is the hardware in this thing good or not? people keep saying

Good at what?

>>4157256
>T. PSX purist.

It was hard to program for, doesn't mean it was crap. Studios that knew how to use it made some of thr best games for it

>>4157248
Boy is that sexy in white

>>4157248
It's good hardware assembled in an asinine manner. At its theoretical limits, it has more computational power than PlayStation, but in order to get the best results, you need to make use of two main processors, two VDPs that are suited to different tasks, the SCU for geometry calculation, etc. And you've gotta do it in assembly. Saturn also draws polygons in an ass-backward manner (forward mapped quads) that wasn't friendly with the direction 3D was heading (UV mapped triangles). I tend to think Saturn 3D looks nicer than PlayStation, since forward mapping provides a limited amount of perspective correction and Saturn's overdrawn quads didn't have the issues with seams that PS did, but the PlayStation is way more advanced and easier to work with in terms of lighting, transparency, and other effects. PlayStation was also much less of a pain in the ass to develop for, being a much simpler hardware design.

>>4157248
It may not do transparency as well as the PSX and N64, but quadrilateral shaped objects and characters are better rendered on it. Same for most 2D stuff. Oh, and it had one of its processors designed exclusively for sound.

>>4157248
The issue with Saturn is...

-The twin CPU architecture is hard to take advantage of
-Its RAM is significantly slower than PS1
-VDP1 is trash
-VDP2 is extremely powerful but an extremely situational chip that is useless for most situations in 3D games
-Saturn's geometry processor DSP is basically impossible to use
-Saturn's sound chip doesn't do hardware audio decompression (ADPCM)

A bit of extra RAM, a RAM expansion slot, and VDP2 is enough to help Saturn win in 2D. But god help it in 3D.

>>4157248
is good for 2d games and shmups

>>4157317
VDP1 either should have been scrapped or made done differently.
>3D saturn games are near universally trash/junk

I don't think so. The sound chip might not be able to do ADPCM out of the box, but it still sounds miles better than the N64. Also, Nights, Darius, Baku Baku Animal and Quake are all 3d Games that don't suck shit at all. Oh and the DSP isn't impossible to use, maybe for PS1 programmers, yeah, but difficult is not the same as impossibility.

>>4157248
it's weird
like, at no point are you going to get advanced 3D transparency without horrible hacks like Burning Rangers literally rendering the scene twice, once to the main VDP1 output, once to a VDP2 layer (which IIRC isn't even straightforward to do) at lower resolution
VDP2 playfields (read: it's basically mode 7 but better) are nice, but they're only really useful for games designed around the Saturn's hardware, where games are deliberately made with large, open spaces to take advantage of it -- this also does mean that the Saturn has an edge in rendering outdoor environments.
Quads suck. There's no way to get around it, no one used quads, and it made VDP1's rendering more complicated anyway. They look less awful than the PS1's triangles because there's less texture distortion (neither really map properly into 3D space since that's not taken into consideration, but at least it's not super noticeable on Saturn except by the screen edges where it's appalling and arguably worse than on PS1).
Lighting on Saturn is faster (because it's fast additive lighting instead of industry standard multiplicative for Gouraud shading -- gives pretty bright, dramatic results, but it's less natural looking)... but you kind of have to calculate it on the CPU to get what points are what color. On the PS1, that can get offloaded to the GTE.
The Saturn is heavily bound by fillrate, unlike the PS1.
VDP2 is nifty in general -- the PS1 doesn't have anything like it. It's not ideal for 3D games though, the flat backgrounds of Saturn games look a bit weak against PS1 polygonal skyboxes/spheres. But it is fast, and it's tilemapped, saving VRAM.
unfortunately, the Saturn's 512/512/512kB VRAM split between VDP1, VDP2, and the result framebuffer sucks -- PS1 has a 1MB unified set of VRAM, which means you can have a small framebuffer and loads of textures if you wanted. It's more flexible, and in practice, made it as if the Saturn didn't have more VRAM space.

>>4157374
>darius
>baku baku animal
>3d
what are you doing (and no, the first stage boss in Darius Gaiden is not polygonal, it's stacked pre-drawn sprites)

also, no adpcm means awful sample quality -- if you have a sample that's compressed and another that's uncompressed and both are the same file size, the compressed one will always, always, always sound better, unless the compression method is absolute garbage or the source sample for both was low quality to begin with

>>4157317
>god help it
the gap isn't so painful, but you are looking at like a 10fps gap and often slightly worse textures on average (and this is just looking at various PS1 to Saturn ports in general) for games not built for the hardware

>>4157375
>(which IIRC isn't even straightforward to do) at lower resolution

It IS straightforward.
1. render transparent crap
2. DMA from framebuffer to VDP2 ram
3. draw the rest normally

That was about it. In practice you also needed to process overdraw, ie. cover up parts of the transparent areas that get, well, covered up by other parts of the screen.

>>4157397
>Baku Baku Animal is all 2d
Nope. at least some of the characters in the Saturn version of Baku Baku animal are literal 3d.
Oh and Sonic Jam, though it does have camera issues in a number of areas in the 3D section, is not garbage. Not as good as Mega Collection for the Gamecube, but still better than the sonic Compilation that the Mega Drive got.

>>4157397
>the gap isn't so painful, but you are looking at like a 10fps gap and often slightly worse textures on average

10fps is a lot when average game ran at 20fps at the time.

For a 3d game on the Saturn, you are looking at a quarter of the fillrate, smaller textures, half the colour depth, no lightning, and no transparency. If you have insane patience, you can add lightning, but it requires you to set up every texture colour, as well as every lit up texture colour, MANUALLY. With a 2048 cap.

>>4157429
I believe all of the characters on Baku Baku are pre-rendered, so no literal 3D. I could be wrong though.
I also prefer Sonic Jam to Mega Collection, simply because of time attack mode.

>>4157374
>The sound chip might not be able to do ADPCM out of the box, but it still sounds miles better than the N64
That has more to do with cartridge space. N64 hardware though can actually decode pretty much any audio compression from that time, even MP3. And yes, hardware decode. Doesn't need to run on the CPU unlike Saturn. Obviously the sound hardware isn't dedicated on N64 though.

>>4157397
>the gap isn't so painful
It's pretty fucking enormous on the better made PS1 games. Ridge Racer Type 4 looks so far ahead of any Saturn racer it isn't funny. Same for Tekken 3, Tobal 2, etc (VF2 has a slightly higher resolution but that's about it). Crash Bandicoot obviously is on rails and cheats, but none of the on-rails Saturn games come even close to looking like that one either.

Even FFVII of all games looks a lot better than Shining Force 3 in the 3D battle scenes.

>>4157439
>It's pretty fucking enormous on the better made PS1 games.

Keep in mind that those were made years later, when the Saturn was already dead. You'd need to compare them to something like the Shenmue video.

And even for released games, some of them like Panzer Dragoon Saga or Sonic R looked real damn good in 3d areas.

>>4157272
Not as cool as the transparent one

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>>4157472

>>4157375
>Lighting on Saturn is faster (because it's fast additive lighting

It's not faster because the VDP1 is way too slow in general. Even if it wasn't, lightning can only be used in 15bit mode (which wastes texture space), in 8 bit mode it can only be used if you precompute every lit pixel as a palette entry. And it cannot be used AT ALL in hi-res mode (it's why Vipers and Megamix and D-Xhird opted for low res polygons instead, cause they wanted lightning).

PSX lightning was way simpler. It could do flat shading and gouraud shading all in hardware, you just told the triangle to have x% of a colour added to it, either globally or for all vertices separately. It also worked in every resolution.

>>4157474

Shit, that is cool

>>4157278
>and you've gotta do it in assembly

Thought to myself that's not a big deal, but making a 3D GAME in an assembly language? No thanks LOL

>>4157449
>Keep in mind that those were made years later
True, I was being unfair to the Saturn. But earlier PS1 games hold up just as well against the Saturn. And of course, Tobal 1 and Crash Bandicoot is of that same era.

>You'd need to compare them to something like the Shenmue video.
Never came out, so we've got nothing more than the developer's word that it would actually look the way it did in the video without any compromises in the final product (whether in graphics, framerate or otherwise).

>Panzer Dragoon Saga or Sonic R
These really only look great compared to other Saturn titles. I'm trying to be charitable here. I like Saturn, but the decreased amount of detail in Saturn games vs PS1 is plain and obvious. Many Saturn games are simply given credit for not being utter technical wrecks like the original Daytona USA port, not because they were blowing the competition on PS1 away.

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>>4157474
While this is nice I like the white saturn better

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QUADS

>>4157410
>2. DMA from framebuffer to VDP2 ram
ah, I'm retarded
why in hell's name did I think that needed to go through work ram or something

As for overdraw, Burning Rangers handled by literally rendering the entire scene twice. Any part of the scene that isn't transparent is re-rendered in black.
The result is overlaid on the final scene with additive blending, so the black bits don't show up.
There's still some issues here and there with transparent things showing over sections they shouldn't, and transparent objects still clobber each other, but it works, and transparent objects don't clobber non-transparent ones, which is all that really matters.

if the Saturn was getting big 3D game releases in 1999, that technique might have probably been copied by other devs

>>4157439
there are only a couple dozen full 3D games in the whole library, a huge portion of them being racing and fighting games
it's honestly hard to know what the Saturn could do, and Sonic R is the high water mark of what we've seen, with smooth fade-ins, all characters lit and fully polygonal, draw distance and framerate are pretty good
like, an absolute ton of Saturn games are just completely unlit, not even flat shaded

and R4 is actual magic and puts everything else on the PS1 to shame in terms of sheer looking good, there wasn't anything before or after that really managed to look as nice or better on the machine

>>4157435
>average game ran at 20fps at the time.
An average 3D game dipped to 20fps at the time. In fact, one of the big issues a few Saturn ports had was that they were 20fps capped instead of 30.

>>4157512
But that is cool

Tomb Raider is 20fps on the Saturn and 30fps on the PSX.
Wipeout is 20fps on the Saturn and 30fps on the PSX.

That means Saturn is only 2/3s as good as the PSX in 3D.
How much better is the Saturn compared to the PSX in 2D?
Is it 1/2 better?
1/3 better?
1/4 better?

How does the N64 3D performance compare to the PSX in fractions?
How does the N64 2D performance compare to the PSX in fractions?

How does the 3DO 3D performance compare to the PSX in fractions?
How does the 3DO 2D performance compare to the PSX in fractions?

>>4157265
I don't think that was the point of his comment, Anon.
Thing being, I think he's asking more for what they're trying to compare.

>>4157757
>That means Saturn is only 2/3s as good as the PSX in 3D.

You forgot the part where
- Saturn 3d games can't do lightning freely (only limited to your palette)
- Saturn 3d games can't do transparency (only with tricks, and even then, they can't stack multiple transparent faces)
- Saturn 3d games are limited to a very low colour (less than 8 bits).

Which makes it impossible to use special effects like reflections or motion blur because they all rely on fast transparency.

>How much better is the Saturn compared to the PSX in 2D?

It has a memory expansion, and has a dedicated tilemapper chip. So imagine it as if had twice the memory for fully 2d games, and 4 times the memory with the RAM cart.

But unfortunately it still has poor sprite performance, so if you do a game with heavy use of modern effects (like SOTN), it will look better than most any 2d game on the Saturn. Saturn can only outdo the PSX in animation, and in the background effects. In everything else the PSX is twice as good.

>>4157546
>if the Saturn was getting big 3D game releases in 1999, that technique might have probably been copied by other devs

I would've found it more useful if they made the Sonic R background blending a standard effect. The entire time I was playing the free-fly sections in Panzer Dragoon Saga, the only thing in my mind was how annoying the polygon pop-up is, how perfectly the backgrounds fit with the scenery, and how great it would look if they made it blend in like in Sonic R.

The transparency trick in BR was indeed part of the very last dev kits, but those might not have been released to third parties by then.

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>>4157248

The Saturn was tricky to program for, but when programmers knew what they were doing and had enough time to do it (instead of "let's just port this and use VDP1 for everything") there were some pretty amazing achievements on the system.

Everything from arcade perfect fighting game ports to a version of Quake that pushes more level geometry than the N64 version to the prototype for Shenmue ran on the hardware.

The Saturn and the PS1 had different strengths, and it shows in the software. The PS1 would have exploded playing something like NiGHTs and the Saturn would melt itself into slag playing something like Gran Turismo 2.

Amusingly enough there are quite a few games where the Saturn version looks or performs better than the PS1 version, Grandia being one of the bigger examples.

>>4157757
N64 is about 3x more powerful than PS1, though the system has a lot of areas it can concentrate that extra power (e.g. drawing perspective accurate textures) so it is very rarely used just on more polygons. The other caveat is that the N64 has more memory bandwidth than PS1, but only s bit more, not even double. So despite the 3x extra power there will be some limitations to manifesting it related to memory bandwidth.

>>4158110
>The PS1 would have exploded playing something like NiGHTs
Why?

>>4157248
the hardware is good. but its all perspective. it does some games better than the ps1 but ps1 had a monda fuckin library. personally, i liked it better than ps1. again, perspective. saturn had great shmups and 2d fighters. and some good rpgs as well. just not as many as ps1. also.... saturn bomberman

>>4157248
TLDR:
Great 2D performance.
Average 3D performance.
An absolute bitch to program due to unconventional architecture, therefore hardware is sorely underutilised by games.

>>4158110
>The PS1 would have exploded playing something like NiGHTs

Nights would've ran fine on the PS1. Probably would've looked even better too.

>>4158110
>Grandia better on the Saturn

pls

>>4157248
What's the most reliable model/version?

>>4161178
It's not a PlayStation, there aren't any unreliable versions of the Saturn.

>>4161219
oh, than what is the best place too buy? I bought one not too long ago and it died 2 or 3 months later

>>4161298
I bought mine from eStarland years ago cause they're local for me, but they only have a couple of shitfuck expensive NIB JP units at the moment, looks like. eBay is probably your best bet. If I were buying, honestly I'd probably import one from Japan then use 4-in-1 cart.

>>4161581
I did that though.

>>4158082
Thanks but I think we're far past that point now. I think the Saturn is sweet but its appeal is definitely limited. Of course, so is the N64's but everybody was a kid, not everybody was a weeb

>>4162178
As a kid I mainly played PS1, I was very much into anime as a kid too, DBZ, Ranma, etc, and PS1 had games of these series.
My older brother and his college friends played mostly N64 due to multiplayer racing, sports and WWF.

>>4161146
>An absolute bitch to program due to unconventional architecture,

It wasn't difficult to program. It was just too damn weak, and the devkits were in their infancy, 3d being completely new to everyone.

>>4162181
I mean the PS1 was completely curbstompingly dominant but it's true that party games were better on N64. We played PS1 communally back in the day but that was pretty chill. Even Twisted Metal 2 didn't keep the party going like Goldeneye did. The Saturn was something I almost exclusively played by myself since if my friends were going to get their asses kicked at a 2D fighter they generally gravitated more toward my World Warrior cab. I guess the D&D collection import got some multiplayer action - and Panzer Dragoon Saga definitely attracted a fair crop of spectators but my absolute peak party days had already passed by that game's release.

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>>4162182
As I understand it, it was easy to program for only one processor but doing so lead to that weakness. Well-made games were comparable to Playstation but the Playstation's power was very straightforward

>>4162202
Sega's SGL actually made writing multi-processor programs relatively easy by just providing a simple function to run shit on the slave CPU while the main CPU ran the bulk of the program (slSlaveFunc -- feed it a function pointer, it gets called on the other SH2).
Mind you, it's not perfect (namely, the easiest way to do things ends up with the slave CPU often left waiting for the main CPU to tell the slave what to do since it'll probably finish early, and on occasion the main CPU will have to wait for the slave to process results -- you could run large, continually running jobs on the slave and pass data between the two CPUs yourself, but now you're back in the realm of "shit's a pain"), but it lets even average programmers take advantage of it.

>>4157493
Applying lighting barely affects VDP1, but yeah, you're left calculating it manually while the PS1 just passes that shit through the GTE.
you're supposed to use the SCU DSP for that sort of thing, but the Saturn's DSP really doesn't help at all and there's a line in one of the Saturn programmers manuals that basically says something like
>if it'll take you an hour to do it in SH2 asm, it'll take you all day to do it for the DSP

>>4157503
Sonic R is fairly impressive looking for a 1997 release in general, PS1 or Saturn. The draw distance is a little on the low side, and that's the only graphical complaint I'd have given it compared to other releases of the era. Nice looking textures and lighting with smooth fade-ins and fairly detailed looking environments. Sonic R actually looks nice, period.
Saga is gorgeous, but most of that is stylistic, rather than raw technical might (of which there is a decent bit).
It's still one of the more impressive Saturn games, and the wide open spaces play heavily to the Saturn's advantages (namely, VDP2's infinite planes).
it holds up less favorably to PS1 games from 1998/1999, but the difference wasn't some gaping chasm like it seemed earlier in the machine's life.

Personally OP i think its an awesome system and recently ive been getting more fun fro it than my PS1 and N64....the games are great although there is a lot of shyte on it, as a reasonable collector you will have no problem falling in love with it, it has heaps of charm and to me just brings a heap of charm and arcade gamers games fun. buy it! a treat, alot of pish on it, but stil a great system to own.