Questions about Sega Saturn

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?

 

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.

 

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.

 

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.

 

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...!

 

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

 

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.

 

in my opinion, the most fascinating hardware ever made.

 

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.

 

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

 

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

 

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

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.

 

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

 

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

 

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?

 

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.

 

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.