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