Back to index

Info for saturn


Sega Saturn (1994)

In 1994 Sega launched its new 32-bit console, just a few weeks ahead of its rival Sony Playstation.
The Playstation was much easier to develop for and quickly overtook the Saturn in sales. While
the Saturn was much more successful in Japan than it was in the US or Europe the lack of good
software and strong competition from the PlayStation doomed the Sega Saturn to a fate similar
to that of the Master System. The CDROM based system did have some great arcade conversions such
as House of The Dead and Virtua Fighter 3. Despite being the first consoles with Internet
capabilities (via the NetLink adapter), Sega was relatively quiet after the slow demise of the
Saturn. Sega turns its focus to the 128-bit Dreamcast a few years later.

Features:
CPU: Two Hitachi SH2 7604 32 Bit RISC chips at ~27 MHz (36 MIPS)
Sound CPU: Motorola 68EC000 at 11.3 MHz
Sound: 32 Channels, with 16 bit sampling at a sampling rate of 44.1 KHz max.
Resolution: 704 x 512 (horz) 60.00 Hz
Colors: 32768 (static)
Main Memory: 1 Megabyte of SDRAM and 1 Megabyte of DRAM
Internal Memory Card
Video Hardware: Two VDP (video display processors) chip sets (VRAM: 512Kb each)
-VDP1 Draw Sprites, lines, warped sprites (quads)
-VDP2 controls background graphics.
CDROM: Max 2x speed - custom interface controlled by Hitachi SH1 processor. (512 Kb Buffer RAM)

MESS Emulation State:
See source code for more information.
Bios starts requesting pad data so maybe we are now in the time set area ????
Need to emulate pad system, add more interrupts and get some grafix working so we can see exactly
where we are at this current time. Currently locks up waiting on (i guess) a response from the 68k
CPU. Probably need to emulate this shortly.


Generated on Sun Sep 21 17:27:54 2003