Why were Scaling 2D arcade games not brought to Home Systems?

[deepthaw]

 

There is no good way even today on modern PC's to enlarge sprites and make them look good, the issue is that by enlarging you need to add detailing.

 

 

Yeah Arcade boards have special chips so they could use hardware assistance as Motorola 68000 or similar CPU's used during those days for Arcades didn't have the ability to run by software effects such as scaling without impacting the game's performance by themselves

 

I guess what strikes me as weird (and what I suspect the original poster was thinking) is how home consoles just kind of skipped right past the "super scaler" hardware. We had hardware that couldn't handle sprite scaling and rotation, then we had hardware that could do stuff better than sprite scaling and rotation. I think the Saturn was going to be a "super scaler" powerhouse when they realized that nope, 3D is what you have to have, and you have to have it yesterday and we ended up with 3D hardware that didn't use triangles and couldn't do transparencies.

 

That entire timeframe was really a *massive* explosion in computing power and technology, so I'm not surprised we'd leapfrog an entire technology. When the Genesis was released, PCs were still getting pretty crummy versions of arcade games and just starting to move from EGA to VGA. By the time the Saturn came out, Doom was already well established on PCs.

 

The entire leap from the 16-bit to 32-bit era is an interesting discussion on its own, IMHO.

[Atari Pogostick]

 

Yes, Saturn couldn't ran those games in its sleep, but you're forgetting about context: there's a reason led the Japanese launch with Virtua Fighter and not, say, Galaxy Force II; that gen was going to be decided in terms of 3D games and they knew it. The boat sailed for super-scaler games to be in the limelight by then. Plus once you see the 3D PlayStation was pushing in the West, for Sega to try relying on those games to go up against Ridge Racer, Tekken, Toshinden etc. in the press would've been a marketing disaster, and they already shot themselves in the foot launching the Saturn that May way ahead of schedule.

 

3D arcade games and 3D PC games...even the very few 3D console games at the time (including the few standouts on systems like 3DO and Jaguar) had wet the appetite in the mainstream for 3D gaming. On a *technical* level the systems weren't ready to handle it, and another generation of 2D being pushed to its max would've found the super-scaler games in the limelight for sure (and imo would've been very interesting to see what could be done in that style; just imagining something like Sin & Punishment as a super-scaler game is pretty godlike).

 

But when you had movies like Jurassic Park and Toy Story being box office hits, and 3D dominating headlines, everyone and their grandmother could tell where mainstream preferences were shifting, and it wasn't towards 2D super-scaler games.

 

Purely from a UK Press perspective:

 

The press had really been hyping the entire Next Generation aspect of the new generation of RISC based consoles, starting with the 3DO and Jaguar.

 

Both were going to make your SNES and Genesis look primitive, hardware prices (in Jaguar's case once you added on cost of the CD unit to the base hardware), above what you'd be paying for 16 bit cartridge based hardware.

 

 

Comments from likes of Bullfrog's Peter Molyneux that finally developers could leave the SNES and MD consoles behind.

 

Lot of expectations for types of games not seen outside of the arcades and high end PC's in terms of polygon 3D.

 

Consoles had been given a taste with the SNES FX chips and Sega's SVP chip...but there was only so much that could be done.

 

New and far more powerful hardware was needed and the biggest shake up of the console market in years was apon us.

 

Sprite based games were simply viewed as old hat.

 

This was a time reviewers honestly did get taken in by games with flashy visuals and very little else.

 

Stinkers like Rise Of The Robots pulled in fantastic reviews from some Amiga press and C+VG magazine.

 

Jaguar Crescent Galaxly got some rave reviews also....

 

C+VG i think gave Playstation Toh Shin Den something like 97% and review was all about it's texture mapped visuals surpassing those of Virtua Fighter...

 

Titles like Bladeforce on 3DO took flak for frame rate issues as it couldn't match latest Playstation titles in this area...

 

 

Imagitec Design and others have spoken of Atari wanting W.I.P Jaguar games to be beefed up with loads of texture mapping and lighting effects by Atari, even though Atari knew it would cripple frame rates, Jaguar had to be seen to be able to compete.

 

The 3D arms race, console wise, was in full effect.

 

This is revisionist history. Hi-Fi 2D games were still throwing big hits while 3D was still trying to find a foothold between the time frame of 1992-1996. During that time frame we had more than capable computer and later console hardware that could run high-end scaling games the older consoles/computers couldn't. It's clear that more Pseudo-3D 2D games would have brought in more success during that time the 3D thirst was there but was still establishing a platform for itself. Because at least those type of games would have some amazing effects to grab attention instead of more colorful/vibrant traditional 2D games.

 

Another piece of Revision is this belief that developers and manufactures knew where the industry was headed. For all intents and purposes, the 3DO was the only console that though 3D was the future and built their product with a lot of tools specifically for 3D support unlike the Jaguar which seems to hae had minal 3D support in mind but wanted a semi-scaling hi-fi 2D architecture thrown in as well. The PSX would follow the 3Do's lead on this.

 

Every other console initially, or even at release, was either all in on FMV, all in on 2D, or a mixture of both. Even some home computers suffered from this. FMV would be a popular format alone in 1997, and used for parts of games until 2001. But by itself it would take some years before it was clear FMV's time was up, at least in the form it took on consoles. FMV adventure games on computers would last another year or two. Also 2D 32-bit graphics was also something that was on the menu that a lot of console and computer makers put into their design.

 

Look at the list of consoles/computers released during 1992-1996 outside PSX and 3DO. Heck even the SAT wasn't intending to focus all-in on 3D. In fact additional 3D hardware was rushed into the architecture.

[Atari Pogostick]

 

I guess what strikes me as weird (and what I suspect the original poster was thinking) is how home consoles just kind of skipped right past the "super scaler" hardware. We had hardware that couldn't handle sprite scaling and rotation, then we had hardware that could do stuff better than sprite scaling and rotation. I think the Saturn was going to be a "super scaler" powerhouse when they realized that nope, 3D is what you have to have, and you have to have it yesterday and we ended up with 3D hardware that didn't use triangles and couldn't do transparencies.

 

That entire timeframe was really a *massive* explosion in computing power and technology, so I'm not surprised we'd leapfrog an entire technology. When the Genesis was released, PCs were still getting pretty crummy versions of arcade games and just starting to move from EGA to VGA. By the time the Saturn came out, Doom was already well established on PCs.

 

The entire leap from the 16-bit to 32-bit era is an interesting discussion on its own, IMHO.

 

This only applies to PC's not other home computers. In fact I'd argue for gaming PC didn't catch up to the others until DOOM in terms of audience.

[Tanooki]

I'm curious why you keep saying consoles skipped by the super scaler type stuff. I had a Genesis a few times over the years, and those games from the arcade had ports on there and they worked just fine. Just saying it doesn't exist doesn't mean it doesn't and it didn't happen. Tech moved along fast enough that they became quickly irrelevant thanks to the FX chip with Nintendo and other things elsewhere overtaking it. But it did happen, and did have a few short years on the market in the Genesis life (and PCE in Japan too), up until 3D chips crept into the picture. As you said Saturn was made for it, but thanks to what Sony pulled on Nintendo, then them going on their own pushing up the Saturn, it just got abandoned for polygons. Consoles developed as a different pace than expensive hardware arcade boards, then it caught up and closed the window on that.

[Atari Pogostick]

I'm curious why you keep saying consoles skipped by the super scaler type stuff. I had a Genesis a few times over the years, and those games from the arcade had ports on there and they worked just fine. Just saying it doesn't exist doesn't mean it doesn't and it didn't happen. Tech moved along fast enough that they became quickly irrelevant thanks to the FX chip with Nintendo and other things elsewhere overtaking it. But it did happen, and did have a few short years on the market in the Genesis life (and PCE in Japan too), up until 3D chips crept into the picture. As you said Saturn was made for it, but thanks to what Sony pulled on Nintendo, then them going on their own pushing up the Saturn, it just got abandoned for polygons. Consoles developed as a different pace than expensive hardware arcade boards, then it caught up and closed the window on that.

Because the Genesis couldn't run the vast majority of them. But systems like SAt/3DO could. The ones the Genesis could run were mostly never even close to the arcade. The FX chip also had nothing to do with making things irrelevant. Also the PCE was worse at it than the Genesis, did you see powerdrift on the PCE/ I mean those compromised versions did have their value for a time you're right.

 

But for a good 4-5 years we had computers and consoles that could run the high-end stuff at a time where they could have taken off and we basically got none. But we got plenty of traditional 2D 32-bit games though. Most of which just threw in weird CG artstyles and never really took advantage of the console power (See most Mega Man sat/psx games.)

[Flojomojo]

Saturn and 3DO were bit players compared to Playstation and its successors. Scaling games were a brief transitional style/fad/trend whose time came and went.

 

Another example of technology driving gameplay design was full-motion video in games. We don't see much of that anymore either.

 

Why wasn't Dragon's Lair on Sony Playstation or Sega Saturn? They could obviously run the game better than Sega CD or 3DO. The reason is because the game and its genre were played out, wouldn't sell well, looked old, and was not in demand.

 

Just like superscalar stuff. Much of it was released on Saturn in Japan, but never localized to North America, because it wouldn't sell.

[Lost Dragon]

I give up.

 

You say it's revisionist history, yet you can go to any number of sites which have PDF and JPEG files of the UK and US press at the time and read for yourself how reviewers treated games that still used plain polygons or limited texture mapping, let alone how sprite based racers like Super Burnout were reviewed.

 

Read interviews with likes of ATD who will tell you Atari had seen Shockwave on the 3DO and wanted them to fully texture map Battlemorph so it could be seen to compete.

 

Or Martin Hooley from Imagitec Design explaining why Freelancer had been moved to the much more capable Playstation ...

 

Or Martin Brownlaw talking about Missile Command 3D.

 

The information is well documented.

 

People like myself who grew up with the Sinclair ZX81 and through the years moved from computers to consoles and vice versa...

 

Who bought a Mega CD on day 1 expecting Sega to use the hardware to bring better than MD versions of it's sprite based coin ops into the home..who went from that system to the Jaguar and then the Playstation, we were avid magazine buyers and readers.

 

We watched the trends as they unfolded.

 

You've come here asking for information, people have given honest answers with the reasoning behind them and now you say we are revising the very history we lived through?.

[Lost Dragon]

I'd politely suggest you look up the work history of Ken Kutaragi and what he was doing on high end S.G.I workstations as he was well aware 3D was the future and it was his vision to bring advanced 3D into the home console market.

 

Sega was also very aware of it's importance but was arrogant enough to state no one other than Namco could touch it's arcade technology and Namco weren't planning a home console.

 

The original Saturn was designed to take on the 3DO and Jaguar.

 

When specs of the Playstation appeared, Sega panicked and rather than take the hardware back to the drawing board and take up Silicon Graphics offer of going for a new chipset from them, they added the second SH2 chip.

 

Development of the Saturn in 1992 the extra CPU being added in 1994 and it uses Quads at a time everyone was using polygons for 3D.

 

Even with the new hardware, Saturn was still seen as a 2D machine primarily.

 

 

As for the Jaguar..it was in development alongside the Atari Panther, a console designed purely as 2D powerhouse, yet Martin Brennan whilst at Atari in 1989 convinced Atari 3D was the way to go...Panther scrapped in favour of Jaguar which had been in R+D alongside it.

Edited September 7, 2018 by Lost Dragon

[Lost Dragon]

Quote:

 

Martin Brennan

 

Throughout that period we did consultancy work - we did work for Amstrad (we designed a fax machine for them and a hard disk controller). At one point one of the guys from Sinclair joined Atari. He had worked for Perihelion - Richard Miller. He became a director of Atari in Sunnyvale and he had a project called Panther - It wasn't called Panther when I joined. Panther was the name of the car my wife had just bought, a Panther Kallista and the chip had no name and I wanted to give it a handle - so it was called Panther.

 

The design and specification had already been started, and they said "somebody's left - here's the concept" and it was only the video part of the chip - there was no sound.

It was a novel video architecture that allowed you to create windows of different sizes and different bit depths. Essentially you didn't have a frame store - it was a composite of frame stores - a kind of smart video frame store. It would have allowed a great deal of sprite style animation. Sprites in general in those days would have been of a fixed size e.g. 16x16. The games looked 'spritey' because of that, this would have been quite an interesting departure. I wasn't keen on it, but I designed it and the chip was built.

But while I was over in California in '89, I actually convinced the bosses at Atari that 3D was the way to go, with the experience we'd gained on Flare one - if you didn't just do flat rendering, but shaded rendering you got a 3D appearance.

At the time, I was seeing pictures in magazines where computers were rendering photo realistic 3D wire meshes and I said "these are static images, but they only contain a very few number of polygons - we could take that, animate it and you could produce a game that was a quantum leap away from the current games".

 

So the Jaguar project was born from the Panther project.

In essence Atari looked at the Panther and looked at what we were promising for the Atari project and said can the Panther project.

 

 

So, yes the industry was well aware 3D was the future and key players were pushing to make it the focus of new generations of console hardware.

 

Texture mapped 3D was still in early infancy when Jaguar chipset were designed.

 

 

It's own designers admit in hindsight that was the 1 area Jaguar fell short on.

 

Quote:

 

 

 

15) What are your biggest regrets about Jaguar (technology, games...)? If you can back to the past (with a time machine for example :-), will you change anything about Jaguar (and what) ?

 

It should have been able to run C, and do texture mapping. When we started all games were written in assembly, and Gouraud shading seemed enough. We were wrong on both those assumptions. I am not sure what we could have done differently, given the limitations of chips at the time, but there would have been a different emphasis.

Edited September 7, 2018 by Lost Dragon

[Atari Pogostick]

Saturn and 3DO were bit players compared to Playstation and its successors. Scaling games were a brief transitional style/fad/trend whose time came and went.

 

Another example of technology driving gameplay design was full-motion video in games. We don't see much of that anymore either.

 

Why wasn't Dragon's Lair on Sony Playstation or Sega Saturn? They could obviously run the game better than Sega CD or 3DO. The reason is because the game and its genre were played out, wouldn't sell well, looked old, and was not in demand.

 

Just like superscalar stuff. Much of it was released on Saturn in Japan, but never localized to North America, because it wouldn't sell.

 

Sony/Capcom literally spend a ridiculous amount of money on Fox Hunt on PSX because they thought FMV had a market along with 3D. Also tons of FMV games on PSX and Sat. Dragons lair is old and we already had older consoles running that game, the 90's scalling games had no hardware that could run it until that time frame. Scalling games were big in arcades during that time so this notion it wouldn't sell on consoles is literally revisionist/. Especially since a good chunk of hardware makers during that time frame did not make their consoles with 3D in mind yet people keep believing for some odd reason everyone was moving to 3D.

 

 

I give up.

 

You say it's revisionist history, yet you can go to any number of sites which have PDF and JPEG files of the UK and US press at the time and read for yourself how reviewers treated games that still used plain polygons or limited texture mapping, let alone how sprite based racers like Super Burnout were reviewed.

 

Read interviews with likes of ATD who will tell you Atari had seen Shockwave on the 3DO and wanted them to fully texture map Battlemorph so it could be seen to compete.

 

Or Martin Hooley from Imagitec Design explaining why Freelancer had been moved to the much more capable Playstation ...

 

Or Martin Brownlaw talking about Missile Command 3D.

 

The information is well documented.

 

People like myself who grew up with the Sinclair ZX81 and through the years moved from computers to consoles and vice versa...

 

Who bought a Mega CD on day 1 expecting Sega to use the hardware to bring better than MD versions of it's sprite based coin ops into the home..who went from that system to the Jaguar and then the Playstation, we were avid magazine buyers and readers.

 

We watched the trends as they unfolded.

 

You've come here asking for information, people have given honest answers with the reasoning behind them and now you say we are revising the very history we lived through?.

 

No those articles you were referring to were later, not the time frame I specified. The Crusin' USA example was on the N64 after it came out, back when Crusin' was new in arcade in 94 people gave it praise and were all over it and it did better then Daytona, which was actually a 3D game. Then you have games like Rayman in 95. Yes its revision.

 

The issue is you believe I'm saying 3D wasn't popular, 3D was popular during those times, however it was still establishing a foothold. It wouldn't be until late 95 into 96 where you started seeing the whole industry rapidly move to 3D instead of some hit titles here and there. Most of the console and computer manufactures again were either going more toward FMV or more toward 32-bit 2D graphics. This wouldn't make sense if 2D was dead around 1992-1996. In fact, as 3D was establishing themselves having scaling games like that would have been a great compromise until the industry moved all-in on 3D.

 

Around late 95, early 96 the tech was there, more templates were out, dev kits were more optimized for 3D, the industry quickly went into the driection of polygons, but in the time frame I specified, popular games were all over the place, it wasn't 3D and everything else is dead as you were implying. people had no clue where the industry was going but 3DO and later PSX. (and some PC developers).

 

The biggest revision to gaming history is "no one played FMV" next to "everyone was jumping in on 3D before 96."

 

 

I'd politely suggest you look up the work history of Ken Kutaragi and what he was doing on high end S.G.I workstations as he was well aware 3D was the future and it was his vision to bring advanced 3D into the home console market.

 

Sega was also very aware of it's importance but was arrogant enough to state no one other than Namco could touch it's arcade technology and Namco weren't planning a home console.

 

The original Saturn was designed to take on the 3DO and Jaguar.

 

When specs of the Playstation appeared, Sega panicked and rather than take the hardware back to the drawing board and take up Silicon Graphics offer of going for a new chipset from them, they added the second SH2 chip.

 

Development of the Saturn in 1992 the extra CPU being added in 1994 and it uses Quads at a time everyone was using polygons for 3D.

 

Even with the new hardware, Saturn was still seen as a 2D machine primarily.

 

 

As for the Jaguar..it was in development alongside the Atari Panther, a console designed purely as 2D powerhouse, yet Martin Brennan whilst at Atari in 1989 convinced Atari 3D was the way to go...Panther scrapped in favour of Jaguar which had been in R+D alongside it.

I said multiple times that PSX followed 3DO in going the 3D route. Read my posts completely.

 

As for the Saturn i've seen a lot of Sega interviews mention the jaguar but very few that mention 3Do, and I highly doubt Sega understood the 3DO as I'm sure they were not expecting a game like NFS to come out on it.

 

As for the jaguar yeah, Sega did have notes on that, and to not be left behind Sega of America panicked, and with help from SOJ, put the 32X out to beat it on the market.

 

But The Saturn wasn't made to fully go all-in on 3D. In fact, it was designed like the Jaguar, 3D capabilities in the design but a lot of focus on 32-bit 2D capability. (or 64 in the jaguars case)

The rest of your post proves my point Sega had no idea what direction the industry was going in.

[Atari Pogostick]

Quote:

 

Martin Brennan

 

Throughout that period we did consultancy work - we did work for Amstrad (we designed a fax machine for them and a hard disk controller). At one point one of the guys from Sinclair joined Atari. He had worked for Perihelion - Richard Miller. He became a director of Atari in Sunnyvale and he had a project called Panther - It wasn't called Panther when I joined. Panther was the name of the car my wife had just bought, a Panther Kallista and the chip had no name and I wanted to give it a handle - so it was called Panther.

 

The design and specification had already been started, and they said "somebody's left - here's the concept" and it was only the video part of the chip - there was no sound.

It was a novel video architecture that allowed you to create windows of different sizes and different bit depths. Essentially you didn't have a frame store - it was a composite of frame stores - a kind of smart video frame store. It would have allowed a great deal of sprite style animation. Sprites in general in those days would have been of a fixed size e.g. 16x16. The games looked 'spritey' because of that, this would have been quite an interesting departure. I wasn't keen on it, but I designed it and the chip was built.

But while I was over in California in '89, I actually convinced the bosses at Atari that 3D was the way to go, with the experience we'd gained on Flare one - if you didn't just do flat rendering, but shaded rendering you got a 3D appearance.

At the time, I was seeing pictures in magazines where computers were rendering photo realistic 3D wire meshes and I said "these are static images, but they only contain a very few number of polygons - we could take that, animate it and you could produce a game that was a quantum leap away from the current games".

 

So the Jaguar project was born from the Panther project.

In essence Atari looked at the Panther and looked at what we were promising for the Atari project and said can the Panther project.

 

 

So, yes the industry was well aware 3D was the future and key players were pushing to make it the focus of new generations of console hardware.

 

Texture mapped 3D was still in early infancy when Jaguar chipset were designed.

 

 

It's own designers admit in hindsight that was the 1 area Jaguar fell short on.

 

Quote:

 

 

 

15) What are your biggest regrets about Jaguar (technology, games...)? If you can back to the past (with a time machine for example :-), will you change anything about Jaguar (and what) ?

 

It should have been able to run C, and do texture mapping. When we started all games were written in assembly, and Gouraud shading seemed enough. We were wrong on both those assumptions. I am not sure what we could have done differently, given the limitations of chips at the time, but there would have been a different emphasis.

 

You have no idea what you're talking about. The Industry was not fully aware and one dev related to Atari is not the "industry."

 

The Jaguar was designed like the original Saturn, a 3D capable machine with a heavy 2D focus. if they believed 3D was the future they would have added more 3D tools to their dev kits and architecture but they didn't because they believed the they needed to go both ways. Opposite of the 3DO which actually had tools for 3D games, with easy to understand dev kits and an easy developer environment while the jaguar(and Saturn) were hard to make games for when creating 3D software.

 

Every other console or computer hardware at the time was either a similar compromise (bt with lesser 3D capabilities than even the jaguar) all 2D, or going in on FMV. From 1992-1996 when you look at hit games o consoles and home computers it was 2D, Compromise, or FMV. period. This notion the industry was focusing on 3D and scaling games had no market in that time frame is nonsense and is indeed revisionist history. Individuals in interviews have indeed said 3D is the future, but other individuals, and whole companies went where they think the money was and many of them did not think it was 3D, at least at the time. in fact change "many" to "most".

 

Heck when 3D was where most the industry started quickly moving toward FMV still had a market and you saw FMV in a ton of 3D games.

[Flojomojo]

What charm school did you go to, again?

You have no idea what you're talking about.

[Lost Dragon]

At least we now know what became of

Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf...

 

Which is lovely.

[Keatah]

Sadly, you need to emulate arcade machines to play most of them.

 

But we have that option!

[Atari Pogostick]

At least we now know what became of

Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf...

 

Which is lovely.

 

it's amazing how you can't explain why all the other consoles didn't focus on 3D and why most of the big hits during that time period were not 3D, but say I'm wrong. and the Industry was all moving to 3D. You also psoted in the wrong thread because you're so angry. You posted your reply in the jaguar thread. try looking before leaping.

 

 

But we have that option!

 

Yes we do. Now. But we didn't then.

 

Actually you'd think some of these companies would put some of those old scaling games on XBL PSN or something.

[Keatah]

For whatever reason(s) large companies don't get into anything retro unless it has proven $$$ attached. Corporate memory is blank when it comes to nostalgia and the emotions surrounding it.

[Flojomojo]

Actually you'd think some of these companies would put some of those old scaling games on XBL PSN or something.

 

Nintendo eShop on 3DS is the best bet for that.

[Lost Dragon]

Everything is amazing or isn't... Maybe it just simply is?.

 

Comment by Martin is in the correct thread.

 

You said nobody in the industry knew 3D was the way forward, i explained how Sony knew it based on their work outside of games and here is Martin explaining to Atari why they should ditch a console focused on 2D in favour of the console that did 3D,years before the PlayStation.

 

Jaguar hardware designer then admits if anything, Jaguar should of had even more advanced 3D than he and his team gave it.

Edited September 7, 2018 by Lost Dragon

[Atari Pogostick]

 

Nintendo eShop on 3DS is the best bet for that.

 

Well most of those are 80's but even then, I'm not the biggest fan of the low quality 3DS screens. Damn shame the Vita was a failure.

[Flojomojo]

Maybe you should make a versus thread about it.

[digdugnate]

 

Nintendo eShop on 3DS is the best bet for that.

absolutely. I have several of the scaling games (Galaxy Force comes to mind), and they're flippin sweet.

[Atari Pogostick]

Edit: NVM seems the mods will let regular go but only go after new guys.

Edited September 7, 2018 by Atari Pogostick

[dj_convoy]

 

Nintendo eShop on 3DS is the best bet for that.

There's also the (later and therefore, better) SEGA AGES collections on PS2 but those are expensive unless you purchase them through the Japanese PSN if you need this stuff on your TV (I certainly do). There's a better than arcade perfect Galaxy Force port, and a complete Space Harrier collection. The Taito PS2 collections also have some of their Super Scaler equivalent games. Sadly, not many of these games have received ports. Well, good ports. I'd love a M2 curated Super Scaler collection for name the modern console of your choice.

[Video]

I was going to say there were plenty of poser 3d 2d games. They were done and some were great.

 

But for arcade specifically, mostly lack of power. The games may not do any thing particularly special. Heck, the machine may not even be all that powerful. BUT, they are custom built and often designed to do things a specific way, which doesn't mesh to well with the do all nature of the consoles.I

 

Genesis and super Nintendo simply weren't powerful enough.

 

Granted, 32x and jaguar could have probably handled them, but those didn't do to sell on their own, so who knows?

 

By the time psx, saturn, and 64 were out, true polygonal 3d was in full force swing and the scaling sprite based 3d ship had sailed.

 

Honestly though, why not now? Retro is in style now, as is classic compilations, so why no collections of these games now?

[JaguarVision]

Actually a system like the jaguar would have a hard time running advanced 2D games, in fact, I'm a fan of the jaguar and I'm not even sure it can run Arcade Hard Drivin', I'm not even sure the Saturn can run Arcade Hard Drivin'.

 

Arcade hardware is tricky because it is advanced custom hardware made specifically for games, The only reason why Computers are so strong now is because almost all game development happens on PC today. Back then arcade machines were basically super computers made for games, hence why a lot of Arcade machines were based on military technology. A console in 1990 running high end 88-89 arcade games like Hard Drivin or Winning Run perfectly would likely cost $1400 or more at retail. No sane company was going to do that, so we ended up with Genesis and Super Nintendo games instead, with Neo-Geo being the high-end. That's why FMV was so popular, it was the only thing home machines could match 1:1 with arcade hardware for.

 

The reason why those old games like Ourrun were on the Saturn and not the "90's games" you want is because it's very likely the Saturn can't run those. One big misconception that needs to be squashed: Fast action-packed 2D games were much harder to make than 3D titles back then.