Apparently the second CPU in Saturn was poorly implemented. It was extremely difficult to get good utilization out of both CPUs, more than just a matter of SMP programming. Saturn in general was not very well designed. Though of course consumer 3D was pretty experimental back then so it's hard to fault them. Nintendo struggled with even SGI behind them and PS1 had Sony money.

Their business decisions like creating Sega CD and 32x were not good but hey hindsight is 20/20.

Dreamcast was some pretty sweet hardware but yeah PS2 hype must have been what killed it. Maybe partly software library too. If you have some seriously tantalizing games, people will come regardless of other concerns. They needed a Goldeneye-ish multiplayer phenomenon. Crap ports of UT and Quake3 aren't the answer. Halo for Dreamcast would've changed things! 🤣

sliderider wrote:

AlphaWing wrote:

Slipheed on the Sega CD (its redone for this system with voice overs too) still impresses me to this day. Its a 3d game and the […]
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Slipheed on the Sega CD (its redone for this system with voice overs too) still impresses me to this day.
Its a 3d game and the Poly count\fps is smooth\high for the time especially during the cut-scenes where you can see all the ships, and its running on very weak hardware!
2-cpu's really did help when they were used to good extent back then.

Sega never did leverage\Market\Advertise why it helped.... JUST BLAST PROCESSING 🤣 !!

Yeah, IF the game took advantage of the second CPU then it was great BUT, as was mentioned earlier, cross platform developers couldn't be bothered to include the second CPU in their ports so the games only used one on Saturn and many suffered for it.

The main reason Sega went with a 2nd CPU was due to their relation with Hitachi at the time, and since the 28Mhz was the fastest Hitachi had , they simply threw 2 into the machine. remember that eventually Sega allowed Hitachi to produce Hitachi branded Saturns in Japan, which usually came bundled with the Photo/VideoCD card.

it was more than the 2nd CPU that was an issue, things like RAM being divided into 2 different speeds (1MB of faster RAM , and 1MB of slower RAM), the whole issue with quads (although quads weren't used nearly as much as people think , most games still used standard triangles).

Even support was poor, I remember talking to someone who worked at the time on Saturn games (stuff like the Saturn port of Wipeout 2097 , Manx TT Superbike and Destruction Derby) , and according to him , Sega pretty much provided no support or info on quite alot of features.

One of them for instance was the 2nd GPU which was mainly concerned with drawing 2D backgrounds and effects. Some games used it to create mode7-like effects in hardware, used in some football games for the field, in some fighting games, or in the Panzer Dragoon games with 3D objects simply laid on top of them (its why if you look at it, they have a nearly infinite draw distance). Sega however didn't provide any documentation for it, resulting in alot of devs either not bothering, or trying to learn as they go (which is why it didn't always turn out the best), The original idea was to save the renderer some work at least in that department, which was useful given that the 3D renderer in the Saturn was not as fast as what the Playstation had.

I generally think people exaggerate the issues Saturn 3D games had, but there is no doubt the hardware had alot of issues.
2D games of course were generally of a considerably better quality

swaaye wrote:

Halo for Dreamcast would've changed things! 🤣

I thought most of the 'what could have saved the dreamcast' "hope" game was the cancelled Half-Life port? I remember I've had fanboys flaming down my neck when I pointed out the sham that was 'counterstrike for dreamcast' being Half-Life DC with the models swapped against HL's monsters, etc. They don't want me to ruin their 'dream' 🙁 The delusional clique is disappointing.

The PS2 got the Half-Life port and that didn't really boost the PS2 much (especially releasing on the heels of GTA3), can't see why that would 'save' a console, GTA3 would squish the DC had it still went on anyeay 😜

Also wasn't Outtrigger supposed to be their Goldeneye stand-in? Its awkward controls and 'arcade' gameplay didn't really have much of a marketing appeal, no matter how mcuh they want to push the point of their framerate.

The DC did get a Lodoss game at least, but it wasn't very good and it was the last Lodoss game ever. 🙁

@Darkman
I never saw any 2d games that were better on the Saturn. They all had really $hitty sound (sounded like the system had a cold). I even remember Street Fighter Alpha 2 being obvious; when you pick a mirror match in training mode, sound right away became way better, but only with mirror matches. Why Sega didn't add more ram is beyond me. The only exception were the RAM expansion games (even SF Zero 3 had awful samplerate for announcer). Psx had built-in hardware for handling compressed adpcm; even the freakin' SNES had that. Again I don't get why Sega didn't add simple stuff like that. I don't think any programmer would handle compressed sfx audio in software on Saturn; even if they did they'd have to figure out were the heck to do it, and they probably couldn't..

I don't agree that 3d games are exaggerated either. They mostly looked like $hit! The only decent looking games I saw were Dead or Alive and Die Hard Arcade. Every psx to Saturn game looked really bad.

I'm not going to lie, I think the Saturn is a great machine but the games on it just didn't cut it. You had to be a ninja programmer on a small team to get impressive games on Saturn.

leileilol wrote:

I thought most of the 'what could have saved the dreamcast' "hope" game was the cancelled Half-Life port? I remember I've had […]
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swaaye wrote:

Halo for Dreamcast would've changed things! 🤣

I thought most of the 'what could have saved the dreamcast' "hope" game was the cancelled Half-Life port? I remember I've had fanboys flaming down my neck when I pointed out the sham that was 'counterstrike for dreamcast' being Half-Life DC with the models swapped against HL's monsters, etc. They don't want me to ruin their 'dream' 🙁 The delusional clique is disappointing.

The PS2 got the Half-Life port and that didn't really boost the PS2 much (especially releasing on the heels of GTA3), can't see why that would 'save' a console, GTA3 would squish the DC had it still went on anyeay 😜

Also wasn't Outtrigger supposed to be their Goldeneye stand-in? Its awkward controls and 'arcade' gameplay didn't really have much of a marketing appeal, no matter how mcuh they want to push the point of their framerate.

The DC did get a Lodoss game at least, but it wasn't very good and it was the last Lodoss game ever. 🙁

Half Life and Shenmue 2 might have done it. Half Life was canceled in the 11th hour and Shenmue 2 was only released in Japan and Europe. I had to get a boot loader CD to run imported games on my DC so I could play the Europe release of Shenmue 2 on it.

Holering wrote:

@Darkman I never saw any 2d games that were better on the Saturn. They all had really $hitty sound (sounded like the system had […]
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@Darkman
I never saw any 2d games that were better on the Saturn. They all had really $hitty sound (sounded like the system had a cold). I even remember Street Fighter Alpha 2 being obvious; when you pick a mirror match in training mode, sound right away became way better, but only with mirror matches. Why Sega didn't add more ram is beyond me. The only exception were the RAM expansion games (even SF Zero 3 had awful samplerate for announcer). Psx had built-in hardware for handling compressed adpcm; even the freakin' SNES had that. Again I don't get why Sega didn't add simple stuff like that. I don't think any programmer would handle compressed sfx audio in software on Saturn; even if they did they'd have to figure out were the heck to do it, and they probably couldn't..

I don't agree that 3d games are exaggerated either. They mostly looked like $hit! The only decent looking games I saw were Dead or Alive and Die Hard Arcade. Every psx to Saturn game looked really bad.

I'm not going to lie, I think the Saturn is a great machine but the games on it just didn't cut it. You had to be a ninja programmer on a small team to get impressive games on Saturn.

I disagree , Saturn sounds just fine to me, and the hardware was generally better for 2D (better support for sprites in hardware for a start, more VRAM for animations, etc)) , I mean , to each his own of course, but I would have to disagree with that (and this comes from having a Saturn collection of some 80 games, so I do have some experience with the system).

I will say that quite a few PS1 ports on the machine do suffer to varying degrees, with a few exceptions (I happen to like the Saturn port of RE for instance over the PS1 original), thats why one should probably avoid them and go with exclusives or arcade ports.

sliderider wrote:

leileilol wrote:

I thought most of the 'what could have saved the dreamcast' "hope" game was the cancelled Half-Life port? I remember I've had […]
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swaaye wrote:

Halo for Dreamcast would've changed things! 🤣

I thought most of the 'what could have saved the dreamcast' "hope" game was the cancelled Half-Life port? I remember I've had fanboys flaming down my neck when I pointed out the sham that was 'counterstrike for dreamcast' being Half-Life DC with the models swapped against HL's monsters, etc. They don't want me to ruin their 'dream' 🙁 The delusional clique is disappointing.

The PS2 got the Half-Life port and that didn't really boost the PS2 much (especially releasing on the heels of GTA3), can't see why that would 'save' a console, GTA3 would squish the DC had it still went on anyeay 😜

Also wasn't Outtrigger supposed to be their Goldeneye stand-in? Its awkward controls and 'arcade' gameplay didn't really have much of a marketing appeal, no matter how mcuh they want to push the point of their framerate.

The DC did get a Lodoss game at least, but it wasn't very good and it was the last Lodoss game ever. 🙁

Half Life and Shenmue 2 might have done it. Half Life was canceled in the 11th hour and Shenmue 2 was only released in Japan and Europe. I had to get a boot loader CD to run imported games on my DC so I could play the Europe release of Shenmue 2 on it.

I don't know, Half Life imo wouldn't have been a system seller, I mean it was a PC port , it might have sold well among the existing userbase , but not sold new systems. I mean can you imagine someone saying "Im going to buy a Dreamcast to play Half Life" , if someone would have wanted Half Life, the PC was the big seller on that front.

Shenmue 2 was the same, I have it on PAL Dreamcast, but it just wasn't a big seller. Its a great game but thew sales figures were not through the roof with either the first or 2nd game, from what I remember it didn't do well on the Xbox either, the series was more of a cult classic than a system seller.

I would say had Virtua Fighter 4 been released on the Dreamcast it would have sold at least some systems in Japan , the VF series is much bigger there than in the west, no doubt why Sony grabbed the exclusivity for it as soon as they could

@Dark man

I don't think the hardware of Saturn is bad in any way, I think it's far better than the PSX for example. I'm trying to say the software side of things had too many quality control issues. If you've played Castlevania on Saturn, I think that is a perfect example of that (it's like an unfinished beta or prototype); and it's the best version of that sequel IMO despite the software quality. For whatever reason, too many games were released with Sega's "seal of quality", and I think they were far from quality. I've seen early titles to be of better software quality than much later games, even if they're not great games (e.g. Robotica; I think it's American too).

Holering wrote:

@Dark man

I don't think the hardware of Saturn is bad in any way, I think it's far better than the PSX for example. I'm trying to say the software side of things had too many quality control issues. If you've played Castlevania on Saturn, I think that is a perfect example of that (it's like an unfinished beta or prototype); and it's the best version of that sequel IMO despite the software quality. For whatever reason, too many games were released with Sega's "seal of quality", and I think they were far from quality. I've seen early titles to be of better software quality than much later games, even if they're not great games (e.g. Robotica; I think it's American too).

I actually had Castlevania SOTN on the Saturn , and it was indeed a pretty iffy port, but like I said alot of PS1 ports ended up like this. Die Hard Trilogy was one example I remember being REALLY bad, slowdown everywhere, ugly as heck , Doom was another, which was odd because Quake and Duke3D were decent ports (although there wasn't a PS1 version of Quake). FIFA98 was also terrible, basically a badly re skinned Fifa97 with a terrible frame rate

I personally found it to be the opposite, if you compare a game like Virtua Fighter 1 or the original Daytona , or the original Panzer Dragoon , to later games like Dead Or Alive, Panzer Saga or Burning Rangers, , on a technical level at least the improvements are many, which is obviously pretty normal for any system. I guess its down to taste at the end of the day.

I would say some of my favourites on the system are Panzer Saga (yes I own it, the PAL version to be exact) , Street Fighter Zero 3 , Marvel Superheroes vs SF , Burning Rangers , DOA , Bulk Slash , etc . thats where Im coming from at least.

Didn't Saturn's (supposedly arcade-perfect) port of Vampire Savior that uses the ram expansion (and which I've never played before) make Darkstalkers 3 on Psx look like a piece of turd in comparison with the latter's having long loading times, missing sprites and version-specific infinites ?

subhuman@xgtx wrote:

Didn't Saturn's (supposedly arcade-perfect) port of Vampire Savior that uses the ram expansion (and which I've never played before) make Darkstalkers 3 on Psx look like a piece of turd in comparison with the latter's having long loading times, missing sprites and version-specific infinites ?

yes and no , the Saturn port of Vampire Savior is considerably superior the PS1 version , with better load times (close to cartridge like, but not quite) and better animation . Though the PS1 isn't too bad in that it played ok. At least I never noticed any really bad slowdown.

it was the Vs games that suffered on PS1, both X-men Vs Street Fighter and Marvel Vs Street Fighter were near perfect on the Saturn , while the PS1 versions had horrid slowdown , choppy animation and the worst sin of all , the removal of the tag team combat, ie the whole point of the game.

both used the Saturn 4MB RAM cart of course, as did quite a few Capcom games, while most of SNK's Saturn games used a 1MB cart

Vampire Savior is way freakin' better on the Saturn. It's true it uses the ram expansion, but it is an exact replica of the cps2 (including vs series), but isn't over $1-3000.00 and huge; and it runs on sh2, is much smaller, way more modular and portable than cps2. All the 4mb expansion games are like a rip off to Capcom; at least it's a dream come true for Saturn owners haha (no joke).

Holering wrote:

Vampire Savior is way freakin' better on the Saturn. It's true it uses the ram expansion, but it is an exact replica of the cps2 (including vs series), but isn't over $1-3000.00 and huge; and it runs on sh2, is much smaller, way more modular and portable than cps2. All the 4mb expansion games are like a rip off to Capcom; at least it's a dream come true for Saturn owners haha (no joke).

when I think about it , Capcom generally did a good job with their Saturn games, their arcade ports were top notch, and even Resident Evil was a very good effort (although I think RE was actually done by a developer called Nex Entertainment, who later went on to program the unfinished RE2 Saturn port as well as Code Veronica on the Dreamcast).

worst offender I can think of was probably EA , at least among big developers/publishers. Their games did get worse in quality as time went on , with the only exception being Soviet Strike.

I think Sega changed their status because of close business with Hitachi, Motorola and Yamaha. If you look at Nintendo and Sony, they both buy hardware that is abandoned. You can also witness this in current consoles.

For example, the Jaguar CPU for PS4 and XboxOne was being developed a while ago by Amd for laptops IIRC, but they abandoned it and probably thought, "You know this is completely useless for us and should be put up for offer. Someone might give us money for it later". Then Sony and Microsoft come along and say, "We need something to make our game console and heard AMD abandoned something because it was useless". Then Nintendo or Sony go to AMD (or whoever they're interested in. Can you say cell cpu for PS3?) and say, "Hey we'd like to offer you this much money for that CPU you don't care about anymore. Would you accept this amount for it"?

I think Sega dealt very differently and had to satisfy Motorola, Hitachi, Yamaha, and any other first parties with direct control of hardware manufacturing. Sega didn't buy abandoned projects or forgotten hardware like others (Nintendo and Sony). I think Sega had to deal with other companies that produced calculators, cell-phones and other machines that used the same hardware. IMO Sega didn't satisfy first party demands in supply chain management, and that helped them lose their status as a gaming console company. I don't even think Sega was as independent as Nintendo or Sony as far as hardware was concerned. Motorola, Hitachi, Yamaha and whoever else probably was more in charge than Sega IMO, at least for Sega game consoles.

IMO 3DFX suing Sega probably helped remove Sega from producing game consoles. I still think it is interesting nobody really mentions how they handled business as partners. Maybe it's too much drama or something (I don't know)?

PS2 Vampire Savior or bust.

also, Darkstalkers Resurrection sucks, and I believe Iron Galaxy destroyed the chances for a revival by having Artgerm's offensively off-model artwork pushed everywhere where it's not even needed as well as ruining the music and speed while they put their full focus on Divekick. The only new content is the frontend and they really botched the job on that.

leileilol wrote:

PS2 Vampire Savior or bust.

also, Darkstalkers Resurrection sucks, and I believe Iron Galaxy destroyed the chances for a revival by having Artgerm's offensively off-model artwork pushed everywhere where it's not even needed as well as ruining the music and speed while they put their full focus on Divekick. The only new content is the frontend and they really botched the job on that.

Talking about console versions, Vampire collection is probably the definitive one. I own a CPS II Us Savior I capsule though 😀

I haven't tried Resurrection yet, but for another re-release they could have at least managed to include the full roster and the ability to switch game systems. Game speed should be the same; it probably defaults to Turbo 2 while the official one used in tournaments and regular matches is Turbo 3.

By the way, now that you mention it I just think Bengus' timeless artwork is part of what gave the series its uniqueness, and as such no generic, plain and soulless stuff will really ever overtake all the legacy he left behind.

I remember going to a computer show with my brother and they had the PSX and Sega Saturn on display. Neither were launched yet. PSX had Ridge Racer, Wipeout and Tekken. Sega Saturn had Virtua Fighter, Sega Rally nad I believe Panzer Dragoon.

Even back then it was clear to me that the PSX was the "better" console.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

I remember going to a computer show with my brother and they had the PSX and Sega Saturn on display. Neither were launched yet. PSX had Ridge Racer, Wipeout and Tekken. Sega Saturn had Virtua Fighter, Sega Rally nad I believe Panzer Dragoon.

Even back then it was clear to me that the PSX was the "better" console.

from alot of the early games, I can see that, If you compare Daytona to Ridge Racer, the visual difference is pretty clear, or even Toshiden vs the original Virtua FIgther. granted I vastly prefer Daytona and VF in terms of gameplay, but visually they had big issues. Things did get better as time went on , but the some devs always did alot better than others.

I have to wonder how much the quirky hardware was related to Sega's arcade side of things. arcade hardware especially in the mid 90s used alot of dual processors, dual GPUs, quirky exotic hardware etc. Sega might have just felt their own dev teams would be fine (which they mostly were)

You should see Doom port on Saturn. It is weird because it runs at higher resolution than psx port. The sprites are much larger, HUD and fonts higher resolution and more detailed, and screen less distorted (the psx is squashed and stretched to 256x240 with black bar under hud. No joke).

Holering wrote:

You should see Doom port on Saturn. It is weird because it runs at higher resolution than psx port. The sprites are much larger, HUD and fonts higher resolution and more detailed, and screen less distorted (the psx is squashed and stretched to 256x240 with black bar under hud. No joke).

Doom is dreadful on the Saturn due to the frame rate from what I remember, my choice of FPS on the Saturn would be Powerslave/Exhumed, even Quake and Duke3D are good efforts (Duke3D had simplified levels, but at least it ran well).

Lobotomy did some good work on the Saturn , its certainly wasn't the Doom engine since Hexen on the Saturn was also decent (not as good as the PC of course, but decent)