a special place in my gamer heart. I had it before PlayStation, so my love for Sega was, and still is, strong. The games for Saturn were awesome! Thanks for this video.
There was a change in taste for games at that time which was generally moving away from arcade coin op or similar style titles which the Saturn was really strong at. People in the west were looking for dedicated home experiences developed from the ground up like Resident Evil and Tomb Raider. Unfortunately, what is or was popular in Japan didn’t necessarily translate to success elsewhere. The subsequent release of the Dreamcast also suffered from too many arcade conversions with too few games with significant depth and those that did appear came in the consoles very last breath.
The Saturn's popularity in Japan gets way overplayed (same as the N64's unpopularity in the country). The Saturn rode the vf 2 craze of the mid 90's, but after that the japanese came around to the same mindset as well. 1997 with FF 7 and dq 7 is what did it. All you have to do is look at sales charts for the country and arcade ports died there as well. It's was all about immersive 3d games built for the home in mind just like everywhere else.
@@ericp631 I disagree. Saturn games were still being produced and the Saturn was still selling very well when the Dreamcast released in Japan. A system that is still selling when it's successor is on the market shows it's popularity. Just look at the PS4 and PS5 today.
In a weird twist of fate Sega hired the moron from Sony (I think his name was Bernie Stolar) to be Chief Executive in the U.S who was very much against importing games from Japan. So the marketing strategy shifted right at that crucial time and many Japanese games and RPG's were being ported to Playstation at a time when they were probably the most popular they ever were, and during that time the Saturn got just a few. So many amazing games were left in Japan, it's not even funny. It's really sad actually.
@@SeanUCF Like I said, you can check out the sales data from then and see for yourself. Remember the Dreamcast was a giant disaster in Japan. And games are often time released on previous consoles not because the consoles are still selling well, but because they have an ownership base(it's an extremely common practice that all consoles have this happens with). The Saturn had over 5 million units sold and CD's were so cheap to print it's worth the gamble if you're talking the local market. But a print run, let alone sales figure of 40,000 are not good figures for Japan back then. All you need to do is look at what the PlayStation was doing over the same period.
The question of which console is more powerful has always been a topic of interest. The reality is that it depends on what you are trying to achieve. If you were to fully utilize the capabilities of the Saturn to develop a game, it would not look or perform as well on the PlayStation, and vice versa. Therefore, if you wanted to create a game that would excel on both platforms, you would need to create two distinct versions, each optimized for the hardware of its respective platform. This is different from modern consoles or PCs, which run on similar X86/X64 hardware designs. Nowadays, a single game can be developed to adjust the resolution, textures, and lighting to accommodate different hardware with varying levels of computing power. The Saturn and PS1 were entirely separate machines, designed to deliver high-end visuals far beyond what 16-bit era game consoles could achieve. However, Sega and Sony took different approaches to reach this common goal. As a result, the way they processed information differed, and the raw power of each system was situated in different areas within each system. Understanding this, developers had to adopt different strategies to fully utilize the potential of each platform. At the end of the day, Saturn and PlayStation One each had distinct advantages and disadvantages from one another. But both are still very powerful machines for their time.
A long time ago, a generation far, far away: the golden age of gaming. Before the dark times. Before the Empire. ‘The more you consolidate the industry, the more systems will slip through your fingers.’
I can’t imagine what life was like so long ago when PlayStation 1 and Sega Saturn was around. It’s mind-baffling that Sega actually made CONSOLES back in the day! I know about them because of Sonic & Yakuza.
Saturn was so underrated especially the Japan side of it great console sega rally still the goat when it comes to handling and 2d fighting games Saturn was a beast still have my Saturn
@drunkensailor Its NOT a myth. Everyone with a single functioning brain cell knows that Japan had a much larger Saturn library mainly because the Saturn was more successful there. But in North America & Europe, the Saturn was a commercial failure in terms of console sales, therefore it had a significantly smaller library than its Japanese counterpart. If you dont believe me regarding the console sales numbers then simple google it. So no, all of the best Saturn games did NOT release in the west. Many Saturn games are still stuck in Japan and have never been released for other regions. I absolutely loathe when clueless people (such as yaself) try to chime in and act like they have any clue of what they're talking about......
I always imagine what would happen if the Playstation had more ram ...capcom fighting games would have been so much better, or if the Saturn had better 3d hardware and was easier to program for
@@bellissimo4520 with the ram for psone yup, not sure with the saturn though as 3d was like a later implementation but i wonder if the system was created with 3d being more prominent right at the start
John's DF Retro series is unmatched. Such good content! Makes me look at retro consoles and games in such a different light and makes me appreciate it even more.
John's work is the only reason I stay subscribed to DIGITAL FOUNDRY. All the recent focus on the current things has got me bored. Love when John's given free reign to explore topics in depth. Miss me with your guys next video on DLSS or Fluid Motion Frames updates.
I am so up for this. Can't wait for people to find out about the resolution and frame rate stuff like VF2 was running at, over the Tekken series etc. Dreamcast Vs PS2 next!!!
Grandia took some hits during its port to PlayStation, but it also had its fair share of benefits. It got proper transparency effects, more vibrant spell effects, better sound and better load times. The idea that the PlayStation version is a strict downgrade isn't necessarily true.
The SNES could do transparencies without convoluted programming. SEGA was offered the help of Silicon Graphics and turned it down. SEGA of Japan was a mess. I remember being super excited about the Saturn…and buying a PS1.
Totally down for a lengthy video, or entire series on this. Comparing both direct ports, launch games, similar games in a genre, etc. It was such an exciting time for gaming by all metrics. Gameplay, graphics, audio, innovations, IPs.. but the difference in those two console's libraries and capabilities meant that you really needed both to truly get the best of that generation.
Can't wait excited for this... As an og Saturn owner, it baffled my pre-teen mind that the Saturn was " not powerful" like the PS1 was. Yet the Saturn had games that looked and performed just as well as the PS1 had
Really anxious for that! I hope you do comparisions on more obscure ports as well, since there are dozens of comparisons of popular games, such as Grandia, Resident Evil, Tomb Raider, etc.
When it comes to PlayStation vs Saturn, the 2 gamse that come to mind is X-Men vs Street Fighter and Marvel Super Heroes vs Street Fighter. Both of those were released but the PS1 version had animations frames missing and it had the tag team feature removed. Apparently this was due to the lack of enough RAM on the PS1. Ultimately I had a PS1 since more games were on it that I liked and Saturn was not really available in the US and not many games got released in the US.
I was thinking that I would only get to buy 8 used games for either system, and I just liked the top 8 games of Sega Saturn and I could rent from a sizable library so I got the sega console.
I loved this Saturn/PS1/N64 era because the consoles were so different from each other. They all had vastly different ideas about what the next generation of gaming would be, and we were all better off for all of these companies having different ideas.
Very much looking forward to this video. This generation is when my interest in gaming turned into a passion. Sure they'll be the Wipeout comparison, and Tomb Raider, Resident Evil and all the Capcom 2D fighters, but I'm looking forward to the Alien Trilogy, Exhumed, Hexen, Duke Nukem and, particularly Doom, showdowns.
Recently I wacthed a long Japanese retrospective video about the Saturn hardware. What I understood from it, via auto-translate admittedly, was that the Saturn's problem with 3D compared to PlayStation was transform-and-lighting being totally overlooked when choosing/designing the CPUs and VDPs. The PlayStation was very innovative in that some T&L support was included, and at the time I think even PC graphics cards didn't have T&L but were able to compensate with their much faster CPUs. However, Saturn's sprite handling wasn't a bottleneck and possibly never got pushed to its limit in terms of sprite numbers or fill rate.
The first consumer GPU that did hardware T&L was the Original GeForce 256. Before then T&L was done in software on the CPU or DSP chips in consoles. For the PS1 T&L was done on the CPU & GTE (Geometry Transformation Engine), a co-processor Sony created that did fixed-point math. For the Saturn, after Sega heard about the PlayStation's 3D abilities, Sega added a second SH-2 and the SCU (Saturn Control Unit). The two SH-2s and the SCU did the T&L on the Saturn. The SCU consisted of two units, a DMA controller to arbitrate all the data between all the different processors and a DSP that did 3D math. The DSP in the SCU was stupidly complicated and hard to use. There's a great video on Game Hut, programmer at Travelers Tales the developers of Sonic R, on how hard it was to use the DSP. The GameCube and Xbox were the first consoles with hardware T&L built in the GPU. With the Xbox being even more advanced with Pixel and Vertex Shaders. The PS2 relied on the CPU, Vector Units and the FPU to do T&L. While the Dreamcast relied on the SH-4 and its FPU.
SS VDP1 fillrate was/is much less powerful than PSX' GTE (PSX one is theoretical 66 MPixel, SS VDP1, while no actual data are available it's said to be 3 to 5 times less powerful, it's a know fact). A recent test on youtube shows how VDP1 fillrate is the only reason why Sega Touring Car SS conversion runs at 20fps instead on 30fps. There was dev talkings about a hybrid hw rendering with VDP plus sw rendering using SH2s (probably together with SCU DSP), we are talking about a programming nightmare anyway in this case...
@@slashrose3287 Maybe it was entirely a sprite count thing and I was misinterpreting it. I looked into Sega Touring Car Championship though, and saw two odd things: 1. It's a 30fps game. I recall magazines saying that it was 20fps on Saturn, but all videos of it definitely show it to be a 30fps game. 2. In the cutscene around the garage after the qualifying lap, it's entirely 60fps. It's not interactive and no cars are around other than the player's chosen one, but it is fullscreen 3D, no VDP2 ground, same assets as in gameplay, at 60fps.
Really looking forward to this. As Rich said, this will mostly be a case of the lead platform having the best version with the port to the other console usually suffering. It will be interesting to see if Resident Evil 1 gets tested, I believe it has better 3D on the PS1 but higher resolution backgrounds on the Saturn.
They Create World podcast has a cool episode about Saturn, focused on Sega behind the scenes. Seem to be true that they added a second processor because PS1. Saturn uses 2D to create 3D polygon. This is why Saturn had quads and not triangles.
SS and 16.000,00$ arcade Model 2 board used the same "forward mapping" method with primitive quad rendering. PSX was the first system with a dedicated math processor that accelerates vector and matrix calculations, with rendering using triangle primitive, on which PSX add texture: this choice allowed easily many 3d advanced rendering (enviroment mapping, alpha blending, etc) while SS and all previoius 3d system struggled due to the way rendering is done (there are videos which expose in depth those fundamental differencies). Arcade Model 3 was the first Sega board to boost primitive triangle and advanced 3d effects, then was released DC and Naomi arcade counterpart, true 3D and 2D powerhouse. It's SAID first SS instance was one SH2 and only VDP1, after PSX presentation Sega was forced to add 2° SH2 and VDP2... I think this situation might be actually accurate, hence the incompatibility between VDP & 2 , the limited 32-bit data transfer channel shared by BOTH SH2 with VDP, etc. . Dunno if SCU DSP was in the original 1992 project or not (same year Sega refused to coonect with Sony to produce a common 32 bit console..)
It's also interesting when bringing up the N64 in these comparisons, since also a lot of games that were made for N64 in mind suffered a lot when ported to PS1, and also a lot of 3D PC games or Midway arcade ports were a better fit for the N64 than PS1, but then obviously every game that actually used the CD space on high quality textures, fmv and voices suffered a lot on the jump to N64 or they were just not possible on it.
One thing that N64 emulation doesn't account for is how extra blurry the N64 output was really pluged into a TV. When you add really low res blurry texture because of the cartridge... Sometimes it was not that evident that the blurry mess of N64 was superior to PS1 or Saturn 3D games, even tho N64 had more stable 3D and bilinear filtering.
The loading times on the n64 were so much better, the ps1 was full of fmv which is just a waste of time now. The ps one has awful texture warping as well, I still think the ps one is the worst of the generation today.
Throw in the Saturn port/tech demo of Unreal for some bonus wow content. I would be really interested to see a take on what the state of the art in 3D on each system was over time. '95 and '96 the Saturn didn't seem too inferior to PS1, but then the PS1 started to have some really incredible looking games in the middle and back end of its life.
Love seeing John's passion. Maybe later you can also do PS1 vs N64 and Dreamcast since they had a number of ports across each other like Vigilante 8: 2nd Offense
Would love to see in depth comparisons of Thunderforce V, Salamander 2, Dead or Alive, Street Fighter Alpha 3, King of Fighters 95-97, Need for Speed, Space Hulk, Grandia, Silhouette Mirage, Nekketsu Oyako, Primal Rage and so many others.
Overlapping sprite on Saturn are only things are treated with dithering if dev set one of them to be semi transparent as to make sure that they’ll not “devour” one another like a solid sprite does. But any transparency that are built within VDP2 scene layer or background layer (it work with foreground too) work perfectly fine. It work ONLY across its multi layers capability but between sprite the VDP2 will just ignore them as the system will treat both sprite as a mere pixel and not two separate object with transparency effect on one or both of them. If only VDP1 got another one or two extra layer then things would be different but I still love seeing how dev and hardware engineering mitigate every single weaknesses of each machines to deliver the best possible experience.
Mega Man 8 is a nice comparison point since it offers a rare chance to compare the sound chips of the PS1/Saturn, which were hardly ever used in favor of CD audio. But MM8 used purely synthesized music on both consoles, and if you listen to them side by side, they do sound subtly different between each other (aside from a couple songs being completely different).
Reg. Grandia‘s floor maps, that reminded me of the Mode 7 routine on the Playstation. Of course that was less detailed, but served it‘s purpose on games like Mario Kart, F-Zero, Super Star Wars, Demon‘s Crest, Actraiser, etc
You could recognize their games by their look. The games could be pretty much on pair, still, they were slightly different due to the way each system handles polygons. N64 too did its own thing. Now everything is the same, not nearly as interesting or exciting.
I LOVED the saturn... but at least partially because I bought something that would allow me to import games. Japan just got the best games. I so miss Sega as a hardware creator.
Hey John, make sure that you also try the astonishing SEGA Saturn CRT shader, which you can see in the video named "Sega Saturn - RetroArch CRT TV Shader/Filter" posted by Retro Crisis.
Saturn for me, although I eventually bought a PS1 and an N64, too, because each console had such different exclusive games that I wanted to play. I was crazy into Sega’s arcade conversions on the Saturn, loved playing Tekken against my friends on the PS1 and got properly addicted to Super Mario 64 on the N64
With some smart development, Saturn handled 3D great and produced excellent results. For example, Sonic R looks better and more pleasant to the eye than most PS1 3D games. Robo Pit for the Saturn looks much better than the PS1, in animation, lighting and geometry and physics. The bigger problem for the Saturn were the early devkits, and lack of understanding of how the platform worked. With better communication between devs and SEGA, the Saturn could have produced better results
The coder behind Sonic R is on youtube, and I remember he talked about programming it, and they had like instructions in parallel in the code :O must have been a nightmare to program.
"Sonic R looks better and more pleasant to the eye than most PS1 3D games", yeah maybe. Too bad it was easier to make a Sonic R looking game on PS1, and much earlier too.
I remember that battle. I went for the Saturn because I didn't like 3D games back then. Sega Saturn was more capable when it came to 2D games. 3D games had annoying controls back then.
The game thst left a permanent mark on me and some of my friends who weren't even into gaming was wipeout. the graphics, the soundtrack. I literally have soundtracks on my phone. It really set the bar so high. Sound effects. I am hoping we will have a new game one day. I mean we have the wipeout omega collection i can play on ps4/ps5 i guess.
I was looking at my Electronic Gaming Monthly issue from June of '94 right after seeing this. It shows the first pics of the Saturn console and shows off pictures of supposed "PS-X" Games. I can't believe it's already been 30 years.
I m very excited for new vídeos about psx vs saturn comparisons and tech analisys... Very very different architectures,... Each machine has its peculiar " graphic id" ... Greetings from Brazil !
I had more PS1 games than Saturn when they came out, but now that I'm older, I have more games I love on Saturn than I do on my PS1. And I'm trying to make collections of games that are still amazing to play (both japanese or english). I love both ps1 and Saturn, but it is kinda interesting that once I got access to the japanese saturn library (and translations of Saturn games), I am sitting at more games on Saturn.
Here we go, keep the Saturn stuff coming.
Yes please!
The Sega Saturn, Nintendo 64 and Sony Playstation (1), have a special place in my heart. Notably, the Saturn, it was my first ever gaming console. My dad gifted one to me for my birthday in Aug 1995; days before the release of PS1. I remember asking for a PS1 for Christmas 1995 and distinctly remembering my dad responding "Two gaming consoles? I'm not so sure about that..."; I knew immediately wasn't gonna happen.
Cut to December 1996, and I open a Sony Playstation on Christmas morning.
"I remember you telling me two [consoles] was too much. What changed your mind?"
"The Sony has really great commercials!"
I cannot wait for your content about comparing the Saturn & Playstation. Tons of great games across all platforms during that time.
The real winner was the gamers. So many great games released that generation. 😎
okay but what is your real answer
@@cronoesifyin Occident the PSX was clearly the better console mostly because a lot of the great Saturn games were stuck in Japan.
Considering the fact none made millions or billions I'd say we are 100% NOT the winner
Finally someone who understands what it’s all about.
I had a PSX as a kid and a friend of mine had a Saturn and I always thought there was something wrong with the Saturn.
saturn rgb output is one of the best analog output .
Yes, Saturn RGB output is truly beautiful!
All of sega consoles have amazing rgb output
Agreed, absolutely lovely
A DC vs PS2 Video Essay would be also very interesting
I love the Sega Saturn. I don't know why I love it so much. I still have my Saturn with about 30 games. The thing still works after almost 30 yrs.
It was built like a beast. I have both a U.S and Japanese one and they both run great.
Sega saturn came from another world another planet. I loved my too even if I had only one demo CD with sega rally, pancer dragon, Baku Baku. I was so amazed to have game console with CD rotating inside 🙂 Nice times
I can assure you it’s not blind nostalgia. I only had the N64 at the time and yet I bought an old Saturn 2 months ago.
There is something charming about it. I feel the same about Neo Geo.
You didn't have to change the battery?
@@JaggedMercenary
The battery is super easy to change. I've changed it a few times over the years.
Saturn vs Ps1 vs N64
Most exciting gaming period and graphical jump from the prior gen - IMO
I got and still have both but i had WAY more fun with my SEGA Saturn.
5 Virtua Fighter, 3 Panzer Dragoon games and the best controller EVER was enough reason for me to ♥ this fantastic system!
tomb raider and rayman are superior to PS
Great times. I remember my 10 year old self going to my local Best Buy with my dad in 1995. He was shopping around for a satellite dish and a new TV. He was comparing the Sony and the RCA models and talking to the salesman for about an hour. During this time I was having my kid mind blown playing on the PSX and Saturn kiosks they had setup in the store. My dad said we could get a "game system" as he called it, so I remember I was also comparing the PSX and the Saturn and going back and forth between the two. I wanted both but ended up with the Saturn since I had an infatuation with Sega arcade games at the time and loved the idea of having home ports of those games. I did eventually get a PSX in 1997 though.
I enjoyed the focus on arcade ports too, a lot which used super scaling which the saturn was great at and should have ported more of the CS1 sega games too. Virtua On was cool too.
At my first game dev job, it was just past this battle. I was still a PSX programmer, but learnt from the guys telling me how awkward the Saturn was to code multi CPU. Now a days it wouldn't have been as tough, but back then the architecture was very different.
Now this is something to look forward to. The 32-bit era is one of the best time periods in gaming history and I look forward to seeing these performance differences for multiplatform games. Will be much more interesting than the usual modern PS vs. Xbox stuff.
I have hundreds (thousands) of gaming magazines scanned onto my PC, including the UK Sega Saturn magazine. As Rich was the editor-in-chief for Sega Saturn magazine, it's neat to see him cover a lot of these games, including many of the titles mentioned here. I appreciate Rich also being a champion of Exhumed back in the day and was frequently singing its praises. It's good to be able to trace back these origins and see him talking about much of the same kinds of things all these years later.
stop your lying you bot
Can't wait. The Sega Saturn IS my favorite console of all time. I played Dragon Force, Guardian Heroes and Iron Storm (daisenryaku) more than any other games growing up and I still go back and play them from time to time
Ohhh I'm very much looking forward to these comparisons. I absolutely love the Saturn and the PS1.
There's something quite magical about early 3D games, at least to a millennial like me who grew up during that era.
It's funny how easily I can return to these consoles and not feel like they're "a thing of the past" or that the graphics are "ugly" or "too low-res".
I remember the Saturn Capcom crossover fighting games with the 4mb cart being amazing. The PS1 version only let you control 1 character and you wasn’t able to swap.
The PS1 version it was a complete joke and showed that the PS2 was severely lacking in the ram required for 2D fighters
As a lifelong Sega fan, I opted for Saturn instead of the Playstation, and while I thoroughly enjoyed it, I could see how some games looked better on my brothers Playstation. Tomb Raider and Resident Evil come to mind. I remember seeing his version of Resident Evil, especially the water scenes, and seeing the big difference. Still, I wouldn't go back and change my choice for nothing. I had so many great experiences on my Saturn that weren't available on any other consoles at that time.
The difference in sound hardware (non Redbook) is pretty interesting as well.
I was there, 3000 years ago...
On a more serious note, glad to see John call PS1 games ported to the Saturn for what they are (in comparison)...vastly inferior ports that made the Saturn look weak. So many other UA-camrs gave these awful ports a pass.
I have a Sega Saturn and it’s a great machine. But the original PlayStation was… well… better! Developers were given a powerful machine that was super easy to exploit. While the Saturn was also powerful… it was just too difficult to program.
@@MrSamPhoenixNo Saturn was king of 2D and PlayStation was king of 3D
@@kamarrawlings6285 if you say so. Both had fantastic 2D games.
@@kamarrawlings6285 NeoGeo was the king of 2D
I wouldn’t say they were poor ports, resident evil exhumed quake just to name a few were better versions on the Saturn plus the controller is much superior to ps1
I wish Daytona USA 1 would get a modern port for new systems, Daytona USA 2 got the "Sega Racing Classic 2" port in Like a Dragon Gaiden which was excellent, i just hope that if SEGA do it that Takenobu Mitsuyoshi's version of the theme is in there, Mitsuyoshi-san's version was so iconic and it was a shame that it couldn't be included in Sega Racing Classic 2
Facts
Daytona is perfectly playable at 1080p 60 on xbox consoles. But it's true that people can't buy it anymore. Such a shame those licences issues.
I got t on ps3
@James-gj8rn Daytona USA already gotten a digital release on Xbox 360 and PS3 back in 2011
Sega Rally Championship was my favourite
Love it. I once had a long conversation with an old Tantalus developer on one of the main gaming forums about this very subject. I learned a bunch that day. Also, IMO, Tantalus' ports are pretty solid as compared to other 3rd party, fully 3D Saturn games. Tantalus did a good enough job that Sega contracted them for the Manx TT Superbike port. I think that says something.
Don't forget to apply the cathode-ray tube mask. Both the Sega Saturn and the PlayStation used dithering, and the only way to get the intended visual experience from them is to keep the dithering effect with a CRT mask.
and with the composite video smudge, too
@@MicahtheDrumCorpsPseudoboomer
Your profile picture is so tiny on my phone screen I thought it was two cheeks hanging out of a thong. Imagine my disappointment when I enlarged it to see a couple of brown eggs
Nothing to do with "CRT masks", it's composite video. And it's not "to keep the dithering effect". it's to conceal the dithering with said composite signal.
I don't care about the "intended visual experience", for me dithering is a charming thing games back then used to do, I don't _want_ or _need_ a CRT TV/Monitor, nor do I resort to using CRT filters in emulators. Give me my pixels raw, please. I'm not gonna have a stroke or explode by not seeing "what the developers originally intended" and this CRT Elitism needs to _stop._
@garaschneider4808 Yeah, that's what I meant to say, more like "keeping the optical illusion of transparency and wider color palettes with a CRT mask that emulates composite video". There's gotta be a combination of settings in the Retrotink 4K that achieves this with the lowest loss of graphical clarity.
First home console 3d game that completely blew me away, it wasn't mario 64. It was panzer dragoon zwei, that game was incredible when it dropped.
Cool! I had a similar experience seeing the original panzer dragoon at a friend's house when I was a little kid. It was magical. Mario 64 was more magical but I saw panzer dragon first!
Jungle Strike on Genesis for me 😂jk
Yes ..mind blowing in every way ..this was the game that showed me real 3D as well
Sorry, but it was Mario 64 for me that blew me away but in terms of fighting games at the time virtua fighter 2 blow me away on the Saturn as well as Sega rally.
@@southsidetherealest2860 I had that! Awesome LOL
This battle will last forever.
It's a shame that only Japanese Saturn owners got to enjoy so many great games, like shmups, fighting games, and even Capcom Marvel crossovers. Even though PlayStation had better marketing and more popular games, I have to say that the Japanese lineup of games could have helped Saturn succeed in the US and EU too.
For me, Saturn holds a special place in my gamer heart. I had it before PlayStation, so my love for Sega was, and still is, strong. The games for Saturn were awesome!
Thanks for this video.
There was a change in taste for games at that time which was generally moving away from arcade coin op or similar style titles which the Saturn was really strong at. People in the west were looking for dedicated home experiences developed from the ground up like Resident Evil and Tomb Raider. Unfortunately, what is or was popular in Japan didn’t necessarily translate to success elsewhere.
The subsequent release of the Dreamcast also suffered from too many arcade conversions with too few games with significant depth and those that did appear came in the consoles very last breath.
The Saturn's popularity in Japan gets way overplayed (same as the N64's unpopularity in the country). The Saturn rode the vf 2 craze of the mid 90's, but after that the japanese came around to the same mindset as well. 1997 with FF 7 and dq 7 is what did it. All you have to do is look at sales charts for the country and arcade ports died there as well. It's was all about immersive 3d games built for the home in mind just like everywhere else.
@@ericp631
I disagree. Saturn games were still being produced and the Saturn was still selling very well when the Dreamcast released in Japan. A system that is still selling when it's successor is on the market shows it's popularity. Just look at the PS4 and PS5 today.
In a weird twist of fate Sega hired the moron from Sony (I think his name was Bernie Stolar) to be Chief Executive in the U.S who was very much against importing games from Japan. So the marketing strategy shifted right at that crucial time and many Japanese games and RPG's were being ported to Playstation at a time when they were probably the most popular they ever were, and during that time the Saturn got just a few. So many amazing games were left in Japan, it's not even funny. It's really sad actually.
@@SeanUCF Like I said, you can check out the sales data from then and see for yourself. Remember the Dreamcast was a giant disaster in Japan. And games are often time released on previous consoles not because the consoles are still selling well, but because they have an ownership base(it's an extremely common practice that all consoles have this happens with). The Saturn had over 5 million units sold and CD's were so cheap to print it's worth the gamble if you're talking the local market. But a print run, let alone sales figure of 40,000 are not good figures for Japan back then. All you need to do is look at what the PlayStation was doing over the same period.
It’s cool that these vids are still engaging for people who didn’t game in that era.
The question of which console is more powerful has always been a topic of interest. The reality is that it depends on what you are trying to achieve. If you were to fully utilize the capabilities of the Saturn to develop a game, it would not look or perform as well on the PlayStation, and vice versa. Therefore, if you wanted to create a game that would excel on both platforms, you would need to create two distinct versions, each optimized for the hardware of its respective platform.
This is different from modern consoles or PCs, which run on similar X86/X64 hardware designs. Nowadays, a single game can be developed to adjust the resolution, textures, and lighting to accommodate different hardware with varying levels of computing power.
The Saturn and PS1 were entirely separate machines, designed to deliver high-end visuals far beyond what 16-bit era game consoles could achieve. However, Sega and Sony took different approaches to reach this common goal. As a result, the way they processed information differed, and the raw power of each system was situated in different areas within each system. Understanding this, developers had to adopt different strategies to fully utilize the potential of each platform.
At the end of the day, Saturn and PlayStation One each had distinct advantages and disadvantages from one another. But both are still very powerful machines for their time.
A long time ago, a generation far, far away: the golden age of gaming. Before the dark times. Before the Empire. ‘The more you consolidate the industry, the more systems will slip through your fingers.’
I can’t imagine what life was like so long ago when PlayStation 1 and Sega Saturn was around. It’s mind-baffling that Sega actually made CONSOLES back in the day! I know about them because of Sonic & Yakuza.
Sega made some great consoles and Rich actually wrote for a Sega Saturn magazine.
@@LeonSKennedy7777 your comment made me feel ancient
Saturn was so underrated especially the Japan side of it great console sega rally still the goat when it comes to handling and 2d fighting games Saturn was a beast still have my Saturn
Think piracy helped the PS1 a lot.
Sega Rally was amazing
The Sega Saturn was very capable, but its potential was never fully realized.
The Saturn had a lot of amazing games, too bad most of them were stuck in Japan…
Too bad US management was so dumb (EUR one did not existed at all)
Again this stupid myth. The western library was amazing. All of the best saturn games were also released in the west
@drunkensailor Its NOT a myth. Everyone with a single functioning brain cell knows that Japan had a much larger Saturn library mainly because the Saturn was more successful there. But in North America & Europe, the Saturn was a commercial failure in terms of console sales, therefore it had a significantly smaller library than its Japanese counterpart. If you dont believe me regarding the console sales numbers then simple google it. So no, all of the best Saturn games did NOT release in the west. Many Saturn games are still stuck in Japan and have never been released for other regions. I absolutely loathe when clueless people (such as yaself) try to chime in and act like they have any clue of what they're talking about......
97/98 was one of the most memorable times of my life when it came to games. I cant wait for John's project to be completed.
I love the retro stuff you do, keep it up guys!
John’s passion about this is really cool
I always imagine what would happen if the Playstation had more ram ...capcom fighting games would have been so much better, or if the Saturn had better 3d hardware and was easier to program for
Then both would have been a lot more expensive and everyone would have complained.
And if N64 had more cartridge space.
@@skycloud4802 was also thinking larger texture cache for that as I heard that was a pain point
@@bellissimo4520 with the ram for psone yup, not sure with the saturn though as 3d was like a later implementation but i wonder if the system was created with 3d being more prominent right at the start
John's DF Retro series is unmatched. Such good content! Makes me look at retro consoles and games in such a different light and makes me appreciate it even more.
John's work is the only reason I stay subscribed to DIGITAL FOUNDRY. All the recent focus on the current things has got me bored. Love when John's given free reign to explore topics in depth. Miss me with your guys next video on DLSS or Fluid Motion Frames updates.
Compare to 3DO where multiplatform titles exist
I am so up for this. Can't wait for people to find out about the resolution and frame rate stuff like VF2 was running at, over the Tekken series etc.
Dreamcast Vs PS2 next!!!
Grandia 2 did the same in the Dreamcast vs PS2
Grandia took some hits during its port to PlayStation, but it also had its fair share of benefits. It got proper transparency effects, more vibrant spell effects, better sound and better load times. The idea that the PlayStation version is a strict downgrade isn't necessarily true.
And an English translation!
Although the real Grandia fan would still need a Saturn to play Grandia Digital Museum.
The SNES could do transparencies without convoluted programming. SEGA was offered the help of Silicon Graphics and turned it down. SEGA of Japan was a mess. I remember being super excited about the Saturn…and buying a PS1.
Saturn has the same 2d transparency capabilities as snes. And then some. But polygon transparency was an issue of course.
@gamesandplanes3984 Having the same capabilities as a previous gen console is nothing to brag about.
Totally down for a lengthy video, or entire series on this.
Comparing both direct ports, launch games, similar games in a genre, etc.
It was such an exciting time for gaming by all metrics. Gameplay, graphics, audio, innovations, IPs.. but the difference in those two console's libraries and capabilities meant that you really needed both to truly get the best of that generation.
Can't wait excited for this... As an og Saturn owner, it baffled my pre-teen mind that the Saturn was " not powerful" like the PS1 was. Yet the Saturn had games that looked and performed just as well as the PS1 had
Oh boy. Looking forward to this one! I had a Saturn in that period and I always looked enviously at PSX games 😂
Awwwww shit. Here we go. Saturn. Fight me.
Jaeger input on this like any subjects were really enlightning :P
This is the video from DF I'm most excited about ever! Hopefully this will be one of the epic several hours videos from John as the topic deserves it!
Really anxious for that! I hope you do comparisions on more obscure ports as well, since there are dozens of comparisons of popular games, such as Grandia, Resident Evil, Tomb Raider, etc.
More Saturn please!!
Nice! Would love to see Tomb Raider, Resident Evil, Rayman, then some of the 2D Capcom fighters
And Symphony of the Night 😉
When it comes to PlayStation vs Saturn, the 2 gamse that come to mind is X-Men vs Street Fighter and Marvel Super Heroes vs Street Fighter. Both of those were released but the PS1 version had animations frames missing and it had the tag team feature removed. Apparently this was due to the lack of enough RAM on the PS1.
Ultimately I had a PS1 since more games were on it that I liked and Saturn was not really available in the US and not many games got released in the US.
The Saturn was easy to find in America and there were plenty of game available in the US market.
I was thinking that I would only get to buy 8 used games for either system, and I just liked the top 8 games of Sega Saturn and I could rent from a sizable library so I got the sega console.
I loved this Saturn/PS1/N64 era because the consoles were so different from each other. They all had vastly different ideas about what the next generation of gaming would be, and we were all better off for all of these companies having different ideas.
will Segata Sanchiro make a cameo?
It's such a shame that most of Saturn's best library was Japan specific.
Come on Sega, you cowards, Sakura Wars 1-5 compilation for modern platforms.
Very much looking forward to this video.
This generation is when my interest in gaming turned into a passion.
Sure they'll be the Wipeout comparison, and Tomb Raider, Resident Evil and all the Capcom 2D fighters, but I'm looking forward to the Alien Trilogy, Exhumed, Hexen, Duke Nukem and, particularly Doom, showdowns.
Recently I wacthed a long Japanese retrospective video about the Saturn hardware. What I understood from it, via auto-translate admittedly, was that the Saturn's problem with 3D compared to PlayStation was transform-and-lighting being totally overlooked when choosing/designing the CPUs and VDPs. The PlayStation was very innovative in that some T&L support was included, and at the time I think even PC graphics cards didn't have T&L but were able to compensate with their much faster CPUs.
However, Saturn's sprite handling wasn't a bottleneck and possibly never got pushed to its limit in terms of sprite numbers or fill rate.
The first consumer GPU that did hardware T&L was the Original GeForce 256. Before then T&L was done in software on the CPU or DSP chips in consoles.
For the PS1 T&L was done on the CPU & GTE (Geometry Transformation Engine), a co-processor Sony created that did fixed-point math.
For the Saturn, after Sega heard about the PlayStation's 3D abilities, Sega added a second SH-2 and the SCU (Saturn Control Unit). The two SH-2s and the SCU did the T&L on the Saturn. The SCU consisted of two units, a DMA controller to arbitrate all the data between all the different processors and a DSP that did 3D math. The DSP in the SCU was stupidly complicated and hard to use. There's a great video on Game Hut, programmer at Travelers Tales the developers of Sonic R, on how hard it was to use the DSP.
The GameCube and Xbox were the first consoles with hardware T&L built in the GPU. With the Xbox being even more advanced with Pixel and Vertex Shaders. The PS2 relied on the CPU, Vector Units and the FPU to do T&L. While the Dreamcast relied on the SH-4 and its FPU.
SS VDP1 fillrate was/is much less powerful than PSX' GTE (PSX one is theoretical 66 MPixel, SS VDP1, while no actual data are available it's said to be 3 to 5 times less powerful, it's a know fact). A recent test on youtube shows how VDP1 fillrate is the only reason why Sega Touring Car SS conversion runs at 20fps instead on 30fps. There was dev talkings about a hybrid hw rendering with VDP plus sw rendering using SH2s (probably together with SCU DSP), we are talking about a programming nightmare anyway in this case...
@@slashrose3287 Maybe it was entirely a sprite count thing and I was misinterpreting it.
I looked into Sega Touring Car Championship though, and saw two odd things:
1. It's a 30fps game. I recall magazines saying that it was 20fps on Saturn, but all videos of it definitely show it to be a 30fps game.
2. In the cutscene around the garage after the qualifying lap, it's entirely 60fps. It's not interactive and no cars are around other than the player's chosen one, but it is fullscreen 3D, no VDP2 ground, same assets as in gameplay, at 60fps.
The best way to compare, is to compare modern tech demos etc as well some amazing stuff on Saturn
I used to read the official Sega Saturn magazine UK every month
The 2d capcom fighting games on saturn are so good , they look better ten the arcade originals
Would have been nice if we had more b-roll
Really looking forward to this. As Rich said, this will mostly be a case of the lead platform having the best version with the port to the other console usually suffering. It will be interesting to see if Resident Evil 1 gets tested, I believe it has better 3D on the PS1 but higher resolution backgrounds on the Saturn.
I kinda wish you *showed* these side by sides while you described them so we can see the comparisons
When I see John tackling Saturn stuff, I'm always excited ! Good luck my friend, I know it's hard work, can't wait for this to come ;)
Saturn = 2D King
PlayStation = 3D King
End of story.
Nah for that gen n64 was the 3d king, ps1 was the rpg and third party king, Saturn had the fighting games and shoot em ups
True generally, though there are always exceptions, such as the PlayStation having the best version of Symphony of the Night.
They Create World podcast has a cool episode about Saturn, focused on Sega behind the scenes. Seem to be true that they added a second processor because PS1. Saturn uses 2D to create 3D polygon. This is why Saturn had quads and not triangles.
SS and 16.000,00$ arcade Model 2 board used the same "forward mapping" method with primitive quad rendering. PSX was the first system with a dedicated math processor that accelerates vector and matrix calculations, with rendering using triangle primitive, on which PSX add texture: this choice allowed easily many 3d advanced rendering (enviroment mapping, alpha blending, etc) while SS and all previoius 3d system struggled due to the way rendering is done (there are videos which expose in depth those fundamental differencies). Arcade Model 3 was the first Sega board to boost primitive triangle and advanced 3d effects, then was released DC and Naomi arcade counterpart, true 3D and 2D powerhouse. It's SAID first SS instance was one SH2 and only VDP1, after PSX presentation Sega was forced to add 2° SH2 and VDP2... I think this situation might be actually accurate, hence the incompatibility between VDP & 2 , the limited 32-bit data transfer channel shared by BOTH SH2 with VDP, etc. . Dunno if SCU DSP was in the original 1992 project or not (same year Sega refused to coonect with Sony to produce a common 32 bit console..)
Playstation was better and more impactful by a mile. John prefers the Saturn though
It's also interesting when bringing up the N64 in these comparisons, since also a lot of games that were made for N64 in mind suffered a lot when ported to PS1, and also a lot of 3D PC games or Midway arcade ports were a better fit for the N64 than PS1, but then obviously every game that actually used the CD space on high quality textures, fmv and voices suffered a lot on the jump to N64 or they were just not possible on it.
One thing that N64 emulation doesn't account for is how extra blurry the N64 output was really pluged into a TV. When you add really low res blurry texture because of the cartridge... Sometimes it was not that evident that the blurry mess of N64 was superior to PS1 or Saturn 3D games, even tho N64 had more stable 3D and bilinear filtering.
Least N64 being cart kept the load times to a minimum
The loading times on the n64 were so much better, the ps1 was full of fmv which is just a waste of time now.
The ps one has awful texture warping as well, I still think the ps one is the worst of the generation today.
Throw in the Saturn port/tech demo of Unreal for some bonus wow content. I would be really interested to see a take on what the state of the art in 3D on each system was over time. '95 and '96 the Saturn didn't seem too inferior to PS1, but then the PS1 started to have some really incredible looking games in the middle and back end of its life.
Man i cant wait for this series...always had a soft spot for the saturn...it was far more capable than most put into it. Gonna be awesome! Thanks DF.
I can’t believe they never did this video before... looking forward to it!
Love seeing John's passion. Maybe later you can also do PS1 vs N64 and Dreamcast since they had a number of ports across each other like Vigilante 8: 2nd Offense
Would love to see in depth comparisons of Thunderforce V, Salamander 2, Dead or Alive, Street Fighter Alpha 3, King of Fighters 95-97, Need for Speed, Space Hulk, Grandia, Silhouette Mirage, Nekketsu Oyako, Primal Rage and so many others.
Overlapping sprite on Saturn are only things are treated with dithering if dev set one of them to be semi transparent as to make sure that they’ll not “devour” one another like a solid sprite does.
But any transparency that are built within VDP2 scene layer or background layer (it work with foreground too) work perfectly fine. It work ONLY across its multi layers capability but between sprite the VDP2 will just ignore them as the system will treat both sprite as a mere pixel and not two separate object with transparency effect on one or both of them.
If only VDP1 got another one or two extra layer then things would be different but I still love seeing how dev and hardware engineering mitigate every single weaknesses of each machines to deliver the best possible experience.
Mega Man 8 is a nice comparison point since it offers a rare chance to compare the sound chips of the PS1/Saturn, which were hardly ever used in favor of CD audio. But MM8 used purely synthesized music on both consoles, and if you listen to them side by side, they do sound subtly different between each other (aside from a couple songs being completely different).
I was a big fan of Sega Saturn magazine back in the day with Rich at the helm! I miss those days!
I'd like to see SNES vs. Genesis and PS1 vs. N64 too.
Super looking forward to this. This sounds right up your alley, John!
You're starting a proper Console War Re-enactment Group? Let's gooo!
Reg. Grandia‘s floor maps, that reminded me of the Mode 7 routine on the Playstation. Of course that was less detailed, but served it‘s purpose on games like Mario Kart, F-Zero, Super Star Wars, Demon‘s Crest, Actraiser, etc
You could recognize their games by their look. The games could be pretty much on pair, still, they were slightly different due to the way each system handles polygons. N64 too did its own thing.
Now everything is the same, not nearly as interesting or exciting.
I loved the Saturn and I had that before before the PS1, Saturn was a nice console but PS1 was just better overall.
I LOVED the saturn... but at least partially because I bought something that would allow me to import games. Japan just got the best games. I so miss Sega as a hardware creator.
I’m excited for that episode! Would be perfect for an early fall or winter release to commemorate the 30th anniversary for each!
I always appreciate these retro deep dives but I honestly thought it would be more in depth. Hopefully you guys revisit this again in the future
What the? This is DF Clips mate. A preview of an upcoming Saturn VS PS1 "deep dive".
Hey John, make sure that you also try the astonishing SEGA Saturn CRT shader, which you can see in the video named "Sega Saturn - RetroArch CRT TV Shader/Filter" posted by Retro Crisis.
Dude that will be an awesome episode. Bring it on 😎
Please do a 3D comparison of games ported from all 3
Saturn was my favourite console that gen and possibly ever. However, objectively speaking Sega got it completely wrong.
Saturn for me, although I eventually bought a PS1 and an N64, too, because each console had such different exclusive games that I wanted to play. I was crazy into Sega’s arcade conversions on the Saturn, loved playing Tekken against my friends on the PS1 and got properly addicted to Super Mario 64 on the N64
Saturn was barely mentioned in my region. Super interesting to learn about it compared to the PS1 which was a monster success.
The japanese Saturn library has WITHOUT QUESTION one the best libraries of all time! If you love 2d fighters and shmups,you´re in for a treat!
Is dynamic tone mapping better off or on when playing retro consoles like the PlayStation or Sega Saturn?
Why would Psygnosis make their games look good on the Saturn, they were owned by Sony werent they?
With some smart development, Saturn handled 3D great and produced excellent results. For example, Sonic R looks better and more pleasant to the eye than most PS1 3D games. Robo Pit for the Saturn looks much better than the PS1, in animation, lighting and geometry and physics.
The bigger problem for the Saturn were the early devkits, and lack of understanding of how the platform worked. With better communication between devs and SEGA, the Saturn could have produced better results
The coder behind Sonic R is on youtube, and I remember he talked about programming it, and they had like instructions in parallel in the code :O must have been a nightmare to program.
I would love to see the early doom port which ran at 60fps but had image warping just to see how it was
Dual CPU Processing much like modern CPUs do now, but more convoluted
"Sonic R looks better and more pleasant to the eye than most PS1 3D games", yeah maybe. Too bad it was easier to make a Sonic R looking game on PS1, and much earlier too.
I remember that battle. I went for the Saturn because I didn't like 3D games back then. Sega Saturn was more capable when it came to 2D games. 3D games had annoying controls back then.
The game thst left a permanent mark on me and some of my friends who weren't even into gaming was wipeout. the graphics, the soundtrack. I literally have soundtracks on my phone. It really set the bar so high. Sound effects. I am hoping we will have a new game one day. I mean we have the wipeout omega collection i can play on ps4/ps5 i guess.
Had both over the years. Prefer the physical design of the Saturn and RGB out. Huge soft spot for it. Would take PS1 for wealth of titles though.
I was looking at my Electronic Gaming Monthly issue from June of '94 right after seeing this. It shows the first pics of the Saturn console and shows off pictures of supposed "PS-X" Games. I can't believe it's already been 30 years.
I m very excited for new vídeos about psx vs saturn comparisons and tech analisys...
Very very different architectures,...
Each machine has its peculiar " graphic id" ...
Greetings from Brazil !
I had more PS1 games than Saturn when they came out, but now that I'm older, I have more games I love on Saturn than I do on my PS1.
And I'm trying to make collections of games that are still amazing to play (both japanese or english).
I love both ps1 and Saturn, but it is kinda interesting that once I got access to the japanese saturn library (and translations of Saturn games), I am sitting at more games on Saturn.