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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 wa

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.

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.