Editing Sega Saturn (section)

===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.