Should the SEGA DC and Saturn have launched with these alternative designs?

These sort of woulda coulda shoulda "what if" scenarios are a lot of fun though I think a lot of users are irritated when discussions of "dead" consoles are sparked.

Other than piracy/security issues I don't think there is anything I would change about the Dreamcast. It was amazingly well designed for its time period and its a real tragedy SEGA couldn't make it work.

The Saturn on the other hand..

In terms of game library, the Sega Saturn is one of my favorite game systems of all time..in terms of hardware design it was a cluster*#($)@.

If I had been in charge of Sega I would have dropped the second CPU and used the savings to add a third VDP to aid with 3d and doubled the ram. The (negligible, due to the terrible and unwieldy single bus for 2 processors) loss of performance could be made up for by a huge increase in video ram allowing for far more texture detail and quantity than what was available on the Playstation. Anyway, an additional VDP would have probably had a more positive effect on Saturn's 3d rendering ability than another processor, at least one that was hobbled by an insufficient bus.

In the initial games (i.e launch window) Sega could have played to the strengths of the machine by employing faux-3d effects such as those seen in the System 32 arcade hardware or combined such effects with polygonal 3d graphics.

(an example of some great sprite based faux-3d from Sega System-32)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UnrfaGIH0rQ&feature=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6aSA8Iu7YuI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9L9p2PAck40

 

I have fallen for Saturn games library, fast loadings, date/time configuration, RGB cable bundled, awesome controller especially the D-pad, nice interface, backup memory so there was no need to buy "memory card".
I have to complain about developers, at that time they did not show any effort into Saturn, and therefore some games were graphically disastrous. Releasing even games where the main character head would simply disappear, IIRC Croc.
Saturn had advantage on the size of video memory, which could display richer textures.
Probably the use of triangles instead of quads could have helped.
Its not like this days where the most difficult hardware console to program is praised and developers find it a challenge, therefore giving their very best. How things have changed.

Regarding the Dreamcast, whoa, I was completely flabbergasted the first instance I saw it!
Unbelievable graphics for its time, game library that pushed concept further. I see that SEGA really gave its best when choose CPU+GPU.
I would not change anything about it.

 

Saturn loading times were definitely not short, and like the PS, it varied from one game to another, and the backup memory was too small so you needed a card sooner or later. However, the notion that the Saturn was a capable hardware hindered only by bad libraries and developer disinterest is simply untrue. It just wasn't a capable 3D hardware and couldn't match the competition in a lot of areas (aside from the sound chip that was never used properly). It was designed well for a 2D pushing machine, and it excelled in that particularly with the RAM upgrade for Capcom and SNK releases in Japan and that's about it.

Some of you may remember Lobotomy's excellent games on the system (Power Slave and Duke, Quake ports). The DF had an interview last year with Ezra Derishbach and he had a few harsh words about the system (check the bottom and continued on page 2):

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/death-tanks-ezra-driesbach-interview

It really doesn't get any clearer than that when it's coming from a developer that produced the system's best looking and performing 3D games.

The DC was a 360 effort and Sega pretty much did everything right design-wise.

 

Snip
Yes you are right, Saturn was not much capable on 3D department, it was weak.
Although, I bought about 8 games, and backup memory was enough, I was happy about it. Sure this would not be the case if I had more games.
About loading times, all of them had fast loadings. But I cannot say it was the rule, as it always gave me that impression.

I can mention two examples of games that I could not play, frame rate was so bad that my eyes could stand it, Sega Touring Car and Wipeout 2097. I believe that more effort could overcome that.

 

The Saturn could only do "good" 3D when it was using vdp2 to cover large areas of the screen with one or two highly detailed planes (for example the floor and/or canopy of a forest). They could be of finite or infinite size, transparent (like the surface of water), animated, were distortion free, and could be rotated around all three axes (unlike the plane the SNES could draw).

When a game had a detailed and distortion free floor, and a detailed and suitably scaled and rotated background (or sequence of parallax scrolling backgrounds), you could focus the limited 3D power on objects within the mocked up world and make some great looking stuff. The Panzer Dragoon games were very impressive for the time, the last of which is IMO by far the best looking Saturn game around and technically amazing.

Outside of these limited situations the Saturn's 3D had a hard time simply not sucking. Had much faster loading times than the PS1 though.

I like the Saturn's games library, but the System itself should never have been built. To go up against the PS1 with an expensive scrambled redesign was a huge mistake, and one that was nicely sandwiched between many others.

 

For 3D? All I saw was variable times depending on the games. Capcom's RE1 port for example loaded slower than the PS original, despite not being full realtime.

 

The only games I was able to directly compare were a couple of Capcom's fighters, a shoot em up, and a football game so it's by no means exhaustive testing*. The Saturn was considerably faster though. In general Saturn stuff did seem to load faster (fighting games, racing games ... fighting games) but comparing genres from memory isn't necessarily an accurate or fair comparison.

The first time I remember coming across truly seamless in-level streaming of level data was in Panzer Dragoon Zwei. That's not proof of anything btw, it's just an anecdote.

Panzer Dragoon Zwei also had awesome chip generate music. Chip generated music is boss. Screw redbook audio.

Edit: * There was also the option of testing Battle Arena Toshinden, but no-one wanted to do that.

 

It really depended on the game. I remember Soul Blade and Tekken 3 loaded fairly fast whereas DOA was slow.
I had no idea that Panzer Dragoon had seamless in level streaming. But I think the best level streaming example in the 32 bit era was in Soul Reaver. Simply unbelievable level morphing and almost zero loading hidden by a few second door opening from area to area.

 

Fair enough, and absolutely, Capcom's 2D fighters and everything well coded, loaded considerably faster and ran noticeably better on the Saturn even with the default hardware. On the other hand, Midway's MK games loaded slower than the PS versions and were incidentally based on previous PS work.

 

While Lobotomy's grasp of the Saturn hardware far exceeded most third-party's, the divide from the expertise of the top first party software engineers at SEGA still kept them on a different level.

Showcases of custom effects like the later Panzer games with their dynamic pools of water, NiGHTS with its morphing terrain in Soft Museum and liberal usage of particles accenting many environmental interactions, Grandia's wide world of texture quality and variety, and Saturn Shenmue's sheer complexity were not matched by PlayStation games. Still, PSone's rendering capabilities were obviously faster in more basic ways which, considering the lower cost of the hardware, made it an impressive feat of engineering.

 

I'm sure Sega will address all the issues in their new console. LOL !

http://seganewswire.webs.com/apps/blog/entries/show/5064381-rumor-imgtec-to-power-segadrive

 

That link leads to FGN, the hideous hideout of TEXAN and his many hateful aliases, our repeat SEGA troll. I consider that worthless as a source. In fact I consider FGN a swearword on this board that should be bleeped out!

 

I believe that some of your examples were matched and probably surpassed by some Playstation games.

Crash Bandicoot 3 had some amazing water effects. MGS also introduced us to some water distortion effects at the beginning of the game. Soul Blade presented us with some great water effects in Long's stage. Oh and Rapid Racer. That was 60fps had great lighting and water effects and if I am not mistaken it was also in 640x480 resolution
Cant think of any game that had constant terrain morphing but Soul Reaver introduced to us to environmental morphing in much more complex environments and lighting effects. Nights although looked great it suffered from limited draw distance and extreme pop ins. Grandia was also released on the PS1 and AFAIK it wasnt developed by Sega.
Shenmue is probably the only example that I cant think of any PS1 game being able to match. But that was unreleased unfortunately so we dont know how it really was apart from the released video

The Saturn didnt age as well as the PS1 though. At the same timframe Saturn was bringing the best it could offer in visuals the PS1 was already coming up with its own. The Saturn's offerings were overshadowed. Panzer Dragoon Saga was the last game I saw on the Saturn and said "wow" but it also had its own visual problems here and there usually when your character was off the dragon

 

Ok, but PS2s power/flexibility ratio was the highest last gen, right? You could have much higher compression levels of the geometry (modifying instances, rotations and scaling of simple parts, tessellated curves, simple fractal rendering. etc.) And there were games that were either ports of DC games or with DC or slightly better levels of geometry. Why didn't they have better texturing?

Not intentionally I insure. I have nothing but respect for the PVR tech. But whether the CLX2 was an off the shelf part or not, it still was made more with overall budget in mind than GS. Am I wrong?

Neat. Ideal for MIP mapping I think?

Interesting. Was ARC1 also for Sega, or someone else?

 

This article about Dreamcast (and Saturn ) comes from Totalgames.net but I cannot provide a link as it's not in their archives.

SEGA *should* have scrapped the 1994 Saturn design entirely, not tweak it, simplify it, or make it more powerful but SCRAPPED it alltogether, in favorite of an all-Lockheed Martin Real3D designed console (GPU side) with an IBM-designed, Hitachi manufactured PowerPC (CPU side) in order to compete with and beat the most powerful consumer 3D technology of that generation, the 3DO M2, and allowed decent ports of Model 3 arcade games at home, as well as scaled up versions of Model 2 games. By 1996, a Lockheed Martin Real3D + IBM/Hitachi based console could've launched for $299, less than the Saturn's $399/$449 U.S. price in May 1995.

 

The price at which the designer wants to sell the product determines the die sizes of the processors, not how ambitious the designs are. The designs of five square millimeter mobile cores aren't necessarily any less or more ambitious than five hundred square millimeter discrete graphics chip add-in boards.

Focusing a lot of the 42 mm^2 @ 250nm sized SH-4 on SIMD like the EE would've reduced its ability to process the gameplay and housekeeping threads and ultimately bottlenecked the games more; its existing design entierly represented a balance to be the best gaming CPU forty square millimeters of silicon could buy.

Ambitiousness is intangible and is a quality of a design that can't be measured, but performance for a given area/power/heat can.

 

I'd say you're wrong! Given how broke Sega were, and how rolling-in-money-and-laughing Sony were, I don't see how the GS could possibly have been built more with budget in mind than CLX2. Which makes it all the more incredible that it could smoke everything in existence (edit: particularly talking about the Japanese launch in 1998).

Or they could have slapped the Saturn's CD drive on the N64. Increase the size of the texture cache (they'd already enhanced the design once for SoA) and add the Saturns sound processor too and you'd be laughing.

 

A Saturn related question:

Does anyone know about the Saturn SCU's DSP, and what kind of 3D work it could assist with? There are some documents here, but I can't find any details (perhaps I don't know what I'm looking for):

http://koti.kapsi.fi/~antime/sega/docs.html

System 16 says the following about the ST-V: "SCU DSP : fixed point maths coprocessor, up to 4 parallel instructions". Does this mean you could do matrix multiplication for 3D transforms?

 

Squeak was saying CLX2 was made with budget in mind "more", not made with "more budget".

That's still wrong, though. While it was built for a lower price point for sale, its desgn wasn't any less ambitious at trying to deliver the most performance for a given cost.

 

By late 1996 SEGA had better options than N64's MIPS R4300i + RCP which was always intended for a 1995 launch. In 1996 Sega could've used 3DO M2, 3DFX Voodoo1 or PowerVR PCX1, at the very least. A custom Lockheed Martin Real3D chip would've beaten all of those and absolutely spanked the N64.

I will admit though, an improved N64 chipset wit 16K texture cache and 8 MB Rambus RAM would've been interesting, but only if launched in late 1995 to combat the U.S. release of PlayStation.