Nintendo: Apple is the 'enemy of the future'

[Da_Shocker]

From what I understand you can use 1 VDP and 1 CPU for 2D and 1 VDP and 1 CPU for 3D, or if you're really clever: use both VDPs and both CPUs at the same time.

They blamed the hardware as a cheap excuse for their bad games.

"One very fast central processor would be preferable. I don't think all programmers have the ability to program two CPUs — most can only get about one-and-a-half times the speed you can get from one SH-2. I think that only 1 in 100 programmers are good enough to get this kind of speed [nearly double] out of the Saturn."

—Yu Suzuki reflecting upon Saturn Virtua Fighter development.


The Saturn boasted an amazing amount of processors including it’s dual Hitachi CPU processors. However, this caused problems in game development. Apparently the two CPU’s did not run in tandem, and could not access memory at the same time. The complexity either caused developers to shy away from the Saturn, or develop games in a manner that didn’t fully utilize the systems capabilities (3rd Party developers initially designed games only using a single processor). Eventually developers found away around Saturn’s complexity, but not soon enough.

If you don't believe that we can always have the resident codeheads in here. I love the Saturn but it is not as easy to program for as the PSX was. Look how long it has takin decent Saturn emulation to become available. And even Sega hasn't bothered with porting anything that was on the Saturn. They simply use PC ports.

[kool kitty89]

.....You just ended your entire argument, if the machine had to rely on hype for its entire first year to carry it over then it was clearly not competitive hardware.

I said it ran on hype, not that it needed to. If it had been super easy to program for and cheaper than it already was (again, already cheaper to buy in the west than the PSX had been) is immaterial to that fact.

Of course non graphics related hardware points are significant too, like DVD, both video support (movies and in-game cutscenes) and higher capacity for games (or fewer discs).

A direction like the Saturn, unwieldy and hard to program

Sort of, except if the Saturn had been fully optimized for 3D, thus stronger than the PSX, but only for ambitious/experienced programmers.
Thus, in context of the Saturn: average programmers would get poorer performance than the PSX early on, maybe equal later on, and highly skilled, ambitious developers could push the hardware and exceed the PSX's capabilities by a good margin.
The Saturn wasn't aimed at that though: in spite of Sega fully redesigning the system to be more capable in 3D (supposedly), it still had a ton of silicon dedicated to features only useful for 2D, and left some 3D features not as clean or well documented as they could have been.

That sounds completely ridiculous, if anyone did that, it was Sega, I know for a fact that Sega actually started getting in touch with every major developer during 97/98 and actually asked all of them for a list of features they would want in the Dreamcast, every interview I've read points to Sega doing their unmost to keep everyone happy, discussions went back and forth with Capcom for ages as Sega added in new features, even smaller companies like Bizarre Creations and No Cliche had long talks where they gave input into how the Dreamcast should be designed.

It's not about features (though, again, the DC had better texture/AA capabilities while the PS2 was much better at pushing polys -not sure about physics), it's about high level efficiency vs low level capabilities -part of that ties into software tools too, but you can only do so much for a system in that respect. (the PSX was designed, like the 3DO, to have very efficient performance using only high-level programming libraries, and Sony, like 3DO had the software tools to match)

I can't find that previous discussion on the PS2 though... (I think it was on Atariage) This is related, but not the one I was thinking of: http://www.atariage.com/forums/topic...8#entry1836748

In respects to market competitiveness none of this matters, during the time when it did matter 2000-2001 the difficulty in development made PS2 games look worse than Dreamcast games, when PS2 games started to look decent the Gamecube and Xbox arrived which both blew the PS2 away, both those machines even had launch titles which were graphically more impressive than anything available on PS2.

It's just a design trade-off, but again, the Xbox and GC were newer than the PS2, so that ties in as well. (a year is a huge difference in terms of technological development, that's one thing that makes the DC look so impressive)

It's more than tech specs and quality of games though... the DC had other troubling factors besides the hype that killed it, like the (perceived) high piracy threat turning off developers to an already shaky company. Sony was a big, successful, stable company, Nintendo had been falling behind but still strong (moreso in the west), MS was a newcomer and never made it in Japan, and Sega screwed themselves prior to the DC and a few significant issues with the DC combined with stiff competition from Sony killed it. (though one could argue it really came down to Sega's decision and some would argue they'd have been better off hanging in a bit longer prior to the full transition to 3rd party)

Success of a system rarely comes down to technical capability alone. (put the Jaguar in Sony's hands and it would have been a totally different story -granted part of that would likely include some hardware modifications, but not fundamental ones, the kind Atari could/would have made if they had the money)

I'm sure most people make out this is more of a big deal than it really is, talking for myself I literally don't care at all whether a game is on multiple disks or not, I'm not even saying its a minor issue for me, its something which I never even particularly noticed.

Because using 6-8 discs is a huge pain, granted, in the case of the PC, more than 1/2 were usually for install only (with full installation, at least). The other option is lower quality textures/streaming video/audio. (for GC or DC it would be more like 3-4 discs for a full DVD game)

3. Every multi-format game between the two i've ever played was worse on PS2.

Most of those would be early PS2 games though, but yes, that's true in general for GC/PC/Xbox games too, later on. (though then you had superior hardware to deal with, while the DC had only modest advantages hardware wise as well as plenty of disadvantages and trade-offs like general performance over the PS2's raw power)

No, the PS1 is literally the complete opposite in competitiveness compared to the PS2.

Not really... Again, it's all trade-offs, the PS2 was a capable machine, jut not optimized in some areas as the DC (or PSX to a lesser extent). There's areas the PS2 excels that the PSX didn't so much and vice versa. (in ther respective eras)
That said, it probably didn't pay off for Sony overall (again, DVD is a separate factor), but such designs had paid off in the past, it's all relative.

My actual technical knowledge is relatively limited: someone who actually programmed on these platforms would be able to describe things a lot more clearly.

Sega and Nintendo utterly dropped the ball during that generation, PS1 was easily the most competitive machine available, in the early days it was easy and cheap to develop for so its library grew the fastest, it was £100 cheaper than the main competition! and it graphics were the best until the N64 came along (and even then the PS1 hardware was still arguably better in certain areas)

The big thing Nintendo did was not use optical media, granted they probably couldn't get a custom, secure format out fast enough, and when they did release an add-on (late) it was rather an odd choice, with expensive, limited magnetic disks. (some have claimed licensing issues with Sony and Phillips prevented the use of CD media, but I'm not sure about that -I'd have thought a custom format would have sidestepped that too)

Sega built a machine which was 2D orientated at a time when nobody wanted to play 2D games, a hardware which was expensive to buy, and a hardware which was developer unfriendly

It was a 2D and 3D machine with a lot of hardware for both and it paid off in their home market, though honestly the PSX handled 2D pretty well at times and one main criticism is tied to the Saturn's ROM/RAM expansion, and not hardware anyway.
Regardless, no argument that Sega screwed up the 5th generation, but hardware capabilities were far from their biggest problems. (releasing conflicting platforms, conflicting management, etc)

Nintendo going with cartridges meant they were never going to get much RPG support which pretty much killed their chances to win Japan, and also meant that their games would be the most expensive, releasing late in the generation also had a detrimental effect on their chances.

Square initially stuck with Nintendo and was developing FFVII on the N64 remember, they didn't switch until later. If Nintendo had predicted that, I doubt they'd have stuck with ROM carts: either pushed for a CD-based (or custom) add-on much earlier to facilitate such games, or delay the launch and add an optical drive. (and drive the per unit price up $50-100) Obviously, some time could have been saved had they started work on a proprietary optical drive in parallel with the N64.

3DO was too expensive and took too long to get quality software.

It had some good software pretty early on, but the limits of that were tied to limited popularity in spite of the friendly dev tools and cheap license fees. Again, the high price tag came mainly from the market model and to some extent the older hardware (larger chips on older manufacturing processes), but generally the design is very similarly optimized as the PSX. Had Panasonic/3DO used a Playstation like business model, things would have been rather different IMO. The only technical aspect of the 3DO that's generally less friendly than the PSX is the use of quads rather than triangles, though that choice is somewhat understandable when put into perspective. (otherwise it's just a lower performance system with much less caching/buffering than the PSX, namely due to it being older)

Jaguar was released too early and didn't have the hardware to compete, it also couldn't garner any software support.

It was mainly Atari's limited funding/budget that killed it, that and some management. But that's a far more complex issue than the 3DO, possibly more than Sega in the 1993-1998 period. But the jaguar was also oen of those machines like the Atari 2600, 7800, Saturn, PS2, or PS3 which opted for raw power and flexibility over ease of development. (there were rather simple modifications which would have substancially changed that though, after the fact, but added to cost -otherwise it would have meant aiming at a different design goal on Flare's part; on top of that there's bugs) Indeed, as it is, the Jaguar can do things the PSX and Saturn can't, or at least not as well. (voxel rendering for one, 256 gradient shading for another, 2D capabilities as another)

The Jaguar actually had a lot of development support and had more games than the PSX (in Japan) by the end of 1995, just before it was discontinued. Some developers left due to difficulties, others simply got attracted to the PSX, that and Sam Tramiel had his hear attack and the family decided to sell/liquidate Atari in '96. (and did quite well actually, the jaguar was a success from that standpoint: holding the company together when they had no other income, facilitating winning the Sega lawsuit, and leaving them quite well off for selling the company in 1996)

Taking everything into account the PS1 is the logical winner, the machine which does the most for the lowest cost and as a hardware can handle most areas at least fairly well (for the time)

The hardware was good, but really, a HUGE part of it was Sony's marketing, that and strong Japanese support. The hardware was good enough in the right areas (though I'd say it was Sony who actually pushed those areas as, prior to that, there was more of a mix in terms of 3D rendering -though Sega's Model 2 arcade board pushed in very similar directions). The high-level performance and comprehensive programming libraries were plusses, of course, as they had been on the 3DO, as with the cheap CD media and multimedia push. (the PSX had its share of FMV)

More potential than the XBox!?! The PS2 was dated hardware by 2002, any developer choosing to support it was immediately resigning themselves to not create a state of the art console game.

I didn't say that, I was speaking in the context of hardware being designed for release in 2000, the Xbox was newer and (almost definitely) less cost effective, the GC is a bit of another issue though. Some Xbox games do indeed bypass the API and go for direct hardware control to really push its capabilities too. The Xbox was almost definitely the most expensive console to manufacture in the generation.

Lets just look at the consoles on their merits without taking into account brand name or advertising, and try to work out how each machine should logically have done

Brand name and Advertising/marketing (including price point and market model -ie 3DO) is usually the deciding factor, NOT hardware capabilities. Otherwise the SMS should have been far more popular, for example. Indeed, Nintendo's market position in the late 80s was very similar to Sony's in the late 90s, many Japanese developers tied up with Sony, etc, etc.

As for the comparison, the PS2's graphical quality isn't always the lowest, not even for multiplatform games, but again: for multiplatform titles trying to cater equally to the various platforms, the Xbox/PC/GC (or DC) would easily have an advantage due to the architecture, but for games optimized for the PS2 and then ported, the PS2 would likely have the better version.

And one more time, it was less expensive than the PS1 at launch, so the "expensive" comment is off unless that would also apply to the PSX in 1995. (the 3DO and Saturn made it look good by comparison, of course, the Jag was 1/2 the price or less)

The Xbox's use of off the shelf parts made it expensive, custom, in-house components (chips, disc drives, etc) are high cost saving methods, especially if you have your own chip fabbing facilities: it's called vertical integration and was famously championed by Commodore with the C64.

My prediction based on reading this would be that -

The market ends up being split between console A and Console D

I'd say A and C honestly, due to cost/performance, and that much of D's advantages are in direct competition with PC gaming. However, that's with all things being equal and that's not the case: console D was developed by a western company and new to the market at that, they never managed to make more than a blip in the influential Japanese market.
Console A was made by a company with a Shaky past and had some unfortunate problems that exacerbated it.
Console C seems quite good on the surface, but fell behind in marketing and got labeled as a "kiddie" machine.
Console B was championed by the strongest, most successful company of the previous generation, with strong ties to developers and strong place in Japan as well as the west, with killer marketing/advertising on top of that as well as the gimmick of out-of-the-box DVD video support as a price point cheaper than many dedicated DVD players.

I want to make this clear though: I'm not a PS2 fanboy, I'm not a particular fan of Sony consoles in general (honestly, the PS3 might be the best, hardware wise -due to the Wii's old hardware and 360's ridiculous reliability issues -that is if you don't opt for a gaming PC).

I don't own a Sony console, though have played a fair bit with friends over the years, PS2 more than PSX, or at least I have fonder memories of PS2...
For me it was NES, SNES (1996), N64 (1999), GC (2003), and now Wii, with lots of PC gaming mixed in up to around 2005. (at least for new PC games, I played older ones plenty and got "new" old games too)
My biggest complaint was/is the stock controllers and the 2 controller ports. The sony gamepads are among my least liked stock controllers for any console released after 1983. (US 7800 is worse -EU got the joypad though, SMS might be worse if the D-pad is as unreliable as claimed -I never had problems with it, SNES is better except for the L/R buttons, and everything else, in proper context, including a variety of 3rd party or PC gamepads are more favorable to me)
That said, I can use sony gampads OK, they're not a plus for the system though in terms of ergonomics -buttons/dpad are sore inducing and handles are too short)

That's enough though, if you wish to continue, I suggest a separate thread.

[kool kitty89]

How come everyone seems to think Saturn was hard to program for ?

ALL machines are hard to program for. Neither Saturn nor PS1 were an exception.

It's buggy, complex and not optimized for high;level languages. On top of that, the dev kits were weak with limited documentation of features on top of the lack of programming libraries.

The PSX, like the 3DO before it (and DC, Xbox, etc), had exceptional high-level optimized hardware with tools to match. In addition, it was more fixed in function than the Saturn and cleaner in that respect as well as having fewer processors to work with in general.

And Saturn's 2D capabilities were not the issue at all. They really focussed on 3D in the West, but it did not help. Quite the opposite: I was waiting for all my favorite 2D Mega Drive games to be continued for Saturn in full 32-bit glory, but all we ever got was Shinobi and that's it.

3D was where the mass market was... there were those who enjoyed 2D, but that's a niche (less so in Japan). Regardless, the PSX was decent in 2D too and the saturn could have been OK if optimized for 3D and cut back in general. (it is more expensive than the PSX in general, and would need to be cheaper to compete directly with Sony's price dumping)

PS1 got Nintendo's hand writing all over it.

It did only as far as gettign Sony interested in the market. Sony abandoned the designed related to the original SNES CD unit by 1992 and the PSX was a totally new, unrelated design.

But unlike Sega and Microsoft's "cooperation" for Dreamcast/2, Nintendo survived the cancellation of their deal with both Sony and Philips (and even their cooperation with SGI which resulted in N64's horrible hardware and which almost killed them in Japan)

Main problem had nothing to do with SGI, but mainly the use of carts that lost them RPGs and japan...

And survived the cancellation of Sony/Phillips deals??? Why would either of those have killed Nintnedo? (MS's cooperation with the DC didn't have much to do with the DC failing, windows CE did nothing but help the platform -unless there's some fine print in their contract that I'm unaware of; Moore's push towards MS post DC is a separate issue)

Not really. The PS1 is marginally different from the Super NES PlayStation add-on, enough for them to be distinct. Obviously Sony couldn't use the SNES 'Station as is because it was dependent on the SNES. Nintendo's part in the creation of PlayStation is really just the inspiration and motivation. If it was any more than that, we would have seen much larger conflicts between Ninty and Sony. Then again, I'm just rambling here...

From what I understand, Sony was originally going to release the Play Station in parallel with Nintendo's add-on (the Play Station being the all-in-one machine). After the deal breaker the contract still stood and Sony pushed on, later litigation forced Sony to agree to only release the SNES related system with a cartridge slot and full SNES compatibility.

Sony abandoned the original design completely and the PSX was a completely new design with absolutely no relation (hardware wise) to the Play Station conceived in 1989/1990.

From what I understand you can use 1 VDP and 1 CPU for 2D and 1 VDP and 1 CPU for 3D, or if you're really clever: use both VDPs and both CPUs at the same time.

They blamed the hardware as a cheap excuse for their bad games.

See: http://sega-16.com/forum/showthread.php?p=133093

The hardware was more complex and far less effieient than the PSX for the kind of games being created. Using Triangles rather than quads for 3D (other than software rasterization) was one difficulty even the 3DO shared. But in general it was less capable at doing what the PSX was best at and far less cost effective as such, and harder to tap at that.

Anyway, read that other thread, you're discription is off, the CPUs are fully flexible, not dedicated. The only thing limited to 2D is VDP 2. (as it's the BG generator)

That was the problem. Using all 4 chips in tandem for any reason was arbitrary, convoluted and none of them were optimized for dual chip use. In every single interview with Saturn developers, they said the Saturn was not meant to have dual VDPs and dual CPUs and it showed.

I never got that "4 processors" things... There's WAY more than 4 processors in the Saturn (even if you limit that to those which can be useful for game logic and graphics, even the 68k in the Saturn isn't dedicated to Sound alone, rather like the Z80 in the MD, not sure about the SH1 though, that could be managing the CD full time).
The PSX has 3 processors working together (for graphics/game logic) anyway... and for 3D, it's often only 3 on the saturn too. (just the SH-2s and VDP1, with the 3D math and game logic done with the SH2s and VDP rasterizing, texture mapping, and shading the quadrilateral polygons, rather like the PSX's VDP, but with dedicated framebuffers and graphics data RAM unlike the unified 1 MB VRAM in the PSX)

"One very fast central processor would be preferable. I don't think all programmers have the ability to program two CPUs — most can only get about one-and-a-half times the speed you can get from one SH-2. I think that only 1 in 100 programmers are good enough to get this kind of speed [nearly double] out of the Saturn."

—Yu Suzuki reflecting upon Saturn Virtua Fighter development.

One, fast CPU would have been MUCH more expensive, plus the SH-2s weren't even available at high speeds and SH-3 would have pushed cost even higher that that if it was even available soon enough. Otherwise they'd have to change architectures or delay the release.

The dual CPUs is the least of the cost ineffectiveness in the Saturn, besides it was nice to have a slave CPU dedicated to things like 3D math. (which the PSX has the much faster GTE dedicated to and saturn had a slower DSP for which was little used)

The Saturn boasted an amazing amount of processors including it’s dual Hitachi CPU processors. However, this caused problems in game development. Apparently the two CPU’s did not run in tandem, and could not access memory at the same time. The complexity either caused developers to shy away from the Saturn, or develop games in a manner that didn’t fully utilize the systems capabilities (3rd Party developers initially designed games only using a single processor). Eventually developers found away around Saturn’s complexity, but not soon enough.

See this thread I posted above: http://sega-16.com/forum/showthread.php?p=133093

Like the 32x, the CPUs can run in parallel, but do share a single bus (but can work in cache) and it takes some optimization to get good performance, but probably 60-75% faster than a single SH2 and considerably cheaper than most single-chip alternatives assuming Sega had cut a good deal with Hitachi. (the SH-2 is a pretty well cost-optimized design, and even at 60% performance for the 2nd CPU, that's still a good bit more than the PSX -and really good as the Saturn was weaker elsewhere, like compared to Sony's GTE)

Specifically:

The processors run in parallel. The only thing to worry about is hogging the bus. There is just one 16 bit bus (on the 32X, it's 32 bit on the Saturn) the processors share. While one CPU is doing an access, the other has to wait. The CPUs have caches, so normally much of the code or data is found in the cache, negating the need for a bus cycle. Balancing this need for data against staying off the bus as much as possible is one of the things a 32X/Saturn programmer needs to handle.

A prime example was my Wolf32X alpha 4 release. The slave was being used to handle the audio, but it wasn't playing sound right, and slowed real hardware down tremendously. Part of the reason was related to time spent on the bus by the second CPU. I completely redid the way the slave handles the audio for beta 1 and the result was clean audio that didn't slow the game at all.

There was another thread specifically discussing the differences between the PSX and saturn. (iirc the OP was on the topic of Saturn to PSX ports)

[kool kitty89]

Oh, and here's that Playstation saturn ports thread:
http://sega-16.com/forum/showthread.php?t=7212

There's a lot of discussion going on there and some things I say early on aren't 100% accurate, but most if not all is corrected later in the thread.

And ignore the Jaguar related stuff. (or 3DO if it's there-- I've learned a lot more about the 3DO and Jag since then... in particular that the 3DO has a fixed point matrix coprocessor for 3D math -like the GTE- and rasterizes quadrilaterals)

The PSX's "sprite" mode is much like the Saturn VDP1's sprite mode for unscaled sprites. (single point, no 3D applied, 2 points for 2D scaling/zooming, and 4 points for rotating/warping; not sure about how flexible the PSX is, but obviously full scaled/rotated/warped would be using full 3-point polygons, or 6 points for quadrilateral tiles)



Some other stuff came up here: http://sega-16.com/forum/showthread....462#post190462 (specifically on the difficulty of using quad based renderers)

[Da_Shocker]

As tomaitheous said

Depends what you mean by parallel. If one processor is busy, the other isn't going to take up the slack and execute the next instruction while the first processor is busy. As Chilly Willy said, they're two separate processors with their own program code. They share the same bus though. One processor has priority over the other processor when accessing the data bus, so it can (and does) stall the other processor. You can optimize by having one processor do most of the work in cache, but it's not always possible to optimize for and introduces limitations. The complexity of your code goes up as well.

But as I said before how on earth did we go from talking about Apple and Nintendo to programming the Saturn?

[old man]

Saying the Saturn was superior to the Playstation is like saying the Delorean was superior to the ford pinto. It was, but then it wasn't, you know?