jon wrote:Why do you not accept that it got outsold in the United States by the PS1 52 million to 1.8 million because its 3d library was significantly inferior to the PS1's?
Okay Jon - I will give this one more go.
Regarding the first main question you have, why not take the effort and cite an article that suggests why the PS1 outsold the Saturn. These articles will have statistics, perhaps growth curves, you know the good stuff that gives us information. I know you read it somewhere so why not do me a favor and cite it for me and everyone to read. I am not being passive aggressive here. You are asking people like myself that may not have this information at hand. My answer would be an uneducated guess and I do not make those guesses. Step up to the plate, earn your keep. Take 5 mins to cite what you read. That is only fair.
Both Pixelated and myself, Pixelated more than me (in regards to evidence and citing his sources) have busted our asses here. Time for you to put some work in.
jon wrote:If you weren't ganging up on me you would've answered this question.
I will summarize my thoughts from all my posts - please do read through it this time. Yes my grammar sucks, I am an engineer who works in R&D and writes things in code or math, I got no time for Queen's English.
I surmised -
1. The Saturn kicked the bucket in 1998 but even murmurs in 1997 were suggesting Sony were going to ditch and run with something else. That is going to motivate developers a whole lot to develop great content, if at all possible on the hardware.
2. Mario 64 is Nintendo genius. Arrived fall 1996 and is different to everything before it. Sony took 2 years to catch up - it had nothing like it before. Saturn did not have even two years of existence once Mario 64 released. No way could Sega complete such a project in little over a year. To make great you need to study great. Not like Nintendo were handing out the manual for creating it.
3. In hypothetical port scenarios I mentioned you could not move Mario 64 assets over to Saturn. Saturn was not built for N64's method of rendering graphics. Neither was the Playstation for that matter. If one were to attempt a ground up development then how it turns out depends on the team, resources, and the capability of the hardware. There is only a blanket answer because there is no determinism. In the hands of the average developer I guess it would look like crap on the Saturn. I have no idea what a talented development team could do. The Saturn could push the quad numbers needed, whether it could do that, texture map, and handle the Matrix math as the little plumber ran around I do not know. The PS1 could probably do it but I say that with only 70% confidence. I told you there were no easy answers.
4. I also said both Saturn and PS1 would give the poor old N64 a good shanking when it comes to Polygon counts. N64 is no match here. Ports developed on Saturn/PS1 going over to Nintendo would equally not work - the N64 was not designed to push 100K textured polygons per second (at least not without optimization at RISC level with specific microcodes which most developers did not have access to), let alone 180K that runs on some PS1 games. The Saturn could pull around 60K-80K textured polys per second, N64 would typically do half that. The N64 cannot run Dead or Alive as it ran on the Saturn - no f**ing chance. It does not have the hardware to do it, it cannot draw enough triangles per sec to keep up. You could try a ground up redevelopment but asking me how it would look your guess is as good as mine. I guess with Factor 5's miracle microcode, with them at the healm, it would turn out better with more FX. In the hands of most other developers it would be lower poly count, blurry, and move at 15-20fps. Some fogging on backgrounds as well just for good measure.
5. I finally said that all fifth gen hardware has it's strengths and weaknesses. There was no perfect console that gen and there was no jack of all trades either. You have in your mind that the N64 was the Master of All Trades, fair due to you, believe what you want.
So the answer to why the Saturn cannot do Mario 64. My response it I do not know. Perhaps the same reason why the N64 cannot pull off Dead or Alive. Different hardwares, different methods, different constraints.