Strange...

[Psionic Chaos]

I'm sure you've all seen the new videos of the Sega Dreamcast Emulator Icarus playing House of the Dead 2 and Crazy Taxi at a pretty impressive level.

I can't find any screenshots or anything of Saturn Emus like Satourne running anything, and an ISO of my friend's Shining Force 3 CD yields nothing but errors and crashes. Just where is Saturn emulation at right now? Are they running commercial games at a playable level?

[Regulus]

Yea....its not progressing as fast as we would have hoped....but there are some games running at full speed. Not sure which though.....Fabien wont dissapoint us!

[Chrono Archangel]

Originally Posted by Psionic Chaos

I'm sure you've all seen the new videos of the Sega Dreamcast Emulator Icarus playing House of the Dead 2 and Crazy Taxi at a pretty impressive level.

I can't find any screenshots or anything of Saturn Emus like Satourne running anything, and an ISO of my friend's Shining Force 3 CD yields nothing but errors and crashes. Just where is Saturn emulation at right now? Are they running commercial games at a playable level?

there are some screens for Saturn emualtion
look at Satourne's website they post some screeshots soemtime to show the developpement of the emu

http://satourne.consollection.com

[DragonSoull]

Well the only game i have that runs on Satourne (EarthWorm Jim 2 pal) gets about 40FPS (but with several graphic glitches and of course no sound) so if you get it to run speed is not that bad

[_E_]

Unlike Most consoles. the Saturn works on a dual processor and emulating that on PC hardware is not an easy task. Moreover, I dont think that hardware was documented well as the PSX or even the N64.....

Yours,
-Elly

[Exophase]

The commercial version of GiriGiri is pretty mature and plays all kinds of Saturn games almost perfectly and pretty fast if you good hardware. Too bad it's not really accessible to us :\ (are we not allowed to talk about it in general..?)

Well, at any rate, it's very true that it takes a lot more CPU power to emulate Saturn. The thing is just a beast to emulate.. which is why I'm so underimpressed by the games. Look at Panzer Dragoon Saga.. low res textures, pretty low polygon count, and four CD's chock full of very low quality FMV (average scene complexity but extremely grainy and low color depth. Looks like it's 160x120x4bpp or something, although it's probably not that bad).. for all I've heard Saturn fans say about Saturn being so superior to PSX I was startled to find that a 1998 game made by Sega themselves (okay, maybe not entirely, but at least partially.. right?) that was supposed to be grade A for the system couldn't hold a candle to the best technical feats on PSX at that time (Probably FF8, and soon Chrono Cross EDIT: Okay, that wasn't really fair, CC was much later, but FF8 was at least the same year.)

- Exo

[wonder_k]

woh woh woh... getting a little arrongant, aren't we?
the psx it nothing someone should compare to saturn. it has hardly a feature saturn has but a "single-cpu-4-everything" and a "make-fmv-look-smoover-chip". sure it has it's advantages but think of what developers would have been able to squeeze out of the saturn if they really had tried?

1st: CD-access doesn't require any cpu on saturn
2nd: the sound unit is nearly self-sustaining while psx has to play the flute all by itself
3rd: the so called "hard-to-handle" dual-cpu architecture can be used to produce some pretty stunning performance if used right

the thing is that those programming at 3rd-parties were far too lazy to read those neat docs resp. weren't supported that much because i believe sega did entrust them with that task, not the other way around.

last but not least, pds wasn't such a bad game at all. quite the contrary, many people still like playing it. to face your "low-res-problem", did you know that the saturn originally was made to be a 2d-only system? it cannot draw polygons accelerated by hardware. the second cpu is just there to compensate that. only those two aspects make saturn's games look even greater.

there are more games which encourage my love for saturn than for psx, since all that counts is the fun playing them. if there are ppl around for which only gfx count: idiots, you really miss the spirit of a real gamer...

ps: sorry, i did not mean to offend anyone.

[DragonSoull]

I have to totally agree with wonder_k, the "has bad graphics so it sucks" totally misses the point of gaming with is having fun.
Hell I'm playing Tomb Raider 1 at the moment (on the PC in software mode) and i think the graphics are great. I even think pac-man (the original) graphics are great
Some of you people have been in the anisotropic filtering / anti aliased world for way to long, go retro (maybe with the help of some emus ) and learn to enjoy games again.

[Exophase]

Okay, response time.

woh woh woh... getting a little arrongant, aren't we?
the psx it nothing someone should compare to saturn. it has hardly a feature saturn has but a "single-cpu-4-everything" and a "make-fmv-look-smoover-chip". sure it has it's advantages but think of what developers would have been able to squeeze out of the saturn if they really had tried?

I never compared Saturn to PSX. I compared a Saturn game to PSX games of the time. Totally legitimate. In fact, I was saying that there was really no excuse for a game to be less quality when the Saturn system SHOULD be better (according to popular opinion around here). But you seem to have quite a bias against PSX. It doesn't have a "single-cpu-4-everything", it has a CPU and hardware accelerated transformations (GTE), 3D acceleration (GPU), and audio voice acceleration (SPU).. and that "make-fmv-look-smoover-chip" that apparently seems to let PSX FMV's look a million times better than that Cinepak crap they used for Panzer Dragoon Saga. So much CPU power, can't they do better compression than that? :P

1st: CD-access doesn't require any cpu on saturn

Or on PSX. There's a CD-ROM DMA channel.

2nd: the sound unit is nearly self-sustaining while psx has to play the flute all by itself

I don't really know what you're talking about here. Yes, PSX doesn't have a CPU for sound. No, it doesn't have to "play the flute all by itself" (it's not like GBA which has almost no audio hardware). It has full hardware acceleration for voice playback, your typical MIDI-like setup. If you look at PSF files in Highly Experimental you will see that most of them use about 1-4% CPU time. They REALLY should have suplemented that with a second CPU, I guess...

3rd: the so called "hard-to-handle" dual-cpu architecture can be used to produce some pretty stunning performance if used right

Yes. If used right. That doesn't make it easy. You seem to criticize my saying it's hard to handle, yet have nothing to invalidate this. Just for reference, it should be noted that having two CPU's doesn't usually equal anything like double performance. Usually a lot of shared resources cuts that down tremendously. Couple the fact that PSX's r3000a has a higher clock rate than the Saturn's SH4's anyway (I couldn't tell you which is actually a better CPU, but they're both 32bit RISC and probably not that far apart performance-wise) and you don't have such a huge advantage on Saturn's end as everyone makes you want to think.

Have you ever wondered why most consoles aren't multi-CPU and the ones that are tend to fail? If you haven't, you should. And by CPU I mean totally general purpose, like in Saturn's case, so don't try to tell me PS2 has several CPUs (and no, IOP doesn't count, either)

I have to totally agree with wonder_k, the "has bad graphics so it sucks" totally misses the point of gaming with is having fun.

I didn't only mention the graphics. I actually thought the gameplay was pretty crappy. But that's not really important. Are you saying that critiquing the graphics is pointless? I guess reviews should stop rating graphics. You know, since they just don't matter. No, I don't think graphics are everything. Far from it. But good graphics do often make a game more enjoyable. But at any rate, I never said anything sucked because of bad graphics. And fwiw, my video card sucks too much to do decent AA/AF. I just think that a Saturn game from 1998 should look comparable in quality to a PSX one (or better, since all the Saturn fans say how superior the machine is)...

- Exo

[DragonSoull]

Personally i never thought that the Saturn hardware was in any way better then the PSX i usually care more for the games and no I'm not an RPG fan.

And no I'm not saying graphics doesn't matter just that they shouldn't be everything! Has you seem to realize (in your post you only mention that the graphics were bad so i assumed you didn't).
In any case maybe i picked my guns a little to soon...

[Kane]

For 2d, the Saturn does kick ass, but IIRC the 3d was bolted on at a later date...

[Exophase]

Originally Posted by Lord Kane

For 2d, the Saturn does kick ass, but IIRC the 3d was bolted on at a later date...

Unfortunately, a lot of people don't realize that good 3D = good 2D. Actually, all of the functions for PSX's GPU are essentially 2D in nature (unlike on a PC 3D accelerator where you feed it 3D vertices, the final projection to 2D occurs outside of the GPU for PSX)

This is what a (pretty minimalist) set of 3D features gives you for 2D on a system like PSX:

Hardware blitting (means fast sprites. You still have to do a sprite engine, but they're just blitting textured quads, more or less. PSX has specific 2D blitting too... so it's a little more work here than say, with SNES, but very little and no tangible speed loss).. there aren't any real limits to how many sprites you can have onscreen at once, either.
Rotation, scaling, shearing, and projection (basically, anything you'd expect to be able to do with mode 7 and whatever tricks on SNES) in hardware.
Color blending (like SNES's but better)
PSX has paletted textures, so you get paletted sprites/tiles.
PSX lets you mess with the framebuffer directly and use it as a texture, so you get all kinds of effects available that way.

All of the above is done for "free", or rather, not in the CPU, and the accelerated components that do this are very fast.

I'm not sure who ever said PSX wasn't fit for 2D games, but that's pretty far from the truth. The only reason Saturn ever had much of an edge was because of more VRAM or VRAM extension cards, letting it have more sprite animation frames in fast memory on once.

As far as N64 goes.. I can't even imagine why Saturn would be better than N64 for 2D games. I think the people who did 2D games for N64 just did an exceptionally bad job and this kind of stuck.

- Exo

[Kane]

I never said that the PSX wasn't suited for 2D, but that the Saturn is superior in this area. This is what I've seen from the quality of similar style games.... dating sims to be specific, which use a lot of 2d.

[Exophase]

Originally Posted by Lord Kane

I never said that the PSX wasn't suited for 2D, but that the Saturn is superior in this area. This is what I've seen from the quality of similar style games.... dating sims to be specific, which use a lot of 2d.

I don't know if it's so much that the Saturn is superior or that it just happened to get better games in that area...

Although it's true more VRAM would help here. Saturn had 1.5x as much VRAM (so enough to have 640x480 2D with a frontbuffer and backbuffer, at least in theory)

- Exo

[fivefeet8]

Saturn and PSX are more or less even in 3D. Saturn is more of a pain in the ass to program to put out such incredible 3D graphics, but in theory if you could use non-coplanar vertices properly, Saturn's graphics could very well challenge the modern consoles. It's all in how you program it.

PSX can't do non-coplanar quads - in order to rasterise, like any modern 3D hardware, it has to tesselate quads into triangles, and the poor PSX isn't sophisticated enough to do multi-stage tesselation. One quad = two triangles... which means non-coplanar verts will make for a nice EPCOT Ball style effect.

PSX is much simpler to code, and uses triangles which are easier on the art department. Plus you don't have to mess with the engine to get transparencies; the rasteriser does accurate dithering for free, provided your sorting is remotely accurate. Which leads to another thing - PSX, like Saturn, doesn't use any form of Z-buffer; it's all manually sorted. PSX has an advantage in that it has a separate geometry processor (GTE), but Saturn has more processing power overall... so that's a toss-up.

Most of the Saturn games that look really terrible, attempted to use degenerate, three-vertex quads as triangles - BAD BAD BAD idea, for quality AND performance.

Show me a PSX game that does the realtime 3D effects found in Nights and Burning Rangers. The number of PSX games that get into that general league can probably be counted on your fingers - I can think of maybe 4 or 5 off the top of my head. Yes, there's a lot of crap 3D on Saturn, but that's more the fault of the development tools and the market (Saturn spent a lot of time being a secondary platform for anyone not doing arcade ports) than the hardware.

The psx can do 2d, but I've played 2d games on the Saturn and Psx. The psx has some serious slowdowns with some of the Capcom ported fighters. Mainly, Xmen Vs SF and MSH vs SF. The saturn versions on the other hand was almost arcade perfect. The psx versions lost loads of animation frames and the ability to switch characters mid match. Look at wolverine in Xmen Vs Sf on the psx. He lost tons of his walking animation. And the loading times on those games were next to nothing on the saturn. The saturn's larger cd-rom buffer helps. Pretty much all the 2d arcade fighter ports were better on the Saturn.

Nights uses an amazing effect in one of it's levels where the ground and ceiling would distort and wrap around the character as you get close to it. The ground is made up totally of quads which are bent and distorted in real time.

I've played a lot of Saturn games(probably all the best games on the system) and a lot of PSx games, and I've seen things done on the saturn that I've never seen done on the psx and vice versa. But the games I would love to play again are on my Saturn.

[Exophase]

Originally Posted by fivefeet8

The psx can do 2d, but I've played 2d games on the Saturn and Psx. The psx has some serious slowdowns with some of the Capcom ported fighters. Mainly, Xmen Vs SF and MSH vs SF. The saturn versions on the other hand was almost arcade perfect. The psx versions lost loads of animation frames and the ability to switch characters mid match. Look at wolverine in Xmen Vs Sf on the psx. He lost tons of his walking animation. And the loading times on those games were next to nothing on the saturn. The saturn's larger cd-rom buffer helps. Pretty much all the 2d arcade fighter ports were better on the Saturn.

You hit on basically what I was getting at... the 2D ports to Saturn tended to be better because Saturn had more VRAM and CD-ROM cache memory, but it really had little to do with the extensive dedicated 2D hardware it had. If you ask me all of that hardware was a waste of silicon.

Now, I admittedly haven't done much in the realms of 3D programming but aren't non-coplaner quads a little uncommon? I haven't heard of a PC video card that can do them either.. how are they rendered on Saturn? As being curved between the vertices? Does this have a speed hit at all? Unfortunately I have a very hard time believing that excellent non-coplaner quad usage could make Saturn's games comparable to those on modern consoles. That seems quite extreme to me...

But in fairness I've never seen NiGHTS or Burning Rangers. I was just underimpressed by Panzer Dragoon Saga, a game which I was expecting great things from given the massive hype/compliments it received and the fact that it was a pretty high priority title for Sega. Like you said, this probably has much more to do with development tools and market conditions than the hardware itself.

- Exo

[fivefeet8]

Originally Posted by Exophase

You hit on basically what I was getting at... the 2D ports to Saturn tended to be better because Saturn had more VRAM and CD-ROM cache memory, but it really had little to do with the extensive dedicated 2D hardware it had. If you ask me all of that hardware was a waste of silicon.

Now, I admittedly haven't done much in the realms of 3D programming but aren't non-coplaner quads a little uncommon? I haven't heard of a PC video card that can do them either.. how are they rendered on Saturn? As being curved between the vertices? Does this have a speed hit at all? Unfortunately I have a very hard time believing that excellent non-coplaner quad usage could make Saturn's games comparable to those on modern consoles. That seems quite extreme to me...
- Exo

Did you play through the entire game of Panzer Dragoon Saga? I thought the later parts were quite amazing.

Less Vram and Cache isn't the reason why Psx ports had horrible slowdowns in the capcom arcade ports. Considering the PSx is processing a lot less frames than the saturn was, if the psx has the 2d power, it shouldn't have those slowdowns. The saturns 2d hardware is quite powerful and is one of the reason why there wasn't much slowdowns in those games. The larger vram and cache enabled less load times and more animation frames.

Quad rendering is very uncommon. No video card does non-coplaner quads these days. The last quad rendering graphics cards were the older Nvidia cards(pre geforce) and old voodoo1 cards.

You can think of it this way. The saturn could draw a 3d 6 sided cube with 6 quads. The psx has to break those quads up into 12 triangles. The saturn can then bend those quads to create some curves. Like the effects in Nights. I'm not too sure of performance impact of such a thing, but playing nights shows that it can be done with minimal if any performance hit.

As to the original guys questions: Emutalk.net has a very long Saturn emulation screenshots thread.
http://www.emutalk.net/showthread.php?threadid=13850

Here is a screenshot of Christmas Nights. Look at the ground near the hill. The quads are bent to make the curvature of the hill. The lines around the quards are where the Bilinear Filtering stops.

[Exophase]

Did you play through the entire game of Panzer Dragoon Saga? I thought the later parts were quite amazing.

No, I haven't. Usually you don't see games that get better graphically that substantially, though. I'm sure the FMV's had serious quality issues throughout the entire game, at least.

Less Vram and Cache isn't the reason why Psx ports had horrible slowdowns in the capcom arcade ports. Considering the PSx is processing a lot less frames than the saturn was, if the psx has the 2d power, it shouldn't have those slowdowns.

You can hardly jump to conclusions and blame the hardware for all the problems with a series of ports all coming from the _same company_. Everyone is quick to label PSX a bad 2D system because of those specific Capcom ports, yet seem to be ignoring all their other 2D games. How about Guilty Gear X?

The saturns 2d hardware is quite powerful and is one of the reason why there wasn't much slowdowns in those games.

I'm far from convinced. I hardly think any 2D fighting game had enough going on to overwhelm the PSX's ability to blit sprites. While most people agree that Sony's rated "300,000 polygons per second" is way too much what is this 2D game doing, a few thousand? I still contend that Saturn's 2D hardware was wholly unnecessary, and was simply being used because all previous consoles had them and they were following a "more is better" principle.

The larger vram and cache enabled less load times and more animation frames.

Yes. I doubt any other inferiorities can be blamed on the hardware.

Quad rendering is very uncommon. No video card does non-coplaner quads these days. The last quad rendering graphics cards were the older Nvidia cards(pre geforce) and old voodoo1 cards.

So my TNT can do tessellation? o_O I know NV1 had some interesting and uncommon features, though.

You can think of it this way. The saturn could draw a 3d 6 sided cube with 6 quads. The psx has to break those quads up into 12 triangles.

Well, yes. You would still give it 6 quads, of course, it broke it up into triangles in hardware. I doubt there'd be much of a difference here performance wise, since a cube has coplaner surfaces.

The saturn can then bend those quads to create some curves.

Does it create smaller quads or does it actually do straight curves? If it did have hardware accelerated curves, why not make them directly accessible?

Like the effects in Nights. I'm not too sure of performance impact of such a thing, but playing nights shows that it can be done with minimal if any performance hit.

As to the original guys questions: Emutalk.net has a very long Saturn emulation screenshots thread.
http://www.emutalk.net/showthread.php?threadid=13850

Here is a screenshot of Christmas Nights. Look at the ground near the hill. The quads are bent to make the curvature of the hill. The lines around the quards are where the Bilinear Filtering stops.

If this is using non-coplaner quads, shouldn't it be hardware accelerated incorrectly on the emulator..? I'm not really sure if anything looks incorrect here, or not. If it's emulating it correctly, how is it being done?

- Exo

[Kane]

I think the NV1 and the ditched NV2 were the only nVidia cards that could do Quads. From what I remember they dropped it after nearly going under in favour of the polygons that people were getting used to.