SONIC TEH HEDGEHOG

the fact that Sega didn't have a Sonic game of any description at launch on the Saturn was really some dumb bullshit
let alone the entire fuckery with Sonic Xtreme

>>134977
I will never not be sad we didn't get Sonic Xtreme

HOW DARE FILTHY GAIJINS STEAL MY GLORIOUS~U NIGHTS CODE THAT I HAND CRAFTED IN PURE ASSEMBLY AND TRY TO USE IT IN FOREIGN DEVELOPED 3D SONIC GAME?! I WILL QUIT SEGA!!!!!!

>>134989
didn't Naka say this didn't happen?

honestly too, I believe him
Sonic Xtreme was being written in C, while NiGHTS was written in SH-2 assembly was what he said IIRC

I know Xtreme was in fact being developed in C, but I don't actually know if NiGHTS was straight SH-2 asm (and holy shit, that's fucking nuts if it was)

>>134977
Thing is, Sonic isn't that popular in Japan, so Sega of Japan didn't see making a mainline Sonic game for the Saturn as a top priority. The Saturn itself very heavily catered to Japanese gamers which is part of why it didn't sell that well in the west.

>>134989
What the FUCK was his problem?

>>134994
He could've just said that to cover his own ass. As far as I can tell, that story has been the official reason why Sonic Xtreme never saw the light of day, but I don't know maybe there's more to it than what the Sonic Xtreme team lets us know.

pointlessly long post

>>134998
even if the story mightn't be true, naka is known to be a bit blunt at best
which can also be pretty lulzy honestly

didn't he eat shit for insider trading after Balan flopped
IIRC he said he was very literally not even there for half the project and he had a lot of negative shit to say about the entire thing, and my conspiracy theory is that Square fucked him over to shut him up and he was not actually doing insider trading lol

>>134996
every single saturn decision outside japan was retarded, but you'd think seeing the sales numbers would do something considering that Sonic basically turned Sega's money losing machine into an international success overnight and was their actual first real success in the home market

really though, sometime in 1994, Sega caught stupid and never stopped being stupid
I still constantly think about the fact that the 32X even exists and all the resources that went into that black hole instead of the Saturn (in particular, it using SH-2 CPUs, even if slower clocked, will never not be retarded, and the supply issues Sega had with sourcing chips were obvious in foresight, let alone hindsight)

also holy shit the early launch torpedoed any possible hope or excitement
imagine just getting fucked this hard
https://youtu.be/ExaAYIKsDBI
(the Saturn launched at $399; IIRC it dropped price very shortly after though, killing Sega's profit margins)

although I also think about the Saturn being stupid too (the dual SH-2 design and the weird-ass DSP chip they added to ostensibly do geometry calcs just added a bunch of cost, but the system also has two other full CPUs on it lol, a 68k variant for handling audio, and a whole fucking SH-1 CPU just for handling the CD drive)

now I just want to talk about the saturn lol, you don't need to read below this line
as someone who has attempted to program for it (didn't get super far because I'm a lazy bitch), I am slightly in a position of knowledge regarding how it works

some people might say the Saturn isn't good at 3D, but the truth is the Saturn is actually pretty good at it!
the saturn is unfortunately terrible at texturing, and PS1 to Saturn ports hit this limit REALLY badly; the ones that run better often just halve the texture resolution (which looks terrible)

and although it has like 3 chips on which it can do 3D calculations (two main CPUs and a DSP chip), there isn't really dedicated hardware for it like the GTE features on the PS1, and one of the more useful features of the saturn (the DSP) is a horrific manually pipelined nightmare with terrible documentation that almost no one touched; later SEGA system libraries use it to accelerate 3D T&L calcs (admittedly, like the ones I used, which would help a lot in my perception of the machine's performance), but IIRC a bunch of early Saturn software doesn't even look at it
https://youtu.be/lxpp3KsA3CI the Sonic R team did use it, to great effect

I absolutely think Sonic R is basically the absolute peak of Saturn 3D visuals, a game that compares well visually to PS1 games from like 2 years later
the Sonic Team developed games are also a cut above, but have way more polygon flicker and generally feel a bit visually off

the Saturn's VDP1 neither supports UV mapping (the four corners of a VDP1 quad are teh 4 corners of the texture) nor can you draw large textures quickly, both of which make texturing way, way, way better on the PS1 (Sega had never actually made their own texturing chipset before the Saturn; the Model 2 arcade board is Martin Marietta tech and the all in-house Model 1 board doesn't do texturing at all)
so even though VDP1 has a very high fillrate that isn't that far behind the PS1's GPU (yes, Sony literally called it the GPU), this instantly goes to hell once you use textures of any quality whatsoever

VDP2 (the dedicated background tilemap chip, the second of two reasons the Saturn is technologically considered better for 2D games; the first reason is that the Saturn actually has slightly more video memory so you can store more graphics frames and shit) is mildly useful for 3D games since it does support big mode 7 style flat planes which is dead useful for doing outdoor environments, but PS1 games get to just brute force things like that (and have actual 3D box or sphere skies instead of flat scrolling backgrounds, since again, texturing isn't slow as shit there)


tl;dr: give me a time machine to like 1993 or something so I can save the Saturn and unfuck Sega ( ´ω`)
I used to like Sega so goddamn much and now I cannot stand to think of what happened to them
(okay, to be fair, I guess the Yakuza team is doing well lol)

>>135011
>pointlessly long post
I still enjoyed reading it.

>>135019
thx

god, now I am reminded:
what the fuck was Sega even on when they added the SH-1 CPU for handling the CD drive

almost every other chip I can think of has a good reason, even if a more sensible design would have made cuts
two SH-2s utilizes the master-slave feature and adds a bit of processing power, the 68k for sound is an extremely standard design of the time, the DSP for handling 3D calcs... well, it would have made sense in 1992/3/4 when they were designing the thing, it's only dumb in hindsight since that was the kind of thing they threw in their arcade boards for the job
the two graphics processors aren't a particularly great design, but it isn't that hard to imagine Sega managing to combine them into one chip that does both jobs

but the SH-1 in the CD drive block is a full fucking 20MHz CPU that is basically a slightly earlier revision of the main CPUs and I cannot imagine this made each Saturn any cheaper to produce regardless of how good of a deal Sega got from Hitachi
and it is not user programmable at all, it strictly runs the CD handling program, so you can't even be like
"YEAH I GOT 3 CPUS BIIIIITCH"

it just doesn't work like that

maybe sega was retarded before 1994
since 1992/1993 is when a lot of these decisions would be getting made