Talk:Sega Saturn

Memory clarification

Should this statement "combined with SDRAM to make the main 2 MB memory area" be rewritten or clarified?

The low work RAM and high work RAM are physically segmented in memory and are not contiguous at all. The drastically slower DRAM compared to SDRAM also has an impact in how the memories are used (program code almost always goes in high work RAM, for example).

On second thought, maybe it's not too critical to fix.

PoV?

Radiant Silvergun, a title released in 1998 by Treasure, is considered by many as the best shooter of all time.

Panzer Dragoon Saga, which came on 4 CDs sold out immediately upon its US release and has since become one of the most collectable domestically released games ever.

NiGHTS Into Dreams, a title released in 1996 by Sonic Team, is considered by many to be one of the groundbreaking titles in the 2.5D Genre

It'd be nice to have sources, or refrence to those three entries; who are the "By many" who are so vaguely referenced to?

• • • As far as Radiant Silvergun goes that really is an opinion based statement, I might remove it. As far as Panzer Dragoon Saga goes, just look at its going price on ebay, Few if any normal domestically released games fetch the prices that it does. So that statement is definitely accurate. As far as NiGhts goes it's groundbreaking in the sense that it's one of the first. That might be a POV as well but all things considered I don't feel it should be removed.

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The Sega Saturn was released on November 22, 1994, in Japan; 170,000 machines were sold the first day.

Could we see some statement in the first sentence that the Sega Saturn is a video game, if I am right in surmising that that is what it is? I came to this page thinking it was a car. Michael Hardy 20:10, 27 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Oh, and while we're thinking about this obscure page: I came here in order to properly direct the link that now goes to the transparency disambiguation page. I am uncertain which of the "transparency" pages it should go to. Perhaps someone can attend to that. Michael Hardy 20:10, 27 Oct 2003 (UTC)

I'd like to note that Saturn does have very powerful hardware transparency, but it is difficult to use because of the interactions between VDP1 and VDP2 (i.e. it's possible to get corrupt rendering if operations are not carefully performed in the correct order). Also I suspect that there's something like a 6x increase in the rendering time because of the per-channel transparency. -- Anonymous

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The overhead for transparency is 2x (one framebuffer read before each framebuffer write as opposed to framebuffer writes only) as the transparency ratio is fixed rather than being variable. Ditto for shadow processing where framebuffer pixels are read, darkened (fixed ratio again), and written back.

You can get additional overhead by using the color look-up table modes as those require VRAM access to look up the colors, as AFAIK they aren't cached. Otherwise the color is 'free' as it comes directly from the framebuffer (packed 5:5:5 BGR) or from VDP2 CRAM.

Saturn Models

US and Canadian Saturns are nearly the same. Consequently, they are referred to as "North American" or "NA" models.

I have been told that European and Australian Saturns are identical, although I don't know that for sure. It would make sense since the AC voltage and TV standard is the same for both.

Japanese models are self-explanatory.

All Saturns are either NTSC or PAL. There was no SECAM Saturn. The "SECAM" Saturn models released in France were PAL models with a converter.

I'm not sure about the rest of Asia or anyplace else. I would assume that places like Hong Kong or Korea would probably get the Saturn, but I can't say for sure. Hong Kong is weird in that it's offically PAL as a former British colony, but they have a VERY strong NTSC market thanks to their proximity to Japan.

This really needs to be cleaned up. Barneyboo 15:11, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)

Yuji Naka quote or Yu Suzuki?

Something about this quote seems off to me "Yuji Naka is rumored to have said 'I think only one in 100 programmers are good enough to get that kind of speed out of the Saturn.' I remember reading the article this quote was taken from in Next Generation magazine, only it was an interview with Yu Suzuki not Yuji Naka.

I could be wrong, but I also remember in this interview Yu Suzuki was talking about the difficulty in programming Virtua Fighter for the Saturn. Suzuki went on to say that only 1 in 100 programmers would be able to utilize the dual SH-2's to gain 1.5 times the speed only a single SH-2 would provide.

Does anyone else remember this interview?

I don't really remember the interview, but I'm pretty certain Suzuki made the quote. --Shadow Hog 00:36, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)

I've now added the full quotation, which was included in an article on the Saturn in a "Retro Special" issue of Edge magazine (which I think was a reprint of an earlier article in the main magazine). --Nick R 13:22, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Modding

Would it be appropriate to talk about modding the Saturn on this page? --Anonymous

U.S./Canadian models

I've got a MK-80000 with a notched power cord. I've been told of a model 1 that didn't, but it was a very early model 1. Further revision of that section is probably needed. --Anonymous

SSF/Emulation

Emulation of a Sega Saturn and commercial games was possible FAR before 2005 or SSF, the earliest being GiriGiri, which, iirc, was released in 2000. 71.224.246.205 21:15, 23 December 2005 (UTC)

Girigiri could barely run games in 2001 and only worked on a bunch of videocards, on some cards it displayed nothing more then just garbage. SSF was into developement since 1999 (and possibly earlier) and could run a few games even on those early versions. It got well known in 2005 only because cpus were fast enough to run the emu at full speed (with the advent of dual core cpus which SSF supports to an extreme amount), and it was at this time when the emulator got sound support implemented. It had a compatibility rivaling that of girigiri-gav as early as in 2002, although speeds were very poor (2-3fps or so). And is the emulator section really needed? If so, some parts should be cleaned up, this stuff about SSF and many things about Cassini which is nothing more then a very cheap hack of girigiri-gav, with absolutely no improvements made by the developement team - everything they added was stolen from somewhere, be it a utility of some kind or game specific INI settings (for these latter, you can even copy them back to girigiri-gav and get all the improvements that users from a japanese BBS submitted and collected by testing hundreds of games). The worst part about it was that they removed all kinds of credits and claimed the work as their own. Their "disassembled source" was infact a junk ASM file that they got from an autodisassembler.

Splitting the article?

While trying to improve some of the writing and add some context to some parts of the article (e.g. "Consumers also noticed a change of marketing strategy at Sega of America" - I think the majority of consumers will have failed to notice this entirely, what with not being American and all), I received an error that my edits would put the article above 37 kB in size. I therefore think that the article probably needs splitting up or streamlining. The most obvious thing to me seems to be to branch off the technical spec and/or the models into a separate article and keep this one for historical context with perhaps a small summary of the technical stuff.

What do others think? - ThomasHarte 21:56, 4 March 2006 (UTC)

I think the models would be a good start for a spin off (maybe some people would make photos of each saturn model for WP), but I wouldn't branch the technical stuff since half of it is important if you want to compare it to other consoles. Maybe there's a chance for the tech's a spin off when the needed information is kept in the article. Processors and memory are important if you want to compare it to the playstation while the power source is quite uninteresting. --32X 00:42, 8 March 2006 (UTC)

cartridges?

Since when does the Sega Saturn use cartridges? I have one and there's no cartridge slot. 68.194.16.14 03:08, 2 April 2006 (UTC)

I would suggest you look a bit closer at your console then, since the slot is rather prominent on the rear top portion of the console. this image demonstrates where the cartridge goes.

Some information about Saturn models

-50,000 units of Skeleton Saturn? At Sega of Japan's official "SEGA HARDWARE Encyclopedia"[1], there is the information that Skeleton Saturn was sold 30,000 limited.[2][3] Does the source of this number(50,000) exist?

-Oval button Hi-Saturn exist. Oval button one is MMP-1 (BIOS1.01)[4] Round button one is MMP-11 (BIOS1.02)