Sega likely couldn't have saved the Saturn even if they wanted to.

[Eltigro]

Parallax Scroll creates the long, long, long posts that are interesting. I'm actually looking forward to having some time at home tonight to read through some of those. So tired of just seeing long posts that are just walls of text arguing about whether or not someone understood what the "intent of the thread" is or whatever. Please, more scans of old magazines and pictures of planes.

[derFunkenstein]

I've read just about all the Sega stuff in that post now, and I've changed my mind. Lockheed Martin might have been "in" on something, but a lot of that stuff I remember reading about as the history of the Dreamcast. 3Dfx VooDoo graphics was SoA's proposal codenamed "Blackbelt", and the eventual Naomi offshoot that used the SH-4 and PowerVR setup was SoJ's ("Katana"). And it was never a contest, SoJ was always going to get the hardware it wanted.

 

I wonder how much got mixed up, if Sega had a hojillion hardware projects in the works all at once. It's something the world may never know.

[+x=usr(1536)]

Parallax Scroll creates the long, long, long posts that are interesting. I'm actually looking forward to having some time at home tonight to read through some of those. So tired of just seeing long posts that are just walls of text arguing about whether or not someone understood what the "intent of the thread" is or whatever. Please, more scans of old magazines and pictures of planes.

 

No, man, this is important stuff! It needs to keep being beaten into the ground!

[Lost Dragon]

Edge and Mean Machines to name but 2 UK magazines have admitted that a lot of the information they printed as fact about new Sega information at the time, was merely speculation etc that was being faxed over to them from their sources in Japan.

 

From my brief experience with EGM and DHGF. .you often have to do a lot of seperation of wheat from chaff.

 

DHGF managed to get some fantastic interviews with likes of Jeremy Heath Smith explaining which games were coming to specific next generation consoles and why, but then you'd also see claims that Imagitec Design's Freelancer 2120 would be a Jaguar cartridge game 1st then appear on Jaguar CD at a later date..it was always a CD project..PC CD and Jaguar CD.

 

 

Edge/Next Generation got scolded by Atari for making up false reports of who had attended key Atari events, overplaying the event of a Jaguar CD unit malfunctioning etc.

 

Rebellion laughed at claims Edge were making about what they were working on for the Jaguar.

 

They used fake screens for the feature on 3DO M2 Power Crystal. .mind you Jane Whittaker is lying about game being finished and reciving 90% scores online about it a present...

 

Harry Holmwood had never touched the Sega Saturn, yet Edge were quoting him as a Ninja coder on it.

 

The magazine scans make for interesting reading and starting points for further investigation, but it's advisable to approach them with a healthy degree of caution at times.

Edited October 3, 2018 by Lost Dragon

[Lost Dragon]

Not been able to return to discussing issues of Sega Saturn hardware for a while now..but:

 

 

 

I remember C+VG magazine here in the uk saying Squaresoft had discovered a hidden DSP chip in the Saturn and thus we had only seen a fraction of what the hardware was capable of, in a news snippets section.

 

The reality appears to be that this second DSP was so poorly documented as to what it could and should be used for..developers often refered to it as hidden.

 

It apparently had lots of restrictions and was tough to code for..

 

Some developers reported using it for matrix math and lighting calculations. ..

 

Others said they found it very good at computing "sums of products", which meant they could speed up calculations a significant amount over the SH2 chip.

 

So it seemed to be a useful chip if you could tap into it, but it wasn't some mythical saviour of the hardware type chip.

 

Also,Codemasters were one UK developer who raged about how hard it was to get info from Sega on the Saturn Sound hardware (sound DSP) saying there were no documents for it and they had no luck getting any info from Sega Japan about it.

 

And put out a public request for any information on programming it to play ADPCM compressed samples ( without using the 68k to decompress into a buffer first) etc.

 

Sega really didn't help themselves at times when it came to ensuring the Saturn hardware was made easy to work with, did they?.

[Punisher5.0]

I forgot all about the Dural name. I remember being excited about that name BITD. Those scans were fun to read.

[BawesomeBurf]

Sega could also done more in getting games like the X-men VS games and RPGs like Suikoden over here.

Actually, the Saturn version of Suikoden was not that great. But I do get what you are saying and agree, more RPGs would have been beneficial. They were a huge reason why the PS1 was so popular. The RPGs the Saturn did get in NA were great, but they only released like 5 copies of each one lol.

[Lostdragon]

Please excuse the necrobumping, but coukd this be the supposed Sega Saturn VF3 add on cart? 

 

My French is terrible. 

 

This is the only screen of such a device I have ever seen, so over to the community.. 

[Mikebloke]

31 minutes ago, Lostdragon said:

Please excuse the necrobumping, but coukd this be the supposed Sega Saturn VF3 add on cart? 

 

My French is terrible. 

 

This is the only screen of such a device I have ever seen, so over to the community.. 

Looks like someone inverted the colours of a 32x (though I always wondered whether a bit of joined up thinking could have led to a 32x/mega drive compatibility to make proper use of that cartridge slot. Oh well). 

[Reaperman]

That 32x blocks the opening of the cd tray

 

 

Back to 'saving saturn,' I'd thought that Segata Sanshiro died doing exactly that.

 

Edited June 25, 2022 by Reaperman

[roots.genoa]

10 hours ago, Lostdragon said:

My French is terrible.

The end of the text implies it's some kind of hoax. It indeed looks like a 32X painted in white anyway...

Edited June 26, 2022 by roots.genoa

[Lostdragon]

5 hours ago, roots.genoa said:

The end of the text implies it's some kind of hoax. It indeed looks like a 32X painted in white anyway...

Thank you, friend of mine said the specs sounded way off as well. 

 

So it's a hoax story, no wonder it struck me as odd. 

[CatPix]

Basically it says that it would be equipped with a PPC603e, 64 Mo of RAM, would be able to calculate about one million of polygon per second, and calculate light in real time (hey, RTX!).

Basically... it's a whole console atop of the Saturn.

[Osgeld]

2 hours ago, CatPix said:

it's a whole console atop of the Saturn.

in that timeframe its an entire Mac pro on top of the console, and the Macintosh 603 based computers was not introduced till 94 and the e variant till a year or two later, 603e workstations were starting to become old tooth in the age of dreamcast 

Edited June 27, 2022 by Osgeld