Sega’s dreams of invading the 32-bit gaming world around four months earlier than its rival Sony Corporation did come in as unexpected in terms of launch, preparedness and value. The Sega Saturn was released in late 1994 in Japan and on May 1995 in North America. Because of the extremely fast-paced race during the decade, the Saturn was an ambitious project from Sega to combine two central processing units to harness power beyond the computing speeds of machines back then. Very sophisticated in terms of processing and concept, the Saturn was a bold attempt of Sega to move forward into the new century for gaming consoles and the entertainment industry as a whole.
The Sega Saturn sold around 9.5 Million units worldwide as of July 2007. The console had much anticipation from its worldwide market. Its Japan launch rallied around 170,000 units of sales in the first few days it was launched. Sega partnered with its fellow manufacturers to make the Saturn come to life. Its processors were developed by Hitachi. There were two Hitachi SuperH-2 7604 RISC processors running at 32 bits at 28.63 MHz. It also employed to custom VDP 32-bit video display for polygons, backgrounds and video.
Motorola was commissioned for its 68EC000 sound controller with the Yamaha FH1 DSP sound processors for its audio requirements. The Saturn Custom Sound Processor (SCSP) was made by Yamaha which served as a game sound generator. Very intricately designed, the random access memory panes are directly connected to the SCSP and are used as storage for sound programs. The entire SCSP is controlled by the Motorola controller which is also very popularly used by other consoles in the 16-bit lines.
The console employs a double speed CD drive made by JVC-Victor with some variants presumably produced by Hitachi or Sanyo. The CD-ROM drive uses a transfer rate of 320 kbps and 512 KB data cache. It is audio CD compatible while video CDs might require an MPEG add-on. It can also play photo CD, e-books and digital karaoke. The Saturn uses two bidirectional input-output ports and a high-speed serial communications port. It is also S-Video and RGB compatible. It uses AC 120 volts for the US version and uses 3 volt lithium battery to power its RAM. Its power consumption is at 25 watts.
The Sega Saturn also has a considerable list of compatible games ready for use with this powerful console. Up until the release of its successor, the Dreamcast, the Saturn has about 540 games readily available for use. Some of the very first licensed Saturn games are World Soccer, Virtua Fighter, Daytona USA, Panzer Dragoon and Pebble Beach Golf. These games immediately captured a good number of supporters upon release. The final Saturn game released in North America in 1998 was the Magic Knight Ravearth and Deep Fear in Europe.
Very powerful machine with timing in release as perhaps its biggest issue, the Saturn is named by the video game website IGN as the 18th all-time best video game console in their 2009 top 25 list.