History of video games/Platforms/Sega Saturn

Sega Saturn Model 1
Sega Saturn Model 2

History

Development

Sega approached both Sony and Silicon Graphics about collaborating on console hardware, but these deals fell through.^[1] Both companies would market consoles that would prove to be significant competitors to the Saturn. Sony would launch the original Playstation and Silicon Graphics became a key technology partner with Nintendo during the development of the Nintendo 64.

The Sega Saturn was initially focused on 2D games, but fearing competition from Sony's Playstation, Sega engineer Hideki Sato decided to add another CPU to give the Saturn extra power this without consulting the company's main experts in 3D Graphics, who were busy in the Arcade division.^[2]^[3] This lead to a strange and unique technical architecture for the Saturn, which somewhat increased it's capabilities at the great expenses of additional production costs and development complexity.

Launch

The Japanese Mark 1 console.

The Sega Saturn was launched in Japan in November of 1994 at a cost of 44,800 yen.^[4]

The Sega Saturn was launched in the USA four months earlier then initially planned when a surprise E3 1995 announcement was made that the Saturn would be released that weekend at a price of $399, which caused Sega to take a $100 loss on each Saturn sold.^[5] The surprise launch damaged relations with 3rd party developers and retailers.^[6]

Sega had a hard time attracting 3rd party developers in part because the Saturn very difficult to develop for on its own, and this was made worse by the Saturn initially lacking a compiler - requiring programmers to use platform specific assembly for Saturn games.^[3]

In December 1995 the Hi-Saturn was released in Japan at a cost of 150,000 yen.^[7]^[8] The Hi-Saturn is an automotive version of the Saturn that was a GPS navigation system and entertainment system.^[8]^[7]

Legacy

The Sega Saturn was discontinued in 1998.^[9] The system sold less than 10 million units, but has a cult following.^[10] The Saturn was followed by the Dreamcast.

Following the failure of the Saturn, Ken Kutaragi of Sony would boast to Saturn designer Hideki Sato of the vertical integration advantage Sony had over Sega, and urged them to become a software focused developer, which Sega eventually did following the inability of the Dreamcast to gain marketshare.^[2]

By 2020 the Sega Saturn was known as a difficult console to collect for.^[11]

Technology

Saturn was nuts
—John Carmack, Tweet on February 21st, 2013.^[12]

Compute

The Sega Saturn has two Hitachi 32-bit SH-2 processors clocked at 28.63 megahertz with 4 kilobytes of cache memory.^[13]^[14]

The Sega Saturn has 2MB of RAM, split into one megabyte of SDRAM, and one megabyte of slower DRAM.^[14] The Saturn also has 1.5 megabytes of VRAM.^[15]

The Saturn uses two custom GPUs, the VDP1 and the VDP2.^[14]

Hardware

Audio was handled by the Saturn Custom Sound Processor, the Yamaha YMF292.^[16]

Development Hardware

A special development model, Sega Saturn Address Checker, was used by developers to verify memory usage compliance.^[17] Early revisions of this hardware is notable for it's length, at approximately 3 feet (0.91 m) long.^[18]