If you don’t know Hideki Sato, he was Sega’s hardware designer and had a major hand in all of their console designs. He sadly passed away this February but back in 2018 and 2019, he was interviewed about the Sega Saturn and MD Shock (re)posted the translated highlights.
You get a variety of topics including how the PlayStation influenced the Saturn design, difficulties of developing for the Saturn (a classic topic), and how Sega responded to the negative impact of Saturn’s lower sales.
You can read the full transcripts here but here’s an excerpt:
On the difficulties of developing for the Saturn:
“At the beginning, there was no compiler. You had to program the SH in assembly. The people at Sega were good at assembly. That’s all they had been using on the MC68000. C, C++ were too slow to use.
“However, third parties struggled with programming the SH in assembly, and there were two of the CPUs along with a CD-ROM. We asked third parties to make games, but without development libraries, they couldn’t do anything. They’d take a week and barely even be able to get something to display on the screen, let alone be able to start making a game. Our third party support was awful. The hardware was incredibly difficult to use. However, if you worked with it a bit, you could get a ton of sprites, with scaling and rotation and so on.”
I have nothing but fond memories of the Saturn, even if they were fleeting. My cousins had one and for two weeks in 1996, I got to play games like NiGHTS and it altered my brain chemistry (fun fact: I have a project called NiTEDREAM which Distant Arcade falls under and that’s where the name and name styling comes from). I’ve not had much of a chance to revisit the console other than to play Baku Baku Animal a few months ago but I have an external CD drive and some disposable income so building a collection to play via emulation is accessible and I’m ready.
Does the Saturn get a bad rep? For the most part, I believe so. It wasn’t great for a lot of 3D games due to the architecture and performance. But it was superb for 2D and when the games were good, they were really good. I know I said I don’t have a deep knowledge of the console and catalogue but I’d still say to ignore the common criticisms of the Saturn and give it a go yourself (with managed expectations).