Saturn Virtua Fighter 3. Saturn 3D upgrade cart. what is known to this day?

The reason why the DC version of Street Fighter Zero 3 is worse is because of the resolution change. This altered all the hit boxes making it play nothing like the arcade original. The Saturn version on the other hand is perfect.

Yakumo

 

This is one of those examples of why scaling sucks shit, and why playing old school games on your Xbox, and most likely on any of the three upcoming next gen machines (speculation) will always be crap. The Xbox, with a lot of modification can output a low res signal... none of the software or emulators support it though. GC - same thing. The DC does, but for some reason Capcom wanted to scale this release AFAIK. Vampire Chronicles I hear is the same. I've owned the game for years and never touched it.

 

Nice forum, this one.

Some clarifications:

DC VC and SFZ3 problems are totally different. The former is scaled-up (and filtered) to a hi-res display, the latter, isn't. It's slightly scaled (distorted, you could say) from its original resolution to fit in DC's true low res mode. And with this, maybe the hitboxes were affected (I haven't played it much to say). VC doesn't have a problem with hitboxes or collision detection. It is just ugly. Oh. SFZ3 isn't RGB-friendly, either. Go figure.

I think you're confusing true low res displays with RGB outputs. As far as I know, neither, the XB nor the GCN display a true low res mode, whatever the mod you do. Notice that with "true low res" I'm refering to 15 kHz, non-interlaced modes.

 

Welcome Recap

 

Welcome.

I've never played either. Only heard what people moan about. The only reason I could think that hit-detection would suffer when pixels are slightly scaled is that they tried to resize the hit-boxes and couldn't make it match, or didn't resize the hitboxes at all. In all honesty, I hate Street Fighter and it's clones to begin with.

This guy says otherwise:
http://dempa.jp/rgb/drug/xbrgb21sx.html
http://dempa.jp/rgb/drug/gcvga01l.html

This guy is apparently a single-handed RGB machine in Japan. Makes all those cables by hand. I don't know why you'd want such a mod with the GC unless all you had was a 15khz monitor. Any old school games are going to be filtered on the software level I would assume. With the Xbox you could at leaset get some use out of emulation theoretically, but have all sorts of memory/CPU problems. You'd also have to have the emulator support the resolution, which none of them do no doubt. The major ones I've tried don't have any useful filtering either... or I completely misconfigured them (and I tried a lot of stuff).

 

Thank you.

They're (well, most of them are) fantastic gaming pieces, thoe. Despite the fanboyism phenomenon they imply.

Those are just RGB scart cables. The "guy" doesn't mention "non-interlaced modes" there. To get a true low res display, the system must have a video chip which works at low resolutions. Think about it - which low res would use the XB or the GCN? It hasn't been defined. A hi-res mode may be displayed at 15 kHz, like a true low res one. It's there where the interlacing makes appearance (which is also there with a RGB cable). Maybe is there where the confusion comes from?

As I told you, the Xbox must support a low res mode natively. Any emulator will have to be coded to use a supported res of the system, and then, scale the native res to fit the one of the Xbox (full screen display, obviously), which will never be lower than 640 x 480.

 

I probably loved SFII as much as the next guy when it came out. 30 version later, and it's just gotten old to me.

I get what you mean now.

 

Is the XBOX video chip not VGA/VESA compatible? I've seen it run in text mode, so it should be able to do 13h as well.

 

Where the hell did you see it run in text mode?

 

on a friends' modded Xbox, it had some sort of Linux variety on it, if I remember right (what I do remember is drinking a lot of wine afterwards so my memory might be a little tainted)

 

Aaah.. Yeah. Ye old Linux.

 

??

 

must be virtua fighter 3 running on the recent model 3 emu from the looks of the background trees and the akira and jeffery having some of their extra textures missing.

 

Does look a bit PC emu.

Where are the other images.......someone posted some characters taken from dev libraries before on the old board.

 

That screenshot is not from the Saturn version of VF3, but instead is of a work-in-progress Model 3 emulator. If anything should give its true identity away, it's the image format and resolution, which are identical to what most emulators use and the arcade board's screen size respectively. Besides, wasn't Saturn VF3 running in the system's standard 320x224 resolution? Although it's probably not a totally accurate representation of how the console edition would have looked, I have a feeling that the "Akira" model included in the SGL sample files might be closer to Saturn VF3 than incomplete coin-op emulation. I haven't seen any pictures or video footage (if any was ever captured in the first place) of this in a while, though I recall the graphical quality was only a little better than Fighters Megamix. Still, that's not really a bad thing - would you have complained about VF RPG/Shenmue if it was released in 1999 looking as it did in that video?

 

In de book "the rise and fall of sega", Sam Pettus writes as follows:
Yu Suzuki and his staff at AM2 had finished a considerably scaled-down Saturn port of VF3 by 3 July 1998(probably using the mythical Shenmue Softwarelibrary SDK 2.0), but by the time Sega of Japan was dead set against releasing it, because of the Dreamcast port.....the game was officially cancelled on 17. September 1998. Nextgen reported that the 64 Bit Modul Expansion Codename Eclipse was already cancelled on the 23 of June 1997 in favor of the 128 Bit project. Sega didn't want to make the same mistake as with the 32x.

Probably there was NEVER a VF3 Version working with an upgrade cart!!!!!

The cartless VF3 version probably looked like an improved Version of VF2(notably more polygons for the fighters and better background implementation). That means high res polygon fighters (as in VF2 or Last Bronx, not as ugly as the low res Fighting Vipers and Megamix efforts). Much better implemented highres backgrounds a la Last bronx(playfield and 2D sprites for objects). But certainly plain battlegrounds(rotating playfield). Maybe it even had 1 or 2 crooked battlegrounds (Pai stage would have worked easily). They would have made sense, because fighters on higher battleground could execute much longer juggles in the arcades.

The only evidence left of that work is Jill with her Aoi moves in Fighters Megamix and the beautiful but plain VF3 desert stage that belonged to wolf....
An other game that was recycled in that game was the cancelled sonic the fighter with 2 stages.....one quite spectacular.

Looking on this new information.....Shenmue was also running without a cart, but was developed with the much improved SDK 2.0 that allowed a better exploitation of parallel processing nature of the saturn hardware(2x SH2 and 2x VDP). Hopefully we will see some sort of pictures of saturn VF3.....if it really existed.....December 2013 20th VF anniversary would be nice ;-P

 

I haven't yet read The Rise and Fall of Sega, but thanks to your posting that quote it seems Mr. Pettus has updated his "information" regarding Saturn Virtua Fighter 3 slightly. I'm not sure what his source is for Shenmue and VF3 probably using the mythical (?) SDK 2.0, as it's already known that after Fighters Megamix the programmers at AM2 moved over to SGL OS 3.02, having exhausted the capabilities of 2.1 with their various upgrades of the Fighting Vipers engine, which itself is heavily adopted from VF2's code base.

As I've said before, my understanding - formed as a result of literally years researching the subject - is that the first complete revision of VF3 for the Saturn featured very basic polygonal backgrounds, with the desert resembling its appearance in Fighters Megamix. Considering the system's 2D capabilities, I don't have any difficulty believing that most areas could be faithfully reproduced using a combination of sprites for their floors/ceilings and only a handful of polygons. The rooftop was more than likely a sloped surface with a simple wall surrounding two sides.

Although developed without such technical expertise or even the same SDK versions, a handful of third party developers like Nextech (D-Xhird) and Cynus (Savaki) proved later into the Saturn's life that it was indeed possible to create fighting games where both characters and the levels around them could be constructed from polygons, with the former benefitting greatly from the machine's sprite layering power to enable transparency effects. Although I'd love to see media of Saturn VF3, I reckon the proverbial boat has long since left port.

On the subject of the Eclipse board for a moment, this was a project in development without the consent or knowledge of anyone within Sega's Japanese building, having started off life as a US-led collaboration with Lockheed Martin. While specific details are thin on the ground, my guess is that a variant on the Real3D chipset was being used, and certainly not the 3Dfx technology as rumoured in certain publications and websites back in the day - it's likely there was a lot of confusion between the proposed Saturn upgrade and SOA's next generation console plans.

There's a slim chance that someone external of AM2 may have created a VF3 tech demo using the Eclipse, but what I'm more interested to see are the genuinely mysterious games being made by Core Design. There are claims they worked on SCUD Race and some kind of engine test to determine whether how close a theoretical conversion of Tomb Raider II would be compared with the PC edition, though as with so many aspects of Sega's history around this period, few are still willing to come forward with solid, concrete facts. Until recently, who even knew about the real Pluto?

Finally, the main reason for Shenmue's impressive visuals was AM2 pushing the parallel processing architecture to its limits. So much has been said about the high quality facial textures seen in that one video, though it's likely much of this is really just the result of video compression masking the reality. In the brief sequence where Ryo is seen walking down a street before fighting Gui Zhang, can anyone honestly say this is any more impressive than the on-foot sections of Panzer Dragoon Saga? The answer is not by much, if at all...

Comparing those two games in particular is logical, since they were being produced at the same time and even shared assets. Team Andromeda provided AM2 with the dynamic engine technology used to create those sweeping camera sequences in Shenmue, and on a similar note I've been told in the past that such inter-departmental assistance was commonplace. Many know that Daytona USA Circuit Edition borrows heavily from the Sega Rally engine, but did you also realise those sweeping camera movements seen before and after races owe their existence to Sonic Team's NiGHTS?

I could talk about these titles all day, providing my opinions and sharing the handful of facts we have. On the other hand, my personal life at the moment doesn't really allow me the freedom to do this as much as I'd like to any more, so it breaks my heart to announce that I won't be able to for now. I bet those of you that have seen me rant on these matters before will be so happy to hear this! Seriously, I really wish Sam Pettus would open to me about his contacts for VF3 and that Keiji Okayasu or even Yu Suzuki would finally drop their veils of silence.

 

Would have been nice to see a game that FULLY exploits the saturn parallel processing capabilities(100%)!
In % what do you think what sega saturns flagship titles do fare better...let's guess
VF2: 70%
PDzwei: 80%
Sega Rally: 70%

My impression after theses titles nobody moved over nowhere(SDK X who cares!)....most saturn titles started to look worse....not better

By the way every Hardware should have a game that nearly exploits all its Hardware capabilities!

 

I don't personally like to use percentage figures, because few thought it would be possible to surpass "the big three" of Virtua Fighter 2, Sega Rally and Virtua Cop, yet barely a few months later Sega's own development teams were giving us Virtua Cop 2, Fighting Vipers, Daytona USA Circuit Edition and NiGHTS to name just a few games I found were significant improvements visually - that's without taking into consideration third party titles such as those I mentioned before. However, I'd like to think the last wave of software including Panzer Dragoon Saga, Burning Rangers, Shining Force III and maybe even Virtua Fighter 3 or Shenmue were reaching the Saturn's limits, and that the torch was passed over to the Dreamcast knowing there was very little untapped power remaining in the company's 32-bit machine. One thing I will say is that while I thought Panzer Dragoon Zwei was more ambitious than its predecessor overall, it looked rougher at the expense of (slightly) more freedom, similar to how The House Of The Dead* was a backward step after Virtua Cop 2.

*I'm fully aware HOTD and VC2 were developed by two completely separate teams, one with great expertise and the other forced into putting out an unfinished product on Sega's orders!

 

fighting vipers with their low res fighters dosn't belong into this list.....but Grandia does...maybe panzer dragoon saga and nights of course...Daytona CEE was also very polished. i agree with House of the dead its port was also more difficult because it came from models2B board...VC2 from its predecessor...
HOTD isn't polished enough.....but it was also a very difficult port.