Trees are flat. You can see it here
For reference crash bandicood 2 although it was a corridor had huge draw distances, more texture variety and geometry and I would dare even say better texture quality as well
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Questions about Sega Saturn
- Thread starter Liandry
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For reference crash bandicood 2 although it was a corridor had huge draw distances, more texture variety and geometry and I would dare even say better texture quality as well
I think Grandia is the only real example of this, and I don't remember it downgraded. But that is a game conversion crying out for the DF treatment!
Trees are 3D. Trunk is flat, but the branches are polygons, 100% sure. Shame im under 10 posts, and cannot post links or pics.
Sonic Jam floor is definitely rendered by VDP2.
You cant compare Crash Bandicoot to Sonic Jam. Crash is only a very narrow corridor, very different from the open 3d area from Sonic.
And.. Crash Bandicoot polygon sorting (call it z-buffer) is pre-calculated and loaded on-fly from the CD drive, so, you cannot move the camera around, etc.
Sonic Jam floor is definitely rendered by VDP2.
You cant compare Crash Bandicoot to Sonic Jam. Crash is only a very narrow corridor, very different from the open 3d area from Sonic.
And.. Crash Bandicoot polygon sorting (call it z-buffer) is pre-calculated and loaded on-fly from the CD drive, so, you cannot move the camera around, etc.
There are some downgrades to Grandia on PS1. Little changes like the building shadows, but nothing earth shattering. Grandia and Sonic World are probably best case scenarios for Saturn, I think. Clearly Grandia could be done on PS1 because it was, albeit with some changes. But it's pretty close, and closer than most of the 2D fighters that people claim are light years better on Saturn. Sonic World on the other hand really is impressive when compared to other games on Saturn. But there is pop in. You can see floating islands pop in at distance at around 4:30 of the video posted above, for example. It isn't perfect, but it does leverage the hardware well, even if the area available to roam around in is limited.
The bottom line is that PSx and N64 were much better at doing the things that most games needed done from their generation. There are certain, limited case situations where Saturn could perform better, but realistically, those were few and far between. I do believe that many games weren't coded to the strengths (or around the weaknesses) of Saturn's architecture, though. Doom should have run better, for example.
Definitely, in what way? VDP display planes are absolutely flat. If Sonic Jam's floor isn't absolutely flat, then it isn't rendered by VDP2. (The Youtube vid linked up above shows floor to be undulating, so not VDP2 then...)
Most of the floor is rendered by the VDP2. Most of it is flat. Only the river section the small undulated sections (the small bridge, river, and central island) are rendered via VDP1. Go and try it on an emulator..
I'm simply going off what the folks that have reverse engineered it have said. Nothing was overstated. Two planes, three axis rotation, can apply transparency from it's own rendering, can apply colour gradients, can use the visibility bit for applying shadows over VDP1, can take a VDP1 buffer from an initial pass and store it then blend it to a subsequent VDP1 pass to provide overlaid VDP2 output (even at different resolutions).
And as the guys behind the most impressive Saturn emu state - VDP2 is harder to master than VDP1.
Certainly that was a *huge* benefit, but things like high frame rate infinite draw distance, transparency, additional memory for high overall "unique texture/tile" and even gradient draw were really nice features.
Again, not saying that this meant the Saturn was better than the Playstation because on balance it wasn't, just that it could do some things really well!
Quite probably! Although Team Andromeda managed varying ambient light on VDP2 for Panzer Dragoon Saga. Then again, they also managed per vertex coloured lighting and RGB point lights. Which was mind blowing for a home console back in 1998. They were by no means representative of the average Saturn dev.
Absolutely. Limited, but very good at what it did.
That's VDP2 in a nutshell.
For some reason this is considered controversial. If you actually look at what the hardware in both consoles could do you can see clearly that this is true for both systems, and that while the PS1 was overall a better systems (and at the same time much cheaper to produce), it doesn't change the fact that the Saturn could do some things well.
Yep. If you tried to achieve the same result you'd struggle because the same hardware wasn't in there. Which is not to say that you could have achieved a different result, better.
Of course, Saturn also had the best sound chip ever put in a games console .....
You could mix polygon output from VDP1 and the planes from VDP2. E.g. cutout an area from VDP2 and use VDP1 output to draw river banks and bottom below the plane, and a bridge above it. And if you wanted, also use VDP2 to draw a second transparent water surface below the VDP2 ground level but above the VDP1 riverbed level.
You could also - if you wanted - use VDP1 to draw effects that you wished to be transparent (e.g. explosions / fire) , copy it to VDP2 memory and make it transparent there, store it, draw level geometry in VDP1, then output the level geometry through VDP2 with a VDP2 infinite plane ground level underneath - and also use VDP2 to apply a gradient (e.g. smoke/fog) while also overlaying the transparent geometry previously generated by VDP1 and stored in VDP2.
VDP2 wasn't just a mode 7 effect.
Saturn was flawed to hell and back, and was a mistake for Sega (just as Yu Suzuki thought at the time) but it's a rather different (and in *some* circumstances more capable) beast than people like Nesh think it is.
I assume you're looking at this: http://wiki.yabause.org/index.php5?title=VDP2
The "color gradient" part is a matter of Sega's own confusing terminology, it probably doesn't mean what you think it means, and from what I've heard no game uses it anyway. There also isn't anything there about blending between passes or mixing resolutions.
And honestly it's kind of naive to think the Yabause team really reverse engineered everything themselves... Even discounting the possibility of them looking at the easily accessible Sega documentation there was a Saturn homebrew scene for a long time before Yabause.
Hard to disagree with this. Well, except for the part about Yabause being the most impressive Saturn emulator
Actually, I've already linked to that page in this very thread, so no assumption is necessary!
Colour gradients across scanlines aren't something I consider confusing (iirc MD and SNES could do it too), and blending between different passes (and at different resolutions) is something that Burning Rangers actually used, and so it's not confusing or controversial! It's something that Saturn could actually do and did actually do. Though in the modern, Saturn unfriendly world, that alone makes it controversial.
It's weird, because I don't actually think the Saturn was a better machine than the PS1 in absolute terms, and in terms of effectiveness vs cost to manufacture it was positively a catastrophic device in the 3D age!
Perhaps, but that seems like an unreasonable reason to disregard definitive statements about things that the Saturn could and did do, and which chips did those things. Especially when emulators can prove definitively what Saturn was and wasn't doing, and with which chip!
Hard to disagree with this. Well, except for the part about Yabause being the most impressive Saturn emulator
Ooof!
I've not bothered much with Saturn emulators because I have a 50/60hz switchable Saturn, but it's true that I may not be up to date with what the most impressive Saturn emulator is at the moment!
Colour gradients across scanlines aren't something I consider confusing (iirc MD and SNES could do it too), and blending between different passes (and at different resolutions) is something that Burning Rangers actually used, and so it's not confusing or controversial! It's something that Saturn could actually do and did actually do. Though in the modern, Saturn unfriendly world, that alone makes it controversial.
The feature which Sega refers to as "gradiation" is using horizontal blurring in conjunction with the intra-layer blending. Yes, Saturn, like most 2D consoles, can support changing the color palette mid-line and it does have a "line color" feature which can be used in conjunction with blending to perform tints without manually intervening. But that's not what gradiation refers to.
Burning Rangers probably works by DMAing between VDP1 framebuffers and VDP2 VRAM, assuming that video about it was an accurate depiction. VDP2 does NOT have any ability to do anything with the VDP1 framebuffer other than display it directly as one of its layers, without any rotation, scaling, or as you referred to it projection. Or copying it to VDP2 VRAM itself.
I've read the VDP1 and VDP2 documentation really thoroughly at this point, and have talked a lot with emulator authors on this (am in process of doing some emulation of it as well, hopefully), so I have a pretty good handle on its featureset. And when you talk about VDP2 being something fundamentally unlike previous 2D hardware like what was on SNES and talking about doing bump mapping with it it doesn't really make sense.
So most likely Sonic Jam isnt using the VDP2. Thought so
It is. Check out this screenshot from a busted version of Yabause that didn't properly display VDP2 rotation layers. The VDP2 parts are everything in black:
http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showpost.php?p=191679123&postcount=61
Here's a screenshot with VDP2 properly rendered, but you can spot it because it's rasterized at a lower resolution:
http://www.uoyabause.org/system/rep...s_MK-81079_2016_03_03_10_09_24.png?1457018032
This isn't anything groundbreaking, it's a projected Z-aligned flat plane (still entirely "mode 7" style) with a bunch of polygons drawn on top of it. It looks like the VDP2 part is being scissored in a complex shape because parts of the 3D geometry appear "underneath" it, but actually everything is drawn on top of it.
I stand corrected then
I am quite curious now....could this be used for non-horizontal surfaces too? If yes probably the Saturn would have been able to produce some pretty remarkable results. Otherwise implementation seems quite limited.
It is the only game which produced such high quality textures in large environments on the Saturn.
Not really. You could rotate something on its side. But you can't render it with perspective projection. In other words, the surface needs to have a constant depth per scanline in order to look correct.
You only get two of these surfaces (and if you use the second one you lose a bunch of other VDP2 features) so it's a really big deal that they're perspective correct when in 3D space, because it's not as if you can break it into many smaller surfaces. And since you have so few it makes more sense to use them for floor and ceiling or skybox than any kind of vertical surface anyway.
I think it actually wouldn't really be that expensive to emulate a basic VDP2-style projected tiled layer on PS1. Definitely some overhead, but maybe not huge, especially if you can limit the layer to 16 colors. The GPU's rectangle blit function could be used to composite a row of the unprojected map on demand, then break it down to textured line primitives to copy it on top of the framebuffer where the rest of the 3D scene has been rendered. The mask bit can be used as a layer priority.
The big limitation is that there's a lot less VRAM to manage this in.
@Liandry
The Motorola 68k is a general purpose CPU (found in many computers and arcade games of the early-mid 80s), as well as in tons of embedded systems, stuff like engine control units for ignition, fuel injection, ABS and so on. Also, medical devices like cardiogram monitors, CNC mills, printers, photocopiers... On and on the list goes.
The 68k's job is to control the Yamaha synth chip. The 68k runs the music player and triggers playback of sound effects, by loading appropriate values into the registers of the yamaha synth. Think of it as the brains of the sound system.
Sega Megadrive also had separate sound CPU (as did almost all 1980s arcade boards btw); a Zilog Z80 or derivative thereof; incidentally the same CPU found in the Sega Master System. Didn't the Megadrive have Master System backwards compatibility? If so, then the sound CPU likely ran game code in compatibility mode...
The Motorola 68k is a general purpose CPU (found in many computers and arcade games of the early-mid 80s), as well as in tons of embedded systems, stuff like engine control units for ignition, fuel injection, ABS and so on. Also, medical devices like cardiogram monitors, CNC mills, printers, photocopiers... On and on the list goes.
The 68k's job is to control the Yamaha synth chip. The 68k runs the music player and triggers playback of sound effects, by loading appropriate values into the registers of the yamaha synth. Think of it as the brains of the sound system.
Sega Megadrive also had separate sound CPU (as did almost all 1980s arcade boards btw); a Zilog Z80 or derivative thereof; incidentally the same CPU found in the Sega Master System.
Didn't the Megadrive have Master System backwards compatibility? If so, then the sound CPU likely ran game code in compatibility mode...
Sega Megadrive also had separate sound CPU (as did almost all 1980s arcade boards btw); a Zilog Z80 or derivative thereof; incidentally the same CPU found in the Sega Master System.
It did have backwards compatibility and I'm sure that's the best reason the Z80 was even there. Without the backwards compatibility feature the system probably would have been better off without the Z80, or at least if they included a way to reliably stream digital samples, like via DMA and a timer.
