Hacker News Reader

Comment by ewams | Hacker News Reader

Thank you for sharing. I recently have begun an interest in programming for old 1990's systems and this provides a great insight into the "best system" of the time and how developers felt about it.

Curious about the dev kit. You mention that Sega provided sample code and there was at least one other dev platform, did Sega provide support and good documentation or did you always basically have to figure everything out for yourself? Is this true for other vendors (ie, Nintendo, Sony and now MSFT)?

View on HN

For the Saturn? I think it was well known that documentation was bad. You see where he said about figuring out how to use the second SH2 processor. Not even Sega could figure out how use both of them efficiently(due to poor design) until the end of the system's life so I don't think there would have been useful documentation on that.

The Saturn failed because consumers were burned by Sega's add-on in the past coupled with the fact that the system was expensive and lacked decent dev tools at launch making is difficult to program for.

I will readily agree to the /expensive/ part. I distinctly remember, as a kid, looking at that system on the highest shelf in the game store in the mall, and thinking that it cost a LOT of money.

Checking with the internet, USD 399/449 (a game included), but that's in 1995 dollars. The CPI places that as being nearer to 625 USD today!

http://data.bls.gov/cgi-bin/cpicalc.pl?cost1=399&year1=1995&...

A steal, compared to the 3do :)

It puts complaints about VR headsets in a different light when you think about how much those consoles you loved as a kid cost after adjusting for 20+ years of inflation. When you compare how expensive a NES was in real terms at launch with how little you got in terms of possible experience, it drives home how much computing has advanced over the years and how high (spoiled?) peoples' expectations are now that they bitch about Oculus costing $700 or whatever.

Hell, look at people complaining about the Xbox One and PS4 costing $500 / $400 at launch respectively.

The Sony PSX (original Playstation) English dev docs were also pretty bad, IMO/IME. I worked at a game company in 1995-1997 where we were porting our PC title to PSX and to Saturn. I was leading the PSX project which eventually shipped and was an "OK" title (but nowhere near the then state-of-the-art IMO). The Saturn project was eventually cancelled as the team couldn't get enough performance out of the Saturn and really struggled to get much pace of development.

We were using a dev kit that I seem to recall was 3 ISA PCBs (though pictures on the internet now show only 2, so maybe my memory is faulty). There was also a "blue" physical playstation that would boot unencrypted disks, so if we were willing to go through a full CD burn cycle, you could test there, which is how we did QA and potential golden master testing, but most development was on the ISA cards.

Compilation toolchain was gcc-based, and we did almost all of our debugging with printf. :)

Most interesting to me technical tidbit: We did build our own pre-emptive interrupt system to ensure we could run the game physics engine at either 15 or 30 Hz (technically slightly less, as it was on the NTSC vertical blank). Sony support said it wasn't possible... ;)

To the extent Sony won that round of console wars, I don't think it was on the quality of documentation, at least not the English translations.

I guess you'd feel that way if you came from a PC background. For console developers, Sony's SDK for the PS1 at the time was pretty good compared to the alternatives.

The technical information was decent. The English translation was rough at times. I can't recall the exact quote now, but my favorite was documentation around the interrupt handling area (IIRC). It went something like, "It must never be forgotten to fail to not enable the XYZ..." It was 3 or 4 negatives and utterly ambiguous as to what was meant. In cases like that, Sony support in the US was willing to run down the original Japanese text and re-interpret it for us, but those often took 3-10 days for the cycle to run its course, especially if there was no code demo to exercise that particular feature/subsystem.

The SDK was good. He's complaining about English docs, which is pretty valid if you look at the Genesis and Nintendo's docs. Especially considering they had to outline brand new 3d functionality, while the sprite/blit engines on all the 2d consoles were pretty similar (here's an address in RAM/VRAM, blit it to this position, vscroll this far, load this tile from this address, etc).

The Saturn failed as Sega had made the best 2d system they could whilst Sony had made the best 3d system they could and it was $100 dollars cheaper.

Sega fought the last was, Sony opened a new battleground.

I've always been impressed by the Nintendo dev kits I've read through and sometimes used.

http://n64devkit.square7.ch/

http://www.chrisantonellis.com/files/gameboy/gb-programming-...

N64 development required a $80,000 SGI Onyx (at least at the early years) didn't it?

From what I've heard, cheaper SGI Indys were the most common dev machines for the N64.

http://n64devkit.square7.ch/caution/caution/index15.htm#15-1

Huh, Mario Party...

The Saturn was not the best system at the time (not sure if that's what you were implying). The first title I worked on [as a Playstation developer] there was Saturn version being made in parallel; it just couldn't keep up with what I was doing on the PS1 and what the PC guys were doing with the first graphics cards. My memory isn't brilliant, but I seem to remember it had major problems moving textures around, so all textures ended up being half the resolution of the PS1. Our Saturn guy was constantly stressed and actually had a breakdown because the whole process got to him - I know this is mostly anecdotal, but perhaps it gives a sense of the difficulty of the machine.

Sega's follow-up, the Dreamcast, was an excellent machine, and tons of fun to code for. But by that point the PS1 had been so phenomenally successful that very few publishers were committing to Dreamcast titles. A development house I was working for at the time went under because the publishers were waiting for the PS2 and they ran out of money.

>My memory isn't brilliant, but I seem to remember it had major problems moving textures around, so all textures ended up being half the resolution of the PS1.

IIRC because of the way the Saturn did texture mapping, all texture coordinates would be forced to be axis aligned quads (like traditional 2D sprites), which caused big problems for games coming from other platforms that had more freeform texture atlases. That could be at least a part of why your team had problems with textures.

Funnily enough I just found an interview somebody must have done with me years ago [1]. I forgot I'd done it. There's a screenshot of the Saturn version. If you click through to the 'Saturn Power' magazine scans you'll see the Playstation screenshots [2] (slightly offside that the PS screenshots were sent as an example of the Saturn version!) - it's pretty obvious that the Saturn version looks terrible compared to the PS

Here's my quote re: the Saturn version:

"However the Saturn version was lagging behind quite badly - the textures looked pretty awful because they had to be down-sampled to fit in the smaller texture memory, and the geometry engine was struggling due to the more limited ability of the Saturn"

[1] http://www.sega-saturn.net/nr/lunatik.php

[2] http://www.sega-saturn.net/nr/lunatik_saturnpower.jpg

Reply on news.ycombinator.com