Devin Kraft (Neverender / Silence) @Home for a bit

Tatsuyuki Tanaka Madness

Moebius

No. You're wrong. The Saturn was a competently-designed console for the era. It was designed as well as Sega could have ever hoped for, and all things considered, they did a very good job of it. First off, you have to stop and consider what the Saturn was designed to do. And, like every other ignorant clown who outright dismisses the Saturn, you probably believe the Lunchroom Larry assessment that it was built "from the ground-up" to a be a "two-dee powerhouse!" It wasn't. When the Saturn was still being designed, Sega's arcade division achieved their greatest worldwide success with the Model 1 hardware, specifically with Virtua Fighter. This, more than anything else, informed Sega the way the market was going. Everything would focus on 3D from here on out. Therefore, nobody knew the necessity of designing a competent 3D capable console better than Sega at this moment in time. To even think that Sega, despite their success with the Virtua series on Model-1, would decide that home console gaming would stick to 2D is one of the most idiotic things ever dreamed up by the Lunchroom Larry mindset. The problem with the Model 1 hardware was how expensive it was. The CPU was nothing special -- an NEC V60 that was roughly comparable to a similarly-clocked 68k -- but all the graphical power was in the GPUs. Like, five of them. This was the advent of 3D gaming and for the moment, something as polygon-intense as Virtua Fighter was strictly limited to expensive arcade hardware that was well out of what the consumer could hope to afford. So Sega opted to spread the 3D graphical workload from the GPUs across the entire system. In order to make this work and still be affordable, they chose the Hitachi SH-2 CPU because of its above-average floating point performance and its RISC instruction set was tailor-made for the C programming language. Even this wasn't enough for the 3D performance Sega required so they added another SH-2. And they added the DSP. The DSP is the only difficult aspect of Saturn development. If you had any knowledge about game programming (doubtful) and if you ever downloaded and took a good look at Sega's Saturn SDK (freely available these days with original documentation) you'd discover that depending on what sort of game you're making, the Saturn can be easy to develop for or several orders more difficult. Not every aspect of the Saturn was difficult to develop for as Lunchroom Larry mindsets like yours keep repeating. If you're making a strictly 2D game, the Saturn is almost criminally easy to develop for. The only time you'd ever need to fool around with assembly language for such development was to switch from one of the CPUs to the other, and the development documentation demonstrates how to do exactly this with provided code. Getting the most out of the 3D was another matter entirely. Working with the DSP was painstaking because you had to pipeline every instruction to get the most out of it. But this was compromise Sega had to make in order to achieve 60fps 3D performance that was acceptably close to the Model 1. There were no real 3D standards at the time. Of the rare 3D cards available for PCs, half of those used quads instead of triangles themselves. Sega was on the cutting edge of the 3D frontier, in other words. There was no precedent to work from, something that Lunchroom Larrys like you never stop to consider. As an aside, the Atari Jaguar attempted to duplicate the Model 1 spec as closely as possible and, well, we all know how THAT turned out. So, yeah, Sega's R&D did a damn good job with the Saturn, it turns out. Sony just did a better job of it. "But muh too-dee powerhouse!" you cry. "3D was an afterthought! Back in middle school, Lunchroom Larry told me so!" This is the funniest part of the entire "2D Powerhouse" myth -- the GPU containing all the background layers and the sort? THAT was the afterthought, not the 3D hardware. THE SATURN WAS DESIGNED FROM DAY ONE TO BE A 3D CONSOLE. Have you ever even stopped to consider just how many of the Saturn's 3D games run at a solid 60fps? The Jaguar was designed from the outset for 3D operations and it could barely reach 20fps on the few 3D games it actually had. A solid 30fps was considered more than acceptable for most Playstation 1 3D games, and the Saturn has a surfeit of 3D games that handle 60fps without breaking a sweat. Shouldn't be possible, according to the middle school Lunchroom Larrys of the era. So why did they include this second 2D GPU? The initial release of Virtua Fighter for the Saturn is your first clue. Remember how glitchy the flooring was, and how the frame rate would drop out? The "2D powerhouse" GPU was installed to address that problem. This extra GPU's cost -- both in terms of dollars and in terms of CPU cycles -- was minimal and using raster effects to create a floor that achieves the same effect as textures. That's it. That's the entire reason the "2D powerhouse" GPU was included into the Saturn. For flooring. And because Sega failed in the west, the "2D Powerhouse" myth was contrived as a cope by Saturn fans. And I prefer the Saturn myself and think it's better than the PS1, but facts are facts. Anyway, enjoy your lunch, Larry.

パンフレットとかロビーカード、フライヤーが大量にあるお店。 ちょっと狭くて商品が見づらいのが難点。