Hideki Sato on the Sega Saturn

If you don’t know Hideki Sato, he was Sega’s hardware designer and had a major hand in all of their console designs. He sadly passed away this February but back in 2018 and 2019, he was interviewed about the Sega Saturn and MD Shock (re)posted the translated highlights. You get a variety of topics including how the PlayStation influenced the Saturn design, difficulties of developing for the Saturn (a classic topic), and how Sega responded to the negative impact of Saturn’s lower sales. You can read the full transcripts here but here’s an excerpt: On the difficulties of developing for the Saturn: “At the beginning, there was no compiler. You had to program the SH in assembly. The people at Sega were good at assembly. That’s all they had been using on the MC68000. C, C++ were too slow to use. “However, third parties struggled with programming the SH in assembly, and there were two of the CPUs along with a CD-ROM. We asked third parties to make games, but without development libraries,…