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Rumour has it that while the Saturn was superior on paper, it was really because rumours of the PSX caused SEGA to double up on processors, meaning more perform
by ac2u 11y ago
Rumour has it that while the Saturn was superior on paper, it was really because rumours of the PSX caused SEGA to double up on processors, meaning more performance but harder to tool up for more parallel based development.
Funnily enough we see Sony repeat the same mistake in the PS3, doubling down on a chip architecture aimed at parallelism (cell), while most developers expressed frustration adapting.
Didn't really hurt Sony in the big picture though as much as it hurt SEGA. By the time SEGA got so much right in the Dreamcast era, they were already swimming upstream thanks to the ground they lost with the Saturn.
- pjmlp 11y agoOne of the things that sold developers to PSX was that Sony took a huge effort to provide a great SDK with the console, something unusual from the other vendors. This was another reason they got lots of flame with the PS3, as not only was it hard to program for, the SDK wasn't that great. Hence why they spent around two years time bringing out a great graphics debugger developed with input of teams like the Gran Turism one, and a middleware for prototyping ideas, PyreEngine.
- SuddsMcDuff 11y agoAs I understood it, Sony provided some really nice C libraries in their SDK. While Sega initially expected developers to write games in assembly language. Years later Sonic Team released SGL 2.0, a much nicer high level C API which showed the true potential of the Saturn, but it was too late to claw back the lead Sony had built up.
- Grazester 11y agoThis. The first SDK's for the Saturn were horrible and it wasn't until the console was practically dead did they get much better.