Sega Saturn's faux 3D in modern form

[Jeckidy]

I've heard Sega Saturn was actually a fully 2D system that rendered 3D using clever tricks. This was done in the history of games long before with titles like the Doom/Wolfenstein engines (if I'm correct) but wasn't really taken to a new level until the Saturn showed what it could do. Also, given their experience with doing this on Saturn, it's no surprise to me that SEGA demonstrated the same technique in their games for GBA, such as Super Monkey Ball Jr. and Sonic Battle. Now I want to know if there are any modern examples of this same graphical trick being done on current operating systems with considerable processing power. What does it look like and what is its advantage over true 3D if anything at all?

[roce]

You seem to be confusing lots of things together. Saturn can render 3d, the software rendering of Doom/w3d is just one approach, and most likely not the same as in those GBA titles.

If you're wondering about "anything cool that GPUs can't do", that'd be raytracing currently. There's raytracing versions of reasonably modern ET/QW games, and what it does is allow perfect lighting and portals, especially visible with mirrors and other reflective surfaces. You can then have reflections of reflections in a deep way, as deep as pixels allow.

There's also similar techniques being done for audio. Modeling the physical environment, and then correctly tracing the audio vibrations lets you have real 3d sound, with echoes, correctly sounding places (church sounds different vs swampy cave, etc.), being able to hear a monster is around the corner... It's been emulated via cheap tricks so far, but this goes far beyond OpenAL/Creative/DolbyWhatever.

[Black_Tiger]

The Saturn was so powerful at doing real 3D, that when Lobotomy ported Powerslave to Saturn, they didn't bother using the Duke 3D/Doom technique, because it wouldn't run anywhere near as fast.

Super Monkey Ball Jr. and Sonic Battle are also real 3D. The Genesis has loads of legit polygonal 3D games.

[Blades]

The port of Doom onto the Saturn was software-rendered and a train wreck.

According to the original programmer, the Saturn was unable to run Doom in software mode because it was just too slow, so he made a hardware accelerated port of Doom for the Saturn that ran great. Apparently, Carmack himself nixed the idea claiming that hardware rendered 3D of the day was "ugly," and forced the team back to square one. They decided to stop caring and ported the PSX port at 12 FPS.

[Sik]

Yikes X_X Although it's amusing when you consider the 32X should be just as good at software rendering (SH2s running at same speed) and it still got 20FPS. Yeah, they had to remove detail (mostly because they ran out of memory and it'd crash without simplification, the Saturn should have had an easier time here), but it was still a much better port in that sense.

And Sonic Battle is literally using skewed sprites for the walls (it was orthogonal projection (i.e. isometric) instead of perspective, so it works). The floors are mode-7 style backgrounds (which is why there are two levels of them, you only get two such layers). It was an extremely clever hack.

[Black_Tiger]

Doom for Saturn was just a rushed low-effort port. Hexxen uses software rendering and runs much better.

[Mask of Destiny]

There are a couple of aspects in which you could argue the Saturn hardware can't really do 3D rendering. The first is that it is incapable of perspective correct texturing and the second is that it has no z-buffer and thus can't properly do occlusion (painters algorithm gets you most of the way there, but there are edge cases it doesn't deal with). That said, both are also true of the original Playstation.

[Mad Moham]

The only 3d 'trick' that I'm aware of that's being used today is voxels. I'm not sure what the advantages are, but I know that some games and other applications are handling 3d using voxels. If you want an example of how it looks compared to polygons, check out Comanche Maximum Overkill from 1992.

[Blades]

Doom for Saturn was just a rushed low-effort port. Hexxen uses software rendering and runs much better.

Wrong. Originally the Saturn port of Doom was supposed to be a port of the PC version, not the Jaguar version which the 32X port was based on. The original programmer posted on Doomworld forums and had this to say.

Hi guys, what do you want to know?

Some answers, to things you might want to know for starters.

1. No, I don't have the old source to the released version.
2. I don't have anything of the approval version.
3. I don't even have a saturn dev kit, ( I do have a fully working saturn though )
4. I originally wanted to port Doom1 and Doom2 direct from PC, due to Carmack knocking it back we went with PSX version for speed, as that one was approved, and the levels were already reduced to fit in console memory.
5. Be thankful I didn't do the rendering using the heavily bottlenecked DSPs that Carmack suggested, it would have been a lot slower having to transfer data in and out constantly through the 2K+2K DSPs
6. PSX could use the hardware to render in columns, the Saturn had no chance.
7. Audio was audio tracks on CD for speed, as we'd already used time up doing the approval submission, then had to start again with a different approach.

Carmack himself admitted this on Twitter.

@PeterBridger @JimBagley69 I hated affine texture swim and integral quad verts, but in hindsight, I probably should have let experiment.
— John Carmack (@ID_AA_Carmack) October 8, 2014

So no, the Saturn port was bad because the team was cut down for no reason.

Why did Carmack care so much when Quake was released earlier on the Saturn with a completely different engine?

Source.

[Blades]

Another quote.

When I started the project, I had to do a demo for Id Software to approve … I started by extracting all the levels and audio and textures from the WAD files, and made my own Saturn version of this, then got an early version of the renderer working using the 3D hardware. The demo got sent off, and a couple of days later I got a call from John Carmack, who stipulated that under no circumstances could I use the 3D hardware to draw the screen. I had to use the processors like the PC. Thankfully I enjoy challenges, so it turned out to be a really enjoyable project, using both SH2s to render the display like the PC did it, using the 68000 to orchestrate them both.

- Jim Bagley, programmer on the “kneecapped” Sega Saturn port of Doom. From Retro Gamer Magazine, issue 134

And another.

Yes, and no, we were given the PC and PlayStation data, but initially, I wanted to use the Saturn's hardware to it's max potential, and wrote a render engine to display the PC levels drawing the walls with the GPU, the problem I came across, was apparently John Carmack wasn't happy about this, he wanted it to look exactly the same as the PC version, but it looked a lot nicer, and was running full screen at 60fps, he said it had to be drawn using the CPU, and not the GPU, he even suggested I used the two DSPs on the Saturn to render the screen, but as they only have 4KB, and if I remember correctly, as it's been a very long time since I used one, 2KB code space and 2KB data space, doing it this way to render a complete screen full of game, would have been a huge memory bandwidth bottleneck, so I ignored that, and did it using the two SH2s to render the screen, each of the two CPUs splitting the draw time, doing a line each of the walls or floors, and to save time having to reduce the PC levels to fit into the Saturn's memory, we decided to use the Playstation levels as they had a smaller memory footprint than the PC ones, so it made sense to convert the PlayStation levels, I was quite happy with the end result, as the SH2s ran at 33Mhz and 28Mhz respectively, and I remember playing doom on a 33Mhz PC and it having to play in a stamp sized display to play at a reasonable rate, where as the Saturn was pretty much full screen but this isn't dissing John Carmack, he's a very talented coder and clever bloke all round, it's more me being proud of what speed I got out of two relatively slow cpus.

Saturn Doom (again sorry, lol). Word has it that John Carmack wouldn’t let you code it for the Saturn hardware specifically, so it ended up more akin to the DX33 PC version than say the Jaguar version being on par with the DX66 version. Why on earth didn’t John just let you handle the conversion in the way you best saw fit?

I have no idea on his choice, but as it was his IP, we had to take his wishes into account, if he said no to hardware rendering, then we had to not have the hardware render it, that was just the way of the contract.

Do you think given the time and freedom, you could have done a version of Doom as good (or better) than the PlayStation version?

Given the time and freedom, yes, I'd have done a better version of Doom than the PlayStation version, and it would have looked better than the PC version too. I know for a fact, as it did look better.

More regret.

BSOD Rocky ‏@SHREKFLEX 26 Nov 2014 @ID_AA_Carmack Do you remember why you told Jim Bagley to not use hardware 3D rendering for Saturn Doom? http://www.retrovideogamer.co.uk/index.php?topic=3122.0 …

1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes

John Carmack Verified account ‏@ID_AA_Carmack

@SHREKFLEX I was proud of Doom's subpixel accurate perspective mapping, and thought integral affine quads were ugly. I was a bit narrow.

[Black_Tiger]

Wrong. Originally the Saturn port of Doom was supposed to be a port of the PC version, not the Jaguar version which the 32X port was based on. The original programmer posted on Doomworld forums and had this to say.



Carmack himself admitted this on Twitter.



So no, the Saturn port was bad because the team was cut down for no reason.

Why did Carmack care so much when Quake was released earlier on the Saturn with a completely different engine?

Source.

Exactly, it wasn't because the Saturn wasn't capable. Again, see Hexen.

[Blades]

Did you even read my post? The Saturn could not handle PC Doom in software.

[Flygon]

It'd be quite nice to see a proper 'Quad' DooM ported to the Saturn through homebrew efforts, I reckon. If not just to settle this debate.

[Jeckidy]

I wasn't actually talking about the Saturn ports of ID's FPS games, but saying that they did the same thing years before on PC by using psuedo-3D effects with 2D hardware, but as I mentioned, it was just an assumption, since it seemed logical.

[Team Andromeda]

Another quote.



And another.







More regret.

Yep I still have that interview Jim Bagley and sadly his and his teams hands with tied by id on the Saturn Doom port . You haven't got to look at either Lobtomy or Prope to see the Saturn could have done so much better . Deadlus on the Saturn was a really decent (in terms of GFX) Saturn FPS game with transparent effects too and at the time the best quailty intro on the Saturn