The sequel to Sonic that never was. Sonic 64 for Saturn

Is the Saturn really that much better at 2D than the Playstation was? Of course the ram cart really showed the power of the system, but what about most of the library that doesn't take advantage of the ram cart?

I bought Dracula X (sotn) when it first came out in Japan for PS1 and absolutely loved the game, and still do. I preordered it when it was announced for the Saturn, finally got it in the mail, and was pretty disappointed with it. There was a lot more loading time, especially when just pulling up the map or the inventory screen, and the game had slowdown issues when turning into mist, which, of course, didn't look as good as it did on the PS1 due to transparency issues. I realize this game is just a port from the PS1, but it seems like the Saturn should've been able to handle the game without issue, but it falls short of the original release. I was hoping for so much more.

I think if you were to port a NES game to both SNES and Genesis you wouldn't notice much of a difference, and that is what I think happened with Saturn and PlayStation: Both machines were much more powerful in terms of 2D than what we got to see.

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I bought Dracula X (sotn) when it first came out in Japan for PS1 and absolutely loved the game, and still do. I preordered it when it was announced for the Saturn, finally got it in the mail, and was pretty disappointed with it. There was a lot more loading time, especially when just pulling up the map or the inventory screen, and the game had slowdown issues when turning into mist, which, of course, didn't look as good as it did on the PS1 due to transparency issues. I realize this game is just a port from the PS1, but it seems like the Saturn should've been able to handle the game without issue, but it falls short of the original release. I was hoping for so much more.

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That's because the game wasn't really in 2D - AFAIK it's engine is actually 3D, so no wonder Saturn has problems with it.
Yes, Saturn IS better when it comes to 2D. The thing is that this game isn't really 2D, but only looks like it.

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Originally Posted by beigemore

Is the Saturn really that much better at 2D than the Playstation was? Of course the ram cart really showed the power of the system, but what about most of the library that doesn't take advantage of the ram cart?

I bought Dracula X (sotn) when it first came out in Japan for PS1 and absolutely loved the game, and still do. I preordered it when it was announced for the Saturn, finally got it in the mail, and was pretty disappointed with it. There was a lot more loading time, especially when just pulling up the map or the inventory screen, and the game had slowdown issues when turning into mist, which, of course, didn't look as good as it did on the PS1 due to transparency issues. I realize this game is just a port from the PS1, but it seems like the Saturn should've been able to handle the game without issue, but it falls short of the original release. I was hoping for so much more.

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Yeah, Konami ported the PS1 game to the Saturn. I assume that meant using triangle based polygons to create all of the sprites and backgrounds being (sloppily) ported to the quad based Saturn. The lack of transparencies in the Saturn version is a dead give away, the Saturn had no trouble with 2D transparency. Then there's Konami's lack of effort in the load rooms, they just didn't even try to use those rooms to mask the load times like they did on the PS1.

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Originally Posted by kool kitty89

Interesting, that would imply that VDP1's quad rendering was faster than software rayscating, although it would also depend on other factors of how the hardware was utilized. (ie if they considered using the 68k for game logic, if the DSP could aid with ray casting, etc -let alone the possibility of hybrid height map/polygon engines)

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The Ezra Dreisbach (not Brooks, stupid whiskey) interview has more details on the engine. It is an incredibly negative interview towards Sega and the Saturn hardware, but Powerslave, Duke Nukem 3D and Quake on the Saturn all are fully 3D, which helped I suppose with the dynamic lighting.

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Originally Posted by kool kitty89

What part of it?
I'm basing it on the interview TA posted here: http://sega-16.com/forum/showthread....584#post295584

He also addressed earlier on that page how Sonic R was totally unrelated. (based on a renderer for an F1 racer, Sonic Adventure would have been all SoJ and built on the Nights engine, Sonic Jam was the resulting demo of that work before moving on to the DC game)

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I'm not sure that the F1 predecessor precludes the engine being provided by Sega. Whether or not that's true (even if I remember where I read it) Sonic R shows the Saturn was capable of a Mario 64esque 3D platformer, if Croc didn't already.

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Originally Posted by kool kitty89

Yes, but I meant for '95 and I never said full 2D (DKC, Toy Story, and Yoshi's Story were considered 2.5D by many as much as Clockwork Knight).
Full 2D would only be for added games like a Sonic CD remake/port and Chaotix. (and any Sonic game would likely get far more interest than something like Astal due to the sheer brand name recognition)

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Damn Astal is good too. I would have loved a fully 2D or 2.5D Sonic game, I just think the 3D pundits would have jumped all over it.

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Originally Posted by sheath

Damn Astal is good too. I would have loved a fully 2D or 2.5D Sonic game, I just think the 3D pundits would have jumped all over it.

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Using prerendered CGI stuff for 2D and thus making it "2.5D" by much of the media (even if a full sidescroller) would have opened things up more.
And what's cool about that is the Sonic games already had a style that carted rather well to a transition to 3D CGI art. 3D Blast showed that quite well, but the gameplay left most of the general fans out and wasn't as marketable in general (that and the lack of saves hurt it).

Imagine if 3D Blast had been more of a 16/32-bit counterpart to Sonic Blast on the SMS/GG. (in general terms at least -some don't like that game bunch either and the CGI was a bit tough to get to look nice with the color limits -even with the GG palette you're limited to 31 colors max and 15 colors shared among all sprites)

And it would especially look good on the Saturn with more animation, higher color, etc. (like 3D Blast on the MD vs Saturn)

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Originally Posted by beigemore

Is the Saturn really that much better at 2D than the Playstation was? Of course the ram cart really showed the power of the system, but what about most of the library that doesn't take advantage of the ram cart?

I bought Dracula X (sotn) when it first came out in Japan for PS1 and absolutely loved the game, and still do. I preordered it when it was announced for the Saturn, finally got it in the mail, and was pretty disappointed with it. There was a lot more loading time, especially when just pulling up the map or the inventory screen, and the game had slowdown issues when turning into mist, which, of course, didn't look as good as it did on the PS1 due to transparency issues. I realize this game is just a port from the PS1, but it seems like the Saturn should've been able to handle the game without issue, but it falls short of the original release. I was hoping for so much more.

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You have to discount after the fact ports in any case: that goes for Saturn emphasized games ported to the PSX and vice versa.

In general, the Saturn's main advantage (and a big one in many cases) is VDP2 with it's background generation as well as some added effects possible (scaling and rotation of BG planes) as well as separate 512kB blocks for BG and sprite/texture data and dedicated framebuffers. The PSX is FAR better at pushign objects on-screen due to the high speed texture mapping of the GPU (especially in sprite mode), but the GPU also has to render the BG, so with more complex multi-plane BGs it looses that advantage. The PSX also has to share the 1MB video RAM block for texture data and framebuffers (and with a normal 320x224 highcolor game you use up 280 kB for the double buffered screen with 744 kB left over). So depending on the game, those dual 512 kB graphics data blocks on the Saturn will be more useful than the shared 744 kB block on the PSX (dropping to lower resolution or clipping the screen will make that larger on the PSX though) and for cases where both the BG and texture RAM are close to totally filled on the Saturn, the PSX would be at a disadvantage. (in cases where you'd want more than 512k for the sprites/textures, the PSX could do that but the Saturn couldn't do that without digging into main RAM)

Both can also store added graphics data in the 2 MB of main RAM and the PSX has faster RAM as well (133 MB/s vs 114 MB/s for 1/2 of the Saturn's main RAM and 57 MB/s for the slow DRAM), so it has an advantage there too. With RAM expansion you're using the cart bus which is slower and only 16-bits wide (so significantly worse than the slow DRAM) and it's not part of the video block but only main memory.