3D is an interesting one, as the Saturn was rather lacking in a few key features - namely gourad shading and transparency. That's not to say they couldn't be done if you knew the machine well enough and found ways to convince the hardware to do these effects.
I worked with an excellent programmer some years ago who at his previous job was a Saturn coder. When I worked with him he was working on PSX stuff. He told me that the Saturn was very conplicated to code for, and to achieve transparency you would lose half your rendering speed. It had two CPUs, the architecture was a cobbled together mess. But, for a coder like him, from the old school of 'direct to the metal' assember code, he loved the Saturn to bits and said that with enough experience and talent, the Saturn was a an amazing system. (and yes, he did have an ego)
Certainly when I look at VF2 I see things that were impossible on the PSX. Tobal No.1 managed to run 60fps in high-res, but with virtually no textures and when it slowed down, due to a lack of VRAM (no space to double buffer in high-res!) you could see it drawing the entire screen in realtime. Then I look at Sega Rally or Sonic R and I see very clean 3D with considerably less texture distortion or clipping than with PSX games.
It wasn't all good, I would say the vast majority of Saturn 3D was inferior to PSX stuff. It just wasn't a 3D machine, was never meant to be. It doesn't really have proper 3D triangles, they're more like distorted sprites (and so are all quads). But but but, in the right hands, it could still sing very sweetly.
With 2D I think it's clearer. The Treasure stuff, take Radiant Silvergun for example, I see nothing on PSX with 2D to that level. It's like a SNES x 100, which is pretty much how the Saturn was designed. It's old school on steroids. It was always meant to be the ultimate 2D system and just had to adapt the best it could when 3D came along.
I worked with an excellent programmer some years ago who at his previous job was a Saturn coder. When I worked with him he was working on PSX stuff. He told me that the Saturn was very conplicated to code for, and to achieve transparency you would lose half your rendering speed. It had two CPUs, the architecture was a cobbled together mess. But, for a coder like him, from the old school of 'direct to the metal' assember code, he loved the Saturn to bits and said that with enough experience and talent, the Saturn was a an amazing system. (and yes, he did have an ego)
Certainly when I look at VF2 I see things that were impossible on the PSX. Tobal No.1 managed to run 60fps in high-res, but with virtually no textures and when it slowed down, due to a lack of VRAM (no space to double buffer in high-res!) you could see it drawing the entire screen in realtime. Then I look at Sega Rally or Sonic R and I see very clean 3D with considerably less texture distortion or clipping than with PSX games.
It wasn't all good, I would say the vast majority of Saturn 3D was inferior to PSX stuff. It just wasn't a 3D machine, was never meant to be. It doesn't really have proper 3D triangles, they're more like distorted sprites (and so are all quads). But but but, in the right hands, it could still sing very sweetly.
With 2D I think it's clearer. The Treasure stuff, take Radiant Silvergun for example, I see nothing on PSX with 2D to that level. It's like a SNES x 100, which is pretty much how the Saturn was designed. It's old school on steroids. It was always meant to be the ultimate 2D system and just had to adapt the best it could when 3D came along.
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