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Comment by breadmaster | Hacker News Reader

For a company to be so visionary and forward thinking on the arcade front, being a pioneering force of 3D polygonal games, it is astonishing that they released the Saturn in the form they did. You had to be a assembly savant to get decent 3D performance out of the Saturn that your average programmer could easily obtain on the Playstation using C. The VDP2 was pretty impressive though...

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My understanding was that Sega had intended to focus on 2D gaming for the Saturn, but after realising what hardware was in the PlayStation they bumped up the specs to compete by adding in extra processors.

The 2D performance of the Saturn appears to have been better than the PlayStation (the RAM expansion probably helped here too), but the 3D capabilities couldn't match up to the PlayStation (I suspect that would've still been the case even if the Saturn was easier to program for).

I believe it was always designed for 3D but they made the 3D aspect more powerful as they saw what Sony was pushing. I get the feeling it was to be a sort of hybrid 2D/3D system instead of a straight jump into 3D.

But the multi-CPU thing was a mess. Sony had a very simple architecture that could still do a very good job. Sony made that mistake with the PS2 but still survived (momentum + sales as a DVD player) and the PS3 which hit them hard (Xbox 360 was much easier, got a big win for it). As of the PS4 they've learned their lesson.

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