Editing Sega Saturn (section)

==History==
The development of the Sega Saturn was composed of much speculation, since it was not the custom of many companies to disclose specific information when developing their products.

In mid-1991 there appeared several news stories about a new console being developed by [[Sega]] called the "Giga Drive", which would be based on a new plate that was beginning to be used in arcade systems. Just as the [[Sega Mega Drive|Mega Drive]] originated from the System 16 board, it made sense to believe that the Giga Drive was being developed using the System 32 as a base. Time passed and there was never an official confirmation about the Giga Drive from Sega.

In 1993 rumors began to appear on two separate 32-bit projects: the cartridge-based '''Jupiter''' and the CD based '''Saturn'''. Technical specifications showed that the console was being designed to be the most powerful platform for 2D gaming. At the same time, Sony was developing what would become the PlayStation, with powerful video focused on 3D. Trying to resolve this situation, the design of the Saturn was altered, and new processors were added, now giving greater support for polygons and 3D graphic processing. With this change, the Sega Saturn was now ready to compete with the Sony PlayStation. The first rumored project didn't fade quite into obscurity, as the Jupiter became the [[Sega 32X]] add-on for the Mega Drive, though it suffered with little success and was outshone by the Saturn.

[[File:Saturn website-sprite.png|225px|thumb|right|The Sega Saturn, from [[Sega]]'s website.]]
By the end of 1994, the 16-bit video game era was in twilight in North America, with gamers eagerly anticipating the new 32-bit machines from Japan. In early 1995, Sega president [[Tom Kalinske]] announced that the Saturn would launch in North America on "Saturnday" (Saturday) 2 September 1995. This date was greatly anticipated by gamers and the media. Sony would announce that the PlayStation would release just one week later, on 9 September 1995. However, at the first Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) in May 1995, Kalinske announced that the "Saturnday" date was a ruse, and that the system was being released nationwide by a few select retailers immediately, this being 11 May 1995.<ref name="releaseNA"/> It appeared that Sega had a real opportunity to take a commanding 4-month lead in the 32-bit race by beating the PlayStation to the market. With an announced starting price of $399 USD, the Sega Saturn faced its first setback right there at E3, when Sony announced that the PlayStation would still launch at the end of the year, but at a price of just $299 USD.<ref name="e3">{{Cite web|url=http://www.gamepro.com/sony/ps3/games/features/199528.shtml|title=Feature: Eight Extremely Embarrassing E3 Moments|last=Rudden|first=Dave|accessdate=14 July 2008|archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20080819194955/http://www.gamepro.com/sony/ps3/games/features/199528.shtml|archivedate=19 August 2008|quote=Sony's keynote speaker went up on stage, said "Two hundred and Ninety-Nine Dollars" and walked off the stage.}}</ref>

The Sega Saturn was released in Japan on 22 November 1994<ref name="releaseJP"/> and was very successful, reaching more than 500,000 units sold by the end of the year. North America did not see as much commercial success, though.

Even with a lowered price and many promotions, the Saturn never caught on in North America, contrasting greatly with Japan's love of the console. The Saturn and remained in the lead until the release of ''Final Fantasy VII'' for the PlayStation in 1997, but held the second position against the Nintendo 64 throughout its lifespan. In 1999, the Saturn was discontinued in favor of its successor, the [[Dreamcast]].

Even today it is still debatable what was the main mistakes made by Sega Saturn during the era, though some of the most notable include:
*The Sega Saturn had a premature release without a large variety of games.
*Due to the more complex architecture, with three processors, developing games for the Saturn cost more and took longer than competitors' consoles.
*The initial development kits were very complicated and inefficient, which made the work more difficult and time consuming for the programmer.
*The console had no official mascot ''Sonic'' game, only a compilation (''[[Sonic Jam]]''), racing game (''[[Sonic R]]''), and a port of a unsuccessful [[Sega Mega Drive|Mega Drive]] game (''[[Sonic 3D Blast]]''). ''[[Sonic X-Treme]]'' was announced, but it was canceled.
*Inexplicably, some of the best Saturn games were never released outside of Japan. There were more than six hundred games released in Japan, while the international list has no more than 250 titles.
*There are no games from Namco on the console, due to the company finding the console too heavy to run their games and thus they became exclusive to the PlayStation.
*The games that would be planned for the Saturn they were canceled due to the end of life and were transferred to the Dreamcast, such as: ''Virtua Fighter 3'', ''Fighting Force'', ''Rayman 2'', and ''Resident Evil 2''.
*Originally, Sega planned to develop the game ''[[Sonic Adventure]]'' for the Saturn to replace the cancelled ''[[Sonic X-treme]]'', but due to the end of the console's life, the game was eventually produced for the [[Dreamcast]].

===Development===
[[Sega]]'s 27-member Away Team, comprised of employees from hardware engineering, product development and marketing, worked for two years to design the Sega Saturn's hardware. The Saturn was a powerful machine for its time, but its design that featured two CPUs and six other processors made harnessing the power extremely difficult. Also, many of the ancillary chips in the system were "off the shelf" components, increasing the complexity of the system because the components were not specifically designed to work together. Rumors suggest that the original design called for a single central processor, but upon hearing of the Sony PlayStation's capabilities, a second processor was added late in development to increase potential performance.

{{Quote left|One very fast central processor would be preferable. I don't think all programmers have the ability to program two CPUs &mdash; 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 the Saturn ''Virtua Fighter'' development.<ref name=YuSuzukiNG/>}}

Third-party development was initially hindered by the lack of useful software libraries and development tools, requiring developers to write in assembly language to achieve good performance. During early Saturn game development, programming in assembly could offer a two to fivefold speed increase over the C language.<ref name="YuSuzukiNG">{{Cite journal|title=Sega Saturn|url=https://retrocdn.net/images/3/3b/NextGeneration_US_02.pdf#page=45|journal=Next Generation|date=February 1995|pages=43}}</ref> To save development costs and time, some programmers would utilize only one CPU, such as with ''Alien Trilogy''.

The implementation of dual CPUs within the Saturn was not ideal. The biggest disadvantage of the architecture was that both processors shared the same bus and had problems accessing the main system RAM at the same time. The 4 KiB of cache memory in each CPU was critical to maintaining performance. In general, very careful division of processing, in addition to the already-challenging task of paralleling the code, was required to get the most out of the Saturn. One example of how the Saturn was utilized was with ''Virtua Fighter''<nowiki>'</nowiki>s use of one CPU for each character.<ref name="YuSuzukiNG"/>

Compared to the PlayStation, the Saturn's hardware was difficult to work with because of its more complex graphics hardware and lesser overall performance, as noted by Lobotomy Software programmer Ezra Dreisbach.<ref name="DreisbachCG">{{Cite web|title=Interview: Ezra Dreisbach|publisher=Curmudgeon Gamer|date=9 July 2002|url=http://curmudgeongamer.com/article.php?story=20021008212903265|accessdate=19 August 2007}}</ref> In order to bring ''Duke Nukem 3D'' and ''PowerSlave''/''Exhumed'' to the Saturn, Lobotomy Software had to almost entirely rewrite the Build engine to get adequate performance from the Saturn.<ref name="DreisbachCG"/> Also, during testing of an unreleased ''Quake'' port for the PlayStation, the Saturn's performance was found to be notably inferior for the game.<ref name="DreisbachCG"/>

Unlike the PlayStation and Nintendo 64, which used triangles as its basic geometric primitive, the Saturn rendered quadrilaterals. This proved to be a hindrance as most of the industry's standard design tools were based around triangles. One of the challenges brought forth by quadrilateral-based rendering was problems with making some shapes, notably triangular objects. This can be seen in the Saturn version of ''Tomb Raider'', in which triangular rocks are not rendered as well as other system's versions of the game.<ref name="DreisbachCG"/> The hardware also lacked light sourcing and hardware video decompression support, the latter being a major disadvantage during a time when full-motion video was quite popular.

Still, if used correctly, the quadrilateral rendering of the Saturn had advantages. It could potentially show less texture distortion than was common with PlayStation titles, as demonstrated by several cross-platform titles such as ''Wipeout'' and ''Destruction Derby''. The quadrilateral-focused hardware and a 50% greater amount of video memory also gave the Saturn an advantage for 2D game engines and attracted many developers of RPGs, arcade games and traditional 2D fighting games. With creative programming, later games like ''Burning Rangers'' were able to achieve true transparency effects on hardware that used simple polygon stipples as a replacement for transparency effects in the past.

The cartridge slot was useful for adding extra RAM or storage devices for saving games to the system. One ROM cartridge was released with ''King of Fighters '95'', which contained part of the game data because not enough RAM was available in the standard console. Two different RAM cartridges were released for the system; a 1MB RAM cart by SNK for ''King of Fighters '96'', and a 4MB RAM cart by Capcom for ''X-Men vs. Street Fighter'' and ''Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter''. Both companies were known for their sprite-based 2D competitive fighting games and many of their subsequent games utilized their respective cartridges.