Are there pictures, info on the Saturn 3D upgrade ?

CRI was quite hit and miss with its Sega conversions, ranging from Virtual On to Galaxy Force II (MD) and Touring Car - the latter being a game you would have expected so much more from, especially when it was such a late era Saturn title (along with the similarly disappointing House Of The Dead). If memory serves me correctly, Yu Suzuki himself was so impressed with the work of CRI programmer Toru Kujirai that he became part of AM2, even getting the honour of being credited on recent installments in the Virtua Fighter series. Shenmue also features the CRI logo in its credits, though I'm not exactly sure what level of involvement this development team had in the production of this game - based on its sheer scale, however, I seriously doubt the entire project was done in-house. Then again, since other internal departments are listed (including Sonic Team to give just one example) then perhaps CRI was thanked for technology and not assistance with the actual creation of content. After all, Yuji Naka's team was known for producing a fair share of libraries, even having a minor role in the design of the Dreamcast's controller. Anyway, back to the subect...

I recall first hearing about the proposed cartridge hardware upgrade for Saturn in early 1997, and since then I've read more about the project codenamed "Eclipse" that was spearheaded by Sega's US division. In all instances, there seem to be certain specific details that are more than likely true, such as the use of Real3D technology and an intended price tag of no more than $100. Core Design has never officially stated whether or not it planned to utilise the Eclipse for its port of Tomb Raider II, but since this game's cancellation was due to exclusivity with Sony and not any significant hardware limitation I seriously doubt we'll truly get to the bottom of this particular mystery for a while - especially when you consider how many times this once prolific company has changed over the years as a result of takeovers/closures/etc.

One thing I am absolutely certain of is that Sega of Japan had no intentions of ever seriously adopting the Eclipse, although it's possible tech demos may exist - more likely than not this would have amounted to discs sent over from America, and not any Japanese in-house research. Sonic Team, Team Andromeda and AM2 were all actively looking to continue development on the Saturn as a standalone system, with the latter coming up with some (allegedly) incredible-looking results. By taking full advantage of its parallel processing architecture, the likes of Burning Rangers, Panzer Dragoon Saga, "Shenmue" and Virtua Fighter 3 were proof of just how much power Sega's 32-bit system truly had in the right hands. Sadly, third party developers never really had the advance in time and software libraries Sega's own teams were given, so only a handful of externally-produced titles ever compared. On the other hand, there were a few examples of games being produced without the need for any upgrade - and that includes the 4Mb RAM cartridge - that could have given the Saturn a late boost in the graphics war, such as Biohazard 2 and Metal Gear Solid. Unfortunately, both were cancelled so early as to prevent the outside world from ever witnessing what could have been, so as a result we can instead turn to the likes of AM2 for its own showcases of the Saturn's relatively untapped capabilities. If rumours are true, even without the Eclipse's power Shenmue and VF3 would have been reaching polygons counts of 750,000 per second - not bad for a console that was supposedly underpowered in comparison to its rivals... and this is without opening up the proverbial Pandora's box that is the mythical (if not entirely trustworthy) suggestion that after completing VF3 there was talk of then somehow trying to get SCUD Race up and running on the Saturn as well!

 

Touring Car was rushed to release. I don't think it is a fair representation of CRI's skills, it's just a sign of how desperate things got.

 

I was reffering to libraries and tools etc about CRI
maybe they are not too good gamedesigners, but it seems that sega are using CRI tools extensively
on the new games too(ps3, xbox360) in sega games there is always CRIware
it's curious that a developer of the sega size is using others middleware

 

Well, CRI was always part of CSK so, in someway, it was SEGA .

 

I'd have to agree that some of these alternative timelines are a little too... optimistic.

You might as well say that in 1995, Sega should have released an Xbox 360, called it Genesis 2 and sold it for $199.

The problem with alternative timelines written about the past is that they're a lot easier to type than they would have been to put in place at the time.

By the third or fourth alternative I had to start skipping posts as it was just getting crazy.

 

A Saturn/Genesis 2 with the power of one of the last revision of the Model2 board was not only possible at the time (1995) but with a clever design meant for mass production since day 1 it may have been even cheaper to produce than the actual, already released Saturn.

The Saturn is the perfect example of an obsolet-at-birth design going to thru a major (and rushed) overhaul at the last minute, all becos SEGA had to release the damn thing before sony did. You just cant slap another layer of components in a consummer product like you would in a custom workstation, this is stuff thats meant to be mass produced and sell with a little profit (if any) unlike big computers and such which are sold at a premium.

Obviously anything near the Model3 or even the last version of the M2 was too expensive before 1997, so a Saturn as poweful as those (or between the two) would have been more than $600 at the time, and looking at the 3DO that isnt the magic number. It would have failed nonetheless, maybe not as much as Saturn or the 3DO did, but I doubt john doe would have like to spend half his paycheck in a console.

But a as-powerful-as-Model2 Saturn for $299 in late 1995 was more than possible.

 

mmm i think no way in hell... any model 2 arcade board was in that time almost 3 times as expensive as a launched saturn, things are not that easy....

the money was paid for a design, everything was done, and sony showed that dinosaur... you know, they got to put another processor.. or release the single processor one, that would have been obsolete by christmas 95 in front of psx.

saturn was tooooooo hard to program, but hey, look at the damn shenmue saturn video, that makes psx and most n64 games look like genesis games (well, maybe not that much xD), but that was not afordable to all the developers in this world.

Looking at the mentioned video, i think that's the closest thing to saturn vf3 we got.. when the camera brings the faces near... or closest character models, who needs an upgrade??

what sega needed badly, was good libraries, because what i saw in saturn, is just A PAIN IN THE ASS to code, and with the rush release, too bad for the titles..

 

Think for a second that the Model2 was an arcade board designed during 93, launched in 94 and produced in small numbers (when compared to a console).

A more advanced design based on technologies to be released in 95 could've been archieved had SEGA:

1-Throw away the System-32 based design in early 94.

2-Improve the relations between SOA and SOJ.

3-Be open to more ideas from different companies, ratter than a small group of "trusted" ones.

I want to stress that last point, since unlike Nintendo with SGI, SOJ didnt went around looking for the best tech available, they just went to hitachi and JVC/Victor and used what they had.

Is ironic that at almost the same time SOA went to nVidia to create a cartridge console to rival the N64...

 

First, hi to all in special to Negora, long time.

The most expansive part for a 3D engine back in the nineties was the Geometry Engine until DirectX 7 GPUs started to include one in the GPU they were very rare and expansive pieces that only with them you could double the cost of your system.

E&S TR3 and the Lockhead Martin 3D Chipset were several times more complex in cost and performance than Playtation and Saturn, in the 32/64 bits generation (N64 included) a game with 100.000 pol/sec was considered ray: because the great majority of game ran between 25.000 and 50.000 pol/sec in real game environment with some exceptions that moved more polygons.

SegaSaturn wasn´t a bad console, it was bad designed for the 3D since Sega didn´t include a Matrix Match Coprocessor equivalent to the GTE inside the Playstation and from my point of view the Eclipse should have been one of those units sold as an expansión pack for the console.

I ever loved console hardware and studied it and I should say that Playstation is only superior to saturn in the video (thanks to the build-in decoder) and the 3D (thanks to the GTE) but in the rest of things Saturn was superior.

The original Playstation was running with a NEC V60 and was nothing more in performance than a Atari Jaguar with CD-ROM, later Sony changed the CPU for the R3000 and modified it for 3D graphics renaming it as R3000A.

All the entire Playstation hardware is based in the first SGI Indy with a Raster Manager and a Geometry Engine, the Geometry Engine was nothing more than an Intel 860XP that included a Matrix Math Coprocessor. In the case of the Playstation they avoided the use of the 860XP making the GTE and the Raster Manager making their own Raster Manager.

We know that Sega engineers believed that an entire new SH2 will put Saturn at the same level of Playstation, this should be truth but not in Sega Saturn. Including a new CPU in a closed box system needs the complete change of the memory controller and I am not wrong this wasn´t changed in the final version. Why? I don´t know the real reason, but I want to ask to some Sega engineer that worked in the project the reason for this huge mistake.

Correct me if I am wrong.

Virtua Fighter 3 was never related to the Eclipse project and since the beginning AM2 was developing a new engine for making the port to an usual SegaSaturn and this entire engine was being used in Shenme Saturn and Sonic Fighters.

The magazine were the ones that started the FUD, they started to say that Saturn was impotent in the 3D space and because of this even Sega would need the Eclipse even for its own games and they gave the image of a 64X for Saturn.

The most logical solution for Sega wasn´t an entire 3D chipset but a simple Matrix Match Coprocessor for the console, the cost for players would have been under $50 (retail price) and games in Saturn should have been upgraded beyond Playstation and Nintendo64 Framerate and Geometry.

Exactly.

Sony and Nintendo lost a lot of time for the release making good libraries for the games developers, Sega made the mistake of releasing the console with bad programming support.

 

really bad programming support... i just took a look to the routines taken on the first daytona game.. man... it's a miracle the game doesn't crash..

 

Of course, but thats becos those were never meant for consoles, ergo the design isnt cost-efficient.

Obviously some sacrificies would've to be done in orden to archieve Model2 (M-2) graphics at a reasonable price. Resolution for example, M-2 games run at 496 x 384, while most 32bit consoles used QVGA or lower.

Yeah, that makes you think if the Saturn would have had a better market performance had the hardware been better, since the amount of money sony spend buying studios and mags at the time was unheard of.

Is funny to hear sony fanboys these days talking smack about MS for doing pretty much the same sony did in the 90s...

 

i know that your nick is saturn worship, but did you take a look at vagrant story or wipeout3? i love the saturn but nothing gets close to them.

 

Exactly. Shenmue was running at less than 15 FPS. Too much faith is put into things that never existed or were never released so we cannot make proper judgements about their quality. In the end, we can only go on what we can experience first hand.

Saturn Shenmue looked good for 32bit, but it all we saw were some rolling demos of the development project. A lot of the scenes look barely beyond Virtual Cop 2 in quality IMO.

 

The Saturn was flawed from the very beggining, to think that better libraries would have put its defficient hardware at the same position (or even surpass) than that of PSX and N64 is too optimistic, if not pure fantasy...

IMO the only option for SEGA were to completely redesign the Saturn or not releasing anything and keep going with the 32X and Genesis.

Releasing the Saturn as we know it was the 2nd worst option, the 1st one being also releasing that nVidia competitor to the N64, which would've created an even worst scenario than the one between 32X and the rushed US Saturn.

 

I´ve an entire theory about what could happened with the Eclipse.

Back at the end of 1995 Sega Studios learned that Saturn was very limited in the geometry space until the point that some of their future games will have big problems if they are ported to Saturn.

The less expansive form for upgrading Saturn was a 3D processor for it but they didn´t need something complex, their main objective was giving to the Saturn enough life until the next generation was released and the less expansive thing was a Matrix Coprocessor.

Thanks to this Saturn 3D polygon capability should have skyrocket giving a new life to the console and making more easy the development of future 3D games and the good part of all this is that this could have included with one of the games, Virtua Fighter 3 for example.

But at the end more and more Sega studios decided to forget the use of the Eclipse for their future games and only the games developed by AM#2 were the ones that used Eclipse and appeared in the last moment, Sega wasn´t going to open a microprocessor manufacturation plant only for 2 or 3 games developed for a console that they considered dead and the history of Eclipse possible finished here.

And this relates to the Virtua Fighter 3, if the Eclipse was something like I am talking then the games were programmed for an entire Saturn but their performance was worse with Eclipse than with Eclipse. In other words, something similar to the N64 Expansion Pack but different.

 

Nah, an addon after the 32X fiasco and the $400 MSRP would've been a terrible idea, like I said before: a better design from the get-go or nothing.

On the other hand I was wondering what would've happened had SEGA decided to launch the first Saturn (which had the same 2D capabilities from the final one, but 3D at barely the level of a Model1) as it was, since I'm sure it would've had a much lower price ($200?) and with a good array of 2D games I'm sure it would've been succesful.

The problem with the 3D hype at the time wasnt just that sony keep pushing it, but that SEGA tried to follow instead of defending their original plan of highend 2D, which IMO may have been a better strategy since in this area the Saturn highly surpassed both PSX and N64.

Then they could've launched a 3D addon in fall 1996 that was as powerful (if not more) than a Model2.

So at the same time you have a 2D powerhouse cheaper than any other nextgen, and when 3D really started to get acceptable you launch an inexpensive addon thats beyond the competition's offerings.

 

of course i have seen vagrant story and wipeout 3, but those don't come any closer to the video footage we have seen of shenmue , just look at the 3d models, they are barely of the same quality as what we could have get for vf3 on the saturn, and the fact that they move their eyes, have expression, the detail, the dynamic light sourcing in some of the places, the kowloon scenario, etc

of course one can tell of fanboyism those things, as i'm talking of something it was never released, but you told about wipeout 3 and vagrant story, 2 games released when sega saturn was DEAD sooooooo far, would have been cool to see what am2 and other studios like team andromeda (hey, panzer dragoon saga? anyone?).. would have released in 1999

i hope someday more footage leaks from shenmue saturn, because it's the fist in the face of sony fanboys who were yelling back in the day of saturn as incapable 3D system.

It got a bad design? YES

How was the SEGA management those days about the system? BAD

Was relevant the fact that it never got decent libraries until end 96 - mid 97 ? Of course..

I mean, we will never know, but what i was trying to tell with the shenmue video thing, is that saturn was capable to make front to any psx or n64 game back in the day if the game was in "correct hands", not some lazy sony-paid developers.

and SORRY for my bad english, i'm in a rush at the work now.

 

ehm, have you REALLY looked at, and played wipeout3? i really doubt it. also, unless you have seen new movies of shenmue on saturn (that i haven't seen) it doesn't look close even to vagrant.

and i'm saying it as a saturn fan. either the saturn was not good enough or died to early, doesn't matter much. it's what we are left with in our hands that counts.

 

"it's what we are left with in our hands that counts."

ok, that's of course the nº1 rule.

but in my opinion, the footage of shenmue for the sega saturn is better than what's seen in vagrant story in number of polygons, textures, etc

vagrant story is impressive, but look at the models, they doesn't have by long the expression and realism of those showed in shenmue.

of course, i don't have played/seen shenmue on saturn, and that's something really important for the matter.

but the point of what i'm trying to say it's the effort of AM2 to show the world that saturn never needed an upgrade, ok it was a pain in the ass to code for, and of course the disastrous sega management for that console speaks for itself.

but it wasn't the crap underpowered console sony was selling at that time, telling that it can't move tomb raider 2 or resident evil 2.

shenmue "footage" shreds both.

(don't want to think how would have looked a new panzer dragoon using the shenmue engine - 120% speculation of course..)

 

It would have been unplayable due to framerate.