The long-rumored Saturn graphics accelerator was real, according to an interview between former Sega hardware designers Kenji Tosaki and Junichi Naoi published this week.
Not only that, but Virtua Fighter 3 and Shenmue indeed were developed with the accelerator in mind — just as rumors dating back to the ’90s claimed.
In an interview with Sega-focused magazine Beep21 published Thursday, Tosaki looked into “Project TRIP,” the codename for a Saturn graphics accelerator that began development in 1996. Tosaki said he’d only heard about it in passing at the time, so he went to one of the men who spearheaded the project: Junichi Naoi.
While working at Hitachi, Naoi helped design the SH-1 and SH-2, both processors used in the Saturn for its CD-ROM and its main CPUs, respectively. In September 1994, the Beep21 interview says he swapped to Sega’s offices where he was tasked with redesigning the already finished Saturn hardware to lower costs.
“However, I still wanted to work on LSI development, so I made a variety of proposals, too,” Naoi said, as human-translated from the original Japanese.
LSI means “large-scale integration,” which is the process of integrating a large number of transistors onto a single semiconductor chip.
At this point in the interview, the article becomes paywalled. SHIRO! bought access to Beep21’s series of writing about Sega hardware, so it has access to the rest of the piece. While the most noteworthy news will be reported on here, anyone interested in reading all the details is encouraged to support Beep21.
The TRIP’s design begins
Naoi’s apparent love for the Virtua Fighter series apparently led to the graphics accelerator’s creation.
“Around the time I was working at Hitachi I played Virtua Fighter [in the arcade], I thought it was awesome,” he said.
Later, as cutting-edge arcade game Virtua Fighter 3 closed in on its July 1996 location test, Naoi said he wanted to design something that would enable a port to the Saturn. That led to his draft for the TRIP accelerator “probably from spring to summer 1996,” he thought.
Naoi presented his design to Sega’s higher-ups that August and they approved him to move forward with development.
Naoi took a small team of about half a dozen people to semiconductor company NEC. There, they worked on refining the design and running simulations — a vital step on the path to creating a computer chip to make sure it’ll work correctly when money is spent on fabricating it in real life.
The chip that the accelerator would have used, according to the interview, was Hitachi’s SH-3E, a variant of the SH-3 that included a floating point unit — useful for calculating 3D graphics.
The SH-3 was the successor to the SH-2s that powered the base Saturn and the predecessor to the SH-4 that would be the heart of Sega’s next console, the Dreamcast.
Hitachi designed several power configurations for the SH-3, but even in its weakest form, it was capable of 62% more calculations per second than the Saturn’s SH-2s individually, and about 80% of their combined power.
Naoi said his team completed the simulation process in January 1997. At that point, Beep21’s article ends, promising another part in the future to continue the story. SHIRO! will keep an eye out for that piece.
While the article published this week doesn’t specify what form the accelerator would have taken, an anonymous source close to Sega hardware development in the ’90s told SHIRO! that it would have connected via the Saturn’s cartridge slot and worked similarly to the Genesis’ 32X add-on.
That person said the expansion unit itself contained polygon rendering hardware, mixing its image with the output of the Saturn to create what is displayed on screen.
The expansion hardware allegedly seemed difficult to use. Stock Saturn hardware would render the user interface, floors, skies and other such background features, primarily with VDP-2, mixed with the polygonal models rendered by the expansion.
The Shenmue connection
In one of Tosaki’s previous interviews for Beep21, Keiji Okayasu of AM2 said that Shenmue started development on the base Saturn, was remade for the accelerator, then was remade again for Dreamcast.
In this week’s interview, Tosaki also spoke with Hiroshi Yagi, who helped develop some of Sega’s arcade boards, including the one Virtua Fighter 3 ran on. Yagi confirmed that Shenmue’s director Yu Suzuki wanted to use the Project TRIP graphics accelerator for his game.
““I want to do this with the Saturn accelerator,” Yagi said Suzuki told him while standing in front of storyboards and concept art.
But Yagi said he worried that if Naoi’s team failed to bring the accelerator to completion, it would cause turmoil throughout the company, including for developers like Suzuki who might be developing software to run on it.
“I asked Naoi, ‘Are you really able to do it?'” Yagi said. So he said he talked with Naoi at the time to help him work on the design, according to the interview.
Tosaki remembers SHIRO!
In 2022, Tosaki answered questions on the SHIRO! Facebook group about the peripherals he designed at Sega. One of the questions was about “the Virtua Fighter 3 accelerator board for Saturn,” but Tosaki skirted around the issue at the time.
“I had an idea for an accelerator cartridge. However, it was expected to be too expensive to manufacture and the performance was not high enough to justify the costs, so it would have been canceled,” he said. “If the planning had progressed to the stage of considering commercialization, the industrial design team would have started moving, but that was not the case…”
This week, SHIRO! reposted Beep21’s announcement on X about the Tosaki-Naoi interview, and Tosaki replied to it with an apology.
“I apologize for saying in a Facebook interview that the accelerator project didn’t exist,” Tosaki said. “The project did exist. This article can be read in your browser, so please subscribe and translate it in your browser.”
SHIRO! assured him that there was no need to apologize.
Tosaki also commented on the interview in a separate post about the interview, saying, as translated via machine:
I think the Saturn Accelerator series is the most entertaining one yet. It really helps you understand the IC design process for game consoles, along with the struggles and ingenuity involved. It offers a fresh perspective that hasn’t been seen before, so I especially recommend it to engineers. You also get a glimpse into one aspect of Japan’s semiconductor industry. The second half of the series is a must-watch!
— Kenji Tosaki
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