Sorry man that part is total bs.
The hardware to the Saturn is nothing like a Genesis.
The Saturn’s main processor was two Hitachi SH-2s while the Genesis used the Motorola 68000 those chips are nothing alike.
This is the best answer in this thread. Sure, different platforms can make a difference, but when the application that is the game is a black box (which is the case for everyone on SRK), none of us could even make a decent guess.
jedpossum,
You’re taking me TOO literally.
I never said the Saturn was “like a Genesis.”
Saturn was designed to be a FOLLOW-ON to the Genesis. Get a grip on definitions and stop inventing things that weren’t said!
The problem Sega had, though, was that the home game market was in the middle of transitioning to polygon-based games (aka 3-D) as opposed to sprite-driven (2-D) games.
Saturn was primarily designed as a “super-2D” system with some 3-D capability thrown in.
After Sega got wind of what Sony was doing with the PlayStation (PS1), they redesigned the Saturn into the mess it became… They added another CPU, forced the main CPU’s to work asynchronously (off each other by milliseconds), and access the same limited amount of RAM. The system became a beast for developers to work with, and Sega never released great development kits for the Saturn.
Capcom was one of the few companies that came to grips with the Saturn – primarily as a 2-D system — although their conversion of Resident Evil 1 on the Saturn was every bit as good as the original PS1 version. Very few companies came to grips with the Saturn as a 3-D console and that’s been the bread-and-butter of the videogame industry for almost 20 years now.
I forget some of you guys are half my age…
What makes it difficult to interact with some of you is the lack of respect you have for differing opinions and the fact that a lot of you have NOT played anything older than a PS2. Or the arcade versions of a lot of the older games, period.
Seriously, you have to look up the old stuff and play it for yourselves before you repeat what everybody else says or take what’s said online as the “absolute truth.” These are mostly opinions, not truths. Opinion is subjective. Extensive experience is still a heck of a lot more informed than just taking somebody else’s word and repeating it for the millionth.
Every time I hear someone say there were no good ports before the PS2… I have to wonder when that person was born and exactly how many games that person has played. And on how many different platforms.
GeorgeC, your wrong again the Saturn is basically a model 1 board toned down (for cheap manufacturing) and used cds instead of epproms. And then there was the STV board which IS a Saturn but takes carts instead. Sega always based their consoles on their arcade hardware.
edit: nvm I misread that
It doesn’t really matter if what you’re saying is untrue. Not sure where people get the idea that their age makes whatever they say infallible.
lol how old are you?
Just wanna add this link to the thread since I think it pretty sums it up well. Even if it doesn’t touch all the points, it’s a good read. Also, all this stuffs leads to is there any profit we can get out of doing it? Do we have the team to do it (this is more for indie games with small teams)? Is the time doing this instead of something else worth it?
Feature - The Problem With Porting Games | bit-tech.net
Hopes it answer most questions.
ok
When did I make reference to sound? And what does sound have to do with gameplay?
I was referring specifically to the gameplay of SF2 when comparing the SNES and Genesis ports.
Graphically, musically, and animation-wise, NEITHER port was perfect. Neither came close.
The Genesis was closer gameplay-wise. And even though one’s OPINION of which music is “better” will differ based mostly on nostalgia-tripping, the Genesis’ music sounded closer to the original arcade music.
Graphically, you would have to be pretty stupid to say the Genesis was better than the SNES. It wasn’t. But they were both missing a shit ton of frames.
Funny you should say that… I owned a Saturn when it originally came out, back in 1995. I also own an MVS with a ton of games, and my bro owns an AES, also with a shit ton of games. 
Saying AES games were “ports” shows either a lack of understanding or a lack of knowledge; the AES and MVS are the same hardware and the games are exactly the same. The only difference between AES and MVS motherboards are the BIOS and the MVS boards having a JAMMA edge.
It’s not a port when the games (and the hardware) are identical.
As far as Saturn goes, yeah, it had a lot of really good ports, and I did neglect to mention the ones that were pretty much perfect, specifically A2, Vampire Saviour and X-Men vs Street Fighter (My bro and I bought X-Men vs Street Fighter when it first came out on Saturn. Everyone wanted to come over all the time and play it. Good times).
Most of the Neo ports on the Saturn were also pretty good, but I wouldn’t go as far as to call them arcade-perfect.
The RAM carts really helped the Saturm, though. Without the RAM cart, the only really close to perfect port would be A2. Some other games came close, notably Vampire Hunter as you mentioned (it is actually closer when you enter the code that inexplicably adds more frames of animation… wtf Capcom).
The lack of RAM simply goes back to my original point; home hardware could not compare to the arcade prior to DC/Xbox/PS2. The Saturn, and to a lesser extent, the PS1 should have been able to do close to perfect or perfect CPS1/2 ports, but the lack of RAM really made it difficult, particularly for the PS1 (the lack of VRAM hurt the PS1 big time).
Shit, VF2 didn’t get a “perfect” port until it was released on the PS2 in 2004, almost ten years after it came out. Saturn couldn’t do it (thought it did a respectable job, and the gameplay was pretty much perfect), the PS1 sure as shit could have never done it. DC could have done it, but by the DC’s launch, SEGA was busy letting Genki fuck up their VF3 port (which should have extremely close and instead came out flawed).
PS1 couldn’t even handle Tekken 2. -_-
I still believe my original statement stands despite the few exceptions: Generally speaking, you could not have arcade-perfect ports prior to the DC/Xbox/PS2 generation. The home hardware just couldn’t compare to what was in the arcade.
Now, the only thing keeping things from being perfect on home consoles is really shitty coding. But that’s a whole 'nother story.
Whilst at the time Saturn ports were great and much closer than what we’re used to, in retrospect NONE of the ports were perfect or even really close. A lot of them were pretty flawed, like MSH and Alpha 3, and while some were a lot closer (A2, Vampire games) they were still off.
I agree that we didnt really see arcade perfect stuff til DC.
You’re a dumbass. He’s talking in design concept, not hardware:rofl:.
Sega Saturn is a 2D beast. I still own all my arcade perfect ports of the Marvel Capcom games with the 4MB carts.
With today’s technology, it’s no longer a problem to do ports. Optimization is rarely an issue when the target consoles are so much more powerful than their predecessors.
It was mainly, like mentioned above, the Xbox/DC/PS2 ports that had trouble, as the tech didn’t seem to be there for procedurally done emulation (As opposed to rebuilding the entire game from the ground up). A lot of the problems they faced back in the day just aren’t issues anymore, especially with cross-platform development pipelines and asset management being lightyears ahead of what they were previously.
“S’all good”, as they say.
Hardware is part of design and concept, but still if you read my second post I also stated that Sega based their consoles on their arcade systems at the time the Genesis was based on their 80’s arcade boards and most arcade boards around in the 90’s, the Saturn was based on Sega’s model 1 and STV. Dreamcast was based on Naomi. So saying the design is similar doesn’t make sense as each system was different and this thread is about porting games and the hardware of the systems and arcade boards plays the biggest role in it.
You’re still a moron thats trying to read to much into someones statement. Saturn is a 2d beast period. Dude is correct, let it go.
Today’s hardware may be powerful enough to emulate old games, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t any issues to contend with. For example, modern graphics hardware tends to buffer frames and display them later and dealing with input is often treated like a black box. To this day, I have a sneaking suspicion that a combination of those two are what caused CCC2’s version of ST to have 4 extra frames of input lag. Porting by using emulation isn’t a silver bullet.
Furthermore, I doubt most people today would consider a straight port good enough. People expect online modes, training modes, extra options, etc. The effort required to hack those things into an emulated version of a game could range a lot in difficulty. At some point, you need to debate whether it’s easier to write an emulator or to properly port the game. This all hinges on the specifics of the game and the target platform(s).
Basically, there’s no easy answer to this question.
Again your trying to derail this thread. This thread is about PORTING games not making games and saying that a system is good a 2d has nothing to do with why the ports were good.
By the way 2d games use a lot of 3d resources as a quick and easy to deal with layers turn on wire frame mode in a 2d game on a n64 or a psx emulator.
Sege ported VOOT from Model 3 arcade hardware to the Xbox 360, arcade perfect port, added some of the best netcode seen in any fighting game, and added a bunch of modes like training, system link support, replays, and color customization. The only thing stopping game developers from arcade perfect ports is sheer laziness.
That’s WAY over-simplifing things. “Laziness” has less to do with it than difficulty and costs vs. expected profit (at this point porting older arcade games is targeted to a smaller, “niche” audience). Not to mentioned that even with today’s console’s specs there are still technical difficulties with either emulation or straight up ports (some of which have already been mentioned).
Then there are things like a lot of the older arcade games ran at different speeds on different arcade units (I think SF2 HF’ had this problem). The whole thing is a lot more complicated than most people think.
I touched on that in my first post; its not as easy as just saying, “Oh well they didn’t do their job”. There’s various factors involved and more power =/= necessarily equal good ports.
Yeah, there’s more to it than that.
Im not derailing anything. Im putting my 2 cent from experience. Sega Saturn ports in the 90s with the 4MB cart were the best home versions period. How is that not talking about ports? You’re the one with reading comprehension issues.