Questions about Sega Saturn

[milk]

The crash games on ps1 also baked all anims. That allowed then to have skinned characters and do all sort of complex cartoon-like distortions and weird motions pretty much for free. In realtime, the hardware was just playing back various sets of vertice positions.

 

[see colon]

The crash games on ps1 also baked all anims. That allowed then to have skinned characters and do all sort of complex cartoon-like distortions and weird motions pretty much for free. In realtime, the hardware was just playing back various sets of vertice positions.

Is that different from how most games from that era were? I mean, most games didn't have a lot of dynamic animation of PSX, Saturn or 64 did they?

 

[function]

IIRC, Panzer Dragoon Saga used skeletal animation for the dragon with keyframe interpolation, as the dragon could smoothly animate while changing forms with different body proportions. The main player character could also move smoothly at different speeds controlled by the (256 sensitivity) analog controller.

Coloured lighting too, with directional and point lights and in places varying ambient lighting.

There's something remarkably cool about seeing hardware that had long been written off doing stuff like that.

 

[Grall]

I don't think the animations in Saturn Quake are different from the original anyway.. which are pre-baked AFAIK.

All the classic full-3D id software games (Quake up to Q3A) used keyframe animation ("pre-baked") on PCs, but they also used tweening/interpolation, or else animation would have looked wonky/jerky when framerate does not match keyframes.

Like, back in classic DOOM, with its 35Hz tick timer (really odd number btw) - in a source port you can pan around the camera at full framerate, but player and monster movement are still locked at 35Hz, unless the port has fixed/bumped up the tick rate of course.

 

[see colon]

All the classic full-3D id software games (Quake up to Q3A) used keyframe animation ("pre-baked") on PCs, but they also used tweening/interpolation, or else animation would have looked wonky/jerky when framerate does not match keyframes.

Doesn't Quake 2 on N64 only display the keyframes? I remember the character animation looking funny when I played it back in the day but couldn't quite put my finger on why, and when I played it again more recently it was obvious that the characters aren't being animated at the same framerate that the game is running.

 

[swaaye]

Doesn't Quake 2 on N64 only display the keyframes? I remember the character animation looking funny when I played it back in the day but couldn't quite put my finger on why, and when I played it again more recently it was obvious that the characters aren't being animated at the same framerate that the game is running.

I actually played through Quake 2 N64 last year. It has the Quake 2 models and colors, but it doesn't really play like Quake 2. I was wondering if it might actually be the Quake 64 engine with some improvements.

 

[Grall]

Doesn't Quake 2 on N64 only display the keyframes?

I've no idea; I played Q2 on the PC. Turok Dinosaur Hunter had an excellent animation system, although if it used keyframe interpolation or inverse kinematics or something else is beyond me. The animations when you enabled slo-mo mode are quite simply super smooth...!

 

[Starx]

http://controllercrusade.com/the-sega-saturn-has-been-cracked-and-it-only-took-20-years/

 

[Grall]

Wow, awesome. A genuine renaissance man, doing fantastic work. Reverse engineering of software, hardware, then development of new hardware; low-level electrical engineering, signal probing, programming - all for making music on the damn thing! I would sell my soul to be as multi-talented as that guy!

Well, no, I wouldn't, assuming there actually is such a thing as souls... Just a figure of speech! But damn. It would be cool to have smarts like that.

 

[Cyan]

The SH2s inside the Saturn can address different pools of memory (also of different type) at the same time as they integrated a flexible memory controller. The SDRAM inside the Saturn was pretty cutting edge technology at the time; a single 4 Mbit Hitachi HM5241605-17 was used; at 28 MHz it operates at CL1 over a 16 bit bus. The Saturn CPU read data in burst of 128bits (thus 4 accesses with a 32 bit bus or 8 with 16) to update one cache line, while memory writes could be 8/16/32 bit. It took 12 cycles to read one entire line and only two cycles to write data to the RAM. That's all I can gather from the technical DOCs I've collected over the year.

My knowledge of the VDP 1/2 is more limited. I have the technical docs somewhere but I only gave them a superficial read once. Yes the Saturn was sort of capable of doing double buffering but not in the same sense we mean today. The VDP1 was a sprite engine that took square or rectangle bitmaps and placed it on a destination buffer using simple (but inefficient) forward rendering; the user could define the position of all the four vertex in the destination buffer, thus the bitmap could be scaled or warped, creating the illusion of having the surface projected in perspective. It was also able to apply per vertex interpolated shading akin to gouraud. The VDP2 created the actual screen picture by combining several pieces of data together; transparency and warping effects were possible. Certain Saturn games used VDP1+2 to obtain interesting effects such as the water reflections in Panzer Dragoon or translucent flames and explosions. Neither the VDP1 nor VDP2, unlike the GPU inside the Playstation, were capable of blending, so transparency or other fancy effect had to be done by superimposing two or more objects in the VDP2.

Many people call the Saturn the ultimate 2D console for this reason... There is no 3D capable hardware in the Saturn at all. If they wanted to build even a basic GPU, using quads, they should have adopted backward rendering to avoid wasting fillrate in small (relative size<1) polygons, allow free placement of UV coordinates instead of thinking in terms of rectanguar sprites and maybe give the VDP1 the ability to perform some basic blending ops. I'm not even considering 'fancy' functions such a proper Z buffer or texture filtering! Those come at a price which was outside the budget back in 1993-94; the Reality Engine compromises (texture cache, horrid fillrate with Z enabled) show that these two functions require more logic and bandwidth that was available at the time for a cheap, mass produced ASIC.

The sole contribution of the SCU to 3D graphics was doing a 'fast' interger dot3 between two vectors. it still took several clock cycles, so many developers preferred to use the SH2 multiply and accumulate instruction (one result every 3 clocks throughput).

I hope it helps and I hope not to have made any mistake. I had the SDRAM and SH2 datasheet ready at hand to check a couple of things. All the rest is written from memory.

in my opinion, the most fascinating hardware ever made.

 

[Cyan]

From everything I've read, the choice to split main memory between sdram and dram ultimately did come down to cost.

In terms of the hardware overall, I've read that Yu Suzuki didn't think the Saturn hardware was right, and thought Sega shouldn't release it. He wanted Sega to develop a 3D focused system based on the experience of their arcade divisions.

An interesting story on late MD / build-up to Saturn Sega and the way Sega Japan hated Sega America:



http://www.sega-16.com/2006/07/interview-tom-kalinske/

Sega Japan did no favours for the far more successful Sega America. Or for themselves, come to think of it.

Actually, Sega Japan was right. N64 games had horrible framerates, I'd never buy that console.

3D wise, the console was decent and had -unlike the PS1- texture correction. And Saturn had the best Duke Nukem 3D version of them all, a mate who has the console told me.

 

[Rikimaru]

Saturn did not have texture correction. It is often just not noticeable due to use of quadrilaterals.

 

[Cyan]

More issues? Like what? 200 polys a second an 16x16 textures. All rendered beutifully with perspective correct projection, texture filtering, AA, sub-pixel precidion, of course. Basically the pretiest 20 polygon objects you could get in the 90s'

yeah, at 10 fps, so no thanks. Saturn was a beast compared to the other two. and only exclusive Saturn games have shown that over time

 

[Exophase]

Actually, Sega Japan was right. N64 games had horrible framerates, I'd never buy that console.

Not all of them. F-Zero X was pretty reliable 60FPS.

yeah, at 10 fps, so no thanks. Saturn was a beast compared to the other two. and only exclusive Saturn games have shown that over time

All the consoles had strengths and weaknesses and a few standout games that showcased their strengths the best. What's really the best is very subjective but calling Saturn a beast compared to the others is a pretty strong statement.

I don't know what it is about Saturn fans defending the console like this. At least it's better than the people who think Jaguar would have been competitive at 3D games.

 

[Nesh]

Actually, Sega Japan was right. N64 games had horrible framerates, I'd never buy that console.

3D wise, the console was decent and had -unlike the PS1- texture correction. And Saturn had the best Duke Nukem 3D version of them all, a mate who has the console told me.

This is something I never understood. There are a few games people widely claim are better on Saturn but when I saw them they looked worse than the PS1 versions

 

[Nesh]

yeah, at 10 fps, so no thanks. Saturn was a beast compared to the other two. and only exclusive Saturn games have shown that over time

A beast compared to the other two? You mean the N64 and PS1?
Games showed otherwise

 

[see colon]

yeah, at 10 fps, so no thanks. Saturn was a beast compared to the other two. and only exclusive Saturn games have shown that over time

I'm a huge Saturn fan. I find the hardware to be absolutely fascinating because of it's weird development history, and the things developers were able to achieve despite it's shortcomings. But I don't see many games that couldn't have been done on other consoles. Maybe PSx and N64 couldn't have done VF2 at the same resolution that Saturn did, but lighting would have been better on both consoles. That's about the only example I could think of.

I'm interested in what exclusives in particular you think really show off the beastiness.

 

[Nesh]

I'm a huge Saturn fan. I find the hardware to be absolutely fascinating because of it's weird development history, and the things developers were able to achieve despite it's shortcomings. But I don't see many games that couldn't have been done on other consoles. Maybe PSx and N64 couldn't have done VF2 at the same resolution that Saturn did, but lighting would have been better on both consoles. That's about the only example I could think of.

I'm interested in what exclusives in particular you think really show off the beastiness.

What resolution was VF2 running at?

 

[function]

VF2 used 512 x 256 buffers, iirc, with 512 x 224 being drawn and output to to NTSC to give the impression of interlaced 512 x 448.

Sega were the first console developer to go in for PAL optimisation - a massively overlooked positive for Euro gamers IMO - and PAL VF2 was rendered at a higher resolution than NTSC. I think it was 50 fps 512 x 256 (effectively 512 x 512).

Only 8 bit colour for the polygons though (again IIRC), while backgrounds were 16 bit. Saturn could mix colour depths like that due to it's different VDPs.

Games built around VDP2s impressive plane and background processing would have looked bad on other systems. Then again, you wouldn't have built games around high quality infinite planes on polygon only systems.

 

[see colon]

What resolution was VF2 running at?

I really don't know, because I've heard 704*512, 704*480, and 640*48 quite a bit, but I'm more inclined to believe function's guess of 512*256 because it's definitely interlaced so half height buffers make sense, and I don't think VDP1 can do higher than that. The back of the box claims "double" the resolution of the arcade as well as double the speed, and it certainly is more crisp and smooth, with lower details and simple backgrounds.

Resolution on Saturn is a funny thing anyway, because you have those 2 display processors composing the image and they don't have to be calculating things at the same resolution, and then the final image is stretched and output to a totally different res. In many ways, it's like talking about resolution on modern consoles, where you have frames composed of assets rendered at different resolutions making the general "what res is it" question hard to answer. See Quantum Break.