This discussion about the resolutions is interesting news to me, so sorry if I made a pretty invalid point earlier. 
I guess Saga sadly ran in the lowest resolution, then?
Saga runs in the same resolution as PD Zwei (640 x 224).
TA: I still believe Sega should have built the Saturn around a single developer-friendly CPU and not rushed the Saturn out. Sega of Japan were more interested in capturing the Japanese market than anywhere else, but thanks to the popularity of Virtua Fighter, Sega could have waited. There was no hurry.
But let’s not live in the past.
[quote=“Ancient Weapon”]This discussion about the resolutions is interesting news to me, so sorry if I made a pretty invalid point earlier.
I guess Saga sadly ran in the lowest resolution, then?[/quote]
At the start it seems too, but when you get to the desert part the game noticeably goes into to a Higher Res mode (well to me it does).
Guess it must have something to do with the water and Desert parts have flat floors so TA could use the VDP II to handle those and ease the CPU workload.
Where as at the begging of the game , there’s undulating terrain. And the VDP II couldn’t be used and the CPU?s had to bare the load, and so the res was knocked down
Wow, thanks for the quick and informative replies. I will have to scrutinise my telly later on to test your theory, Team Andromeda!
[quote=“Geoffrey Duke”]Saga runs in the same resolution as PD Zwei (640 x 224).
TA: I still believe Sega should have built the Saturn around a single developer-friendly CPU and not rushed the Saturn out. Sega of Japan were more interested in capturing the Japanese market than anywhere else, but thanks to the popularity of Virtua Fighter, Sega could have waited. There was no hurry.
But let’s not live in the past.[/quote]
There was to SEGA Japan, the MD was dead on its feet in Jp and Sony was entering the marke, t so they had to bring the Saturn out when it did.
For better if SOA/SOE just went the Saturn route, instead of taking it down all the time and saying the 32X was the future .
That way SEGA would have had a better and more focused marking campaign (pushing just one machine) would have had the 32X Line up for games (and all the dropped ones) helping with the Saturn library.
It did make me laugh when you had the losers at Sega Europe were saying the Saturn was too expensive to be massmarket.
Only to ask ?170 for the 32X with no game, and ?60 per 32X game. Wow that?s the way to save the consumer money .
For the price of a 32X with a couple of games one could have got a Saturn (with a free VF) and saved on the games thanks to the CD format .
When you had tossers like that working at Sega Europe and America, Sony didn?t have to do a thing. SEGA America and Europe were plotting the downfall of SEGA all by them self?s
I won’t deny that the 32X was a costly mistake, but so was rushing out the Saturn. Virtua Fighter Remix should have been a Saturn launch title for a start, and would have better stood up against Toshinden etc than the rushed conversion of Virtua Fighter.
The Saturn just couldn’t compete on the Playstation’s terms because the hardware was so outdated. Just imagine what Sega could have done with state of the art hardware at the time capable of 3D transparancy effects etc.
[quote=“Geoffrey Duke”]It’s a shame so few Saturn games used its highest 3D resolution. Riglord Saga 2 is the only game I know of that uses it.
Synchronizing the Saturn’s dual processors was a nightmare. Shinji Mikami said Capcom couldn’t do it, and Yu Suzuki hated them. No wonder the Saturn almost killed Sega.[/quote]
He didn?t hate them. He had more of problem with the twin chips accessing the same memory and so as a result of that there was a delay while one was waiting for the other.
After all multi processors to SEGA was nothing new. Almost all of their Scalier coin ups had multi processors set ups .
I think the biggest problem with the Saturn was you had to code in assembly to get the best out of it (when everybody was using C) and it lacked support for transparencies. Even SEGA JP said their self?s their early Saturn Tools and libraries were in-effect cr8p
Well it’s ancient history now, even if the Saturn era still seems fresh in our minds.
I think Exhumed and Panzer Dragoon Saga best pushed the Saturn hardware to its limits, but the Saturn’s true gems were the titles that merged 2D and 3D visuals seemlessly like Dragon Force, Guardian Heroes and Shining The Holy Ark. I just wish Dragon Force 2, Grandia and the final two scenarios of Shining Force III had made it to our shores. That little mishap still annoys me even to this day.
[quote=“Geoffrey Duke”]I won’t deny that the 32X was a costly mistake, but so was rushing out the Saturn. Virtua Fighter Remix should have been a Saturn launch title for a start, and would have better stood up against Toshinden etc than the rushed conversion of Virtua Fighter.
The Saturn just couldn’t compete on the Playstation’s terms because the hardware was so outdated. Just imagine what Sega could have done with state of the art hardware at the time capable of 3D transparancy effects etc.[/quote]
I don’t buy that.
Yes SEGA should have held back the Saturn in the West, but I don’t buy this Saturn couldn’t compete.
Exhumed looks miles better than it does on the PS, as does Mass Destruction, Thunder Force 5, Duke Nukem, Grandia.
VC is an almost perfect port of a ?10,000 plus Model 2 game and looks way better than any of the TimeCrisis PlayStation ports.
VF II looks better than PS Tekken III (even though that came out in 1998) never mind part II.
Sega Rally , Zwei (for me the best looking 32bit game), Decathlete, Amok had some of the best 3D graphics I’d seen at the time. And there wasn’t a pray of the PS handlling the likes of RSG, Taromura.
When used right the Saturn was a awesome machine. Trouble was developers made little use of the system
[quote=“Geoffrey Duke”]Well it’s ancient history now, even if the Saturn era still seems fresh in our minds.
I think Exhumed and Panzer Dragoon Saga best pushed the Saturn hardware to its limits, but the Saturn’s true gems were the titles that merged 2D and 3D visuals seemlessly like Dragon Force, Guardian Heroes and Shining The Holy Ark. I just wish Dragon Force 2, Grandia and the final two scenarios of Shining Force III had made it to our shores. That little mishap still annoys me even to this day.[/quote]
Hell yeah Lobotomy were awesome, and Ezra Urea was and is a programming genius. Some other Saturn games that must have pushed it to the limits were Dark Savior, World League Soccer 98 (again much better than the PS version), RSG, Quake/Duke Last Bronx, Burning Ragers.
And we have that top Twat Berine to thank for the likes of Grandia, DF II, SF III (Pt II/III to coming over here.
And he then upset Working Desgins as well while he was at it. The one company that might have brought those games to the West
Just a question about emulating Saga…I remember long ago when girigiri was first making the rounds, people were having problems with the game freezing at certain points like durin the first fight with azel. I can’t remember if there was any way to stop this happening and for me it’s freezing just befor the fight with the Gigra. Yeah I could use another emulator or somthing but I want to play it on a higher resolution which, as far as I know, only girigiri has the option to do that. I tried running the game from a disc image and also straight from the cd but it happens the same either way.
Any help would be great.
Ah, the freezing problem. Basically, GiriGiri freezes almost without fail when you get to certain specific points in Panzer Dragoon Saga, which are always during dialogue in battle sequences. However, this only happens if the emulator is running at full speed; anything you can do to slow the emulator down (so that the game is literally playing in slow-motion) should allow you to get past these freeze points.
The easiest way I found to do this was by using a CPU slowdown / CPU limiter program, so if you Google a bit you should be able to find something that works. Mo’Slo seems to be one of the more well-known programs, and the following slowdown program (called Turbo) is very easy to use:
gamehippo.com/free_util/turbo.shtml
…however, it doesn’t seem to work on all setups and operating systems. When you do get something like this to work though, you can just slow the game down before you reach the freeze point, then put it back up to normal speed again once you’re past it.
Or, you could use the latest version of SSF. Which surpasses GiriGiri in terms of emulation flow. http://www7a.biglobe.ne.jp/~phantasy/ssf/index.html
I played almost all of PDS-Disc 1 on SSF 0.07 Alpha R7, though, the experience wasn’t flawless; there are a couple unfinished parts in the emulation; most notably the transparencies; they’re very pixelated. I also noticed that during the Gigra battle, whenever you got in front of it, the sky would have a solid texture of green. Probably a layer issue.
Sound emulation is almost perfect; the BGM is a couple notches faster than how it would sound if a game were running on a console. Sound effects were perfect, I didn’t have any problems with those.
I didn’t run into any heavy glitches like freezing, but that’s probably because I was running PDS off of a mounted ISO. You’ll have to try the disc for yourself.
If SSF continues, I’ll be very happy. Hopefully Sega Saturn emulators will gain features like those in ePSXe.
Hey thanks a lot. Turbo worked out well. It’s funny how a few in game cinematic bits work better on a pc than they do running on the Saturn.
I’ll give SSF a run later too and see what I think.
Kick ass avatar Calzvicsius!
Haha thanks. I just made it when I got to camp after the Gigra fight. Yay for high resolutions.
Wow, it really does; I hadn’t heard anything on SSF for quite some time, and didn’t know it had come this far. This version does seem to give much more accurate emulation than GiriGiri, with nowhere near as many / as serious rendering errors; I just had a quick go on PD1 and PDZ and didn’t notice anything wrong with the visuals at all.
On the down side though, it seems to be fixed at a fairly low resolution approximating the Saturn’s real-life visuals, unless there are some graphics options that can change this, which I haven’t noticed? But yeah, for anyone just wanting to play Saturn games on their PC I’d definitely recommend giving this a try; it seems more generally stable and accurate than GiriGiri.
If you’ve been playing the PAL version of PDS, that would probably be the reason for this: the PAL version of the game unfortunately isn’t PAL optimised, so numerous cut-scenes have glitches in them where things happen slightly out of sync when played on a PAL Saturn. (If not, I have no idea why this would be. =P)
[quote=“Lance Way”]
On the down side though, it seems to be fixed at a fairly low resolution approximating the Saturn’s real-life visuals, unless there are some graphics options that can change this, which I haven’t noticed?[/quote]
There aren’t any graphical options as far as I know. The resolution is fixed at the defualt output of the Sega Saturn console; 640 x 480.
I donwloaded SSF.I get the options menu I hit OK.What now?
How cna I actually play? CD Open does nothing.Is there some step I’m missing?
Bare in mind this is the very first time I try using an emulator so maybe there’s something awfully naive that I’m missing.CD image?
What am I suppose to pu after “BIOS”?
PS:Strangely (and I’m doing this on my enw ocmputer) when I insert the Saa CD1 on my computer I get no files displayed.It’s blank.I tried using my other drive (DVD-RW) and i get the same result.Is this normal?
I haven’t tried SSF yet, but the reason the files aren’t showing on the CD could be because hidden files are turned off (I believe that they are by default). In Windows Explorer, go Tools > Folder Options > View and then check “Show hidden files and folders”. Windows XP tries to hide anything that the user could break (system files, etc), but can end up hiding too much sometimes.