Shenmue 3, or a New Sega Console?

[SEGA-TUDE]

has anyone seen sonic on the progressive commercial.

[Logic]

has anyone seen sonic on the progressive commercial.

I have...I want to say that Sonic's new recent small chain of success would put him above such stunts..but I guess there are still a ways to go.

[MrSega]

has anyone seen sonic on the progressive commercial.

I have...I want to say that Sonic's new recent small chain of success would put him above such stunts..but I guess there are still a ways to go.

I too have seen the commercial. And while its cool seeing Sonic in a TV commercial, I would agree he has quite a ways to go before he can regain that 1993-1994 popluarity.

SEGAs got work to do.

[Hiryosuke]

Whaaat? Sonic's in a prgessive commercial?! Gonna have to youtube it lol can't miss my fav mascot getting face time like that lol

[CruSega]

That's a good point. If the Saturn was a scaled down version of Model 2, the conversions of Daytona USA and Virtua Fighter would not have been so dreadful. The frame-rate for Saturn Daytona was unbearable and the draw distance so bad--side scenery and road ahead popped up right in your face. VF1 replays had all sorts of trouble, clipping and even parts of the fighters disappearing. Its a testament to the programmers at AM2/AM3 that Saturn VF2 and Sega Rally looked quite decent (though not arcade perfect) but by that point Sony was outselling Sega Saturn by about an 8:1 ratio.

The Saturn IS low resolution Model 2. Contrary what stu says, Saturn hardware is low end Model 2 built with less memory & seperate proccessors. The VDPs were designed to run 500,000 polygons each. The reason why early Saturn games looked no different from
crappy PSX, was because ALL of its early games were designed using Model 1 which like shitty, primatitive 398,000 PPS only PSX suffered from polygon clipping & RAM loss.

There's a link I have that reveals ALL the secrets of Saturn hardware. Including the difference between its 3D Engine & PSone's.

The Saturn had its moments such as VF2, Sega Rally, Virtua Cop, Panzer Dragoon 2, the Shenmue demo (which was awesome). If harnessed properly, it was impressive. But Sega didn't seem to cooperate with their 3rd party publishers. For example, Battle Arena Toshinden, Destruction Derby and Wipeout were better on the PSOne. Tomb Raider, Resident Evil looked impressive on Saturn. Dead or Alive--I never played the PS1 version but the Saturn explosion effect consisted of a pseudo-3D mesh (common on many Saturn titles), possibly due to the systems difficulty with transparencies. I will admit the Saturn version was very fun, responsive.

Toshinden:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mRnW4xwvCrc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WC_DT-6yhc

(No 3D backgrounds in Saturn version, Saturn cannot handle translucent textures)

Destruction Derby:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4rY7FyJe08

(Saturn cannot do particle effect so exhaust smoke looks like sprites)

Need For Speed:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17C0N_Kq8GE

(PS1 has better frame rate, possible more detail)

TombRaider:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q6oh_y9Tdao

(Core did a great job on Saturn, this title was originally designed as a Saturn exclusive and Core's talent shines through. Note, no warping textures on Saturn which always plagued the PSOne. If Sega was smart, they should have taken over Core when this title was in development)


Dead or Alive:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wm8miaYbWz4

(PS1 looks more polished, Saturn cannot produce spark effects from fighter impact)

The little things such as light sourcing, transparency,translucent textures, effects such as dust and smoke. These are things that the Saturn seemed to have a great deal of trouble rendering. Other than that, the Saturn was capable of beautiful graphics circa 1994-1998. Had Sega been more open with their Graphic Library to 3rd parties, Saturn titles could have offered advantages over the PS1 counterparts to compensate for its hardware limitations stated above. But then, Sega would probably still be making consoles today if they made good decisions those days.

[MrSega]

@CruSega. Here's the link to the Saturn Secrets page:

http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Sega_Saturn

The problem with the Saturn's hardware was that it wasn't very good at processing 3D polygons. That's because it used an older 3D Engine from Lockheed Martin used by NASA in the early 90s called "Quadlateral". Which used Sqaure polygons as opposed to "Trilateral" which used Triangles in which most developers preferred this engine because it created a better 3D effect than Quadlateral.

The Model 2 board lacked "Light Sourcing". So SEGA solved this problem with the "CRX" board which contained converters that added all the missing features the engine had & doubled the preformances of the VDPs resulting in Nintendo 64 like graphics running almost a million polygons per second! For Model 2 arcade ports, SEGA would use both Saturn VDPs but coding them on CD ROM was really iffy.


SEGA failed to realize early on that as a cost cutting measure, all they had to do was have developers design games with a back up RAM cartridge eqquiped with converter chips that would have helped either VDP preform stronger,better & would have made the games look 3Xs better than PSone.

[CruSega]

@CruSega. Here's the link to the Saturn Secrets page:

http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Sega_Saturn

The problem with the Saturn's hardware was that it wasn't very good at processing 3D polygons. That's because it used an older 3D Engine from Lockheed Martin used by NASA in the early 90s called "Quadlateral". Which used Sqaure polygons as opposed to "Trilateral" which used Triangles in which most developers preferred this engine because it created a better 3D effect than Quadlateral.

The Model 2 board lacked "Light Sourcing". So SEGA solved this problem with the "CRX" board which contained converters that added all the missing features the engine had & doubled the preformances of the VDPs resulting in Nintendo 64 like graphics running almost a million polygons per second! For Model 2 arcade ports, SEGA would use both Saturn VDPs but coding them on CD ROM was really iffy.


SEGA failed to realize early on that as a cost cutting measure, all they had to do was have developers design games with a back up RAM cartridge eqquiped with converter chips that would have helped either VDP preform stronger,better & would have made the games look 3Xs better than PSone.

Interesting article but doesn't it just reconfirm most of what I mentioned earlier?

From Article:

Compared to the PlayStation
PlayStation
The is a 32-bit fifth-generation video game console first released by Sony Computer Entertainment in Japan on December 3, .The PlayStation was the first of the PlayStation series of consoles and handheld game devices. Upgrades and variants include the Net Yaroze and the PS One, with the...

the Saturn's hardware was difficult to work with because of its more complex graphics hardware and lesser overall performance, as noted by Lobotomy Software

Lobotomy Software was an American video game company, best known for the game PowerSlave as well as the successful Sega Saturn ports of Duke Nukem 3D and Quake.The company is no longer active.-History:...

programmer Ezra Dreisbach. In order to port Duke Nukem 3D
Duke Nukem 3D and PowerSlave
The Build engine is a first-person shooter engine created by Ken Silverman for 3D Realms. Like the Doom engine, the Build engine represents its world on a two-dimensional grid using closed 2D shapes called sectors, and uses simple flat objects called sprites to populate the world geometry with...

to get adequate performance from the Saturn. Also, during testing of an unreleased Quake port for the PlayStation, the Saturn's performance was found to be notably inferior for the game.


However, later programming techniques employed by Sega's AM2 saw an improvement in performance. Video exists of a canceled version of Shenmue





Quadrilateral
In Euclidean plane geometry, a quadrilateral is a polygon with four sides and four vertices or corners. Sometimes, the term quadrangle is used, by analogy with triangle, and sometimes tetragon for consistency with pentagon , hexagon and so on...

This proved to be a hindrance because most of the industry's standard design tools were based on triangles. One of the challenges brought forth by quadrilateral-based rendering was problems with making some shapes, notably triangular objects. This can be seen in the Saturn version of Tomb Raider, in which triangular rocks are not rendered as well as other systems' versions of the game. The hardware also lacked light sourcing and hardware video decompression support, the latter being a major disadvantage during a time when full-motion video was quite popular.
If used correctly, the quadrilateral rendering of the Saturn had advantages. It could potentially reduce the texture distortion common in PlayStation titles, as demonstrated by several cross-platform titles such as Wipeout and Destruction Derby
Destruction Derby
This article is about the 1995 video game. For the series of video games , see Destruction Derby Destruction Derby is a 1995 video game developed by Reflections and published by Psygnosis, the former of which would later develop the successful Driver series. It was released for PlayStation, Sega...

. The quadrilateral-focused hardware and a 50% greater amount of video memory also gave the Saturn an advantage for 2D game engines and attracted many developers of role-playing video game
Role-playing video game
Role-playing video games form a loosely-defined genre of video games with origins in pen-and-paper role-playing games such as Dungeons & Dragons, using much of the same terminology, settings and game mechanics...




Burning Rangers is a video game developed by Sonic Team for the Sega Saturn. The player takes on the role of a new recruit to the futuristic firefighting organization of the title, and must explore locations where various emergencies have taken place, extinguishing fires and rescuing survivors.They were able to achieve true transparency effects on hardware that used simple polygon stipples
Stippling
Stippling is the creation of a pattern simulating varying degrees of solidity or shading by using small dots. Such a pattern may occur in nature and these effects are frequently emulated by artists.-Art:...
as a replacement for transparency effects in the past.
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The Saturn was always a 2D powerhouse, though. And SNK/Capcom fighters (especially ones using the memory cartridge) blew away the PS1 counterparts. That is indisputable. From what I recall, Sega wanted the original Saturn to have perfect 2D capabilities and some 3D performance, a step up over the Panasonic 3DO but not remotely close to the PS1. This lead to Sega being in a panic when they discovered the capabilities of the PS1 late into the Saturn's development leading Nakayama to lash out at the engineers for a quick fix which resulted in what would become Saturn's non-parallel dual SH2 architecture.

I still love the Saturn to this day. I wish some fans would make more homebrew Saturn games just to see the true capabilities of this intriguing system. Too bad the Saturn version of Shenmue isn't available for distribution. Rumor has it that the sole copy (working demo) of Sonic XTreme (STI version) was purchased on eBay for thousands of dollars.

Shenmue could have been a bigger success on Saturn, with its huge userbase in Japan. Shenmue 2 could then have been the perfect killer app when Dreamcast was launched in Japan. Sega was burning away precious R&D money on projects that never saw the light of day...money they could ill-afford to loose.

[stu]

Also, none of that information proves MrSega's bogus claim that the Saturn is some how related the the Model 2 arcade system. They were developed for different markets, Model 2 was developed as a high end 3d arcade system costing thousands of dollars, the Saturn on the other hand was developed as a 400 dollar console.

[CruSega]

Also, none of that information proves MrSega's bogus claim that the Saturn is some how related the the Model 2 arcade system. They were developed for different markets, Model 2 was developed as a high end 3d arcade system costing thousands of dollars, the Saturn on the other hand was developed as a 400 dollar console.

Right. Weren't they developed with the help of Lockheed, who are contractors for the US military? Model 2 and Model 3 were state of the art hardware while Saturn was comprised of off-the-shelf components.

[stu]

Right. Weren't they developed with the help of Lockheed, who are contractors for the US military? Model 2 and Model 3 were state of the art hardware while Saturn was comprised of off-the-shelf components.

That is correct, The Model 2 was developed by Martin Marietta Corp, who were later taken over by Lockheed Martin. MMC developed a high performance chipset for Model 2 that allowed for 300,000 texture mapped, shaded, lit polygons per sec, and the system had a total throughput of about 900,000 vectors per second.

Here are the specs for the Model 2 arcade board:

Main CPU : Intel i960-KB @ 25 MHz 32bits RISC
Graphics Co-Processor : Fujitsu TGP MB86234 FPU 32bits 16M flops
Co-Processor Abilities : Floating decimal point operation function, Axis rotation operation function, 3D matrix operation function
Sound CPU : 16bits 68000 @ 10Mhz
Sound chip : 2 x Custom 28 channel PCM chips, 1 for Music and 1 for Effects (Can access up to 8meg sample rom *per chip*)
Sound Timing Chip : YM3834 @ 8MHz (only used for its timers)
Audio RAM : 540 Kilobytes (4 megabits)
Video resolution : 496x384 in 65536 colors
Geometry : 300,000 polygons/s. 900,000 vectors/s
Rendering : 1,200,000 pixels/s
Video : Shading Flat Shading, Perspective Texture, Micro Texture, Multi Window, Diffuse Reflection, Specula Reflection

As for the Saturn, it was an Sega in house design utilizing 8 separate processors and used a combination of 'off the shelf' components, with 2 Sega designed Video Display Processors, VDP1 was used for drawing the polygons and for texture mapping too, it could also do the more traditional sprites with full sprite scaling and rotation. The VDP2 was added late on in the development of the Saturn and was responsible for all the background graphics The processors included in the Saturn are as follows: 2x SH2, VDP1, SCU, VDP2, 68EC000, FH1 and an SH1.

This complicated architecture created 2 big issues for Sega, firstly it made the Saturn an expensive machine to manufacture and therefore would of meant that they were losing a lot of money the entire time they were selling it, since there were all these chips it meant that the mainboard was large and therefore expensive. The other issue was that it made the Saturn a very difficult to program machine and since Sega never bothered to offer decent programming libraries, the lack of good tools and documentation made the situation even worse.


Here are the specs for the Sega Saturn:

Processors: Two Hitachi SuperH-2 7604 32-bit RISC processors at 28.63 MHz (25 MIPS)—each has 4 kB on-chip cache (4-way associative), of which 2 kB can alternatively be used as directly addressable Scratchpad RAM
Custom VDP 1: 32-bit video display processor (running at 28.63 MHz on NTSC and PAL Systems) for sprites/polygons
Custom VDP 2 :32-bit video display processor (running at 28.63 MHz on NTSC and PAL Systems) for backgrounds/video out
Custom System Control Unit (SCU) with DSP for geometry processing and DMA controller (running at 14.3 MHz)
Motorola 68EC000 sound controller (running at 11.3 MHz / 1.5 MIPS)
Yamaha FH1 DSP sound processor, "Saturn Custom Sound Processor" (SCSP), running at 22.6 MHz
SH-1 32-bit RISC microcontroller (for the CD-ROM and CD security checks; uses preprogrammed embedded ROM, not programmable by software)
Hitachi 4-bit MCU, "System Manager & Peripheral Control" (SMPC)
[edit] Memory1 MB SDRAM as work RAM for both SH-2 CPUs (faster)
1 MB DRAM as work RAM for both SH-2 CPUs (slower)
512K VDP1 SDRAM for 3D graphics (Texture data for polygon/sprites and drawing command lists)
2x 256K VDP1 SDRAM for 3D graphics (Two framebuffers for double-buffered polygon/sprite rendering)
512K VDP2 SDRAM for 2D graphics (Texture data for the background layers and display lists)
4 KB VDP2 SRAM for color palette data and rotation coefficient data (local, on-chip SRAM)
512 KB DRAM for sound. (Multiplexed as sound CPU work RAM, SCSP DSP RAM, and SCSP wavetable RAM)
512 KB DRAM as work RAM for the CD-ROM subsystem's SH-1 CPU
32 KB SRAM with battery back-up for data retention.
512 KB Mask ROM for the SH-2 BIOS

As you can see, the two systems are very different and in no way similar in design, in fact the only similarity is that they both use quadralaterals as their 3D primitives, rather than triangles. Other than that they use different CPUs and different graphic chips, the Saturn can do 2D sprite based games, but the Model 2 is 3D polygon only.

The only arcade board that shares technology with the Saturn is the ST-V (Sega Titan Video system), this was an arcade version of the Saturn that used a ROM board for game storage, instead of the CD-Rom.