Yeah i ended up importing Marvel Super Heroes when it first came out…I’ll check my copy to see if the import is slow, i haven’t played it in over 15 years…
Ram carts work like a ram upgrade for your PC.
It adds more memory to do more tasks, you get the ram cart your machine should not lag.
Replayed COTA on PS1 because of this thread. Nothing’s changed. Shit’s still horrible.
I played it a few months ago and wasn’t terribly impressed. It was a US copy on a US Saturn. The game was nowhere near as fluid as I remembered it being. Though, that might just be the game itself and not the port (haven’t played the arcade version in forever).
Surprisingly, I actually boot up MSH on CPS2 or MAME (depending which room of the house I’m in) at least once every 2 days or so; it’s probably my favorite fighting game ever, so I often just start it up to play 15-20 minutes when I have random pockets of free time.
Found this post: guy goes pretty in depth on differences and Saturn looks like it’s not good. =[
I got COTA but not MSH so I can’t comment on MSH. But there no way a hardware upgrade makes a game lag more unless there some really sloppy programming going on. The fault would be with Capcom and not Sega.
The article itself explains it quite well. It seems that the RAM cart utilization was added simply as an afterthought.
That’s on the Capcom… It’s not the hardware’s fault.
Capcom originally cancelled MSH for both Saturn and PS1 but for some reason restarted development and released the game in a bad, bad state. It should never have been released the way it was!
The game’s slow and choppy on both systems. It has terrible slowdown issues and the sound is poor on the Saturn.
It really didn’t seem that there’s much more challenging the hardware in the MSH game versus X:COTA. The X:COTA port (for Saturn) was excellent considering all the problems with the home consoles back then – not enough memory, period!
The sad fact with MSH is that it was released not that many months apart from X-Men Vs Street Fighter, the first game to use the 4MB RAM expansion cart. There’s no question an arcade-perfect port could have been done with virtually every CPS-2 game using the 4 MB RAM expansion cart… the cart came too late in the development I suppose to hold things up with MSH and take full advantage of it.
MSH was able to use the 1MB RAM expansion cart SNK developed for its Neo Geo arcade ports to the Saturn but it does very little for the game. MSH is still plagued by bad sound and slowdown issues.
Likewise, not every game that was compatible with a RAM carts actually had improved gameplay. The D&D Collection was still awful, I noticed very little improvement in Pocket Fighter, and SF Alpha3 still had poorer quality sound than most other CPS-2 ports that used the RAM cart.
Those issues were the with the developer, not the hardware. There were projects started by Capcom that got cancelled midway in development but were later restarted. The restarted projects generally didn’t end in the best product Capcom could have put out…
SNES had the best port of SF Alpha 2??? No, no, no!!! Sound quality on the SNES alone port is pretty bad not to mention all the horrible animation frame cuts on the SNES port that make both X:COTA ports look arcade-perfect by comparison! The SNES port just looks ugly with muddy graphics.
There are times I have my doubts people actually played with games that they said did… I know you didn’t play all three versions SF Alpha 2 otherwise you wouldn’t be saying something that pops out as that ridiculous. Alpha 2 was fine on the Saturn and PS1. The SNES port is atrocious – and I have played that alongside the Saturn version. No contest! So much of the game was taken out to fit into that cart…
There WERE fair Neo Geo ports on the Saturn that used proprietary ROM carts (one-game only support) OR the 1MB RAM cart SNK made on its own for the Saturn. The Saturn was more powerful than the CPS-2 AND Neo Geo system… It just didn’t have the in-built memory to handle many of the later games without RAM carts. SNK back then was still favoring a home system that was considerably easier to port for (same tech as the arcade!) even if the economics of the cart format never made it a large viable market to develop for. SNK never used the 4MB RAM expansion cart Capcom introduced in 1997 – Capcom was their main competitor – and the Saturn was around in Japan for two more last years; the last official Saturn game release in 2000.
Even with all those flaws, I felt the SNES version was far superior to the PS1 and Saturn versions of the game.
What made the SNES version so much better isn’t the graphics or sound but that Capcom actually put effort to fit Street Fighter Alpha 2 into a SNES cart and get it working on the SNES console.
If Capcom made half the effort on the PS1 and Saturn versions of the game as they did on the SNES version we would not even have this thread now.
But they could of made the effort for the games to be better which they didn’t. Its the same sloppy programming Capcom is always known for.
The CPU was superior on the Saturn (2x 28.6 mhz 32 bit processors) compared to the CPS2 (16mhz) and the SNK Neo Geo MVS (12mhz) but their are major flaws to the Saturn’s design.
Multiple processors and sub processors, no unified cache memory to tie all of this together.
Central Processing Units, specially commissioned by Sega, optmized for 3D graphics work. Dual processors give the Saturn limited parallel processing capabilities, but the segmented cache doesn’t allow both to operate simultaneously. - http://videogamereview.tripod.com/saturn/specs.html
So you can never properly utilize the parallel processors, yeah the Ram carts were great except the hardware was designed poorly so the system can never use its full potential. The Bottle mnecks at the CPU are so horrendous that the PS1 actually preformed better. One CPU had to wait for the other to finish its task. What is the point of having dual-CPUs then?
But here is where the CPS2 and NEO GEO MVS shined, there were no bottle necks for the memory.
P.S. I played the CPS2, SNES, Saturn and PS1 versions of Alpha 2. Excluding the CPS2 although the SNES version is inferior hardware, much more effort and skill was poured into the SNES version.
Played MSH with my RAM cart. I’m depressed. =[
Doesn’t matter. SNES version of Alpha 2 still plays worse than the PS1 and Saturn ports.
Just because you take a bit more effort to take a shit doesn’t mean that what comes out isn’t shit.
At least you have the crouching idle animations though, right, riiight?
On the reals though, sorry you feel let down. I had a Saturn back in the day, no RAM cart and MSH was my favourite arcade game and I loved playing it at home (couldn’t afford much arcade time).
Gotta ask though, why don’t you just emulate the CPS2 version? You can run a CPS2 emulator on an old Xbox that plays pretty damn well and any hardware more recent.
Well, he just got a Saturn, so he’s looking for stuff to play on it.
Me, I’d skip the stuff that can be found in other places and got for the Saturn exclusive stuff.
Spoiler
DBZ: Shin Butoden all the way.
I mainly got a Saturn to play some Gundam games and the Panzer Dragoon stuff. Only reason I thought I’d try COTA and MSH is because I heard the Saturn versions were good and because COTA didn’t have any other home console ports. I also thought they might have training mode, which arcade emulation would lack…
But it turns out the ports are lazy and there’s no training mode anyway. =[ Good thing I only paid 10 bucks each. Maybe I should just dump em…looking at them on my shelf makes me rage. >=[
The X-Men:COTA port was probably the best Capcom could do with the Saturn at that point in the console’s history. It’s still a decent port. I was surprised by how close it actually was to the original arcade game years later when I finally got the chance to play the arcade version. (I never saw COTA locally… it’s one of the few CPS-2 titles that never appeared in local arcades in my area.) The Saturn port does play at arcade speed and the animation frame cuts weren’t anywhere near as bad as I thought. The critiques and reports from videogame magazines back then really made the situation appear worse on the Saturn than it was. Then again, we’re talking gaming magazines and it’s not as if they’re never played favorites with videogame companies either, right??? There’s no possible financial motive to report more favorably on one company than another even if the software quality issue is not so skewed as they’d like you to believe???
The key problem was the memory issue… why MSH was particularly bad is something I don’t completely understand to this day. I don’t think MSH was much more complicated than X-Men: COTA. The big difference I can see between the two titles is that Capcom intended to release the Saturn and PS1 ports of MSH at the same time. The fact that Capcom was porting code to two utterly different system architectures might have been why MSH was a particularly bad porting effort by Capcom. Capcom shouldn’t have published MSH as it was, yes, BUT they had all that work put into the game and there were gamers that wanted it. The end result was half-assed, no question, but every gaming developer has released half-assed games. Nothing shocking there.
The SF Alpha games were a different story but I don’t think those games in particular pushed the limits of either the arcade hardware or home consoles of the era as hard as the Marvel fighters and Darkstalkers games did. The SF Alpha games did not have the best character animation of the CPS-2 fighters nor did they have the tall backgrounds characters could leap through with large, animated figures and background effects. The Street Fighter games in general ran fairly well on the the PS1 and Saturn without memory upgrades.
I’ve found no evidence that Capcom intended to do simultaneous releases of Saturn and PS1 ports of COTA in Japan; that seems to be an exclusive “American event” and was probably the reason X-Men: COTA got delayed from Christmas 1995 to Spring 1996 for the North American release. Acclaim, the American publisher of the game – Capcom was developer but sublicensed the game for release outside of Japan – wanted simultaneous releases of COTA on the PS1 and Saturn but the game was delayed for PS1 up to two years after the Saturn port’s release in the US because of the programming headaches on the PS1. Likewise, the original Darkstalkers game, intended to be a Spring 1995 PS1 release, got delayed a year because of the all problems Capcom had figuring out how to port its fighting games to PS1. The original Darkstalkers finally got released in Spring 1996 but suffered in comparison to the near-simultaneous Saturn port of NightWarriors (Darkstalkers 2) release which was both a better game and superior port.
(PS1 issues aside – and it had them with both longer load times AND slowdown issues on DS1 – , I have yet to meet a Darkstalkers fan that likes DS1 more than DS2 or DS3. DS1 is by far the weakest game in that series. DS1, in both its arcade and home editions, feels like an experiment-in-progress rather than a finished, fully-developed game.)
According to the online and magazine reports I read back in the day, the Saturn CPS-2 ports were easier for Capcom to develop BUT by first quarter 1997 the PS1 had neatly passed the Saturn in popularity (in huge part because of Final Fantasy VII and generally superior multi-platform title ports like Tomb Raider 1) and Capcom couldn’t afford to neglect PS1 development of its CPS-2 titles even if the PS1 wasn’t particularly suited for those ports or very well capable of arcade-perfect ports of later titles like the “Vs” fighting series. The major third-party developers were making good money off the PS1; the same couldn’t be said with the Saturn a lot of the time. Tomb Raider 1, which was originally slated to be a Saturn-exclusive, sold something like at least 4-5 times as many copies on the PS1 as it did on the Saturn.
The Saturn’s memory and load time issues pretty much disappeared after the 4MB RAM cart was introduced with X-Men Vs Street Fighter. The PS1’s issues got worse with the “Vs” series and those should be the last Capcom fighting games anybody should recommend for the PS1. The SF Alpha titles, SF2 Collections, and Darkstalkers 3/Vampire Savior were all above average or excellent CPS-2 ports on the PS1 as well as the Saturn.
Capcom kind of hinted at a special relationship with Sega back when Sega was still a console manufacturer. The way history played out, what should have worked out well for both companies ended up not being a huge money-maker. Call it a misguided popularity contest – and there was that, yes – but there was also the reality of the shift in game development from sprite-driven/2-D art to polygons. The bigger cause for the sales failure still has to be laid at Sega’s feet for both bad marketing – especially outside of Japan --; perceived abuse of the customer base with half-assed and poorly thought-out add-on peripherals for the preceding console (Genesis CD-ROM and 32X); a badly-designed, thrown-together console design (Saturn) that was biased and aimed in the wrong direction of software trends (2-D instead of 3-D/poly); and management (primarily Sega of America CEO Bernie Stolar) which didn’t know how to work with developers and maintain a genial relationship with them. Stolar’s the man who killed the Saturn in America with his comments about the console not being “Sega’s future” and his generally damning, thoughtless comments. Sales may not have been great in the States but with one speech Stolar pretty much encouraged every major developer to stop working on titles for release on the North American Saturn console.
Just mentioning Bernie’s name even today makes the bile rise in my throat… There are relatively few people who manage to take down major corporations with words. Bernie’s one of them… He killed SOA as much as anyone else could have with his lack of tact.
Mmm interesting. I live in Asia where JP Saturn/PS1 releases are the ONLY thing you can buy, so luckily I have access to a larger Saturn library than people back home in the US. Really makes you wonder how things would have turned out if the world was much more connected back then. Saturn has LOTS of cool Asian releases…looking at the US lineup I find little interesting. =/
That is why I have the Action Replay 4 in 1 cart.
Hehe I do too…that and a Japanese Saturn. I just use the Action Replay for the save backup/auto 4/1MB RAM features. 
I remember MSH on Saturn being shitty. I never owned it but I played a bunch with a buddy years ago and it was hideous, with or without the 4MB cart. Pretty sure MSH on console also had different properties for certain characters/moves than the CPS2 version. I think some of it revolved around airdashing or flight for the characters that had it (Iron Man, Blackheart, Magneto). All I really recall was how slow the game played and how I couldn’t do anything I normally could easily on CPS2.
I might be in the minority but I enjoyed the PS1 EX versions of the Vs. games. They were also different than the CPS2 versions but Capcom compensated by changing the gameplay to effectively make it a new game for each one. All of the Vs. game ports post-MSH on Saturn/DC, despite being good overall, had various issues: xvssf was version 3, or the more boring version with less broken stuff, mvssf was accurate overall but had loading times, mvc1 had incorrect timing on duo team and juggling/uncombos didn’t work like it did on CPS2 - possible frame rate issue?