you explained this well and better than i would have, had i approached this subject i probably would have used humor in places where it wouldn't need to be to draw comparisons. great video and BTW there's nothing wrong with the way you speak or how you pause during sentences. you speak like a normal lad, don't let people try to shit on you for keeping it humble and grounded
Thank you for the kind words, I think a lot of the issues people are bringing up are down to my audio mix which hopefully I can correct in future videos
The hardware design really looks like they were focused on porting their arcade games to home, but misread the market and didnt expect games like what developers were looking to make and gamers were wanting to play. Like the hardware was perfect for games like Virtua Fighter, where both VDP1 and 2 could work in tandem, but a lot of games really wanted to be fully 3D without the old school 2D backgrounds being a major part of the graphics. Would have been great if VDP2 was just as capable as VDP1 along with its traditional capabilities.
Happy 30th Saturn! Great job on the video Retro48. This was really well outlined for those of us not intimately knowledgeable in the technical intricacies of the console. Loved it. And so glad I finally got a Saturn ….currently playing though my first game ever now (PDS 😊)
Great video! Though I think the 7th gen was the last generation where every system had a unique look. Dreamcast with its tile based deferred rendering, the PS2 had low quality textures but alot games that used framebuffer effects, GameCube games had high quality textures and Xbox had games that used shaders. You could tell games apart for each system. Even multiplatform games like Splinter Cell looked totally different on each console.
7th gen had a lot of games looking pretty similar to each other besides exclusives. PS3 and 360 titles never really looked too different aside from missing effect, often due to people not understanding how to use the PS3's chip
I cannot believe I have not found your channel sooner , fantastic commentary, well presented and a real wealth of information on show not to mention the huge effort you have put in , well done sir you have a subscriber for life
Perfect way to pay homage for the debut of the SEGA SATURN 30yrs ago in Japan November 22, 1994. IMO a stellar SEGA product with an amazing collection of games once you tape into the Japanese market.
Saturn is my favorite system... Kind of wish indie devs took a crack at it like they do on Dreamcast... It has entirely unique visuals in the fact that you can see the programming tricks they used to achieve certain results... Everyone I knew had Playstation, but when I'd pop in Panzer Dragoon Zwei, Dragon Force, Radiant Silvergun, or Guardian Heroes they would be stunned... The games we played the most though were Decathlete, Winter Heat, and X-men vs Street Fighter/Marvel Superheroes vs Street Fighter... We wore out those sega arcade fighter sticks... I have Retrotink 4k now, and dear god is that thing Amazing at making Saturn look like it should on a modern TV...
The Saturn kind of getting reevaluated today, but I never knew anyone who had one during its lifetime. It kind of reminds me of the PS3 in that both should have been very powerful on paper, but their eccentricities made ports a challenge. When you did have a programmer who really understood how they worked though, both could do some really impressive things.
Cool video, always good to hear more about the most intriguing failure in video console history that Saturn is, it jut turned 30 too! Also all the myths you spoke about were technically facts lol. What next, maybe Jaguar? I heard it was also rather complex (and killed a company like Saturn).
I think if SEGA had really prepared better, and helped people by offering more dev. kits and giving training on how to use both dev.kits and how to program for the Saturn. Like training several in-house experts and sending them out to help or train other developers. I think they were too paranoid about helping or giving away info to their competitors, so in the end they did exactly what they were afraid of doing, but more by sabotaging themselves. (In MANY ways, not just the programming for Saturn)
OK at first I was like.. this sounds like a cool idea for a video to help get people interested in this stuff through retro gaming. I don't know how much of the video I'll watch though. Now I'm like.. wtf.. This guy is making this look really simple.. You're just explaining it so well and it's all making sense perfectly. Good luck with your channel. subbed. Maybe you could do this for games and old computers like the msx or dos computers etc. I'll check out your game reviews at some point too as I'm hoping there is some of this easy to understand technical stuff in it but if there is you should really make it obvious in the title as it's different from just "x game review".
Been really enjoying this series, a great concise breakdown of these consoles. I agree that there was something special about each system having its own unique architecture. I guess the PS3 was the last major console with weird unique architecture (which arguably ended up kneecapping the whole concept altogether). Look forward to seeing what comes next!
There wasn't much strange about the CPU's architecture as it was just an IBM PowerPC chip much like the 360 and Wii/GameCube. It was those SPUs which made it special and difficult to understand to get its full potential. The Cell chip did have other things unique about it though
While expensive in a physical media production cost, a Cartridge/CD-Rom combo would have been the perfect delivery method for this machine and that era of gaming which was crippled by 2X CD-Rom speeds - if you wanted the best in both loading times and total amount of content. You would basically load most of VDP2's tasks at the beginning of a scene, having a deep library of content on CD-ROM to load from for backgrounds, scene layout, etc You would load some unique scene assets to VDP1 from CD-ROM at the beginning, but primarily access common game assets, run program code, sprites, small sample sounds, straight from the cartridge. The CD-Rom could stream in rich audio as well. Are there some examples of this? If that were the intended use for the Saturn they may have set up the Working RAM and VDP RAM allocations differently.
Great video. I always thought the trade offs were in favor of the Saturn for image quality. Dithered transparencies in some Saturn games versus dithering all over the screen in most 3D PS1 games was a no brainer for me. Relatively stable for non-perspective correct hardware Quads versus severely warping triangles, that frequently can't even hold together between frames, was also a good call by Sega's engineers as far as I'm concerned. The Saturn not being able to do Gran Turismo - like fake reflections has been disproven by the dev who made the reflective car demo and adapted Unreal to Saturn. It is stated somewhere that the reflective texture displayed in both is a hardware feature, not a CPU driven C effect.
The reflection effect in Sonic R that I'm referring to was a not a hardware effect the dev has a UA-cam channel and discusses it there. I'm sure someone has figured out how to do the fake reflections now but at the time it was not thought possible.
Seriously Sega needs to reconsider coming back. So much information they've had to gather to see how modern gaming is for them not to know how to do it. Sega if your listening ... You got this, please come back! 🙏🏽
They'd just end up releasing another AMD chipset based console. There's no architectural variety out there anymore, and developing something new is prohibitively expensive.
the saturn is like releasing an arcade architecture for home consoles - assured to only get first-party titles that use it to its fullest, and a bunch of wacky third-party titles that do not move units. SNK made the same mistake back in the day - more like SMH am i right
The problem was Sega was constantly pushing its arcade hardware so even those first party games looked worse because of it where as Sony had Namco making arcade games on basically turbo charged PlayStation hardware. Compare Virtua Fighter and Tekken on the arcades and at home as an example of this, VF 3 would have looked wildly out of date on the Saturn, simple because Segas arcade hardware was so bleeding edge
The main correction I would point out would be when you talked about the reflections like the sonic head in Sonic R. It wasn't slower (just) because they had to write it in C. It was slower because it's was a 100% software render pass done only on a CPU and could not use any of the geometry functions of VDP1 It's a little like Quake 2, among many other PC games, that had a software renderer that was entirely done on the CPU and then there was the ability to off load a bunch of calculations to a graphics card like a 3DFX VooDoo and speed things up considerably. Maybe that's what you meant in the first place but it wasn't clear in the video. I know how easy it can be to think something but not translate that thought into text as you meant it. Otherwise nice overview video and well produced.
Sega Saturn is my favorite of the Sega consoles. Such a shame it wasn't popular outside of Japan. The Saturn was incredibly capable in both 2D and 3D graphics and if it were easier to program for it actually can pull out visuals much better than Sony's PlayStation could.
In some cases yes but in a commercial setting time and effort cost money so even if your the best programmer in the world you would want to be working on a system that allowed you get focus on the most bang for your buck rather than wrestling with the hardware if you see what I mean
You'd forget an advantage the distorted sprites, that was the technical name of Saturn quads, had over the competence, Saturn drew them with perspective correction, meaning the tesellation that happened on other systems to avoid the wobly textures on the close-ups could be mitigated, or even avoided, also, the vdp2 scrolling planes could be used as "mode7" planes, and draw really large environments using tiles and horizontal interrupt tricks.
The VDP2 infinite plane bg layers could be given XY co-ordinates and this made it easy to build a 3D scene and incorporate the infinite (mode7 style) planes with VDP1 polygons. The 'distorted sprites' had _some_ perspective correction and this helped warped textures not be so warped. This meant textures close to the camera held their shape better. But apparently, the Saturn was less good at displaying large distorted sprites/textured polygons (ie close to the camera) than the PSX but better at multiple but smaller textured polygons. The other thing was the 'pixel grid' or sub pixel grid or something. That is, there is such a thing as a sub-pixel. That is geometry or sprite positioning that can be calculated in finer increments than the actual resolution. As the PSX had only as many co-ordinates as there were visible pixels on the screen, I believe this was the cause of the 'polygon wobble' often seen on the PSX.
@@iwanttocomplain There's multiple reasons for polygon wobble on the PSX, but they all stem from the limitations along the whole chain of the render pipeline, the limitation being that it was all 32-bit integer math. The wobble you're referring to is part of the final rendering of the coordinate system to a pixel onscreen, and the Saturn has this issue too. It's not so big a problem as the output it pixelated anyway. A bigger problem was the accuracy of the transform calculations for a given set of 3D coordinates on the Playstation. Since this was done in hardware and you couldn't really change how this was done, if the area you were calculating across was wide enough, it magnified the inaccuracies in the math since in a given axis you only had 4 billion possible coordinates. If you were stacking multiple calculations together in a row, the error would magnify and polygon vertices would start jumping around. On the Saturn, since you had no fixed hardware geometry engine, you could tailor how your software handled it to the task at hand. Most developers did their transforms in software on the SH-2, with a few developers using the generic DSP for some calculations. While these were still 32-bit, since you had more direct control of the pipeline, you had more granularity in how you could pick the scale for the calculations. For this reason polygon wobble tends to be pretty uniformly bad on the Playstation, whereas the Saturn had more variation -- more akin to the wobble you'd see on software 3D engines on early PC 3D polygon games. The irony is that you can eliminate much of the wobble on many games on Playstation emulators now *because* of uniform use of the 32-bit hardware engine. You have the emulator keep track of "shadow registers" which extend the CPU, GTE, and rasterizer registers to 64-bits. The software is completely oblivious to this and thinks it's pushing 32-bit values around, but the emulator does 64-bit calculations on every register and memory location. You can't really do this on Saturn emulators because of all the variable casting between formats being done in software and lots of use of precalculated tables in that software.
@@NozomuYume it seems that you can never learn a whole system completely. I'm not sure how 8bill isn't a large enough number to get accurate positioning though. I can't understand the value of a 64bit number even though I do keep trying to...
@@iwanttocomplain The problem was clipping the quads at the near projection distance when the primitives couldn't remain as quads, they were split into other primitives, which didn't retain the rendering information, that was their biggest, and meaniest drawback
@@santitabnavascues8673 primitives isn't really a thing when you have rectangles or rectangles. Textures close to the projection disappeared before the fix was figured out. Daytona shows this happening.
The reason triangles are used as the basic primitive in basically all GPUs is because triangles are always planar so you never have to worry about non planar polygons.
There is no worry when you use painters algorithm anyway. Yeah, but backface culling? It is already kinda expensive with two multiplications per triangle, but with quads you need to find the crossing of the edges. Gotta check upper edge, check lower edge. If forward facing, start from there. Stop when crossed??
I have not played Saturn before this year for the first time. I was really surprised by the good sound quality. I have a relatively good sound system, and it did sound good. And I think the games have held up pretty good, but that could be because of the more "simple graphic" fits better on a modern TV, some games on the PSX is almost unplayable on anything else than a CRT. I wonder how games could have looked on the Saturn if it continued along with the PSX. Maybe Populous The beginning would fit better on the Saturn the PSX.
The Saturn had *great* audio hardware for synthesized music generation. It was so good that many times when porting Saturn games to the Playstation, the Playstation developers converted Saturn music to ADPCM audio tracks on the Playstation rather than trying to generate the music on the Playstation's sound hardware. This even resulted in a few Playstation ports needing more discs to fit all the audio tracks. Going the other way it was a problem for the Saturn as it had no audio compression (PSX supported ADPCM), so to fit RAM limitations sample quality was often worse for wavetable music and sound effects ported over from the PSX.
So just to let you know, I'm 5 seconds in and almost decided not to watch the video because of that intro. I'm still going to watch the video after I made it through that, but you gotta reconsider that intro. I really hope it's not in your other videos because you're getting the viewer off to a really bad start by setting the mood. Which is the opposite of pleasant.
That intro sound ugh... Why??? If it wasn't because I really am interested in Saturn, I'd leave. A shame, because the rest of the video is really well done
I don't think you've got the transparency information right. The rendered would not draw quads the way you describe, and if it did, thr hatching wouldn't look any better than true transparency. The fact of the matter is, adding two colors together is a much cheaper than alpha blending, so many early 3D chips were able to do "additive transparency" which works for fire and the like, but not "alpha transparency" which blends two colors together based on an alpha value and requires a multiplication per pixel.
a truly crazy system .. dual CPU, dual GPU .. extreme demands on the programmer. But with great coding, it will create a fantastic port of Unreal, which is very demanding on HW ! ua-cam.com/video/WpcjkDDLoXM/v-deo.html
I should have quit this video on the "32bit gen", but take it until MHz were synonym of processing power. UA-cam really is not a place to find technical infos when it came into retro video game
There is no replacement for displacement in cars. Likewise a lot of these cheats to increase processing power by other means increased the power consumption and heat production. Even the infamous Intel P4 basically came back when fabs got more advanced. Look how N64 increased clocks everywhere!
excellent explanations, I knew some of them but not at all about the transparency tricks. Just as a friendly critic, you sound like whispering as if you are about to wake up someone sleeping next room, I had to max the volue so I could listen to you.
Hi thanks, this is actually one of my earlier videos from when I ran the channel a few years back I have since (hopefully) improved my sound mix so you may find it better in my other videos.
The Sega Saturn was all-in-all a very great 2D to 2.5D machine, but not so great at 3D. It was a very expensive system to manufacture and more expensive on the market. The biggest problem the Saturn faced was it was a big headache for developers to work with to use all its potential due to its complex technological architexture and Sega's poor job of providing quality documentations of how to work with the system. The Sony PlayStation just killed the market. The PlayStation was powerfull for both 2D to 3D and cheaper to manufacture (and became more affordable by year) and it was veru developer-friendly to work with combined with that Sony had provided excellent documentation for how to master the system. Another big part that hurt the Saturn in the west was its poor marketing and lack of impressive software to boost its sales. Again Sony proveded both. In short context, the Saturn was killed by the PlayStation, with the Nintendo 64 as a strong 2nd on the western market. BUT in Japan the Saturn was its best Sega system ever (!)
It didn't help that Sega of America actively thwarted the Saturn's huge Japanese game library from being ported over to the US for being "too Japanese".
"The Sega Saturn was all-in-all a very great 2D to 2.5D machine, but not so great at 3D." That's blatantly wrong. As if you hadn't watched the video at all.
Nice video and very well explained. Thing is, when you speak you make constant pauses every few words which makes it very irritating to hear. Sorry! :(
There are people often saying that the Sega Saturn was theoretically more powerful than the PlayStation. However, the fact is that it doesn’t matter when almost all cross platform games ran much better on the PlayStation. First party games looked better on the PlayStation too. Even a late generation game like Burning Rangers suffers from a low frame rate, blocky, low resolution transparency effects, and noticeable polygon breakage.
Cross platform games aren't really a fair comparison, as most of them were originally built for the PS1 and then sloppily ported to the Saturn. Games built for the Saturn hardware and ported to the PS1 run noticeably worse, wild how that works. As for first party PS1 games looking better than first party PS1 games? Yeah they did, after 1996. Funnily enough, that was also the last year the Saturn had any real push. I'd also point out that most of those beloved PS1 games don't look anywhere near as good as people seem to suggest/remember. Many of them look like shit, frankly. I love MGS1, it's a great game. Looks like fucking trash by modern standards and was honestly pretty rough at the time.
Ive always found the earlier games on both consoles have held up better to be honest. I think Ridge Racer holds up better visually than say GT2 for example, maybe not on a CRT but on modern screens any jagged edges look a thousand times worse, thats just personal taste though
@@seanmckelvey6618all true. I still the key point is. Cross platform = better looking on PS1 in most cases. First part games also looking better on PS1 in most cases. Nothing more complicated than that
Very informative, but can you please speak more clearly next time? It's really heard to understand what you're saying when you whisper every word. And this is coming from someone who is using audiophile-grade amplified headphones too.
I stopped watching Game Hut after one episode when he said the Mega Drive CRAM stood for "Creature RAM" and you can "just put anything you want in there". Now, I don't know if he considered this a joke. But I was pretty pissed off trying to understand what cram was for. It's colour. As I assumed. I had to go back and count number of cram bytes and calculate that is was exactly the amount of memory to hold 4 9bit palettes and so the c must stand for 'colour'. So I don't know if that was a joke. But pretty annoying and confusing and time wasting if you're trying to learn programming. Hack.
If you can neither see a joke, nor track down the official Mega Drive docs, and on top of that think that it's a good idea to try to "learn to program" from videos where someone explains how they achieved some trickery with advanced techniques, then, well... Maybe reconsider your priorities.
@@elgoog-the-third was it a joke? Maybe not. I was really struggling to find any info on it just 5 years ago. Sega Retro then seemingly appeared out of nowhere and and I was able to confirm _most_ information on the subject of Sega hardware I'd read up to that point was wrong.
...since then though, I found alot of info going back to the 90's (all forums) and I guess Sega Retro was going long before I found it. TT seem to be based around demo scene mentality of doing gimmicks to prove their might. But really they can't design a game to save their lives and good programming is aided by clever gimmicks that strain the hardware.
Happy 30th Anniversary to my most beloved gaming system!
you explained this well and better than i would have, had i approached this subject i probably would have used humor in places where it wouldn't need to be to draw comparisons. great video and BTW there's nothing wrong with the way you speak or how you pause during sentences. you speak like a normal lad, don't let people try to shit on you for keeping it humble and grounded
Thank you for the kind words, I think a lot of the issues people are bringing up are down to my audio mix which hopefully I can correct in future videos
This is the best explanation I've seen of how the Saturn operates
Happy Birthday to Sega Saturn ❤1994 - 2024
It’s more that VDP1 is the evolution of the super scalar. Basically a massive sprite generator. While VDP2 was basically a big tile map handler
Most powerful 2.5D hardware ever. Theoretically more powerful than PS1, but just too hard to make that all work.
The hardware design really looks like they were focused on porting their arcade games to home, but misread the market and didnt expect games like what developers were looking to make and gamers were wanting to play.
Like the hardware was perfect for games like Virtua Fighter, where both VDP1 and 2 could work in tandem, but a lot of games really wanted to be fully 3D without the old school 2D backgrounds being a major part of the graphics. Would have been great if VDP2 was just as capable as VDP1 along with its traditional capabilities.
Thanks for explaining the architecture of this system in terms anyone can understand, lovely work!
Other commenters have it right, this channel is an unrecognised gem! Hopefully it will get the 'exposure' it deserves, great work!
Thank you, it really is appreciated
I love my Saturn and CRT.. it's a shame it didn't get a longer life.
You deserve way more subs than you have. keep at it. Great videos.
Thank you
The channel is a few weeks old...
Great info. Especially about the “more effort” vs “harder”
Happy 30th Saturn! Great job on the video Retro48. This was really well outlined for those of us not intimately knowledgeable in the technical intricacies of the console. Loved it. And so glad I finally got a Saturn ….currently playing though my first game ever now (PDS 😊)
Holy shit, this is the best breakdown I've seen of this console. Subbing right away
Glad I found this channel last week. I love it! Keep up the awesome work and the great explanations.
Thanks
Happy 30th to the saturn. A classic gem.
Excellent video. I love the architecture flow chart. Please do one on PS2 especially with eDram.
Thanks for the suggestion I will add it to the request list.
i bought my Sega Saturn thru e.b games years ago for $100 & i still have it today
I was wondering what happened to this video, glad it’s back up, I really like the explanation of the hardware here!
Thanks, yeah I took a break for a while and removed my old channel but its back now.
WOW, this was one of the more interesting videos I've watched in YEARS!
Great video! Though I think the 7th gen was the last generation where every system had a unique look. Dreamcast with its tile based deferred rendering, the PS2 had low quality textures but alot games that used framebuffer effects, GameCube games had high quality textures and Xbox had games that used shaders. You could tell games apart for each system. Even multiplatform games like Splinter Cell looked totally different on each console.
7th gen had a lot of games looking pretty similar to each other besides exclusives. PS3 and 360 titles never really looked too different aside from missing effect, often due to people not understanding how to use the PS3's chip
6th gen son
That was 6th gen
Thanks. This was very interesting. I miss playing Sega Rally, one of the greatest.
I cannot believe I have not found your channel sooner , fantastic commentary, well presented and a real wealth of information on show not to mention the huge effort you have put in , well done sir you have a subscriber for life
Perfect way to pay homage for the debut of the SEGA SATURN 30yrs ago in Japan November 22, 1994. IMO a stellar SEGA product with an amazing collection of games once you tape into the Japanese market.
A very happy coincidence happy birthday Saturn!
@Retro48K526 it's a clear sign from the creator that you are on the right path and blessed. Keep up the great work harness your craft.
Saturn is my favorite system... Kind of wish indie devs took a crack at it like they do on Dreamcast... It has entirely unique visuals in the fact that you can see the programming tricks they used to achieve certain results... Everyone I knew had Playstation, but when I'd pop in Panzer Dragoon Zwei, Dragon Force, Radiant Silvergun, or Guardian Heroes they would be stunned... The games we played the most though were Decathlete, Winter Heat, and X-men vs Street Fighter/Marvel Superheroes vs Street Fighter... We wore out those sega arcade fighter sticks...
I have Retrotink 4k now, and dear god is that thing Amazing at making Saturn look like it should on a modern TV...
I will never understand the tricks used for water in panzer dragoon or wave rider 64.
Happy Big 3-0, Sega Saturn! :) I believe that makes it a pearl anniversary.
The Saturn kind of getting reevaluated today, but I never knew anyone who had one during its lifetime. It kind of reminds me of the PS3 in that both should have been very powerful on paper, but their eccentricities made ports a challenge. When you did have a programmer who really understood how they worked though, both could do some really impressive things.
Cool video, always good to hear more about the most intriguing failure in video console history that Saturn is, it jut turned 30 too! Also all the myths you spoke about were technically facts lol. What next, maybe Jaguar? I heard it was also rather complex (and killed a company like Saturn).
I think if SEGA had really prepared better, and helped people by offering more dev. kits and giving training on how to use both dev.kits and how to program for the Saturn. Like training several in-house experts and sending them out to help or train other developers.
I think they were too paranoid about helping or giving away info to their competitors, so in the end they did exactly what they were afraid of doing, but more by sabotaging themselves. (In MANY ways, not just the programming for Saturn)
OK at first I was like.. this sounds like a cool idea for a video to help get people interested in this stuff through retro gaming. I don't know how much of the video I'll watch though. Now I'm like.. wtf.. This guy is making this look really simple.. You're just explaining it so well and it's all making sense perfectly.
Good luck with your channel. subbed. Maybe you could do this for games and old computers like the msx or dos computers etc. I'll check out your game reviews at some point too as I'm hoping there is some of this easy to understand technical stuff in it but if there is you should really make it obvious in the title as it's different from just "x game review".
Great in depth overview of the Saturn!
Great video. recommendation/feedback: look at a little audio post-processing on your narration. Some sibilance filter, maybe some EQ
Thanks, this is actually an earlier recording, I do have a better mix on other videos like my silent hill 2 review
Been really enjoying this series, a great concise breakdown of these consoles.
I agree that there was something special about each system having its own unique architecture. I guess the PS3 was the last major console with weird unique architecture (which arguably ended up kneecapping the whole concept altogether).
Look forward to seeing what comes next!
Thank you, I have one ready for each Friday until Christmas, so there is plenty more to come
There wasn't much strange about the CPU's architecture as it was just an IBM PowerPC chip much like the 360 and Wii/GameCube. It was those SPUs which made it special and difficult to understand to get its full potential. The Cell chip did have other things unique about it though
While expensive in a physical media production cost, a Cartridge/CD-Rom combo would have been the perfect delivery method for this machine and that era of gaming which was crippled by 2X CD-Rom speeds - if you wanted the best in both loading times and total amount of content.
You would basically load most of VDP2's tasks at the beginning of a scene, having a deep library of content on CD-ROM to load from for backgrounds, scene layout, etc
You would load some unique scene assets to VDP1 from CD-ROM at the beginning, but primarily access common game assets, run program code, sprites, small sample sounds, straight from the cartridge. The CD-Rom could stream in rich audio as well.
Are there some examples of this? If that were the intended use for the Saturn they may have set up the Working RAM and VDP RAM allocations differently.
Not that Im aware of, closest would be Xmen verses Street Fighter using it as RAM expansion
Very well explained! You need more subs!
Thank you
Quality work and fantastic explanations!
i could watch a 2hour video about hardware design!
Great video. I always thought the trade offs were in favor of the Saturn for image quality. Dithered transparencies in some Saturn games versus dithering all over the screen in most 3D PS1 games was a no brainer for me. Relatively stable for non-perspective correct hardware Quads versus severely warping triangles, that frequently can't even hold together between frames, was also a good call by Sega's engineers as far as I'm concerned.
The Saturn not being able to do Gran Turismo - like fake reflections has been disproven by the dev who made the reflective car demo and adapted Unreal to Saturn. It is stated somewhere that the reflective texture displayed in both is a hardware feature, not a CPU driven C effect.
The reflection effect in Sonic R that I'm referring to was a not a hardware effect the dev has a UA-cam channel and discusses it there. I'm sure someone has figured out how to do the fake reflections now but at the time it was not thought possible.
Seriously Sega needs to reconsider coming back. So much information they've had to gather to see how modern gaming is for them not to know how to do it. Sega if your listening ... You got this, please come back! 🙏🏽
They'd just end up releasing another AMD chipset based console. There's no architectural variety out there anymore, and developing something new is prohibitively expensive.
Very good video. Well done.
Any chance of an N64 video in the same style?
Thank you very much!
Awesome video man. I love this
Best explanation I ever heard on the SEGA Saturn architecture 😊
Wow, thanks!
Amazing work, thank you for this!
My pleasure!
So the second CPU is Usseles on real life. Intersting.
the saturn is like releasing an arcade architecture for home consoles - assured to only get first-party titles that use it to its fullest, and a bunch of wacky third-party titles that do not move units. SNK made the same mistake back in the day - more like SMH am i right
The problem was Sega was constantly pushing its arcade hardware so even those first party games looked worse because of it where as Sony had Namco making arcade games on basically turbo charged PlayStation hardware. Compare Virtua Fighter and Tekken on the arcades and at home as an example of this, VF 3 would have looked wildly out of date on the Saturn, simple because Segas arcade hardware was so bleeding edge
This video means you need to do the master system/mark 3 now!
Haha I will add it to the list
@@Retro48K526 Seriously, I have enjoyed all three of the 'How the X Worked" videos. I hope you make more of them!
The main correction I would point out would be when you talked about the reflections like the sonic head in Sonic R.
It wasn't slower (just) because they had to write it in C.
It was slower because it's was a 100% software render pass done only on a CPU and could not use any of the geometry functions of VDP1
It's a little like Quake 2, among many other PC games, that had a software renderer that was entirely done on the CPU and then there was the ability to off load a bunch of calculations to a graphics card like a 3DFX VooDoo and speed things up considerably.
Maybe that's what you meant in the first place but it wasn't clear in the video. I know how easy it can be to think something but not translate that thought into text as you meant it.
Otherwise nice overview video and well produced.
Sega Saturn is my favorite of the Sega consoles. Such a shame it wasn't popular outside of Japan. The Saturn was incredibly capable in both 2D and 3D graphics and if it were easier to program for it actually can pull out visuals much better than Sony's PlayStation could.
In some cases yes but in a commercial setting time and effort cost money so even if your the best programmer in the world you would want to be working on a system that allowed you get focus on the most bang for your buck rather than wrestling with the hardware if you see what I mean
You'd forget an advantage the distorted sprites, that was the technical name of Saturn quads, had over the competence, Saturn drew them with perspective correction, meaning the tesellation that happened on other systems to avoid the wobly textures on the close-ups could be mitigated, or even avoided, also, the vdp2 scrolling planes could be used as "mode7" planes, and draw really large environments using tiles and horizontal interrupt tricks.
The VDP2 infinite plane bg layers could be given XY co-ordinates and this made it easy to build a 3D scene and incorporate the infinite (mode7 style) planes with VDP1 polygons.
The 'distorted sprites' had _some_ perspective correction and this helped warped textures not be so warped. This meant textures close to the camera held their shape better. But apparently, the Saturn was less good at displaying large distorted sprites/textured polygons (ie close to the camera) than the PSX but better at multiple but smaller textured polygons.
The other thing was the 'pixel grid' or sub pixel grid or something. That is, there is such a thing as a sub-pixel. That is geometry or sprite positioning that can be calculated in finer increments than the actual resolution. As the PSX had only as many co-ordinates as there were visible pixels on the screen, I believe this was the cause of the 'polygon wobble' often seen on the PSX.
@@iwanttocomplain There's multiple reasons for polygon wobble on the PSX, but they all stem from the limitations along the whole chain of the render pipeline, the limitation being that it was all 32-bit integer math. The wobble you're referring to is part of the final rendering of the coordinate system to a pixel onscreen, and the Saturn has this issue too. It's not so big a problem as the output it pixelated anyway.
A bigger problem was the accuracy of the transform calculations for a given set of 3D coordinates on the Playstation. Since this was done in hardware and you couldn't really change how this was done, if the area you were calculating across was wide enough, it magnified the inaccuracies in the math since in a given axis you only had 4 billion possible coordinates. If you were stacking multiple calculations together in a row, the error would magnify and polygon vertices would start jumping around.
On the Saturn, since you had no fixed hardware geometry engine, you could tailor how your software handled it to the task at hand. Most developers did their transforms in software on the SH-2, with a few developers using the generic DSP for some calculations. While these were still 32-bit, since you had more direct control of the pipeline, you had more granularity in how you could pick the scale for the calculations. For this reason polygon wobble tends to be pretty uniformly bad on the Playstation, whereas the Saturn had more variation -- more akin to the wobble you'd see on software 3D engines on early PC 3D polygon games.
The irony is that you can eliminate much of the wobble on many games on Playstation emulators now *because* of uniform use of the 32-bit hardware engine. You have the emulator keep track of "shadow registers" which extend the CPU, GTE, and rasterizer registers to 64-bits. The software is completely oblivious to this and thinks it's pushing 32-bit values around, but the emulator does 64-bit calculations on every register and memory location.
You can't really do this on Saturn emulators because of all the variable casting between formats being done in software and lots of use of precalculated tables in that software.
@@NozomuYume it seems that you can never learn a whole system completely.
I'm not sure how 8bill isn't a large enough number to get accurate positioning though.
I can't understand the value of a 64bit number even though I do keep trying to...
@@iwanttocomplain The problem was clipping the quads at the near projection distance when the primitives couldn't remain as quads, they were split into other primitives, which didn't retain the rendering information, that was their biggest, and meaniest drawback
@@santitabnavascues8673 primitives isn't really a thing when you have rectangles or rectangles.
Textures close to the projection disappeared before the fix was figured out.
Daytona shows this happening.
any bets on how long it's gonna take for Retro48K to get interviewed by Bob from RetroRGB?
Die Hard Arcade, Panzer Dragoon and VF.
The reason triangles are used as the basic primitive in basically all GPUs is because triangles are always planar so you never have to worry about non planar polygons.
There is no worry when you use painters algorithm anyway. Yeah, but backface culling? It is already kinda expensive with two multiplications per triangle, but with quads you need to find the crossing of the edges. Gotta check upper edge, check lower edge. If forward facing, start from there. Stop when crossed??
Just wondering, dose anybody know whats the name of the BGM that starts playing at 1:04?
I have not played Saturn before this year for the first time. I was really surprised by the good sound quality. I have a relatively good sound system, and it did sound good. And I think the games have held up pretty good, but that could be because of the more "simple graphic" fits better on a modern TV, some games on the PSX is almost unplayable on anything else than a CRT. I wonder how games could have looked on the Saturn if it continued along with the PSX.
Maybe Populous The beginning would fit better on the Saturn the PSX.
The Saturn had *great* audio hardware for synthesized music generation. It was so good that many times when porting Saturn games to the Playstation, the Playstation developers converted Saturn music to ADPCM audio tracks on the Playstation rather than trying to generate the music on the Playstation's sound hardware. This even resulted in a few Playstation ports needing more discs to fit all the audio tracks.
Going the other way it was a problem for the Saturn as it had no audio compression (PSX supported ADPCM), so to fit RAM limitations sample quality was often worse for wavetable music and sound effects ported over from the PSX.
In simple terms they basically taped two stronger 32x together with the sega cd.
Not at all. The only thing those two systems had in common were having the same SH2 chips.
Look at the views on this one
How did D-Xhird manage polygonal transparency effects on one of the fighters?
Ive not played that one to be honest but looking its kind of like thoshinden so I would have to look into it
So just to let you know, I'm 5 seconds in and almost decided not to watch the video because of that intro. I'm still going to watch the video after I made it through that, but you gotta reconsider that intro. I really hope it's not in your other videos because you're getting the viewer off to a really bad start by setting the mood. Which is the opposite of pleasant.
That intro sound ugh... Why??? If it wasn't because I really am interested in Saturn, I'd leave. A shame, because the rest of the video is really well done
Its a 48K Spectrum loading, hence Retro 48K. Don't worry its not on all my videos
@Retro48K526 makes sense. My wife wouldn't understand it at 2am though haha.
I just remember the Street fighter alpha games looked much better than the PS ones.
And the Saturn games could not be pirated.
Kids, don't do squares. They'll ruin your life
:D
Is this a repost?
I feel like I’ve seen this years ago
Yes I used to have an old channel that I have brought back
I don't think you've got the transparency information right. The rendered would not draw quads the way you describe, and if it did, thr hatching wouldn't look any better than true transparency. The fact of the matter is, adding two colors together is a much cheaper than alpha blending, so many early 3D chips were able to do "additive transparency" which works for fire and the like, but not "alpha transparency" which blends two colors together based on an alpha value and requires a multiplication per pixel.
a truly crazy system .. dual CPU, dual GPU .. extreme demands on the programmer. But with great coding, it will create a fantastic port of Unreal, which is very demanding on HW !
ua-cam.com/video/WpcjkDDLoXM/v-deo.html
Subb’d. You’re knowledgeable.
Thank you
Is that Elon Musk speaking?
Haha I wish I had his money
I should have quit this video on the "32bit gen", but take it until MHz were synonym of processing power. UA-cam really is not a place to find technical infos when it came into retro video game
There is no replacement for displacement in cars. Likewise a lot of these cheats to increase processing power by other means increased the power consumption and heat production. Even the infamous Intel P4 basically came back when fabs got more advanced. Look how N64 increased clocks everywhere!
excellent explanations, I knew some of them but not at all about the transparency tricks. Just as a friendly critic, you sound like whispering as if you are about to wake up someone sleeping next room, I had to max the volue so I could listen to you.
Hi thanks, this is actually one of my earlier videos from when I ran the channel a few years back I have since (hopefully) improved my sound mix so you may find it better in my other videos.
The Sega Saturn was all-in-all a very great 2D to 2.5D machine, but not so great at 3D. It was a very expensive system to manufacture and more expensive on the market.
The biggest problem the Saturn faced was it was a big headache for developers to work with to use all its potential due to its complex technological architexture and Sega's poor job of providing quality documentations of how to work with the system.
The Sony PlayStation just killed the market. The PlayStation was powerfull for both 2D to 3D and cheaper to manufacture (and became more affordable by year) and it was veru developer-friendly to work with combined with that Sony had provided excellent documentation for how to master the system.
Another big part that hurt the Saturn in the west was its poor marketing and lack of impressive software to boost its sales. Again Sony proveded both.
In short context, the Saturn was killed by the PlayStation, with the Nintendo 64 as a strong 2nd on the western market.
BUT in Japan the Saturn was its best Sega system ever (!)
It didn't help that Sega of America actively thwarted the Saturn's huge Japanese game library from being ported over to the US for being "too Japanese".
"The Sega Saturn was all-in-all a very great 2D to 2.5D machine, but not so great at 3D." That's blatantly wrong. As if you hadn't watched the video at all.
Akshually the Nvidia NV1 also used quads for rendering 3D objects. There was even an NV1 specific port of Panzer Dragoon for it.
Wait! Did it work?!?!
That intro sound is horrid on mobile.
Nice video and very well explained. Thing is, when you speak you make constant pauses every few words which makes it very irritating to hear. Sorry! :(
Hi thanks for the feedback I will work on it for future videos
It didn’t , it was. 2d beast in a 3D world
Huge thumbs down for that eardrum shattering intro. I wear headphones.. that was awful.
It was not very elegant.....
There are people often saying that the Sega Saturn was theoretically more powerful than the PlayStation. However, the fact is that it doesn’t matter when almost all cross platform games ran much better on the PlayStation. First party games looked better on the PlayStation too. Even a late generation game like Burning Rangers suffers from a low frame rate, blocky, low resolution transparency effects, and noticeable polygon breakage.
Cross platform games aren't really a fair comparison, as most of them were originally built for the PS1 and then sloppily ported to the Saturn. Games built for the Saturn hardware and ported to the PS1 run noticeably worse, wild how that works. As for first party PS1 games looking better than first party PS1 games? Yeah they did, after 1996. Funnily enough, that was also the last year the Saturn had any real push. I'd also point out that most of those beloved PS1 games don't look anywhere near as good as people seem to suggest/remember. Many of them look like shit, frankly. I love MGS1, it's a great game. Looks like fucking trash by modern standards and was honestly pretty rough at the time.
Ive always found the earlier games on both consoles have held up better to be honest. I think Ridge Racer holds up better visually than say GT2 for example, maybe not on a CRT but on modern screens any jagged edges look a thousand times worse, thats just personal taste though
@@seanmckelvey6618all true. I still the key point is. Cross platform = better looking on PS1 in most cases. First part games also looking better on PS1 in most cases. Nothing more complicated than that
@@Retro48K526 gt 2 makes bad use of ps1gpu ,wipout 3 looks better thanks to higher screen resolution and better textures.
@@litjellyfish the vdp1 chip was to weak ,ps1 gpu had maybe more than 2times the overal power plus better alpha.
Very informative, but can you please speak more clearly next time? It's really heard to understand what you're saying when you whisper every word. And this is coming from someone who is using audiophile-grade amplified headphones too.
I stopped watching Game Hut after one episode when he said the Mega Drive CRAM stood for "Creature RAM" and you can "just put anything you want in there".
Now, I don't know if he considered this a joke. But I was pretty pissed off trying to understand what cram was for. It's colour. As I assumed. I had to go back and count number of cram bytes and calculate that is was exactly the amount of memory to hold 4 9bit palettes and so the c must stand for 'colour'.
So I don't know if that was a joke. But pretty annoying and confusing and time wasting if you're trying to learn programming. Hack.
If you can neither see a joke, nor track down the official Mega Drive docs, and on top of that think that it's a good idea to try to "learn to program" from videos where someone explains how they achieved some trickery with advanced techniques, then, well... Maybe reconsider your priorities.
@@elgoog-the-third was it a joke? Maybe not. I was really struggling to find any info on it just 5 years ago. Sega Retro then seemingly appeared out of nowhere and and I was able to confirm _most_ information on the subject of Sega hardware I'd read up to that point was wrong.
...since then though, I found alot of info going back to the 90's (all forums) and I guess Sega Retro was going long before I found it.
TT seem to be based around demo scene mentality of doing gimmicks to prove their might.
But really they can't design a game to save their lives and good programming is aided by clever gimmicks that strain the hardware.