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[Krejlooc]

With nowadays knowledge of the hardware and all its chips, combined with new ways of parallelizing computing in general and more efficient algorithms, how much would that benefit the Saturn?
I mean with effort and budget and dedication to make a game of that era.

Not at all. The nv1 actually is nothing like the Saturn, it's very different hardware.

 

[Izuna]

If this video does well I'll do Quake 2 PSX and the two N64 Quake games

I love Quake 2 64. Do it

 

[DeVeAn]

So far, it's tracking pretty well on views (we'll see how it continues) so it's looking pretty likely that we'll be able to make more of these (and perhaps go more in-depth in the future).

Wait, that's you talking in the video? Love the work.

 

[metsallica]

Just watched that whole Lobotomy doc because of this thread! Awesome work, dark (and Tatsu!). You must do more of these.

 

[MrCunningham]

All models support the PC gamepad too. It connects via a cat5 connector on the main board. The adapter is hard to find.

Interesting. I was wondering what was up with the ethernet jack:

 

[Barrel Cannon]

If this video does well I'll do Quake 2 PSX and the two N64 Quake games

You are from DF?

Yes, Doom 3 was insanely impressive on Xbox. It runs very consistently as well.

Half-Life 2 is another good one. Runs a lot worse than Doom 3 but it's the entire HL2 experience.


Oh? Now that's interesting. I need to research that one.

/goes to eBay

Yes, Top Gear Overdrive is an insane looking title. Doesn't seem possible for the N64, yet it somehow runs.

 

[c0de]

Not at all. The nv1 actually is nothing like the Saturn, it's very different hardware.

Oh, this was more of a general question to just ask you and get your attention and had nothing to do with nv1 ;-)

 

[Krejlooc]

Oh, this was more of a general question to just ask you and get your attention and had nothing to do with nv1 ;-)

Oh, well Saturn development is way easier today because of projects like sega Saturn orbit. You can get something running on your Saturn in about a day, including setup time of the ide, which was way more difficult to do in those days.

It's still tough to work with, but we have much better tools now.

 

[dark10x]

You are from DF?


Yes, Top Gear Overdrive is an insane looking title. Doesn't seem possible for the N64, yet it somehow runs.

Yep, that's me. I really need to check out TGO then.

 

[Chiggs]

If this video does well I'll do Quake 2 PSX and the two N64 Quake games

Sounds interesting. Hope it does well.

 

[c0de]

Oh, well Saturn development is way easier today because of projects like sega Saturn orbit. You can get something running on your Saturn in about a day, including setup time of the ide, which was way more difficult to do in those days.

It's still tough to work with, but we have much better tools now.

But how would that reflect in a game? Pushing more polygons? Better effects, better framerates?

 

[M3d10n]

It wasn't weaker than the PS1 in terms of raw processing ability, just look into the Shenmue prototype to be baffled that that sort of thing was being rendered by the "terrible" Saturn. The practical problems with the Saturn, though, were two fold and huuuuuge.

First, its ridiculous hardware complexity. For the time, without any assisting tools, middleware, and barely any documentation, someone would need not only the ability to program directly on top of the hardware (assembly), but also being able to coordinate the two CPUs and two GPUs at the same time, which was simply a baffling concept -- nothing else in the industry tried this approach. And no company in their right mind would spend years learning the hardware's complexities to create amazing games that wouldn't sell.

Second problem with the Saturn was the 3D approach they went with: quads instead of triangles. That decision came at the wrong time when that sort of thing wasn't 100% figured out by all of the industry adopting one standard... and Sega bet on the wrong horse, resulting in basically none of the popular 3D tools of the time being able to create assets for it, while ports from PC/PS1 had to be "downconverted" or entirely remade.

All of this meant that the 3D games on the Saturn would always be produced in a "lazy" way. Companies aren't a charity and they couldn't justify spending the resources to program incredibly looking games on the Saturn when it took ridiculous effort to do so, which couldn't be justified when the market wasn't there. Whatever ports it would get would always look bad, like, say Tomb Raider. And thus people associated Saturn with being unable to do 3D as good as the PS1, because real world results and deadlines are more important than theoretical possibilities.

Taking this into consideration it makes what Lobotomy Software did both an achievement and one of major the conditions for their eventual downfall.

While the CPUs could provide more raw power, the Saturn graphics chip was objectively slower than the PS1's when it came to drawing polygons to the screen and that was its ultimate bottleneck. There's a interview with Lobotomy where they say they had a PS1 port of Quake in the works (that never got released) and it actually ran at 60fps before they added collision, physics and enemy AI.

Several 3D Saturn games "cheated" by using the 2D graphics chip's ability to apply perspective to a 2D tile layer to render large/infinite planes without using polygons (the ultimate form of mode 7) and thus achieving better framerates, but this trick couldn't be applied to games with highly 3D enclosed environments like Quake, which were becoming more and more common.

 

[Dragon1893]

Random thought, I remember the ground textures in Last Bronx looking really good.
Shame about that shimmering on the characters when executing throws, why did that happen anyway?
Man, I really liked that game.

 

[Krejlooc]

But how would that reflect in a game? Pushing more polygons? Better effects, better framerates?

It wouldn't, really. It's just that getting the same results would be easier. Any time you really push the system, you're gonna be writing in SH2 ASM anyways.

 

[Celine]

Yes, Top Gear Overdrive is an insane looking title. Doesn't seem possible for the N64, yet it somehow runs.

If World Driver Championship runs on N64, TGO can very well do it.
However what's more surprising is that TGO doesn't use a custom microcode (like WDC does)!

 

[c0de]

It wouldn't, really. It's just that getting the same results would be easier. Any time you really push the system, you're gonna be writing in SH2 ASM anyways.

Ah, ok. I also guess that sh2 compilers are at least a bit immature because of the rather odd architecture. Or at least worse than the r3k used on PlayStation, mainly due to the support of SGI.
Does it have a pipeline and branch prediction?

 

[Krejlooc]

Ah, ok. I also guess that sh2 compilers are at least a bit immature because of the rather odd architecture. Or at least worse than the r3k used on PlayStation, mainly due to the support of SGI.
Does it have a pipeline and branch prediction?

You actually have a much wider array of SH2 compilers these days, haha. The SH2 C compiler shipped with devkits did not have pipeline or branch prediction, they were extremely immature. Here is actually the documentation shipped with it:

http://koti.kapsi.fi/~antime/sega/files/shccomp.pdf

 

[TheKastorian]

Quake 2 on PSX is more impressive, honestly.

.

 

[c0de]

You actually have a much wider array of SH2 compilers these days, haha. The SH2 C compiler shipped with devkits did not have pipeline or branch prediction, they were extremely immature. Here is actually the documentation shipped with it:

http://koti.kapsi.fi/~antime/sega/files/shccomp.pdf

Thanks for all the information. I can't believe how bad the devkit was. The formatting in the pdf is also amazing as are the differences between the Windows (PC) and Unix compiler...
I think I'm going to read some docs about the sh2, it's a totally unknown architecture to me.

 

[RustyNails]

Man developers like these are true forgotten heroes of gaming.

 

[mavericktopgun]

.

Doesn't it even have a 4 Player Splitscreen Mode?

 

[ascii42]

Doesn't it even have a 4 Player Splitscreen Mode?

Yep

 

[The Taxman]

While the CPUs could provide more raw power, the Saturn graphics chip was objectively slower than the PS1's when it came to drawing polygons to the screen and that was its ultimate bottleneck. There's a interview with Lobotomy where they say they had a PS1 port of Quake in the works (that never got released) and it actually ran at 60fps before they added collision, physics and enemy AI.

Several 3D Saturn games "cheated" by using the 2D graphics chip's ability to apply perspective to a 2D tile layer to render large/infinite planes without using polygons (the ultimate form of mode 7) and thus achieving better framerates, but this trick couldn't be applied to games with highly 3D enclosed environments like Quake, which were becoming more and more common.

I would also add that in contrast to how polygons are rasterised on the PSX and most hardware today, the Saturn's quads don't use scan conversion like below:

Instead, it draws lines arbitrarily from edge to edge, which can be exploited to draw some smooth curve shapes for "free" if you deliberately deform the quad's vertices in a certain way.

It's a double edged sword however, as this rasterisation method has "overdraw" which makes it not very good for anything with alpha blending, and is probably slower than scan conversion overall.

 

[mavericktopgun]

Yep

That's like a miracle...

 

[Krejlooc]

I would also add that in contrast to how polygons are rasterised on the PSX and most hardware today, the Saturn's quads don't use scan conversion like below:

Instead, it draws lines arbitrarily from edge to edge, which can be exploited to draw some smooth curve shapes for "free" if you deliberately deform the quad's vertices in a certain way.



It's a double edged sword however, as this rasterisation method has "overdraw" which makes it not very good for anything with alpha blending, and is probably slower than scan conversion overall.

Another good example of deforming quads to draw smooth curves - the edges of Sonic's eye in both Sonic Jam World and Christmas NiGHTS into Dreams (and the early Sonic Xtreme proto).

To achieve this effect, you essentially twist the quad like a bowtie.

 

[Timu]

If this video does well I'll do Quake 2 PSX and the two N64 Quake games

Please do them, I would love to know about them.

 

[lazygecko]

Interesting video, with one heck of a confusing preview image.

It appears to be a screenshot from a retexture project called Quake Reforged.... with cartoon eyebrows drawn over the fiend's nose to make it look like it has googly eyes?
Weird.

Here, I made it better

 

[Sciz]

Ah, Saturn Quake. My second FPS as a lad after Chex Quest. Fond memories.

A couple neat things that the video didn't mention is that they replaced the four original secret levels with all new ones, and there's a secret voice-acted presentation of the first couple issues of Dank and Scud, a Quake machinima comic from 1996, when that sort of thing was still extremely novel.

 

[Quadraphonic]

Next we need port comparisons. Like Symphony of the Night on the Saturn, which had more content, but worse VFX.

 

[Ragnarok]

Now here's something I can get behind. More retro DF please!

 

[Gestault]

This is now my favorite DF examination piece. Tricking hardware into doing things it "can't" is a huge part of why I find game tech fascinating.

 

[TotalHorlicks]

Bit left field, but Soldier of Fortune on the Dreamcast, P.C port, horrific loading times.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YCH9NNOkvA

and of course

Half life 2 OG Xbox
Doom 3 OG Xbox
Riddick OG Xbox

Brill work.

 

[Oemenia]

If this video does well I'll do Quake 2 PSX and the two N64 Quake games

Thanks a lot, I'm a real sucker for ports of old PC ports so can't wait!

 

[dark10x]

Bit left field, but Soldier of Fortune on the Dreamcast, P.C port, horrific loading times.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YCH9NNOkvA

and of course

Half life 2 OG Xbox
Doom 3 OG Xbox
Riddick OG Xbox

Brill work.

I own that SoF port and I do kinda want to cover it.

Next we need port comparisons. Like Symphony of the Night on the Saturn, which had more content, but worse VFX.

I also own SotN on both PSX and Saturn and definitely want to cover that one especially when a lot of sites have missed out on precisely WHY it looks so much worse.

 

[Vazduh]

and of course

Half life 2 OG Xbox
Doom 3 OG Xbox

Yesssssssssssss, I want to see these covered, too!

 

[Gitaroo]

dont forget Farcry, thought it was impossible for Xbox back then. All the big 3 fps were ported to the original Xbox which was quite awesome.

 

[nkarafo]

This has gotta be one of the most valiant port efforts I have seen, probably crazier than Tekken 3 PS1.

Tekken 3 isn't even the crazier PS1 example. Quake 2 is even more impossible than that.

 

[Gitaroo]

I own that SoF port and I do kinda want to cover it.


I also own SotN on both PSX and Saturn and definitely want to cover that one especially when a lot of sites have missed out on precisely WHY it looks so much worse.

Please do a PSOne, SS, and N64 face off article showing their best softwares and multi platform games comparision. Then PS2, DC, NGC and Xbox face off since that gen has the most competitions.

 

[Celine]

I would also add that in contrast to how polygons are rasterised on the PSX and most hardware today, the Saturn's quads don't use scan conversion like below:

Instead, it draws lines arbitrarily from edge to edge, which can be exploited to draw some smooth curve shapes for "free" if you deliberately deform the quad's vertices in a certain way.



It's a double edged sword however, as this rasterisation method has "overdraw" which makes it not very good for anything with alpha blending, and is probably slower than scan conversion overall.

Interesting post.

 

[M3d10n]

I would also add that in contrast to how polygons are rasterised on the PSX and most hardware today, the Saturn's quads don't use scan conversion like below:

Instead, it draws lines arbitrarily from edge to edge, which can be exploited to draw some smooth curve shapes for "free" if you deliberately deform the quad's vertices in a certain way.



It's a double edged sword however, as this rasterisation method has "overdraw" which makes it not very good for anything with alpha blending, and is probably slower than scan conversion overall.

Yeah, the weird quad rasterization is probably the big reason why it's slow compared to the PS1. The more distorted the quad was, the bigger the overdraw caused by the line-based painting became, which caused bizarre performance fluctuations: scenes where most polygons are facing the camera straight are less taxing than scenes with lots of oblique surfaces. That's why some of the later larger areas of Quake have actually a higher FPS than the small cramped ones: the quads far away from the camera are less distorted and have less overdraw compared to quads that are very close to the camera and are affected more heavily by perspective.

The Saturn had a 50% alpha blending mode for quads/sprites, which was the closest thing to true accumulative blending it had, but the quad overdraw artifacts made it even more useless than it already was and very, very few games bothered to use it.

Drawing the quads was so much more complicated compared to drawing triangles that I wonder how the Saturn would perform if the same cycles were applied to a triangle rasterizer.

 

[dogen]

It's really interesting to see what kinds of crazy things developers had to do to get specific games and types of graphical effects working on the system.

The video is nice, but it really doesn't go into that at all.

 

[Tyrael]

Awesome video! I'm a fan of those retro comparisons and technical analysis.

As a retro gamer and a fan of DF work, I'm really looking foward of more videos like this.

Here in Brazil we had some technical curiosities made by Tec Toy, the Brazil's Sega partner, like the Mega Drive Duke Nukem 3D port.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9doqwl-U7jU

It's nowhere as good like the original game, but was an interesing effort for a game running on a much less capable hardware.

But I think the 32-bit era is the more interesting time to dive on these technical analysis. It's when we had the rise of the polygonal era and a lot of games running on very diferent types of hardware, including the N64.

As a Saturn fan, I would like to see someday you doing a technical analysis of the Sega Rally port of the Sega Saturn. Specially the japanese version (or the Sega Rally Plus) as this one have better graphics than the rushed US version. It's impressive how good it looks when compared to the Model 2 version, loosing mostly only on the resolution department.

 

[Odorono]

Yesssssssssssss, I want to see these covered, too!

The horror.

 

[c0de]

Yeah, the weird quad rasterization is probably the big reason why it's slow compared to the PS1. The more distorted the quad was, the bigger the overdraw caused by the line-based painting became, which caused bizarre performance fluctuations: scenes where most polygons are facing the camera straight are less taxing than scenes with lots of oblique surfaces. That's why some of the later larger areas of Quake have actually a higher FPS than the small cramped ones: the quads far away from the camera are less distorted and have less overdraw compared to quads that are very close to the camera and are affected more heavily by perspective.

The Saturn had a 50% alpha blending mode for quads/sprites, which was the closest thing to true accumulative blending it had, but the quad overdraw artifacts made it even more useless than it already was and very, very few games bothered to use it.

Drawing the quads was so much more complicated compared to drawing triangles that I wonder how the Saturn would perform if the same cycles were applied to a triangle rasterizer.

I always wondered what the problem was with the quads, to be honest. I mean for a square you would need two triangles and obviously only one quad. But is a triangle a problem for a quad? I don't know how it really works but from my understanding a triangle is achievable by drawing a quad where two points are just at the same position. But as you said above, this probably leads to performance issues I never thought about and I always assumed that I look at it from a way too simple point of view.

 

[Y2Kev]

Dark, have we proved yet we will click on retro videos? Do we have to send Leadbetter (more) angry emails?

 

[c0de]

As a Saturn fan, I would like to see someday you doing a technical analysis of the Sega Rally port of the Sega Saturn. Specially the japanese version (or the Sega Rally Plus) as this one have better graphics than the rushed US version. It's impressive how good it looks when compared to the Model 2 version, loosing mostly only on the resolution department.

Wait, there is a difference between the versions?!

 

[dark10x]

Dark, have we proved yet we will click on retro videos? Do we have to send Leadbetter (more) angry emails?

It's looking very good. I'm already brainstorming for more. Hope to go into more detail in the future now that it seems viable.

Of course, I'll be at e3 in a couple weeks so won't be able to crank out too many during that period. I do have a huge one on Shenmue in the works but I want to get into more 32/64 stuff soon.

 

[Zelias]

Didn't even know there was a Saturn port of Quake, heh. That's genuinely impressive stuff.

 

[NeOak]

It's looking very good. I'm already brainstorming for more. Hope to go into more detail in the future now that it seems viable.

Of course, I'll be at e3 in a couple weeks so won't be able to crank out too many during that period. I do have a huge one on Shenmue in the works but I want to get into more 32/64 stuff soon.

Please do so. These kind of videos are very interesting!

 

[Y2Kev]

It's looking very good. I'm already brainstorming for more. Hope to go into more detail in the future now that it seems viable.

Of course, I'll be at e3 in a couple weeks so won't be able to crank out too many during that period. I do have a huge one on Shenmue in the works but I want to get into more 32/64 stuff soon.

SHENNNMUEEE YASSSSSSSS