7 ms·
The Saturn was not the best system at the time (not sure if that's what you were implying). The first title I worked on [as a Playstation developer] there was
by louthy 11y ago
The Saturn was not the best system at the time (not sure if that's what you were implying). The first title I worked on [as a Playstation developer] there was Saturn version being made in parallel; it just couldn't keep up with what I was doing on the PS1 and what the PC guys were doing with the first graphics cards. My memory isn't brilliant, but I seem to remember it had major problems moving textures around, so all textures ended up being half the resolution of the PS1. Our Saturn guy was constantly stressed and actually had a breakdown because the whole process got to him - I know this is mostly anecdotal, but perhaps it gives a sense of the difficulty of the machine.
Sega's follow-up, the Dreamcast, was an excellent machine, and tons of fun to code for. But by that point the PS1 had been so phenomenally successful that very few publishers were committing to Dreamcast titles. A development house I was working for at the time went under because the publishers were waiting for the PS2 and they ran out of money.
- clevernickname 11y ago>My memory isn't brilliant, but I seem to remember it had major problems moving textures around, so all textures ended up being half the resolution of the PS1. IIRC because of the way the Saturn did texture mapping, all texture coordinates would be forced to be axis aligned quads (like traditional 2D sprites), which caused big problems for games coming from other platforms that had more freeform texture atlases. That could be at least a part of why your team had problems with textures.
- louthy 11y agoFunnily enough I just found an interview somebody must have done with me years ago [1]. I forgot I'd done it. There's a screenshot of the Saturn version. If you click through to the 'Saturn Power' magazine scans you'll see the Playstation screenshots [2] (slightly offside that the PS screenshots were sent as an example of the Saturn version!) - it's pretty obvious that the Saturn version looks terrible compared to the PS Here's my quote re: the Saturn version: "However the Saturn version was lagging behind quite badly - the textures looked pretty awful because they had to be down-sampled to fit in the smaller texture memory, and the geometry engine was struggling due to the more limited ability of the Saturn" [1] http://www.sega-saturn.net/nr/lunatik.php http://www.sega-saturn.net/nr/lunatik.php [2] http://www.sega-saturn.net/nr/lunatik_saturnpower.jpg http://www.sega-saturn.net/nr/lunatik_saturnpower.jpg