SEGA Galaxy Force II on 3DS & PS2 is Awesome - On Saturn? Not So Much

[parallaxscroll]

With the recent release of SEGA's 3D Galaxy Force II on 3DS eShop this past week, and the SEGA 3D Classics – Galaxy Force II Interview with Developer M2 -I wanted to understand more about why the Japanese Saturn version was so sloppy & choppy, given Saturn's usual prowess with 2D / sprites and scaling.



The 1998 SEGA AGES Saturn ports of Galaxy Force II and Power Drift were done by Appaloosa, not Rutubo Games who did the outstanding work on Saturn Space Harrier, Out Run and After Burner II in 1996 (1997 in the U.S. and EU).
Those three games however, ran on less and less complex/powerful super-scaler boards (SEGA calls it Super-Scalar Technology) than what Galaxy Force II and Power Drift ran on. Still, I thought Saturn was more powerful than
the 16-Bit arcade super-scalar techology that ran GFII, PD, G-LOC and others.

Apparently not.




Meet SEGA's arcade Y-BOARD HARDWARE -The King of the Super-Scalar boards.

Main CPU : 3 x MC68000 @ 12.5 MHz
Sound CPU : Z80 @ 4 MHz
Sound chip : YM2151 @ 4 MHz & SegaPCM @ 15.625 MHz
Max Colours : 16384 (4bpp - 16 per sprite, which go through a 16->512 indirection table), then selects which 512 color bank to take from 4096. This is used to do colour rotations (the red-yellow rotation of the lava sprites from Galaxy force for instance) without changing the color palette, also allows it to have sprites that rotate colors and sprites that don't on the same screen, and to get different levels of luminosity as well
Sprite Structure : Uses a linked list of sprites (each sprite includes the number of the next one)
Video resoution : 320 x 224
Board composition : CPU board + Video board
Board Features : 3 68K, nicknamed M, X and Y.
You have a sky gradiant, a first sprite layer which plugs into a full-screen rotation (seen in the the power drift/galaxy force screen tilt), then a second sprite layer (outrun type) on top of them which has priority, and they have full sprite zooming and scaling on both sprite planes.
This hardware uses no tiles at all.

It is no wonder that even Sega's monster 2D/sprite pushing 32-Bit console, the Sega Saturn (with all those CPUs & VDPs) released in Nov. 1994 in Japan, could not handle 1988 Power Drift and Galaxy Force II without Appaloosa having to cut the framerate in half, to 30fps. in both 1998 Japanese SEGA AGES ports for Saturn. --And then there was *still* major slowdown on top of that in Galaxy Force II.

Videos of the 30 FPS slowdown-ridden Saturn Galaxy Force II and the 30 FPS Saturn Power Drift

EDIT: The Saturn version of Power Drift was coded by a group in Japan called Phant. Thanks to CRV for the correction!


Bonus: 60 FPS Dreamcast Power Drift from Yu Suzuki Game Works Vol 1.
(even tho YouTube does not display 60fps you can still tell Power Drift is much smoother on Dreamcast than it is on Saturn).


SEGA's Y-BOARD arcade hardware powered these games:

G-LOC Air Battle (1990)
Galaxy Force (1988)
Galaxy Force II (1988)
Power Drift (1988) Flier -1- -2- -3-
Power Drift Link (1988)
R-360: G-Loc (1990)
Rail Chase (1991)
Strike Fighter (1991)

Huge thanks and shout outs to both System 16 The Arcade Museum and The Arcade Flier Archive for all the information & images they have and preserve!


PlayStation2 SEGA AGES 2500 Series Vol. 30: Galaxy Force II: Special Extended Edition -- All Stage Clear Replay in Neo Classic Mode and with Y-Board / Arcade Mode graphics


Arcade longplay in MAME

Finally, there is this wonderful little video by SuperHighTechGamer recalling how great Galaxy Force II was. He talks about and shows Saturn Galaxy Force II from 1998 and arcade Galaxy Force II from 1988 running in MAME.

He is so right, in the arcades, there were everyone else's games, and then there were SEGA games.


If you love Galaxy Force II, your best options to play it are Japanese import PS2, MAME or the incredible auto-stereoscopic 3D version on 3DS.

[ccovell]

Yeah, OutRun itself ran at only 30 FPS in the arcade. Even the arcade version sucked!

[CRV]

Saturn Power Drift was done by a group in Japan called Phant.

[parallaxscroll]

Yeah, OutRun itself ran at only 30 FPS in the arcade. Even the arcade version sucked!

Look I never said 1986 arcade Out Run sucked, I know it was 30 FPS.

When Retubo Games ported Out Run to Japanese Saturn in 1996, they added a 60 FPS smooth mode. You could play it at either default 30fps or 60fps in smooth mode with a code.

At 60fps, Saturn Out Run was even more amazing to look at but, actually seemed to play better at original 30 FPS framerate.

With smooth mode enabled, although the framerate was indeed 60fps, twice that of the actual arcade machine (or in MAME or in OutRun on Dreamcast/Xbox Shenmue II)
it seemed to *play* slower. It was a weird thing and effect for the gameplay.




See the thread I made in '09 about the 1996-released standalone OutRun for Japanese Saturn


The western world got Saturn OutRun in 1997 as part of the 3-in-1 SEGA AGES compilation with Space Harrier and After Burner II, published by Working Designs.

Saturn Power Drift was done by a group in Japan called Phant.

I googled that. You are right. Saturn Power Drift was done by Phant. My mistake.

[Ace]

Allow me to add a few things to this:

-Some of the graphics in the Saturn version of Galaxy Force II look wrong.
-The Saturn version's music sounds nice (it seems to have been sampled directly off a real Galaxy Force II arcade board), but the sound effects are of pretty low quality.
-The Saturn version's controls suck! I don't know if it's just my controller (Saturn Mission Stick here), but the controls feel so sluggish. I can't get the Destroyer to make tight corners like I can in the arcade version.
-The PlayStation 2 port has HORRIBLE software emulation for the music. In that version, you can actually choose to use software-emulated music, the original soundtrack streamed off the disc or the FM Towns soundtrack, but when you listen to the arcade version's music, be it emulated or streamed off the disc, it sounds wrong. The emulation is dreadful; nearly everything sounds off. And the streamed music sounds like it was recorded off of MAME.
-When using a DualShock 2 with the PlayStation 2 port, I couldn't help but notice the controls are oversensitive.

A note, too. I see you used my playthrough of Galaxy Force II to demonstrate the PlayStation 2 port of the game, but I must point out in case you missed it, I played the game with the music streamed off the disc, but with the lid of my slim PlayStation 2 held open so I could play the game with no music, then overlay an edited version of the Saturn port's music (the PlayStation 2 port runs entirely in the RAM, so if you choose to use streamed music, you can keep your PlayStation 2's lid/tray open to play the game with no music, then put in your own music in its place). So what you have there is not entirely representative of the PlayStation 2 port of Galaxy Force II.