Sega Saturn

A 32-Bit CD-ROM based video game system developed by SEGA which was released in 1995 and ultimately was a commercial failure outside of the Japanese market. The Saturn was the second console designed during SEGA's "Planet Projects." The other two consoles designed were the SEGA Jupiter which became the 32X and the SEGA Neptune which was canceled before any working prototypes were finished. The SEGA Saturn was originally designed to be the fastest 2D console on the market, and it still holds this title proudly, but after Sony announced the fully 3D capable Playstation SEGA decided to hastily add 3D capability to the Saturn. The resulting hardware ultimately became the Saturn's downfall. Dual CPUs and the multiple audio and video co-processors brought the Saturn's total processor count to 8. This unorthodox architecture made the Saturn notoriously difficult to program for and discouraged third party developers who decided it would be easier to program games for the Sony Playstation and Nintendo 64 instead. Although the Saturn has more on board RAM and more processing power then the Playstation no game programmers were ever able to fully utilize the Saturn's hardware. The only game ever designed to take full advantage of the Saturn's hardware was Shenmue which unfortunately was never released for the system and was eventually moved to the SEGA Dreamcast. However working demos of Shenmue showed impressively detailed fully 3D environments and animation but because the game was never completed and no new games are being developed for the system the true graphical capabilities of the SEGA Saturn may never be known.