Saturn Emulator?

[bender]

it's more because of the complexity of the system, too many chips to emulate. Doesn't matter if a game needs more or less cpu resources, i think.
The VDP1 it's the same than the megadrive has? Perhaps BlackAura's proyect could help for this

[abydos1000]

This is pure speculation, but from what I read, the Saturn was designed originally for 2D gaming, especially fighers. In this regard, it was excellent (remember all of those large sprites of Dragon Warrior on the screen at once?) and better than the PS at handling sprites, mode 7 effects, etc. However, closer to release, they began to see the writing on the wall; 3D was going to be the next thing (whether it is better for gaming or not is an endless debate too long for here), and the PS was going to come out with a much more powerful engine. So a second SH2 was tossed in at the last second, and the VDP1 got the additional task of doing 3D. From what I understand, developers were complaining the design was a mess, and it was hard to get all of those things going at once. So while 2D was beautiful on the Saturn, people in the states wanted 3D, and there you have it (not to mention all of the marketing debacle).

The VDP1 handles most of the 3D stuff in addition to all of the great 2D sprites while the VDP2 handles layers, background, etc. I could be wrong, but I don't think anything like that was inside the genesis.

[Ian Micheal]

Saturn out benchmarks a ps1 in 3d power. Saturn could do the same games the ps1 could it was harder to program for. It's not it did not have the power benchmarks for it are better and 3d it could do as well as 2d.

But lests believe the ps1 hype.

[Christuserloeser]

You are both absolutley correct

The SAT wasn't designed for Model 2 like gfx at first but with the SuperNES CDROM "PlayStationX" coming SEGA added the 2nd SH2 (both running at 25Mhz), the PSX CPU with it's 33 MHz wasn't as powerful, but its grafic processor offered easier FX support without the loss of too much power. So to do the same fx on SAT would require lots of work and so most SAT games does'nt look as good as their PS equivalents but actually should look better in some ways.

Take GRANDIA the best 32Bit RPG ever. Designed for SAT it had nice 2D FX, the PSX version 2 years later sucked visually but had a transparency effect within the battle scenes, nothing big, but something the SAT version had only as 2D layers for water FX.
Similar goes for Thunderforce V - I have yet the PSX version to see though.
Other games like Castlevania SOTN for SAT sucked because they didn't even use 20 percent of the hardware for the PS conversion that had better graphics in almost every way.

Missing time and money were the reasons for the awful SAT games library, only few games are really original and perfect in both gameplay and audio-visual ways - take Panzer Dragoon Zwei, it took PSX years (Metal Gear Solid) to get to the level that SEGA reached 1996 with PDZwei, I don't need to mention SEGA Rally and years later PSX had GranTurimo or RR T4

When it comes to 2D: Astal and Darius Gaiden would be suggestions... Lots of others that I still have to play!

Saturn Bomberman Easily the best version of Bomberman ever. Has all the features the series offered within its development of 10+ years and offered 10 player support on one single screen in SuperHiRes (VF2 style interlaced)


...gone playin' NiGHTS, GoldenAxeTD and ShinobiX:


Chris

[Zealous zerotype]

10 people on 1 screen!That is crazy I gotta have that game and get osme friends over and buy more controlers/multi taps

[q_006]

That second link is a great one (miss Dragon Warrior). I guess the first site answers my long standing questions of why both processors could never really be used at the same time and parallel processing could only be used in a very limited capacity. Must have been an after thought and marketing ploy.

Thing is, wasn't there one or two games that made very limited use of both processors (maybe it was the sonic game that was never released)? That would be painful to emulate.

i thought the SH-4 would take make two threads and have each one simulate a SH-2 processors.
plus can you imagine if it could do parallel processing!?
that would have been one powerful machine.
Dreamcast wouldn't even have been necessary, til much much later.

[Alexvrb]

That idiotic rumor about them throwing in an extra chip because they saw the PSX's 3D capability never ceases to amaze me. I mean, it has managed to survive despite being based on nothing. Also, the second SH2 wasn't a "marketing ploy". That's just silly. The SH2s aren't able to work at 100%, but your ability to use both CPUs is mostly limited by skill. Heck, here's a quote from that psxfanatics site:

As it stands, only one SH2 CPU can access the main memory bank at a time, so both CPUs, if not programmed properly, will continually play a game of catch up, where one processor is constantly waiting for the other to finish its task.

So as others have said, the Saturn had more raw power when it came to both 2D and 3D. But most games don't really show that off.

Edit: There's also some stuff on that site that is wrong/doesn't make sense. They label main RAM as "CPU RAM", which would make me think cache, but they aren't talking about cache. They don't even seem to list CPU cache, but I don't care.