Console Wars: Doom SNES vs 32X

[VGA]

The Saturn also had an epic 2MB of RAM and 1.5MB of VRAM, that is many times over what the 32X had. If we judge each port's framerate according to the hardware's capabilities, the Saturn must be the biggest failure and the 32X a big success.

[roboticmehdi2]

Yeah. There many ways to rank them: absolute rank (Digital foundry's ranking is this), bang per buck ranking (Genesis/32x is very good here actually, considering that it was cheap), per hardware capability ranking (shame to saturn and 3do, snes/sfx isn't bad at all in this ranking, it only had so much capable hardware, it's as good as it could be), etc...

 

Also it is known that some of these could be better, but were not due to reasons. 3do: extremely rushed, saturn: carmack did not allow fast version to be reeleased due to texture warping that he hated so much, Genesis/32x: a bit rushed, could have more levels, Snes/sfx: nothing to say here, maybe could be 1 frame faster or 3-4% higher resolution if any little optimizations are left :D

Edited February 11, 2020 by roboticmehdi2

[VGA]

The Saturn could have a high framerate software-rendered port, as proven by the similar but weaker hardware of the 32X. The developers dropped the ball and now people blame Carmack for not giving the go-ahead on the mythical texture warped version ... I wonder if there is video of that version.

[cybdmn]

55 minutes ago, VGA said:

The Saturn also had an epic 2MB of RAM and 1.5MB of VRAM, that is many times over what the 32X had. If we judge each port's framerate according to the hardware's capabilities, the Saturn must be the biggest failure and the 32X a big success.

 

Yea, and if i plug in two Ferrari engines into your car, you can fly with it.

 

A game console or a computer isn't just the sum of the amount of hardware and memory you put in.

[cybdmn]

6 minutes ago, VGA said:

The Saturn could have a high framerate software-rendered port, as proven by the similar but weaker hardware of the 32X. The developers dropped the ball and now people blame Carmack for not giving the go-ahead on the mythical texture warped version ... I wonder if there is video of that version.

 

 

No, Carmack blamed himself, as shown in his twitter posting.

[taufan99]

Found this as well.

Now I can't decide which one is better to use for comparison(s)!

EDIT: The owner agreed as soon as I asked whether I can use his remixes for comparisons. I'll settle with this one for sure.

Edited February 11, 2020 by taufan99

[cybdmn]

Does the soundtrack really running on the original hardware, and does it run while the game is actually played? Because from other "fixed 32x OST" videos, it wasn't clear if they use the actual hardware, or just limit other hardware to what the SEGA soundchip could do.

 

In this video, gameplay is clearly not from the 32x, seems to be (G)ZDoom. It would be interesting to see the game on the actual hardware with this soundtrack.

[VGA]

According to the description it doesn't seem to be running on original hardware. No talks of a romhack or anything.

 

Also, I don't understand why people refuse to accept that the Saturn is faster than a 32X and there is no reason to resort to a hardware renderer with texture warping. Since the developers failed and the result was disastrous, Carmack said it may have been better if he hadn't intervened. That doesn't invalidate the previous statement.

[cybdmn]

And i don't understand why you refuse to understand, that faster on paper does not mean software (especially if the system is completely new to the developers) runs perfectly optimized. As i told you before, the Saturn hardware was a rather complex mixture of various processors with various clockspeed, and they had to optimize the code for kind of SMP, which was usually needed for big server stuff at that time, far less programmers had any expertise or experience in this field. We still talking about the mid-90ies, not today, where even your fucking phone has a multicore processor with an operating system optimized for it, and plenty of APIs you can use. We talk about a piece of hardware, where the programmers had to crawl deep into the hardware documentations to optimize their code.

 

The Saturn is like your car with two engines, and a turbo loader, which you aren't allowed to use, and that's what happened to Saturn Doom.

[taufan99]

1 hour ago, cybdmn said:

Does the soundtrack really running on the original hardware, and does it run while the game is actually played? Because from other "fixed 32x OST" videos, it wasn't clear if they use the actual hardware, or just limit other hardware to what the SEGA soundchip could do.

 

In this video, gameplay is clearly not from the 32x, seems to be (G)ZDoom. It would be interesting to see the game on the actual hardware with this soundtrack.

From the video's description;

 

"So, not too long ago, I was contacted by someone who knows Chilly Willy. Chilly Willy is a well-known romhacker, homebrewer, Doom modder, etc, and he took a liking to the remixes I had already posted on my channel. As it turns out, he's been working on a revised 32X port to make it closer to the Jaguar port. The 32X version only had 16 levels, where the Jaguar has 24, so he's working from the Jaguar WAD files to put those levels into the 32X version. But anyways, we got to talking, and he asked me to cover all the rest of the songs from the Doom soundtrack as well, and now I've basically covered the whole thing! Also, I discovered something was inaccurate about the program I use to rip FM instruments, in that it messed up the Detune parameter. After going back and fixing the afflicted instruments, it sounds far richer in a lot of areas. Hope you enjoy!"

 

Still, I can't say much if these can actually be put in the 32X cartridge. Fingers crossed to any Sega hardware master confirming this.

[VGA]

20 minutes ago, cybdmn said:

And i don't understand why you refuse to understand, that faster on paper does not mean software (especially if the system is completely new to the developers) runs perfectly optimized. As i told you before, the Saturn hardware was a rather complex mixture of various processors with various clockspeed, and they had to optimize the code for kind of SMP, which was usually needed for big server stuff at that time, far less programmers had any expertise or experience in this field. We still talking about the mid-90ies, not today, where even your fucking phone has a multicore processor with an operating system optimized for it, and plenty of APIs you can use. We talk about a piece of hardware, where the programmers had to crawl deep into the hardware documentations to optimize their code.

 

The Saturn is like your car with two engines, and a turbo loader, which you aren't allowed to use, and that's what happened to Saturn Doom.

You don't need to use all the processors, dude. And most games did not. You can only use the main CPU duo, which is the same as the 32X but a few mhz faster. And with 2MB of RAM. Software rendering means you avoid all the pitfalls of its crappy 3D engine.

 

I mean if Doom 32X did not exist, you might get away with your dual processor complexity handwaving. But why do it now?

[cybdmn]

5 minutes ago, VGA said:

You don't need to use all the processors, dude. And most games did not. You can only use the main CPU duo, which is the same as the 32X but a few mhz faster. And with 2MB of RAM. Software rendering means you avoid all the pitfalls of its crappy 3D engine.

 

I mean if Doom 32X did not exist, you might get away with your dual processor complexity handwaving. But why do it now?

 

I give up. You have won, you are clearly much more clever than the actual developers, they should have asked you to do the ports.

[VGA]

All I am saying is that hardware rendering was not the only way to get playable framerate. The developers released a bad, unoptimised port on the Saturn. The proof is the 32X version running way better on similar but inferior hardware.

 

And the 32X was just crappy, failed addon hardware to the Genesis with no impressive games. And very few of them. It would be as bad or worse to code/debug than the Saturn.

Edited February 11, 2020 by VGA

[Redneckerz]

9 hours ago, VGA said:

Isn't the Saturn hardware closely related to the 32X dual CPU hardware? Shouldn't that port run at least as good as the 32X version?

The two systems are similar, but not fully. The design philosophy of both machines is different.  Lets take a trip down memory lane:

 

Sega Retro says the following about the Saturn version of Doom:

 

Quote

Saturn programmer Jim Bagley had originally written an engine more suited to the Saturn, allowing VDP1 to handle the textured walls, floors and ceilings. Carmack reportedly veteoed the idea on behalf of id Software, as he did not like the affine texture warping inherent with 3D renderers which do not support texture perspective correction (like the VDP1). This means all rendering is handled by the dual SH-2 CPUs, save for the HUD and background texture which is updated separately by VDP2. Performance is an issue for the Saturn version of the game, averaging around 12FPS during the original (optimised) Doom levels, but frequently dropping below 10FPS when dealing with the more complex geometry of Doom II. The firing rate of the weapons is thought to have been increased to compensate for this.

 

And Jim Bagley himself says in a feature for RetroGamer (Found in the Black Book, mentioned below):

 

Quote

When I started the project, I had to do a demo for id Software to approve. I started by extracting all the levels and audio and textures from the WAD files and made my own Saturn version of this, then got an early version of the renderer working using the 3D hardware. This got sent off and a couple days later I got a call from John Carmack, who stipulated that under no circumstances could I use the 3D hardware to draw the screen. I had to use the processor like the PC. Thankfully I enjoy challenges, so it turned out to be a really enjoyable project, using both SH2s to render the display like the PC did it, using the 68000 to orchestrate them both.

However, it kneecapped the game and the speed-framerate suffered greatly.
— Jim Bagley for RetroGamer #134

 

In other words: There was a specific Saturn renderer and it could even hit 60 FPS, but Carmack opposed the idea. In 2014, he had reconsidered:

 

Quote

I hated affine texture swim and integral quad verts, but in hindsight, I probably should have let experiment.
— John Carmack

 

Thus rendering had to be shared across two seperate processors - Something Doom, and by comparison, most games of that era weren't suited for. Starting from Quake 3 however, The game included support for SMP, so that two physical processors (Not dual cores! Dual core means two cores are on the same die, two physical processors is two seperate cores.) can be used for the game.

 

The 32X version runs smoother (But compared to today's performance, 20 FPS at best is slow), but introduced a host of its own issues, including not running in full screen, a reworked soundtrack and even glitches. Several builds of 32X Doom exist, and bizarrely, even after the official version was released: It is assumed a revision was in the works, as the files dating to these builds is labeled Doom RR.

 

According to the Game Engine Black Book on DOOM by Fabian Sanglard (An excellent download, but please, just buy the book.), basically a defacto standardwork on all official versions of Doom, has this to say about the 32X and Saturn versions:

 

32X:

Quote

The design of the graphics subsystem was brilliantly simple; something of a coder’s dream for the day. It was built around two central processors feeding independent frame buffers with twice the depth per pixel of anything else out there. It was a wonderful platform for doing 3D in ways that nobody else was attempting outside the workstation market.
— Scot Bayless

 

Saturn:

Quote

The Saturn was essentially a 2D system with the ability to move the four corners of a sprite in a way that could simulate projection in 3D space, It had the advantage of doing the rendering in hardware, but the rendering scheme also tended to create a lot of problems, and the pixel overwrite rate was very high; much of the advantage of dedicated hardware was lost to memory access stalls. The 32X, on the other hand, did everything in software but gave two fast RISC chips tied to great big frame buffers and complete control to the programmer.
— Scot Bayless

 

To give an idea as to what programmers had to deal with, these are the system configurations of the 32X and Saturn:

 

32X:

 

Saturn:

 

So as you can see, not only did Jim Bagley had to ditch his Saturn optimized renderer, he then had to make the game logic run and work smoothly across this setup. Compare that to the 32X: Its a walk in the park versus a war zone, in terms of complexity (Look at the borded space that highlights whats inside a 32X.)

 

Thus now you know the why part as to why the Saturn version runs poorly (and even at a lower resolution than the 32X): A combination of limited timing, increased complexity of the machine and Carmack's decision. But that isn't to say the 32X version is much better. Both have their own peculiar limitations that fall short from providing the authentic Doom experience, but the 32X was semi-decent, at best.

 

8 hours ago, Quasar said:

Sometimes I feel like the only one who legit likes the SNES version and appreciates it for what it is. Lag or no.

Raises hand. What Randy Linden did with the SNES version is nothing short of black magic given the limitations he had to work with, even when using the SuperFX chip.

 

Edited February 11, 2020 by Redneckerz
Slight edit.

[Allard]

Not that it's too relevant, but there's a ROM hack that reinserts the eight missing Jaguar levels into the 32X version and another one that alters them so they are all completable. 
There's also an overall improvement project for it.

[Job]

9 hours ago, Quasar said:

Sometimes I feel like the only one who legit likes the SNES version and appreciates it for what it is. Lag or no.

I think there's a handful of people here, myself included, who can look past the surface and appreciate the accomplishment SNES Doom represented. It's definitively the, if not the most, complete port of Doom 1 to a console (possibly with the exception of the GBA port). Systems with far more processing power and potential failed in this execution, like Jaguar Doom. 

[Mattfrie1]

9 hours ago, VGA said:

The Saturn could have a high framerate software-rendered port, as proven by the similar but weaker hardware of the 32X. The developers dropped the ball and now people blame Carmack for not giving the go-ahead on the mythical texture warped version ... I wonder if there is video of that version.

 

Nope, nothing remains of Bagley's original version of the port. He said so himself in my Saturn Doom thread from a few years back.

 

 

[betabox]

On 2/11/2020 at 11:31 AM, Job said:

I think there's a handful of people here, myself included, who can look past the surface and appreciate the accomplishment SNES Doom represented. It's definitively the, if not the most, complete port of Doom 1 to a console (possibly with the exception of the GBA port). Systems with far more processing power and potential failed in this execution, like Jaguar Doom. 

 

Yep, count me as another one who likes the SNES port.

[Quasar]

In that diagram I can only help but notice only VDP1 seems to have direct access to the framebuffers. If that implies that VDP2 had to go over the system bus to negotiate access, or even worse, had to copy its own output to main RAM to get it there first, well, then using 2 CPUs may actually render worse performance than just writing the code to the VDP1 would. But somebody well versed in Saturn architecture would have to answer these questions; I know pretty much nothing.

 

I do know this though: John Carmack dictated that it be implemented this way, because it was the same sort of approach he used on the Jaguar with the dual chips there, overlapping the game code and rendering. I don't think he understood anything about the system architecture either.

[Redneckerz]

3 hours ago, Quasar said:

In that diagram I can only help but notice only VDP1 seems to have direct access to the framebuffers. If that implies that VDP2 had to go over the system bus to negotiate access, or even worse, had to copy its own output to main RAM to get it there first, well, then using 2 CPUs may actually render worse performance than just writing the code to the VDP1 would.

I remember reading about this somewhere (but don't tell me where) that this was indeed one culprit as to why getting proper performance out of the Saturn was so difficult.

 

It was a strange time for Sega. Back in 1994-1995, they had to support no less than 4-5 systems (Master System even, Megadrive, 32X, Mega CD and thus Saturn) which is quite insane if you apply that to today's consoles. The OG Xbox would still be getting games. :P

 

If that was not strange enough, Sega planned to include yet another console into the market aswell - The Neptune. Which was basically a Megadrive and a 32X in one shell.

 

 

The machine got cancelled as by the time the Neptune had a prototype, the Saturn was ready for release. Given the Saturn's superior specs, Sega thought the Neptune would not be a good idea, especially when launched in late 1995. Nowadays you can make your own modded Neptune however which results in a similar look as the prototype.

 

Quote

But somebody well versed in Saturn architecture would have to answer these questions; I know pretty much nothing.

 

I do know this though: John Carmack dictated that it be implemented this way, because it was the same sort of approach he used on the Jaguar with the dual chips there, overlapping the game code and rendering. I don't think he understood anything about the system architecture either.

Indeed. Its why he regretted the decision later on to have the 60 fps capable renderer discarded. Had he not given the decision to drop it, the Saturn version of Doom would be one of the highest performing versions of the little game that could.

 

That's life, i suppose. Back in the 90's consumer 3D hardware was moving at a rapid pace. In 1994-1995, Carmack's statements made total sense - Especially from Carmack's point of view, who just moved to Integraph Realizm's based dual Pentium Pro PC's to get Quake in OpenGL (Those 1995 cards are the earliest cards that should run Quake in GL, too). Carmack's own perception of 3D hardware (as noted by the .plans of the time) was also rapidly changing: He was moving to OpenGL and Verite, thus looking back at something as relatively primitive as the Saturn, with its odd choice of rendering that Carmack may have seen already in 1995 with the Nvidia NV1, it makes sense that he went for multiprocessor whenever he could.)

Edited February 12, 2020 by Redneckerz

[cybdmn]

4 hours ago, Quasar said:

In that diagram I can only help but notice only VDP1 seems to have direct access to the framebuffers. If that implies that VDP2 had to go over the system bus to negotiate access, or even worse, had to copy its own output to main RAM to get it there first, well, then using 2 CPUs may actually render worse performance than just writing the code to the VDP1 would. But somebody well versed in Saturn architecture would have to answer these questions; I know pretty much nothing.

 

I do know this though: John Carmack dictated that it be implemented this way, because it was the same sort of approach he used on the Jaguar with the dual chips there, overlapping the game code and rendering. I don't think he understood anything about the system architecture either.

 

As far as i always understood the Saturn tech, VDP1 was thought as kind of an graphics accelerator (for sprites and stuff), and VDP2 was thought for background only, because it was never developed as a "3D machine". This worked great for jump 'n runs, or games like Virtua Fighter, and maybe would have worked for Doom too, if only John Carmack hadn't vetoed.

[elend]

Back then, when I had my Saturn I always wanted to see a Doom port using Lobotomy's proprietary Slave Driver engine. This engine was good and ran very well on Saturn. Duke, Exhumed and even Quake show that it would have been possible. With compromises of course, but that would have been okay for me. I mean, people who want the 1:1 exact perfect port should maybe just play the original then. Heh.

[Redneckerz]

2 hours ago, elend said:

Back then, when I had my Saturn I always wanted to see a Doom port using Lobotomy's proprietary Slave Driver engine. This engine was good and ran very well on Saturn. Duke, Exhumed and even Quake show that it would have been possible. With compromises of course, but that would have been okay for me. I mean, people who want the 1:1 exact perfect port should maybe just play the original then. Heh.

Useless trivia:

Quake was going to be on PSX using that engine. It was unfortunately canned however. SlaveDriver really highlighted the power of the Saturn, including great framerates (And solid for that time) and colored lights.

 

If there is one engine i'd love to see reverse engineered to PC, it would be SlaveDriver.

[VGA]

 

 

Looks impressive at first but if you go at 3:00 you can notice the extreme texture warping when the player is close to the wall. In a game like Doom, in those mostly cramped maps, where you go through corridors and are almost constantly near vertical walls, it would look like an LSD trip. That's even worse than the PSX texture warping.

[famicommander]

There's no reason to play any of the old console versions except Jag and PS1.

 

3DO, 32X, Saturn, and SNES ports are unplayable in 2020. And this is coming from a guy who still plays Atari 2600 regularly.

 

[cybdmn]

I wouldn't call them unplayable, but none of them present anything special, with the exception of the Jaguar and the Playstation versions. The graphics differ very much from the PC original, and all other console ports.

[VGA]

3 hours ago, cybdmn said:

I wouldn't call them unplayable, but none of them present anything special, with the exception of the Jaguar and the Playstation versions. The graphics differ very much from the PC original, and all other console ports.

What does the Jaguar version offer compared to DOS?

 

@famicommander Anyway, I would consider 3DO, SNES and Saturn unplayable but 32X looks playable from the videos I've seen.

[cybdmn]

4 hours ago, VGA said:

What does the Jaguar version offer compared to DOS?

 

Maybe you should read to understand.

None of any other version of the game offer this kind of graphics.

[unerxai]

I've never played any of them but from what I've seen, SNES Doom's framerate would be way too low for me to be playable. 32x looks more playable but I'd still hate it for its other problems. Not to mention I suck at playing FPS with controllers, so add framerate issues to that and I'm in hell.

[VGA]

9 hours ago, unerxai said:

I've never played any of them but from what I've seen, SNES Doom's framerate would be way too low for me to be playable. 32x looks more playable but I'd still hate it for its other problems. Not to mention I suck at playing FPS with controllers, so add framerate issues to that and I'm in hell.

Imagine having an SNES and playing SNES games. Then you see screenshots in magazines of Doom running on the SNES! Wow! Tubular, dude!