I need some ideas and comments

[segasaturndude]

I had some ideas for the Sega Saturn i wan't to try, possibly an External Hardware accelerator, and maybey a DVD add-on. I also had a thought on a better music visualizer for Cd playback for when you have those awsome partys . anyways does anybody have any ideas also?

[Warp2063]

You dream big. I like that. However, with the exception of the music visualizer, those projects dwarf your game project in terms of difficulty and feasibility. As in "off the charts."


A better music visualizer could be pretty simple, actually. I see three ways it could be accomplished.
1. Write it like a game. -- This would be by far the easiest method. All it would require is a way to play regular CD-Rs. (Swap trick or modchip). You'd write your visualization program like a Saturn game and program it to respond to CD audio. You'd load it up in the Saturn like any other game on a CD-R, and once it finished loading, it would then prompt you to insert an audio CD. Easy-peasy. The difficulty of this whole thing is writing Saturn software, and this would be a pretty simple program to write.

2. Put it on an expansion cartridge. -- I know this is possible - the Action Replay loads up before a game disc, and this would work in much the same way. I've also heard of someone else who managed to make their own game cartridge for the Saturn, although I don't know exactly how much work was involved, nor do I know its limitations. In theory, however, this method would be only slightly harder than the first one... you'd write your program pretty much the same as before, with maybe a few minor alterations. The hardest part would be getting it on a bootable cartridge. Not bad.

3. Write a new BIOS. -- I think this is what you had in mind, and it would be downright nuts. Theoretically you could dump the old BIOS, reverse-engineer it, write a new BIOS that had your CD visualizer software on it, burn it to a new chip, build an interface board for your new BIOS, desolder the old BIOS, and solder in the new BIOS interface board. The risk to your hardware would be immense - not just the desoldering and soldering to a surface-mount board (difficult, but if you're skilled enough, possible) - but the chance of fouling up connections and causing electrical shorts that could burn out parts of the system, potential timing difficulties with the new chip, messing up on the bootstrapping of the various hardware components of the system with potentially destructive consequences, writing errors into the BIOS causing it to not handle system calls correctly, causing game software to crash out... For this method you'd need a bunch of luck, a ton of electrical knowledge, a very deep and thorough understanding of the low-level operations of the Saturn and its individual components, extremely steady hands... yeah.


An external hardware accelerator for the Saturn would be like a 32X for the Genesis. Very few games were developed for it due to the complexity of writing games for it and its arrival so near to the release of the Saturn itself. Like option 3 above, you'd need an INCREDIBLY deep and thorough understanding not only of the Saturn's workings, but the very device you were trying to build. That really isn't a one-person task... that's a team of highly-skilled digital electricians and programmers. Heck, the people who try to write Saturn emulators don't even have a full understanding of the system - that's why there are so few working Saturn emulators out there. In a lot of ways it's easier to design a new system than it is to design an add-on to another one. I'm even done some preliminary planning for a game system of my own... but it's still a big project - one I don't think I'll ever complete.

I'm not completely sure about what would be required to put a DVD drive in the Saturn. You'd definitely need new drive electronics... a faster motor, a new laser, new chips to work with those... most likely you'd need a new main BIOS to handle the different disc standard. The Saturn isn't powerful enough to do MPEG decoding on the fly - that's why MPEG decoder cards were sold in Japan and Europe - so you could watch VCDs - a close predecessor to DVDs. However, none of those would be powerful or fast enough to decode a DVD's MPEG stream either, so you'd need to design and build a new one of those. I believe the Saturn is capable of outputting DVD resolutions... and with the new MPEG card doing all the heavy lifting in terms of decoding, I imagine the video chipset could output it... I don't know about the drive's connection to the data bus... whether that would be fast enough... and then after all these modifications, I don't know if the system could still be used to play Saturn games. This project would probably be about as difficult as the external accelerator project... possibly worse.




I think a more realistic project - although still insanely difficult and beyond our level of expertise - would be to build a LAN adapter for the system and write a new web browser to support it. It would be great if it was contained in a cartridge expansion that also added RAM to the system so that larger files could be handled by the browser. Flash would still be beyond the processing capabilities of the system, but at least web browsing would be a little faster.

[segasaturndude]

If I remember correctly, that the netlink browser said that it had macromedia flash on it, which was a precursor to the aquisition of macromedia Inc. into Adobe flash player. i think it might be possible to put a modified version of adobe flash player 9 into a new web browser designed for Lan if we got a working lan going.

[Warp2063]

If I remember correctly, that the netlink browser said that it had macromedia flash on it, which was a precursor to the aquisition of macromedia Inc. into Adobe flash player. i think it might be possible to put a modified version of adobe flash player 9 into a new web browser designed for Lan if we got a working lan going.

I think you're thinking of the Dreamcast browser, not the Saturn one. Also, Flash is really processor- and memory- intensive. Even if you got it working on the Saturn, it would be extremely, extremely slow. As in unusably slow. Plus, to get even a few megs of extra RAM, you'd need to use a RAM cart, which precludes the usage of the modem you'd be using to connect to the internet anyway... unless you're talking about my hypothetical LAN cartridge.

[segasaturndude]

yes a lan cartridge with built in ram would be very convienent for internet usage

[segasaturndude]

I've also heard that the Sega saturn can Address up to 128mb ram cartridges or upgrades. this would be very good for the web browser and system speeds

[Warp2063]

I don't know what the Saturn's maximum addressability is... but just adding tons of RAM won't speed up a system. RAM is going to be a limiting factor in loading any web page, especially modern ones... but it's the modem's speed first, then the Saturn's processors next that are the real bottlenecks to speedy internet browsing right now. Even an old connection such as a 10base-T ethernet connection would increase the speed of loading pages into memory... and adding memory would allow the Saturn to load larger (file size) pages. However, the processors are still going to have to process that data and display it on the screen... and the more there is to process, the longer it'll take to display.

[segasaturndude]

if we were able to take advantage of the dual processors, we could speed up alot of things

[segasaturndude]

there are 2 processors, and each is rated at 25 Million instructions per second, but together its 50MIPS

[Warp2063]

if we were able to take advantage of the dual processors, we could speed up alot of things

Not really. You'd think that two processors would double the processing capabilities of the system, but due to the way the system was built, only one processor can access memory at a time. So the processors spend a lot of time waiting their turn for the RAM. And even if that bottleneck didn't exist, we're still talking about two 28MHz processors. They're not exactly speed demons. Most people in the US don't even use a sub-1GHz machine these days, and even those can be slow when it comes to certain things on the internet.

[Warp2063]

there are 2 processors, and each is rated at 25 Million instructions per second, but together its 50MIPS

The laptop that I'm using right now is capable of around 25 billion instructions per second. We're talking about 1000x the instructions per second count of a single SH-2. Computers have improved a bit since the mid-90's. So has the internet, and therefore the system requirements of machines that access it.

When they're talking about instructions per second, they're not talking about high-level instructions like:

Code: Select all

String msg1 = "Hello, World!";
System.out.println(msg1);

They're talking about individual, low-level instructions like these (shown as H-1 assembly rather than assembled machine code):

Code: Select all

ADD X
SUB Y
PUSH
LDC 24
SUBR 1
DLOC 1
LDI

A whole program in H-1 assembly to do just that println command might look like this (again, in H-1 assembly, which actually makes text input/output operations much easier than they would be on a different machine... so the code on a different machine would be much longer than this):

Code: Select all

msg1: dw 'H'
dw 'e'
dw 'l'
dw 'l'
dw 'o'
dw ','
dw ' '
dw 'W'
dw 'o'
dw 'r'
dw 'l'
dw 'd'
dw '!'
dw 0

main: ldc msg1
push
loop: ldr 0
ldi
jz exit
aout
ldc 1
addr 0
str 0
ja loop
exit: dloc 1
halt
end main

Complex commands have to be broken up into tiny commands that a processor can actually do work on. A computer is just a very fast calculator that can make extremely simple decisions about what instructions to operate on next depending on the results of other calculations. So you can see that with even a few lines of code, you could be looking at hundreds of instructions. I'm only operating on a single string of characters there. Web pages have whole pages of characters that have to be processed and interpreted by a browser (HTML), and then the information gleaned from those files used to display other things, like graphics (each bit of which must be operated on to convert it so something the Saturn can display)... And that's just simple HTML. Java and Flash add even more complexity.

[segasaturndude]

this is a good time to develop an External hardware accelerator, or someway to speed up the way the system works

[Warp2063]

this is a good time to develop an External hardware accelerator, or someway to speed up the way the system works

Do you have a team of people highly experienced with the deep inner electrical workings of an archaic piece of technology and the means of paying them for their time? Either that or a hobbyist or two with that same level of knowledge and the free time to immerse themselves in such an endeavor? We're not talking a weekend project here. You're looking at months of work, minimum, for something that at best you'd end up with a prototype for - and then you'd have to develop software that specifically uses the accelerator. It's not just going to magically speed up software on the system. You can't just overclock the Saturn, either... not without potentially burning it out. Even if you cooled it well enough, eventually you'll get it going faster than it can accurately perform computations, and it'll crash. Not to mention if you have any software or hardware that depends on the original timing of the Saturn, it won't run properly.

[segasaturndude]

comparing making a visualizer, to making a game would making a visualizer take less time to make, and be less complicated?

[Warp2063]

A visualization program would most likely be easier. Games usually involve a lot of user interaction and often have many possible program states, making them much harder to write and debug. A visualizer program would expect minimal user interaction, has a very limited number of program states, and for the most part should be dealing only with common music CD's... so it should be relatively easy. The hardest part would be designing the visualization effects, determining how to display them, and writing the algorithms to control the effects based on the music.