Old Sega Veteran just joined... what did you want to know?

wouldn't dissembling the Saturn's bootrom tell you everything you ever wanted to know?

 

AFAIK, the Saturn's copy protection is based off a signature check from the outer ring of Sega Saturn discs. The Saturn doesn't need to literally read the data back at those parts, but merely check for it's presents or not. How it is created is a mystery, but if your read the patent info on it, it indicates that you just need to know "it exists" and not necessarily read it back in it's entirety.

Though thats what I recall. Please correct me if I'm wrong because I could very well be.

 

I'd like to second this question, particularly about late era MD games. Also did you have any experiences working with the Sega Channel at all?

 

Yeah, one of the main reasons I wanted to work there. I got to spend a good amount of time with all the devs be it at E3, local press events for their game and I was shipped over to SOJ for a few meetings. The Smilebit guys and Hitmaker guys were so super sweet. Also, talking to Yoot Saito to his face was creepy cause it was like talking to real life Seaman!!!

I was super bottom of the totem pole back in 94. I worked on the Game Play Hotline giving out tips on how to beat games (loved that job!)

No, I tested Typing of the Dead arcade before we got our Dreamcast port. That's about it.

There were only a couple games and you guys know about them. Shenmue 2 for the Dreamcast was finalized but the contract with MS and the Xbox version meant we couldn't release it. Also, the game Deep Fear for the Saturn had a US version that was never released but I have a copy and will be selling it here in a week or so!!!

 

I'm guessing the US version of Shenmue II was identical to the PAL edition in so much as it used the original Japanese voiceovers with English subtitles? Also, wasn't the cancelled US version of Deep Fear (which is fully optimised and not just a region-swap of the earlier PAL build) released in limited numbers as part of the Lost And Found series a few years back?

 

US Shenmue was the same as the PAL version wtih American localized text (color vs colour) kind of thing.

Not sure about the Lost and Found. The version of Deep Fear that I have is a complete US version that was only scrapped cause the system was dead at that point.

Btw, we never had a US version of Headhunter for Dreamcast for some reason. We all wanted to bring it out in the states but for some weird reason SOE never agreed.

 

wow DonnyK thank you so much for sharing all this information with us! I have a question that really hope you can answer, Did you work or were involved with the Dreamcast version of Half-Life? any reason you could know why it was cancelled? or do you have any material about this game?

Thanks in advance for any information you can say about this! :nod:

 

Small question, How much did Microsoft liaise with Sega in terms of Windows CE?

 

Half-Life was 100% done. When Sega went third party, they let go all everyone in the third party cert group. So, all other third party games that needed cert were then sent to First party test. Half-Life was one of these games. It was fully certified for release but the publisher didn't think it would sell. Sega at one point debating on making it a Sega published title just to bring it out but a deal could never been done in regards to it so it was quietly canceled.

 

ROFL, that really put a smile in my face.

 

can you tell us more info regarding the Saturn Virtua Fighter 3 footage??? Was it something amazing for a 32bit system??? Could have lived to the hype??

Was it running on a stock saturn??? or it had some kind of add-on?

thanks for your time DonnyK!!!!!!! and thanks for all the effort put on the Dreamcast.

 

It was so fast when I saw it, I wasn't even supposed to see it and it was years ago... I'm sorry I can't give you guys more. In my head I just remembrance seeing it real fast while my buddy played. It was from a Saturn that Japan sent but that could have been anything. I seriously only got barely a minute with it at the time.

 

Are you burned out on the games industry as a whole? It sounds like you're maybe only a couple of years older than me, looking at your job history. Do you think had you not worked at Sega, you wouldn't be?

 

In another post you mentioned you worked for Time Warner, did you ever feel like punching the programming team on Virtua Racing in the face repeatedly for doing a really bad conversion?

 

hahaha, oh yes. Time Warner's Virtua Racing is such a sack of shit but it is better than the so called 10% released I have video footage of. That ran like a slide show. Time Warner's race Drivin' is also bloody awful It seems to use the same engine as VR but in the Saturn's higher resolution.

By the way, my brother still insists that Saturn VF3 was shown on some early Sky TV show. He still says that the demo was Aoi on a plain blue background. DonnyK, do you have any information on this? Also back in the day, I had a video which came from Sega Europe (London) that contained all manner of Japanese Saturn beta footage including the high resolution Daytona car running on a mode 7 style floor. Do you know of this demo? Was it really running on a Saturn?

Yakumo

 

DonnyK thanks a lot for your response.

I know it's very hard to remember such a thing, but the big deal here is that you are proving that VF3 got a Saturn port.

That's simply amazing, and I thank you for that... sorry if I'm too repetitive but I have some odd question haha...

Do you reckon if that footage was superior to what we saw in Virtua Fighter 2 for the Sega Saturn?

Damn, now I will die to see it, and that's VERY unlikely to happen.

Edit/P.D:

You made my day, my week, my month and this year, man, I was waiting for that game since the fall of 1996, and recently I started to think that it NEVER existed in any way or form..

And now...this...thank you, a billion thousand times.

Edit 2:

Hey Anthaemia, cool ah?

 

Cool, indeed! I was actually half-way through writing a (typically epic) rant on VF3 when I caught your much shorter response. Also, to follow-up on something Yakumo just said, I have managed to finally acquire some of the 1994 promotional tapes you mentioned featuring various Saturn prototypes, including the build of Gran Chaser/Cyber Speedway with wireframe elements still present and an early, mostly untextured early level of Clockwork Knight. Also, there's a CG mockup of Ecco The Dolphin that looks far superior to even the Dreamcast game... and that came years later!

Better yet, it even has a very - and I mean VERY - short clip of Keiji Okayasu's high resolution Daytona USA tech demo, only the footage shows a flat-shaded version of the 777 Speedway before then going on to show what is obviously Model 2 footage being passed off as Saturn code in lieu of the fact AM2's proper conversion was only 30-40% complete at the time. There's also some beta VF1 material, but apart from a few extra polygonal glitches and character name spelling errors I can't see much else that's different.

Anyway, I thought "what the heck" and decided to finish my original post, so here goes:

The fact you describe the build of Saturn Virtua Fighter 3 you saw as playable rules out any chance of it being either the character movement demonstration build or first revision, as to my knowledge the latter never left Sega of Japan's sight. This particular version only ever got as far as the evaluation stage and - despite being complete - was rejected outright in favour of Genki's treatment for the Dreamcast, which raised a lot of concerns when it was publically debuted at the second New Challenge conference...

Even though it was obvious Sega's 32-bit machine couldn't possibly reproduce VF3 in a pixel-perfect form, Yu Suzuki honestly believed his team (actually working under the direction of lead programmer Keiji Okayasu) would at least be able to recreate the essence of this high-end arcade machine in terms of playability, if not graphical capability. By contrast, AM2 was also very much aware of Genki's struggles to get VF3tb up and running on the Dreamcast in time for launch alongside the system itself.

Years later during an interview, Suzuki infamously commented that it was during this period he really began to feel undermined within Sega, quoting management's preference of Genki's Dreamcast treatment to his own team's Saturn swansong as a particular sticking point. Furthermore, he went on to claim that much of the work for Shenmue III was already in the can as early as 2001, but the sale of US distribution rights to Microsoft was not a decision he personally agreed with...

In fact, he cites the "interference" of Microsoft as one of the key reasons he stepped back from active involvement within Sega for his last few years at the company. According to a member of the Dreamcast hardware planning team (believed to either Yuji Naka or Hideki Sato), Suzuki was strongly against what he perceived as the dumbing down of the original Japanese specifications for a PC-lite next generation console to accomodate the Windows CE operating system.

Along with many others department heads, Suzuki stated his preference for an extension of the Model 3 coin-op board, only with backwards compatibility to allow for much arcade ports. In the end, it was Shoichiro Irimajiri that settled for a more programmer-friendly solution, choosing NEC and Microsoft as partners with custom libraries available to first and third party developers alike from day one. In other words, lessons had clearly been learned from mistakes made during the Saturn era.

While various high ranking members of Sega's Japanese offices were quick to openly praise the Dreamcast at first, it didn't take long for the dissent to filter through. According to one interviewer, Yu Suzuki has often discussed at length (and again, strictly off the record) that in his eyes the promise of a system more powerful than Model 3 was never fulfilled, as the launch conversions of VF3tb and Sega Rally 2 would prove all too effectively soon enough.

As a result of these early failures, most of Sega's in-house AM teams were asked to quietly abandon plans for any further Model 3 conversions, instead focusing on bringing home titles for the Dreamcast-based NAOMI platform. This plan almost worked, though Scud Race and Emergency Call Ambulance were two high profile casualties that didn't quite manage to disappear without reaching the public's attention first.

Many of you will already know this, but in the beginning Sega was looking to convert Daytona USA 2 quite early on in the Dreamcast's life, with the game often slipping down release tables until it was finally released as Daytona 2001 - a complete reworking that was more an upgraded expansion of Championship Circuit Edition rather than any arcade conversion.

From what I've been able to find out, even the combined talents of Amusement Vision (formerly known as AM1; the team responsible for the original Daytona coin-op) and Genki had problems carrying over the Model 3 code, so they settled on a compromise and hoped nobody would notice. Of course the average consumer didn't think twice, but we at the "home of the obscure" knew differently and most weren't impressed by just how much this committee development group changed in the process of creating what is effectively an all-new sequel.

Returning to the subject of Saturn VF3 again, it's known that after this game was rejected the first time AM2 continued work on the conversion with a "nothing to lose" attitude, knowing it was too late to seize control of the Dreamcast version from Genki (similar to how production of Sega Rally 2 was delayed so it could be handed from CRI back to its original AM team following a disastrous appearance at the '98 Tokyo Game Show where a 40% complete non-playable build was previewed just weeks before its scheduled release date).

In the May '98 issue of the official UK Saturn magazine, it was being reported through a Japanese publication that Sega had VF3 running on both the Saturn and Dreamcast. A few months later, management would choose to approve only the Dreamcast edition, even though Saturn revision 2 was complete and ready for pressing. As I've said before, the master was returned to the vault at the very last minute, and in retalliation at what he saw as the first major knock against his reputation, Yu Suzuki managed to somehow persuade others within the company to hand out a small number of test discs, including one that found its way to Europe where a certain high ranking person managed to show it to a select number of journalists.

Despite previous rumours that members of SSM had seen this disc (and were even offered the chance to reproduce it as a cover disc to grace a special, final issue dedicated to a world-exclusive review and showcase of Saturn VF3), former editor Rich Leadbetter shot down this notion completely. On the other hand, it's been hinted the magazine's Japanese correspondent may still have been present at the backstage TGS presentation I detailed earlier, though so far I've yet to get this confirmed. What can be guaranteed is that something was seen, and your recollection seems to back this up further.

On one last and completely different note, were you aware that Shenmue was originally meant to be a story-advancing prequel to the Virtua Fighter series focused on the character Akira, who was later changed into the standalone Ryo Hazuki? At one point there was even talk from Yu Suzuki himself of plans for a sequel based in Chigaco featuring a similar back story for the Bryant siblings - Shin Ishikawa and Hiroshi Kataoka have also mentioned this in brief, though neither seems aware that VF3 was ever an active project on the Saturn despite the fact it was known to have been completed in two separate revisions. Finally, it must be noted they were busy at the time on other projects independent from those Suzuki was supervising, with Kataoka in particular working on a sequel to his own VF spin-off, Fighting Vipers.

P.S. I really hate to say this, but didn't I tell you so about Saturn VF3 existing after all? If only we knew what programme broadcast that Aoi character movement demo footage (though I always thought it was a late night Channel 4 show as opposed to being on Sky, but oh well) and how to contact Mark Maslowicz, as he's believed to be responsible for showing off the second revision quite a lot back in the immediate pre-Dreamcast launch period. Actually, doesn't he still have something to do with approving third party games for Microsoft? I'm sure he was definitely there when Grand Theft Auto IV was released as I once read an interview with him about arranging deals between Microsoft and Rockstar. On the subject of that mythical video again very quickly, wasn't the C4 footage just the pre-rendered intro from VF3 lifted directly from a Sega Europe promotional tape doing the rounds in mid-to-late '97? At least we're finally getting somewhere... now all we need is access to Yu Suzuki's personal vault as if he doesn't have VF3 it's unlikely anyone does now!

 

Donny, any idea why it took that long to get HL for the DC?

Did Sega deal with Sierra or directly with Valve?

 

Why didn't they ever make sor4? I know they were for the dc? Why did they scrap it? Sor3 ws awesome but a little hard I think it flopped because there wernt that many copies around.

 

I don't really want to comment on VF3 for the Saturn at all since I saw it for mere seconds over 13 years ago. I really don't have any information on it. Sorry guys. I would rather just not say anything cause I don't want you to guys to take as fact something I barely remember.

I forget who the publisher was but the version on the torrents is the version we had in test.