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You're not wrong. The Genesis shipped with fairly 'boring' but powerful hardware for the time - an M68K, a Yamaha synth, and a PPU-style video scanout chip. In

You're not wrong. The Genesis shipped with fairly 'boring' but powerful hardware for the time - an M68K, a Yamaha synth, and a PPU-style video scanout chip. In contrast the Saturn was a kitchen sink of novel ideas that developers struggled to work with. Two CPUs, a polygon rasterizer[0], a sound system with an M68K inside, AND a DSP with a VLIW instruction set. At the same time I'm not convinced that these failures are entirely orthogonal. Developer marketing is still marketing. At some point during the Saturn's development someone should have said "hey, maybe we shouldn't make developers juggle five CPUs to get decent performance." Letting the system engineers go wild with power is how you wind up shipping a system that looks really powerful on paper but nobody can actually develop games for. See also: the PlayStation 3. [0] Which itself wasn't even as functional as the PlayStation's. If I remember correctly, rendering to a texture was either impossible or merely very difficult. SEGA also stuck a PPU in there as well which you could use for some effects but it didn't make up for those missing features.

usefulcat 3y ago
I worked with the DreamCast dev hardware for a time back then. The rendering hardware was definitely rather different than typical triangle-based approaches. IIRC, polygonal shapes were defined by means of multiple intersecting planes. I also seem to recall that it was capable of unusually high frame rates (for the time).
- Narishma 3y ago
  Are you perharps mixing up the Dreamcast and the Saturn? The Dreamcast had a fairly standard PowerVR GPU.
  - grepfru_it 3y ago
    Yes, the Saturn was a different beast. The Saturn also suffered from the PS2 problem, not having a decent developer toolkit. I think the PS2 was floundering hard but the hype was unreal and the dreamcast could not match the PS2 hardware. The dreamcast did offer Windows CE and as such, Microsoft's DirectX APIs.. but at the time PC gaming wasn't as big and console-only developers did not see value in porting between the two. IIRC only a handful of third party games relied on CE. There's probably a lot more I'm glossing over.
  - usefulcat 3y ago
    This was in 1999, and definitely the DreamCast. I was using one of the Katana dev kits. But I may be misremembering about the the plane-based rendering; I can't seem to find any references to that now.
corysama 3y ago
The Saturn hardware was a mess because of last-minute additions welded on in response to their “Oh Crap!” moment of seeing what the PS1 could do. The Saturn was made to be the ultimate 2D games machine. It had incredibly powerful 2D sprite hardware. But, then the PS1 announced it was all about 3D! Suddenly the hardware engineers were ordered to retrofit 3D into their 2D beast. So, they tacked on a second CPU and some other chips as fast as they could. If you open one up, you’ll see wires haphazardly stretched across the boards connecting the extra hardware to the original design. The Saturn’s “3D rendering” was a clever desperation move. Turns out, with powerful enough 2D sprite rendering hardware, you can scale, rotate and shear a square 2D sprite into the distorted configuration that is equivalent to an 3D transformed rectangle viewed in perspective…. So, just tell the game developers to build their 3D scenes out of sprites instead of triangles!
- fredoralive 3y ago
  As far as I know no Saturns have "wires stretched haphazardly across the board", at least mine don't. Perhaps really early Japanese models, but random bodge wires tend to get fixed pretty quickly for later revisions of PCBs, and like most games consoles the Saturn has quite a few variants through its production run. For example very first revision of the Mega Drive in Japan did have an extra PCB and wires to fix a bug though. But only the first revision, it went away by the second.
- mrguyorama 3y ago
  Indeed. The Saturn didn't REALLY render "quads", but just transformed and translated sprites. That lead to all sorts of strange concepts. You didn't have UVs; a "quad" "texture" covered the entire quad from corner to corner and you couldn't change that. That lead to situations like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDJgeuoaSvQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDJgeuoaSvQ where the programmer wanted a simple environment mapping effect, but it was impossible with the Saturn hardware so he ended up writing a 3D rasterizer in software to enable the effect on the start screen.

usefulcat 3y ago

I worked with the DreamCast dev hardware for a time back then. The rendering hardware was definitely rather different than typical triangle-based approaches. IIRC, polygonal shapes were defined by means of multiple intersecting planes. I also seem to recall that it was capable of unusually high frame rates (for the time).

Narishma 3y ago
Are you perharps mixing up the Dreamcast and the Saturn? The Dreamcast had a fairly standard PowerVR GPU.
- grepfru_it 3y ago
  Yes, the Saturn was a different beast. The Saturn also suffered from the PS2 problem, not having a decent developer toolkit. I think the PS2 was floundering hard but the hype was unreal and the dreamcast could not match the PS2 hardware. The dreamcast did offer Windows CE and as such, Microsoft's DirectX APIs.. but at the time PC gaming wasn't as big and console-only developers did not see value in porting between the two. IIRC only a handful of third party games relied on CE. There's probably a lot more I'm glossing over.
- usefulcat 3y ago
  This was in 1999, and definitely the DreamCast. I was using one of the Katana dev kits. But I may be misremembering about the the plane-based rendering; I can't seem to find any references to that now.

corysama 3y ago

The Saturn hardware was a mess because of last-minute additions welded on in response to their “Oh Crap!” moment of seeing what the PS1 could do. The Saturn was made to be the ultimate 2D games machine. It had incredibly powerful 2D sprite hardware. But, then the PS1 announced it was all about 3D! Suddenly the hardware engineers were ordered to retrofit 3D into their 2D beast. So, they tacked on a second CPU and some other chips as fast as they could. If you open one up, you’ll see wires haphazardly stretched across the boards connecting the extra hardware to the original design. The Saturn’s “3D rendering” was a clever desperation move. Turns out, with powerful enough 2D sprite rendering hardware, you can scale, rotate and shear a square 2D sprite into the distorted configuration that is equivalent to an 3D transformed rectangle viewed in perspective…. So, just tell the game developers to build their 3D scenes out of sprites instead of triangles!

fredoralive 3y ago
As far as I know no Saturns have "wires stretched haphazardly across the board", at least mine don't. Perhaps really early Japanese models, but random bodge wires tend to get fixed pretty quickly for later revisions of PCBs, and like most games consoles the Saturn has quite a few variants through its production run. For example very first revision of the Mega Drive in Japan did have an extra PCB and wires to fix a bug though. But only the first revision, it went away by the second.
mrguyorama 3y ago
Indeed. The Saturn didn't REALLY render "quads", but just transformed and translated sprites. That lead to all sorts of strange concepts. You didn't have UVs; a "quad" "texture" covered the entire quad from corner to corner and you couldn't change that. That lead to situations like https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDJgeuoaSvQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDJgeuoaSvQ where the programmer wanted a simple environment mapping effect, but it was impossible with the Saturn hardware so he ended up writing a 3D rasterizer in software to enable the effect on the start screen.