Saturn ( Off topic in Xbox 2 thread )

[Clashman]

the 2d games look fine. I really think the 32 bit generation was the wrong time for consoles to make the jump. The filtering and power just wasn't there . In another generation those games willl look so bad . you can still look at a nintendo game from the nes and play it and think it looks fine. But those are just blury pixilated messes .

You should remember, however, that Nintendo was several generations into 2D gaming. There always needs to be a starting point, and for 2D it wasn't nintendo, it was Pong, Space Invaders, etc. If you compare those to todays 2D games, you could well come to the conclusion that "Pong was the wrong time for videogames to start turning up". However, what happens, happens. Once you open it up, it's kind of difficult to shut back down. People wanted 3D when Saturn and Playstation and N64 were offering it, and that's just how things happened. Personally, I would disagree with the notion that just because it doesn't look up to par to today's graphics that it can't be fun. I still enjoy games like Shockwave on my 3DO, and Alone in The Dark, Wing Commander III, etc, on my PC. The graphics of these pales in comparison to even what was done on Saturn and PS1, but that doesn't mean they weren't any fun.

 

[Paul]

I really think the 32 bit generation was the wrong time for consoles to make the jump. The filtering and power just wasn't there . In another generation those games willl look so bad . you can still look at a nintendo game from the nes and play it and think it looks fine. But those are just blury pixilated messes .

Ditto. The 32/64bit era was 3D done wrong, period.

Odd though, years ago before PS2/DC existed, when I used to play a new PSX game.. It never looked pixelated like they do now when I play the same game. I think it's because we are so used to games today.

 

[jvd]

the 2d games look fine. I really think the 32 bit generation was the wrong time for consoles to make the jump. The filtering and power just wasn't there . In another generation those games willl look so bad . you can still look at a nintendo game from the nes and play it and think it looks fine. But those are just blury pixilated messes .

You should remember, however, that Nintendo was several generations into 2D gaming. There always needs to be a starting point, and for 2D it wasn't nintendo, it was Pong, Space Invaders, etc. If you compare those to todays 2D games, you could well come to the conclusion that "Pong was the wrong time for videogames to start turning up". However, what happens, happens. Once you open it up, it's kind of difficult to shut back down. People wanted 3D when Saturn and Playstation and N64 were offering it, and that's just how things happened. Personally, I would disagree with the notion that just because it doesn't look up to par to today's graphics that it can't be fun. I still enjoy games like Shockwave on my 3DO, and Alone in The Dark, Wing Commander III, etc, on my PC. The graphics of these pales in comparison to even what was done on Saturn and PS1, but that doesn't mean they weren't any fun.

See i can play space invaders and pong and see nothing wrong with it. Even my 10 year old cousin doesn't think they look bad. But i show him re1 on the ps1 and he says it looks really bad.

Pong was simple. There was only 2 lines , 1 big line and a small square moving around. But the image quality was still fine. Which means in another 10 years people wont go oh god this is so blury my eyes are bothering me. They wont go wth is that supposed to be .

Even with my intelvision you can still make out whateverything was supposed to be on the screen. sure they weren't detailed and were simplistic but look at the 32bit gen . Look it at it now you'd be hard pressed to tell what some things are and in 10 years when your memory of the game is gone you'd really have no clue what it is .

There allways needs to be a starting point yes. Doesn't mean that the 32 bit era was the right starting point . If the first 3d system was the dreamcast or ps2 the filtering and texture quality would hold up much better .

In 10 years i wont hear people say god crazy taxi was a blurry mess . Because the filtering was just there to make the games look better .

The jump in detail isn't even what does it. ps1 games on bleem played on the dc look much better with filtering than the psx originals .

 

[zidane1strife]

Actually guys. Go and see the saturn video of Shenme. I found it very impressive for the time. IMO there are very few or no games on PS2 that have the same detail and it was still a beta. The frame rate was OK for the time and the ammount of detail visible. The faces where especially good compared to other games on the console.

PS2? you mean psone, don't you!!!

 

[cthellis42]

The problem with screenshot-comparing is you can ALWAYS pull optimal and poorer examples from any title. (Not to mention the size of the pics posted, and the frame of reference can adjust the relative "goodness" of them as well.) Not to mention it's immensely hard to judge against an unreleased title, since we can't tell anything else performance-wise to compare (framerate, tendency to stall, etc) on an more equivalent scale.

I can certainly say it LOOKED like it would have been damn impressive, and sucks that it never saw the light of day... but mainly I just have to concur with jvd in that playing theses games now--even just looking at screenshots--makes my brain hurt.

 

[Fox5]

I really think the 32 bit generation was the wrong time for consoles to make the jump. The filtering and power just wasn't there . In another generation those games willl look so bad . you can still look at a nintendo game from the nes and play it and think it looks fine. But those are just blury pixilated messes .

Ditto. The 32/64bit era was 3D done wrong, period.

Odd though, years ago before PS2/DC existed, when I used to play a new PSX game.. It never looked pixelated like they do now when I play the same game. I think it's because we are so used to games today.

I always thought psx looked pixelated, that's why I was such a n64 fan. N64 almost got 3d right in my opinion, it was just way too blurry and often had too low of a framerate.(lets see, they need to fix bilinear filtering, give that thing faster ram and more of it, and cut out some of those wasteful 3d effects....I'd love more spruced up n64 ports like the zelda ones for my gamecube though, but only because I just recently got a crap lcd screen and anything in 640x480 res makes it extremely blurry and nasty)

BTW, some nes games were pretty bad, very flickery(nearly every nes game had a problem with flicker). And crazi taxi does look pretty blurry to me now.

 

[CIN]

Actually guys. Go and see the saturn video of Shenme. I found it very impressive for the time. IMO there are very few or no games on PS2 that have the same detail and it was still a beta. The frame rate was OK for the time and the ammount of detail visible. The faces where especially good compared to other games on the console.

PS2? you mean psone, don't you!!!

Sure.

 

[Tagrineth]

I think that there wasn't really any programmability involved with the saturn, unless you count the vdp1 -> vdp2 blend/priority modes which weren't necessary on the PS1 due to there only being a single graphics chip. The warping on the Saturn in 3D was just as bad - just in a different way ( The only real correct effects tended to come from the VDP2 generated rotated playfields.. )

Maybe, but transforms were done on the completely programmable SH-2's, 68k (in some cases), and SCU DSP... not on a totally fixed GTE.

I'd agree with the 80% comment from Suzuki-san, but even then it wouldn't match the performance possible from a good programmer using the GTE/MIPs well on PS1.

The Saturn's Virtua Fighter 3 would've put anything on the PS1 to shame. Too bad DC came early. The last dev kit for Saturn (that only went to a small handful of devs, and only AM2 actually used it) apparently gave a dramatic boost to video performance.

 

[Fox5]

I think that there wasn't really any programmability involved with the saturn, unless you count the vdp1 -> vdp2 blend/priority modes which weren't necessary on the PS1 due to there only being a single graphics chip. The warping on the Saturn in 3D was just as bad - just in a different way ( The only real correct effects tended to come from the VDP2 generated rotated playfields.. )

Maybe, but transforms were done on the completely programmable SH-2's, 68k (in some cases), and SCU DSP... not on a totally fixed GTE.

I'd agree with the 80% comment from Suzuki-san, but even then it wouldn't match the performance possible from a good programmer using the GTE/MIPs well on PS1.

The Saturn's Virtua Fighter 3 would've put anything on the PS1 to shame. Too bad DC came early. The last dev kit for Saturn (that only went to a small handful of devs, and only AM2 actually used it) apparently gave a dramatic boost to video performance.

Funny how it's always 'how good things could have been'. By 1998/99, DC was probably as cheap as or cheaper to build than saturn though.

 

[MrWibble]

I'm really glad some of you guys aren't making the big decisions at Sony et-al. I'd hate to have missed out on all the hours I spent enjoying 3D games duing the PS1 life-time because the hardware was never released due to "3D not being ready".

Do you extend this back to even more primitive (programmer joke intended) 3D done on 16-bit and even 8-bit machines? Should Braben&Bell have held back on Elite? Whats the metric for judging "good enough" here anyway? You say Crazy Taxi looks fine to you now, but I suspect that a lot of people will be looking back at that in a few years and the flaws we ignore or can't see right now will be all too obvious.

My own take on this is that we're always the most critical of titles from about 1 generation ago. Anything much older than that tends to be forgiven because it's practically an antique. But there's a narrow band of stuff in our recent memory that we can't help but compare on equal terms to the state of the art.

Every time we've shifted up a generation I can remember suddenly looking at the previous gen's output and turning my nose up at it. And the marority of it I can look back at now in a much more favourable light.

 

[Crazyace]

Maybe, but transforms were done on the completely programmable SH-2's, 68k (in some cases), and SCU DSP... not on a totally fixed GTE.

Although the 68k is usable - I dont think it was a major contributor ( I'd use it
to decompress audio samples to increase the usability of the 512kb sound ram more than anything else )
The MIPS+GTE was pretty programmable, ( in the same way as the SH4 on the DC it implemented the basic building blocks of 3D transformation - but with more registers to hold multiple matrices )
If you ran everything at full potential you match or exceed the numbers for the ps1, but you then ignore all of the connection overheads..

The Saturn's Virtua Fighter 3 would've put anything on the PS1 to shame. Too bad DC came early. The last dev kit for Saturn (that only went to a small handful of devs, and only AM2 actually used it) apparently gave a dramatic boost to video performance.

Sorry, I think you are moving into the realms of fantasy there. The Sega libraries sucked at the beginning, but so did the Sony libraries. Both improved during the lifetimes of the consoles, but they never improved the underlying hardware, and many devs ( especially on Saturn, where full HW
documentation was available from day one ) just rolled their own 3D graphics libs anyway.
If Vf3 had come out - it would have been similar to either fighters Megamix ( low res interlaced with gourard shading ) or LastBronx/VF2 ( high res interlaced with no lighting ) - I very much doubt that the different landscapes would have been implemented - just a normal infinite plain.

( As another indication of potential Sega Rally 2 is one of the better Saturn
games - but it doesn't really look as nice as the original Ridge Racer, let alone RR4 )

No amount of rose tinted hindsight is going to change the HW...sorry..

 

[Deepak]

It is impossible to satisfy human race. When I used play PS1 I was in awe of Tekken3, RE,MGS,SH....now I look at them and all I see is pixels, and I wonder how did it impressed me with its graphics 4-5 yrs back....maybe 3-4 yrs later PS2/GC/XB games will look crap (graphically)...

 

[I.S.T.]

I'm surprised anybody can do that, lol. When I look at one of my old games, I see what I saw when I first played it. If it looked good then, it still looks good to me. If I didn't like how it looked then, then it still sucks.

 

[London Geezer]

I really think the 32 bit generation was the wrong time for consoles to make the jump. The filtering and power just wasn't there . In another generation those games willl look so bad . you can still look at a nintendo game from the nes and play it and think it looks fine. But those are just blury pixilated messes .

Ditto. The 32/64bit era was 3D done wrong, period.

Odd though, years ago before PS2/DC existed, when I used to play a new PSX game.. It never looked pixelated like they do now when I play the same game. I think it's because we are so used to games today.

Oooookay... So the companies involved in 3D games should have gotten their experience in 3D HOW exactly?... I mean it's a bit stupid to think they should have just "waited till they had ps2-level of hardware" to come out with 3D games, simply because there might have not been any PS2-level hardware if Sony-Nint-Sega hadnt tried it out in the 32-bit generation to see what works and what doesn't...

Or, better, 128-gen hardware would NOT be the same as it is now (see: completely and obsessively centered on 3D)...

Really, think about it... It's like thinking we should have waited for Ferrari till the first car was released, just so we could have been spared years of dodgy machinery... :? :|

 

[-tkf-]

Re: ...

PSX couldn't possibly do this even if it started smoking while trying.... End of story.

You do know that the PSX features a Complete Playstation 2 ?

 

[pakotlar]

Re: ...

PSX couldn't possibly do this even if it started smoking while trying.... End of story.

You do know that the PSX features a Complete Playstation 2 ?

you know what he meant.

 

[London Geezer]

Re: ...

PSX couldn't possibly do this even if it started smoking while trying.... End of story.

You do know that the PSX features a Complete Playstation 2 ?

you know what he meant.

Doesn't excuse DM from keeping using wrong names, bragging about how his way is the "correct way"... The fact that we all got used to "his names" is only indicative of how long this has been going on and how tired we are of him...

 

[Squeak]

Was the VDP2 good for anything else but advanced mode7 style effects?
Could it be used for stuff other than skies and distant hills in free roaming 3d games?

 

[Clashman]

However, PSOne was referred to as PSX before PSX was. People seem to forget that now.

 

[Rodéric]

However, PSOne was referred to as PSX before PSX was. People seem to forget that now.

Whom by ?
I'm not sure SONY ever used PSX to refer to the PS1...