5th Generation - Sega Saturn

The Sega Saturn video game console was developed by Sega and released in 1994 at the price of $399, although the development of the game started in 1992 under the name Giga Drive. This 32-bit console came out after the Sega Genesis 16-bit console of 1988.

The Sega Saturn was a great success in Japan, but in the United States it was not so popular with the consumers and therefore it did not sell as many units as it was expected, especially after the Nintendo 64 was launched in 1996. The Sega Saturn sold 9.5 million units worldwide and is considered to have been a commercial failure.

Figure 1 - Sega Saturn game console

Sega added a 3D processor to the console to compete with the PlayStation, but having two processors made the Saturn a lot more challenging for game developers, so the games ended up going on the PlayStation.  But even if 3D was not one of the Saturn’s strengths, it had one of the best 2D processors in gaming ever released and it also included a 4MB ram cartridges to give the console more graphical capabilities over the PlayStation.

The console used two Hitachi SH-2 32-bit RISC processors of 28.6 MHz each, a Yamaha Saturn Custom Sound Processor YMF292 and a total internal memory of 5156 KB. It was able to display 16.77 million colors simultaneously on a screen which had a resolution up to 704x224 pixels.

The Sega Saturn was discontinued in 1998 and replaced by the Sega Dreamcast which was released in November 1998 in Japan and in 1999 in North America. Games that were being developed for the Sega Saturn, such as Sonic Adventure and Virtua Fighter, were cancelled and moved to the Sega Dreamcast, due to the Saturn’s commercial failure and hardware limitations.

Some games that could be played on the Sega Saturn where; Nights into Dreams, Virtua Fighter, Sonic R and Mortal Kombat II. 

Bibliography:

Wikipedia.org, (2015). Sega Saturn. [online] Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sega_Saturn [Accessed 5 May 2015]

Racketboy.com, (2013). Sega Saturn: The Beginner’s Guide. [online] Available at: http://www.racketboy.com/retro/sega-saturn-101-beginners-guide [Accessed 5 May 2015]

Segaretro.org, (2015). Sega Saturn. [online] Available at: http://segaretro.org/Sega_Saturn [Accessed 5 May 2015]