Back in the day, the Sega Saturn was often viewed as a weaker and somewhat unsuccessful console, one that still cost more to buy than the PlayStation. Sales took a beating, marking the beginning of Sega's exit from the console market. But... the truth is that the Saturn wasn't weak at all, quite the opposite.
Sega had packed it full of technology, and the problem was instead that the console was considered incredibly difficult to develop for, with inadequate documentation and components that were hard to get to work together. In fact, it was so powerful that Argonauts founder Jez San (best known as the programmer of Star Fox, among other titles) weighed in on the debate the other year, saying that "it was exceptionally more powerful than the PlayStation at the time", with the caveat that it was unreasonably difficult to develop for.
Additionally, Sega executive Yukio Sugino said in a Famitsu interview that the company had previously explored the possibility of releasing a Sega Saturn Mini, but that this was complicated by the fact that "the Sega Saturn has surprisingly high performance." We got yet another example of just how powerful it really was in January when a Saturn developer demonstrated that the console was actually capable of ray tracing, and the community regularly showcases the incredible graphics the device is actually capable of in the right hands. Not bad for a piece of hardware from 1994.
The reason we're bringing this up is that the Saturn's unusual design has made it difficult to emulate. Emulators exist, but none have produced a perfect result yet. Now, however, one of the biggest problems has been solved.
It is Yaba Sanshiro developer devMiyax (a well-known figure in the Saturn community) who writes on his website, via Time Extension, that he has solved one of the console's biggest quirks, namely that the Saturn's VDP1 chip renders sprites and polygons as quadrilaterals (quads) instead of triangles, which has long been the norm:
"When you render a quad on a modern GPU, it is normally split into two triangles. If you draw a sprite this way, a texture that should look natural across the whole quad can appear distorted across the seam between the two triangles.
"The new path runs a compute shader for each VDP1 command. In the current screen-side reverse-mapping approach, each thread is responsible for a screen pixel — or, when upscaled, an output HD pixel.
"In places where tessellation was too coarse, textures used to come out distorted. With this method, smooth rendering is achieved through simple per-pixel logic."
He provides a concrete example of how much better it looks in the image below, where you can check out the previous emulation on the left and the new one on the right, which is much closer to how it should look.
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Despite this improvement, emulating the Saturn this way doesn't cost any more performance, but we're getting significantly closer to the original games. Now we just have to hope that Sega takes notice and releases the Sega Saturn Mini that the community has been begging for over the past ten years...