any body remember ff7 being converted....

Shitface

Established Member
A long time ago there was a group (cant remember there name) that was putting ff7 on saturn... it was a very lengthy project. Anyone remember that? what happen to that?
 
i remember it......and i have 6 walpapers of sepiroth (in the flames) with the FF7 logo.....and a satrun thingy on it too!

yea.....i remember it alright!

but i lost the URL....(still have the pics tho!)
 
As far as I can remember all that happned was a "contest" to design a logo for the project. There were several entries but as far as I know nobody ever won and nothing ever happened after that.
 
The project never went anywhere. It got to the "theory" stage. Also, I tracked down that page a long time ago, when it had different news updates - I am STILL not entirely sure if its the same guy or not. Irregardless, I'm not so sure I'd expect anything from this one either.
 
Originally posted by SegaSquad@May 21, 2003 @ 06:21 PM

A long time ago there was a group (cant remember there name) that was putting ff7 on saturn... it was a very lengthy project. Anyone remember that? what happen to that?

You really want to see FF7 rendered in ugly-ass squares?
 
Originally posted by DBOY@May 22, 2003 @ 05:54 PM

You really want to see FF7 rendered in ugly-ass squares?

Er... actually, I don't know if you're aware of this or not, but quadratics have the potential to look a whole lot better than triangles, though AFAIK no Saturn game ever used non-coplanar vertices.
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You do realise Saturn has some unbelievably great looking games? Search for screenshots of Saturn's Quake port.
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Still don't believe Saturn could easily do FFVII justice?
 
Search for screenshots of Final Fight Revenge. THe second to last game ever released on Saturn and a game that was two years in development prior to it's release.

And it was using the 4MB cart.
 
Originally posted by DBOY@May 22, 2003 @ 07:18 PM

Search for screenshots of Final Fight Revenge. THe second to last game ever released on Saturn and a game that was two years in development prior to it's release.

And it was using the 4MB cart.

I never said it was easy to set up Quads.

Also keep in mind, Saturn has four main processors... and I can assure you, even managing two can be a pain at times.

Then there's also the question of how much is going on at a given moment in Final Fight Revenge.

And finally... have you seen the screenshots of the Sega Saturn Shenmue?
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I have a video of it.
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I didn't know FFR used the RAM cart.

My RAM is built into my Action Replay so I guess I wouldn't be able to tell the difference.
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That was one of the most stupid things I ever heard. Just because a company makes an ass-looking game by the end of a console's life, does this means that piece of shit is the BEST the console has to offer?

May I point you to some "sweet" looking PSX games?

Saturn DOA looks a LOT better than FF revenge. The character models have a very, very good amount of polygons, the game runs at 720x448 AND at rock-solid 60 frames per second.

Anyway, the PSX also used quads, for a good deal of time. I remember one of the biggest features in Tomb Raider III was "models that are made of real triangles!". The difference is that, internally, the PSX splits the quad in two triangles for cheesy and fast texture warpin... err, I mean, texture *mapping*, whereas the Saturn would use an actual quad perspective effect to map a quad texture to the 4 screen coordinates.

A good example is Shining Force 3, and the field levels. The small mountains have a good shape, and sometimes they even look slightly curved, since the Saturn did a subtle curving effect if the 2D quad was convex. Too bad few game developers noticed that they could use this to reduce polygon usage.

I think it could do FF7, with some changes, of course. The exploration and world-map modes can be done easily, but the battles...

The transparency effects during battles would need some cleverness to be reproduced without having to use the god-awful mesh transparencies, but actual transparencies are very possible: anyone who played the Saturn version of Grandia can tell that, since ALL spells in Grandia are 3D and use nice transparency effects (gradual transparency with additive effects).

But transparency overlapping would not be possible, I fear, since even in Grandia, you can see sometimes that the transparent objects won't show other transparent objects behind them, so some spells that abuse on it would look weird, unless they were redesigned.

Anyway getting a game with that amount of polygons (in the battle scenes) running on the Saturn is a task I think only some skilled programmers could get done. Like a few people at AM2, Sonic Team, Team Andromeda/Smilebit and a few scattered dudes from other companies, like ppl from Game Arts, the insane Tecmo dudes (they seem to squeeze performance from anything they touch) and a few others.

The average joe with a good idea, little programming experience and homebrewing Saturn dev tools and these libraries that are floating around simply can't do it. No way. For such project, one would need a *SOLID* set of libraries, prolly customized, and would need to go for ASM all the way.

I seriously doubt a Saturn game engine made with C++, the GCC compulers and the GLP libraries that are floating around the net can have enough performance to run something at the same level as the first Panzer Dragoon.
 
AFAIK no Saturn game ever used non-coplanar vertices

That's probably because VDP2, like most early "3D" hardware, has no concept of a Z axis, so all vertices are coplanar.

But transparency overlapping would not be possible, I fear, since even in Grandia, you can see sometimes that the transparent objects won't show other transparent objects behind them, so some spells that abuse on it would look weird, unless they were redesigned.

If my reading of the VDP2 manual is correct, overlapping transparencies is possible, but is a tremendous pain in the ass to do without screwing up the effect.

Anyway getting a game with that amount of polygons (in the battle scenes) running on the Saturn is a task I think only some skilled programmers could get done. Like a few people at AM2, Sonic Team, Team Andromeda/Smilebit and a few scattered dudes from other companies, like ppl from Game Arts, the insane Tecmo dudes (they seem to squeeze performance from anything they touch) and a few others.

*cough*Treasure*cough*
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The average joe with a good idea, little programming experience and homebrewing Saturn dev tools and these libraries that are floating around simply can't do it.

Agreed. I'm not sure Saturn Utena had little programming knowledge, but it was clearly too big of a project for him to take on alone.

For such project, one would need a *SOLID* set of libraries, prolly customized, and would need to go for ASM all the way.

Agreed again. What would be needed are things like:

- A game-specific hardware library optimized for the tasks that the game performs (basically this would be 90% composed of rewrites of the functions that the next item can't handle).

- A smart disassembler / static translator (probably would have to be designed specifically for the project, though it could be reused in later ports) to do termination / datapath analysis and translate the bulk of the core game code. This is the sort of thing that probably requires a solid grounding in algorithmic theory and compiler design to pull off properly.

- Various tools to extract and translate the models, animation data, backgrounds, action scripts (for the in-game cutscenes; I assume these are coded in an interpreted scripting language rather than hardcoded), music, sound effects, etc.

- 48-hour days (not strictly necessary, but it would be quite helpful
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well, you don't need to disassemble the whole game and 'port' it to Saturn from there - as you said it would be insanely difficult, and moreover I don't think Square/Sony would like the idea if they ever found out...

I think a more viable option would be to reprogram a game that just *resembles* FF7 as much as possible...

In response to M3d10n (or what's-his-name): I think you should use *some* C, because the SBL/SGL does some things that are a real pain in the ass to do by yourself (i.e. CD functions)... or can SNASMSH2 be used in conjunction with SBL/SGL too?
 
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