Games - Sega Saturn

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	Games - Sega Saturn

The Sega Saturn (Japanese: セガサターン, Sega Saturn), is a video game console of the 32-bit era. It was released on November 22 1994 in Japan, May 1995 in North America and July 8 1995 in Europe. Approximately 170,000 machines were sold the first day of the Japanese launch. 5,000 were sold in the weekend following the UK launch.

At one time, the Sega Saturn held second place in the console wars, placing it above Nintendo's Super Famicom in Japan and Nintendo's Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES) in North America and Europe, but the Saturn slowly lost market share to Sony's PlayStation and, outside Japan, the cartridge-based Nintendo 64.

The Japanese Saturn was rushed to the market, just a few weeks ahead of its rival, Sony's PlayStation. This led to very few games being available at launch.

The system was supported in North America and Europe until 1998, and in Japan until the end of 2000. The last official game for the system, Yukyu Gensokyoku Perpetual Collection, was released by Mediaworks in December that year.

Development

Sega's 27-member Away Team, comprised of employees from every aspect of hardware engineering, product development and marketing, worked exclusively for two years to ensure the Sega Saturn's hardware and design met the precise needs of both the U.S. and Japanese markets and would launch with some of the world's best software.

The Saturn was a powerful machine for the time, but its design, with two CPUs and 6 other processors, made harnessing its power difficult. Rumours suggest that the original plan called for a single processor, but a second one was added late in development to increase potential performance. Yu Suzuki is reported to have said:

:One very fast central processor would be preferable. I don't think that all programmers have the ability to program two CPUs - most can only get about one-and-a-half times the speed you can get from one SH-2. I think only one out of 100 programmers is good enough to get that kind of speed out of the Saturn.

Third-party development was further hindered by the initial lack of useful software libraries and development tools, requiring developers to write in assembly language to achieve decent performance. Programmers would often utilise only one CPU to simplify development, and when compared to their Playstation versions, many games would be visibly slower or uglier. Alien Trilogy is a notorious example of this phenomenon.

The main disadvantage of the dual CPU architecture was that both processors shared the same bus, and besides 4K of on-chip memory, all data and program code for both CPUs was located in the same shared 2MB of main memory. This meant that without very careful division of processing, the second CPU would often have to wait while the first CPU was working, reducing its processing ability.

The hardware also lacked light sourcing and hardware video decompression support, and design bugs prevented hardware transparency from functioning correctly. Nevertheless, when properly utilised, the dual processors in the Saturn could produce impressive results such as the 1997 ports of Quake and Duke Nukem 3D by Lobotomy Software, and later games like Burning Rangers were able to achieve true transparency effects on hardware that used simple polygon stipples as a replacement for transparency effects in the past.

From a market viewpoint, the architectural design problems of the Saturn meant that it quickly lost third party support to the PlayStation, which Sony supported with a very well-regarded development kit.

Unlike the Playstation's use of triangles as its basic geometric primitive, the Saturn rendered quads. This proved a hindrance as most industry standard design tools were based around triangles, and multiplatform games were usually developed with triangles and the Playstation's larger market share in mind.

If used correctly the quad rendering of the Saturn would show less texture distortion than was common on Playstation titles, as demonstrated by several cross-platform titles such as Wipeout and Destruction Derby. The quad-focussed hardware and a 50% greater amount of video RAM also gave the Saturn an advantage for 2D game engines and attracted many developers of RPGs, arcade games and traditional 2D fighting games. A 4MB RAM cart, released only in Japan, boosted available memory even further for games such as Capcom's X-Men Vs Streetfighter.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for Sega Saturn ]

Games - Sega Saturn

Development

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