Saturn Accelerator Cart anyone ?

has anyone have any information on proposed Accelerator cart for Saturn?

From what I heard/read it was initially planned to boost Saturn capability in order to port the arcade Virtua Fighter 3. But due to high manufacturing cost this was cancelled and instead completely new next-gen console was planned which we now called Dreamcast.

I wonder whether this Accelerator cart got anywhere in actual prototype stage or never left drawing board stage.

cheers

 

I doubt it reached prototype stage but there might be drawings of it somewhere.

 

there is so much speculation and rumor out there, regarding the Saturn 3D upgrade cartridge. it all goes back to 1995 when EDGE / Next Generation magazines reported on Saturn2. the Saturn2 was going to either be a stand alone console, or and upgrade for the Saturn.

now the part in bold sounds to me like an upgrade.

the two possible candidates for the supplier of the chipset in the Saturn upgrade are: PowerVR Series 1 (DC used Series 2) and Lockheed Martin Real3D. most likely it was Lockheed Real3D, and most often it was reported in magazines and the internet that the Real3D chipset for the upgrade was Real3D-100, which was a powerful chipset for workstations. it was a full 3D processing chipset, not just an accelerator. although not as powerful as the Model3 board, which used two Real3D Pro 1000 processors, but Real3D-100 was still more powerful than Sega's Model 2. the older Model 2 boards used a Martin Marietta chipset, something before Real3D existed. (Martin Marietta merged with Lockheed to form Lockheed Martin, and from that, the Real3D division came into being)

Model 3 with two Real3D Pro 1000s: 1.5 million polygons/sec
Real3D-100: 750,000 polygons/sec
Model 2: 300,000 polygons/sec

also, the Saturn upgrade with Real3D-100 might have also had a PowerPC CPU. or, it could have simply used the CPUs already in Saturn. we probably will never know exactly what the Saturn upgrade consisted of...

the other Lockheed chip that might have been in the Saturn upgrade, is the i740. a joint effort between Real3D and Intel. this chip is much weaker than Real3D-100. the i740 is a 3D accelerator, not a full 3D polygon processor. it relies on the host CPU to provide polygon calculations.

so we have 3 possible graphics chips for the Saturn upgrade:

Lockheed Martin Real3D-100
Lockheed Martin Real3D / Intel i740
PowerVR Series 1

the Real3D-100 would have ben by far the strongest of the 3 chips. giving Saturn 750,000 textured polygons per second with all features on. this is about half as powerful as Model 3. it would have allowed a very good conversion (not port) of VF3. the other chips (PowerVR1 or i740) being much weaker would have only allowed a barely acceptable version of VF3, not very close to the arcade at all.

 

The i740 in a Saturn? I recall that ended up as a budget 3D accelerator for PCs :smt043

When leafing through the Saturn development docs I did notice that the VCD addon port is very versatile, and it would have allowed for more than just VCD decoding. Just as I'm typing this a thought surfaces from the murky depths of my mind about having read somewhere that the Saturn upgrade card would've used both the VCD and cartridge ports, but I'm not sure where I got that from.

 

Right, so let me get this straight... Sega release the 32x. Ppls purchase this in the hope it's gonna make their MD 32 bit. Except no-one buys it cos its crap.

So 4yrs later, someone else has the bright idea of a '64x' or '128x' for the Saturn. D'oh. :snipe:

In the long run, it's probably a good thing this never came out. However, for us game collectors, it's damn interesting. I'd never heared of this before. Would be interesting to see what a Saturn could do with this Accelerator cart plugged in.

Edit: Just thought, maybe the Accelerator cart has something to do with Saturn Shenmue? Surely they can't have expected the Saturn to do Shenmue by itself? Maybe this would have helped?

 

Now that does sound interresting indeed because it would seem highly unlikely that the saturn would have enough power to run the shenmue and VF3 games that were in developement.
But if those games were verry far in developement would't they have needed something like that accelerator card ? meaning there might be working samples out there ?

 

Indeed. Sega would have had a good stock of Model3 games they would have wanted home conversions of, before NaOmi/DC existed.

This would have enabled easier home ports of say, VirtuaStriker, VF3, Rally2 and also for Shenmue. Maybe this is the original idea that lead to the DC/NaOmi being near enough the same machine?

There must definately be finished Acc. Cart dev kits. But they were most probably only used internally by Sega. One for VF3 dev team, and maybe one for the Shenmue team? So yeah, there probably is a fully working proto version inside Sega Japan with a fully running version of VF3.

But think of it this way: powering up the Saturn with an extra GPU and bits n' bobs is all well and good, but Sega must have realised at some point that there were enough potential model3 conversions (and new game ideas i.e Shenmue) to warrant a new home machine, that could handle this easily. Which leads us nicely on to the Katana/Dural/Blackbelt legend.....

 

There was an interview last year with two of the people who worked on Shenmue stating that it was running on a standard, unexpanded machine.

As for what they were planning for this upgrade, hard to tell. The VCD slot is just about the only place a graphics update could be sensibly added, but that puts some serious size constraints on things. Personally I doubt this project ever got very far, even Sega must have realised how silly it was.

 

That's verry verry impressing getting those kind of 3D graphics out of a stock saturn to bad it came to late in the saturn life :Hangman:

 

Virtua Fighter 3 was finished for the saturn as well it was ready for release in September 1998 and it required no upgrade of hardware. AM2 used the final development kit SGL OS 3.20 to finish and develop the game. The game was finished and ready for printing presses but never released because of the iminent dreamcast launch with an arcade port of VF3.

Release date for the game can bee seen on their site

http://web.archive.org/web/20001006212211/www.sega.co.jp/sega_e/saturn/main/schedule/0698.html

 

Anyone knows if is true the story about Sega Saturn Magazine and Virtua Fighter 3? They wanted to give the game with an issue of the magazine?

 

I got one of the last issues and it says one of their members played the game... ill dig it out later.

 

It was Yu Suzuki himself who said that...very impressive!


PD

 

It is true that a number of lucky people played Virtua Fighter 3 on the saturn before it was canned im not sure if they got sent a disc or went to SOA or SOE to play the game. We can only hope that it got sent to the magazine and that the disc will one day get released.

 

This does not mean the game was finished... or even started for that matter.

 

Saturn VF3 + Upgrade Cart

It's great to see 'Q2000' posting here - he really does have a vast range of Sega knowledge!

Anyway, I'd like to point out that the "Eclipse" upgrade cart was an independent R&D project within Sega of America. AM2 had tried working with their own designs for an upgrade cart, but in the end they concluded that the Saturn was powerful enough as a standalone system to justify slight downscaling for the conversions of Virtua Fighter 3 and Scud Race (this would have been the second Model 3 port if VF3 was success).

Specifications for the Eclipse have never been leaked, and it's unsure if working prototypes ever existed. I'm sure that either the top-loading cart slot or the Video-CD connection would have been useful, though in the end Sega of Japan were calling the shots and they dictated that the company start moving onto a new platform. I don't exactly know when the rival US-designed 'Blackbelt' and Japanese 'Katana' concepts first began taking shape, but the Saturn upgrade finally disappeared in late '97. This was around the same time that AM2 had delivered their 'first revision' of Saturn VF3 that did NOT use such a cart, and by then programmers were learning about ever-advancing software tricks (such as AVR processing, a technique which utilises the Saturn's audio chip for geometry rendering and best seen in later games such as Burning Rangers and Panzer Dragoon Saga).

I could write a book on the information I've managed to collect regarding both revisions of Saturn VF3, but I'll spare you all the boring details (I'm sure most of you know the story by now).

As for the 'myth' surrounding SSM#38, this consisted of nothing more than a rumour that the UK Official Sega Saturn Magazine intended to strike a deal with Sega Europe and AM2 so that they could be the only publication in the world to actually play and review the complete ('second revision') of Saturn Virtua Fighter 3. However, by this point the game would already have been cancelled in its native Japan (in preparation for the "superior" Dreamcast version), so apparently the SSM crew secured the rights to include the full PAL edition as a cover disc with this final special issue of their magazine. They had previously done the same with Christmas NiGHTS and the first disc of Panzer Dragoon Saga, not to mention the stunning Sega Flash demo series (though the first volume was replaced by the US-produced Bootleg Sampler - Sega Flash Vol. 1 was a pack-in disc with the first batch of Mk.2 Saturns to arrive in the UK).

I have spoken personally with former-SSM editor Richard Leadbetter (now of PSW magazine - the team responsible for 'leaking' the first direct-feed Killzone footage), and he completely rejected all previous suggestions. Then again, I still wasn't able to find an answer to the most important question - did SSM get invited by AM2 to play Saturn VF3 backstage while at the 1998 Tokyo Game Show? I know for definite that SSM Japanese correspondent Warren Harrod was at this show, and four poor quality scans from a brochure have been linked to Saturn VF3. These screenshots appear (in my opinion) to have considerably less detail than the Model 3 version of VF3, particularly in the 'flatter' backgrounds of the Chinatown/Rooftop stage. Also, the character models and shadows do seem more Saturn-like in places, though you'll need to spend a lot of time comparing them to their coin-op counterparts. Finally, the most interesting feature is the appearance of a debug counter above the time part of the upper display. This might be a feature that was not disabled in the arcade version being tested, but the July '97 date perfectly matches the period in which AM2 supposedly completed their first Saturn revision of VF3. Co-incidence or just an ill-fated conspiracy theory? Hmm...

P.S. Saturn Virtua Fighter 3 WAS finished - TWICE!! Both noted 'revisions' were completed, but only the first was subsequently rejected by Sega. The second build appeared at pressing plants in Japan with a scheduled release date of September 5th 1998. However, it's also been mentioned that AM2 also completed a PAL version of 'Revision 2' as well. If this had come out on the same day as its Japanese variant, it would have been released in the UK on the same day as Deep Fear, which became the final new PAL Saturn game. Why would Sega release one title on its own, especially when you consider that earlier the same year their high-profile games all arrived at the same time (Panzer Dragoon Saga, Burning Rangers, The House Of The Dead and Shining Force III). Once again, there's definitely something strange about all of this, but sadly it looks as if non-disclosure agreements will probably ensure that we won't find out much else for a while.

 

I remember that someone posted a pic of what was supposedly VF3 running off of the eclipse hardware on the old board. I'm not sure but I believe he said he used to work at Sega Europe. The thread might still be buried there.

 

Eclipse VF3?

I've never heard of Saturn VF3 running on the Eclipse board, though since the source allegedly comes from within Sega Europe I'm guessing that this particular conversion of the game was probably nothing more than a tech demo by SOA to showcase their upgrade hardware (AM2 have said before that they used absolutely nothing apart from a "stock Saturn" for VF3 and Shenmue). Also, I was always under the impression that Sega Europe supported SOJ when it came to VF3 - why would they "play both sides" and also secretly support the US division's efforts? Then again, there's not much information regarding Sega of Japan's activities regarding VF3 while SOA was so outspoken on the subject. Who REALLY knew what was going on, though? Not even SOA could give a release date, yet over in Japan plans were underway for a simultaneous Japanese and PAL release - how come there wasn't an American version of VF3 in the pipeline?

 

gawd you would think these programers would be prowd of getting these games to run on these consoles and at the least would let us see things... i think we should all e-mail AM2 and ask them about it over and over again! :smt043

 

I'm probably mistaken. I read this thread a long time ago. I remember that his post talked about having VF3 for the Saturn (He posted a pic that much I do remember). He also talked about a 64 bit upgrade for the Saturn in either that post or somewhere in the thread. I believe he said that VF3 was running off of it. I can't remember for sure though. It was my mistake to assume that it was the eclipse upgrade. Perhaps someone else can remember more.