It's well known at this point that the N64 library was tiny as shit. Relative to its competition, even the Saturn...

only a fool considers a debate and discussion on three, 20 year old consoles a war. You're welcome to go back to r/pcmasterrace if you feel more comfortable discussing your platform of choice there. It's got no place in a thread like this. It's a safe space for people like you, I hear.

You are the one that announced you were filtering a dude because of a valid opinion.

ps I'm not falling for your shitty bait, just giving the volunteers more evidence of your faggotry and intent to D&C. I know things are tough at cuckchan right now but you have to go back.

sorry? I don't care if you want to talk about PC games, this isn't the thread for it. Please stick to the subject, shitposter.

$10

I thought I was from 4chan, not SA? Please keep your story straight when shilling because someone said mean things to a PC gamer. Perhaps it's you who needs to go back? You're trying a bit hard to fit in.

The N64 was generally more powerful, the only positive to the PS1 was it's storage size, but that brought it's own problems. I'd much rather go without some voice files than have to wait 15 seconds foe a turn-based battle to start.

When you have discussions of this nature you need to remember that the Saturn died a lot earlier than the other 5th-gen consoles, thus years of graphical improvement potential was lost since there was practically no further development going on into 1998.

I can only think of a handful of N64 3D games that didn't look like complete ass, but they had massive framerate issues.

...

both of you are insufferable faggots. kill yourselves

If you were a huge 2D games fan, the N64 would show you a big middle finger. At least the PSX or Saturn tried to make that transition a bit smoother, without completelly ignoring 2D games.

Also, someone should have informed them that you can't make a new console without any game belonging to the franchises that sold the most in your previous home console (Street Fighter, Final Fantasy or Dragon Ball Z). It's simply not a good strategy.

GameCube was a far better choice if you had a minimal interest in third party games, although for what I have seen people have it in a worse consideration.

If i remember right, they thought they had secured Final Fantasy 7, only for Squaresoft to change allegiances at the last minute because of how well the PS1 was selling.

N64 is generally held in higher regard than the Gamecube because it still broke some ground - it was the first console to do an FPS decently, and it was the go-to system for split-screen multiplayer, which brought a lot of millennials into gaming. The Gamecube didn't really achieve anything.

i'll take badly warped point filtering over smeared vomit-jelly all over the place anytime

PS1, it had the bigger library and just more was done with it. If you followed a popular franchise, you literally could see how the Games improved, not only from a graphical standpoint, but also controls and movement of the Games.

Most people aren't from fucking france, you know.

You are fucking retarded. Fuck off.

From an European perspective these discussions look funny, because in Europe the N64 tanked and the Saturn was basically nonexistent.

the change from n64 to ps1 for ff7 has less to do with the sales and more with the technology, it seems. The PS1 allowed Square to do exactly what they want at the time, while the N64 had none of the capability to achieve remotely similar results.

It was originally developed for the Nintendo hardware though. I assume they were going to grin and bear with it since their games always sold well on Nintendo, but the unexpected success of the PS1 gave them the impetus they needed.

Shame about the Saturn, shit's amazing when used correctly.

Fun fact, the N64 is the only European console that is so gimped you can't get an rgb signal out of it even with hardware modding. The one advantage Europe actually had over America.

It sold decently well in the UK though.

What?

I wish it was easier to go from RGB to HDMI, I don't want to spend $400 on a Framemeister.

Custom Robo/Custom Robo v2 looked great in battles and had no frame rate issues.

That's great, if you live in France.

yes, sales were absolutely part of it, but I can only imagine the frustration square felt when they saw what CD technology was capable of and how many ideas they had and the fact they couldn't do what they wanted to do on the N64. I think this was the biggest impetus, and sales were strong enough justification. Better hardware, better technology, and ultimately a guarantee of more potential sales.

nintendo was always jeb bush when it came to getting high quality output from their systems.

saturn seemed to have better presence in europe than in america, judging from games that released over there. Of course, out of Japan (where the N64 was a joke) where the Saturn and PS1 were extremely huge systems.

Everyone fucking goes mad for the Framemeister and never understood why, RGB is good enough as is until 6th gen.

Brought into UK since wanted RGB N64.
Wasn't as good as I expected. Should have went for HDMI one.

the framemeister really is tremendous, but only if you refuse to use a CRT.

the framemeister is shit and adds input lag, stay away and get a real crt

Most EU people didn't even know that Saturn existed. N64 was at least known as the failed Nintendo thingy with the outdated cartridge system.

when you have to do any processing lag is being added, but the framemeister is a dedicated piece of technology that minimizes that lag much better than other tech.

I ain't got no room for one, is there anyway to get it to plug into a standard hdmi, or should I stick with my regular cables?

nes and n64 have good hdmi mods.

I wouldn't say so really. There were a bunch of games that never made it over to Europe like Magic Knight Rayearth and Albert Odyssey. It was stuffed in a corner at the back with 5 generic games at gamestores.

Hi-Def NES, UltraHDMI N64.

why is that people complains about having no room for a CRT? what kind of prison do you live in that you can't fit a small table or a tiny desk…maybe you are some of those people in China that live on tiny locker rooms

If i'm going to get a TV for games, it's going to be as big as I can get it. I play a lot of multiplayer, so anything that can fit in the corner isn't going to cut it. Plus, the corner shelf is reserved for my models

I see no problem with having two separate stations for games.

I can take a picture of my room, the space is somewhat limited for a whole seperate 20+ inch TV.

Europe did not even get the Virtual Boy. It seems Nintendo was aware Europeans weren't avid consumers of their stuff.

I'll never understand why people will shell out that kind of money for a tiny, yet trashy little statue.

take a load of this bad goy's cam

Are you talking about the little things you get in "limited editions" of games? Because we seem to be thinking of two completely different things.

13 dollars for a shitty toy statue that doubles as DLC is pretty outrageous tbh fam

Some of them came with the games at standard price and the others were discounted as "damaged", but the quality is better than you think either way.

Robots are my bread and butter, to the point that I can't fit them all in the shelf as it is. I need to rearrange them.

this bait tastes like shit.

this argument has no grounds, people can do whatever they want with their money, only people without money complains about this.

like a famous rich man says "i hate the poor, because all of their problems are bout money"

Seriously, what the fuck nintendjew?

Isn't there a Star Wars game that runs the best on N64 due to a rewrite of microcode for the rendering engine? Obviously now it's not as impressive looking compared to the shit we have available but it had a really high draw distance for N64 games.

Rogue Squadron (and it's gamecube sequels) are notoriously difficult to emulate for pulling shit like that. Hell, the gamecube ones still look pretty good today. That might be what you're thinking of?

Is the N64 considered a retro console yet? I don't see /vr/ threads enough to justify an opinion.
Personally I see it as a modern console due to it starting the current era of 3D games. With VR coming out though I can see it being considered retro.

Pretty sure it had none or REALLY limited, almost SNES like. Best comparison is Castlevania SOTN port on Saturn and PS1. Shame Saturn had more content. I really wish someone ported or restored the saturn content to the PS1 version.

Although he is, his opinion is valid up to his last sentence.

Please, stop. This could have been a good thread.

/vr/ likes to talk about stuff earlier than mid 90's, (with a strict cutoff at 99 if I remember correctly) so they don't talk about N64 too much, but it is considered retro by today's standards, it's 20 year old tech.

nigga

Nigga the PS1 3D looked way worse, and I think the Saturn looked even worse than PS1

I like the lack of texture filtering.

honestly not much has changed since the N64. Sure graphics got better, but games like skyrim still use an engine developed in the 90s.

This.

With some exceptions, 3D on the n64 looked better than on PS1, and not all of that can be chalked up to nintendo's characteristic cartoony art style, and the weird blur the N64 slaps on everything.

I cannot tell you how bad I want a re-release of the best fifth generation games but running at 60fps. There are tons of great games but I can't play them for very long due to how choppy they are in comparison.

same as the guy above tbh
makes the games age better visually

I don't think years should dictate retro, to me the difference between it and modern is a shift in design philosophy, where devs decided to stop making games challenging and deep and pandered to retards instead. The cutoff point for me is 6th gen, you saw the beginnings of the shift, but it mostly just resulted in really well done tutorials, which devs went full retard with next gen and basically made the whole games one giant easy as shit tutorial.

All modern Call of Duty games use a heavily modified Quake 3 engine. Bethesda is just incompetent.

>What is Panzer Dragoon Zwei

Also, recently got pic related. I've just put in a full-set into the thing, however, what are some must plays apart from the obvious? Is chart user working on it?

Unless you know moon most of the good stuff will be inaccessible to you.

That's my point, until we see something that opens a new dimension like the transition from 2D to 3D or pixel to vector graphics, there's no real landmark between 2016 and 1996.

Just emulate you dumb faggot

Fully programmable graphics pipelines? I mean you can compile regular c programs for the RX480 IIRC.

IIRC Carmack basically said graphics had reached a plateau and won't be going anywhere anytime soon.

Even the easy to implement avenues to increase raw processing power have been nearly exhausted, which is why we've seen CPU development slow to a crawl and contradict Moore's law.

Isn't that what Vulkan is about? Getting closer to the "raw metal"?

Still, even such an approach is limited because you can only squeeze so much from existing architectures before you hit a wall.

Saging for faggotry

Sure graphics won't improve anymore, beyond how accessible and efficient it will be to render something. But there's still new dimensions for a player to play a game, and frontiers for developers to explore.
Motion controls came close, but that's really only limited to the Wii. Stereoscopic came close too, but that's limited to the 3DS. Hell it seems like nintendo is the only company concerned with exploring gameplay.

Speaking of which if any of you here knows how to do 60fps patches for emulated games you should get your ass working on PS1 since options to make it viable have started popping up, we even go a SH 60fps hack

You probably spent more money buying the thing than you would have actually buying the carts but whatever.

Blast Corps
Anything Factor 5
Anything Rare
Anything Mario
Anything Zelda
Anything Turok
Buck Bumble
Body Harvest
X-Treme G
F-Zero X
Mischief Makers
Sin & Punishment
Rogue Squadron
Ridge Racer 64
Kirby 64
I know I'm forgetting a ton

Gauntlet Legends (emulate the arcade version)
Doom64 (Doom 64 ex on your PC is better in almost every way)
Rayman 2 (by far the worst fucking version of it, R2R on PS2 is the recommended one but most released are ok except DS/PS1)
Megaman 64 (PC if you're a glutton for punishment or PS1 emulated with PGXP)
Vigilante 8 (The DC port)
Shadownman (PC/DC port)
Quake1/2 (PC obviously)
Hexen (PC obviously)

Err, no. Vulkan was about reducing CPU overhead.

Vulkan is also about giving low level control of the hardware.

I guess. I'm just going to stick to openGL for now though.

Pretty much no reason not to stick with OGL if you don't care about the new things vulkan can do like async compute, you can get similar results to vulkan overhead wise with AZDO and OGL 4.x.

Doesn't DSA help?

where is Gaster?

developer.nvidia.com/opengl-vulkan

I admit it looks impressive for a Saturn game, but it's really the only example I've seen, and even yet is pretty mediocre compared to most N64/PS1 titles.

Neat. *Anyone know how to collision math?*

It wasn't sales and technology. The PS1 had flopped in Japan till that point and the N64 and Saturn were selling stronger, especially since Saturn had an incredible conversion of Virtua Fighter 2. Square were seriously considering switching to Sega because FF VII was becoming out of scope for the N64 or at least waiting for the 64DD like Capcom were allegedly doing. They were even considering releasing it as a PC only game with Windows 95 systems booming in Japan and home PC's being popular despite space issues as it wouldn't be a spec hungry game. They could even just render it in software mode without issue and have it run on pentium systems.

What Sony offered, far beyond what Nintendo and Sega could offer, was money. A fucking ton of dosh in exchange for timed console exclusivity. It was their hail mary play for saving the PS1 in Japan as up to that point, it had been a massive failure. It wasn't even doing that hot in the US as the console gen was slow to start because of the late gen burst in quality SNES titles, but PS1 was a huge success in Europe due to great marketing and titles made for their market.

Sony bet big, funded the game and it worked. PS1 sales shot up like a rocket in Japan and the US when FFVII came out and the PS1 went onto stratospheric success.

That's how Sony got FFVII. They paid for it. And thank god. Imagine if Sega got it? Bernie Stollar would have blocked its release because it "Wasn't modern looking enough".

fuck my life

There has been almost as much time between the release of the N64 and now as there is between the release of Pong and the N64.
Yea, it is "retro".

the very first level of panzer dragoon is more incredible than 95% of the n64 library. and that's a launch title.

If an emulator doesn't have overclock settings then it will only run at what did on the real hardware. It will get rid of any performance related frame dips (like explosions and such) but many games are locked to 30fps (like P.N.03 for GC) and require actual hacks to get around.

Someone remind me when Nintendo was supposed to be good? After SNES I draw a blank.

PlayStation had a cd drive.

Can't make a Final Fantasy game without FMVs.

Still boggles the mind Nintendo went with cartridges.

Nah, it looks pretty terrible.

This. An actual re-release with fixed stuff it's always nice, but you always get the "just emulate" faggots that will never learn emulation is shit in most cases.
Shame that most re-releases are also shit in most cases.

Are you being ironic? Because Cartridge > CD

After SNES nintendo exclusive games were a lot less, but the few games they have are considered really good in each generation for one reason or other. Arguably, they went downhill with quality, but they managed until now, so…

Emulation isn't shit, you are just bad at it.

Shitty meme, the lack of capacity is among one of the things that held the N64 back and it's the primary thing that held the NGC back.
Not having as big a loadtime isn't that great when you don't have enough space to fit your game to begin with.

Yeah, it's fucking bizarre that Nintendo didn't fucking switch to CDs, considered they had to strip down their graphics to fit the cartridges, and struggling to fit entire games to fit the cartridges. Did you know that Ocarina of Time nearly couldn't fit the overworld in the cartridge? They were going to make it like Super Mario 64, the entire game was going to be in Ganon's Castle, and you got to different levels by going into paintings. You can see the influence during the Phantom Ganon boss fight.

N64 has been considered retro for a long time. It's an ancient machine.

You seriously don't see the problem there? I mean, sure, it's satisfying to emulate something right, but all the time I spent twiking a single game I could just insert the cartridge on my N64 and play it. Fuck playing N64 games in anything other than a N64 controller, btw. Fixing the dead zone and thanks to the particular retarded way the stick works is a pain.

To be filled with what? FMVs? Storage and capacity are advantages on CDs, that's a fact, but there are far more advantages on cartridges, before, and even more now. Back then main advantage was more stability, less load times and internal memory.
Only downside is what this user said >>10886859but you could have visually stunning graphics with a short game or simple graphics with a long game. I like the later more.

after the super nintendo they've been bleeding third party support.

considering the reflections, heavy detail sprites, transparencies it's easily better looking than most of the n64 library, which despite any graphical prowess in any game, it's all reduced to a blurry mess.

No. Emulators aren't hard to set up, and it's easy to download plug ins to improve graphics, and set up controllers. Controls also had controller problems, you had to replug them in if they were faulty, or replace them because they are broken. You also have the hassle of buying the games and consoles. I like consoles, but prefer emulators from time to time.

Nobody cares about load times, everybody has moved on to optical media and digital games, even Nintendo. I don't know what you mean by internal memory though.

I prefer short games with gorgeous graphics, but all the consoles in that era had long games with gorgeous graphics.

Textures (not that the N64 would be able to really use them but that's another story), music, uncompressed data so you don't have to compromise the performance of your game to fit it on an undersized cartridge.

I mean look at RE2 on N64, they had to manually resize every single screen, reduce the sample quality in the music (despite the music not being very heavy to begin with) and develop their own custom texture and video compression algorithm just to have the game fit on a cartridge in an heavily butchered state.

Or look at FF9, just the music in one cd wouldn't fit on a cartridge and it's already sample based and heavily compressed for space reason on the PS1.

N64 had at least 20 or so worthwhile games to play. Nearly another 40 probably if you look for the underrated gems or can handle a few flaws like a bad camera or the graphics.

The N64 did just fine in terms of storage space, the main problem was that it couldn't hold fmvs and voices. It did open worlds fine, and what it did have was better than what you could find on the PS1

All with load times 20x faster.

the n64 inarguably suffered due to storage space limitations. It also hurt third party interest due to how expensive higher capacity carts could be. I really don't know how you can defend this, even with the well known lower resolution assets.

Because the NX will be using carts and shills need to rewrite history to erase the negativity surrounding cart gaming.

I don't think the NX will be using traditional carts as we might think of them, probably just 3ds style sd cards.

The N64 has meme-status both in online shopping and anywhere else.

If anything the worst version is the PS1 but whatever. Also, the PS2 version suffered from frame-rate drops, DC version a best.

You're trading 2d for 3d quality, I think the emphasis on 3d games at the time justified the trade-off. The cost is a legitimate problem, but that doesn't effect the quality of the games themselves, it's a business issue.

If fucking Chrono Trigger gets 10 second load times on a CD, then there is something wrong with the choice of medium.

chrono trigger with its low detail 2D backgrounds has longer load times than the full detail 3D crash bandicoot 3. The problem came from how good developers were with the technology. Chrono Trigger front loaded content in and out of memory, crash 3 wiped that content as it removed things from visible chunks. Chrono Trigger could have 1 second load times with all the expertise square eventually gained about the technology. Your example is retarded.

CT on PS1 loaded the games assets from a copy of the SNES rom that is on the disk, which is a terrible idea since you're basically reading a compressed archive on a media with terrible access time.

exactly the problem, poorly optimized, cheap port. Could have easily had second long load times.

It's not the only example. And even if the load time is reduced, the 3d models are still jaggy as fuck. I agree that Nintendo can never get a full package right, but they always nail at least ONE thing. With the N64 and the Gamecube, it was the power and the load times, with the Wii and the Wii U it was the neat pointer/tablet thing.

N64 excelled in casual, multiplayer 3d games, while the PS1 had more versatile, but much more difficult to optimize, single player experiences. I spent most of my time with the N64, but I can see the faults with the both of them. DC/early PC master race

something tells me 95% of your examples are early PS1 titles.

Smackdown 2, Lunar Silver Star, Populus, Mortal Kombat, not all games are as bad, but they could certainly be better.

They did it for copy protection.

The cartridge had a theoretical maximum storage space of 32 MB.
Which couldn't be used, because 32 MB of solid state ROM storage was way too expensive in the 90s. So most games came on 8 MB cartridges with half of the game price being the cartridge cost.
While CD-ROM provided a 700 MB capacity and a CD did already cost less than $1 to make.
Result: PSX games were way cheaper than N64 stuff, at least in Europe. You got free demo discs at every corner. Consequence: N64 tanked hard.

You do realize that most games on the N64 had the devs spend just as much if not more time trying to work around the systems limitations?

Just look at devblogs and commentary from the most technically impressive games on both systems, N64 devs had to basically come with entirely new solutions to fix mundane problems while PS1 devs generally just managed with clever use of the dev tools and a handful of times with crazy workarounds.

*64MB

This gotta be a fucking bait. PS1 never used texture filtering much less fullscreen filtering, and N64 never had high resolution.

Such ROM sizes weren't available during the 90s.
So while you could theoretically sell a $250 (manufacturing cost) 32 MB cartridge, the tech for 64 MB cartridges simply didn't exist.
While the 650 MB CD-ROM was readily available and cheap to produce.

Except they were pretty obviously.

Release date Biohazard 2:

The US version used the same sized cart, that released in '99.

Free months earlier doesn't really count as "during the 90s", not even for autists.
And PS2 with 9 GB DVDs was around the corner.

Never tired of moving the goalpost I see.

The Saturn could do 3D nigger, it was just fucking obtuse due to the retarded design of the dual processors and using 4 sided polys

You're not wrong about SOTN's Saturn port though, but that was primarily because Konami didn't give a single about the system and handed off the port to one of their lesser studios to churn out the port for a quick buck

...

Ahem

Slightly off topic
Wasn't the early crash series coded by an absolute madman who used a language that practically nobody else used at the time too?

Pshaw, 5th gen was the first where high-level compilers were commonly used to generate shipping code, but also the last gasp of the raw assembly masters.

Nintendo fans are hilarious~

Are you very stupid or are you just an easily triggered tumblirina?

Fix'd.

Everybody was talking about how the 64 bit Trumped over the PS1 32 bits, but when you compare any Crash Bandicoot with any N64 3D games it is very clear who the victor is
Ok brainiak How about Tomb Raider the Last Revelation? that was fully 3D and looked far better than anything on the N64,

...

GOOL iirc, yeah. Unconventional and incredibly optimized.

...

...

We're burgers and yuropoors, nobody owned one. Did the Saturn even have any games outside nipland?

The Saturn was as irrelevant as the Nintendo Virtual Boy.

I played this on PC and Tomb Raider still had somethoing this did not

Archs and round shapes in the background
Up until the las revelation there wasn't a single curved surface in the world of Tomb Raider, And this Indi game is the same, sqared all over the place
TR at least had arches

The PS3 version of GTA V also required some neat tricks to pull it off.

we're post-5th gen by about 16 years now. We can talk about all platforms in a global sense, your childhood doesn't hold back game libraries any more.

not in Japan, where the Saturn library was twice as big as the N64.

EU N64 losers were really fucked
Good thing nobody bought Nintendon't.

Nobody here cares for games full of runes, weaboo.

Stick to your (((localized))) garbage, normalfag.

Nice buzzword fag. What a waste of digits.

The lack of storage space meant this was often foiled by a need to compress things a ton, which often ended up generating longer wait times than a well-designed disc streaming game. Especially for systems with more RAM like the Saturn, speaking of which…

Believe it or not, this is actually one of the few PC-to-N64 ports where the N64 version was VASTLY superior in pretty much every way.

This. Fanlation patch or fuck off, I'm not desperate enough to waste time learning moonic just for vidya and puppet theater yet.

you must be very, very new then

apart from shining force 3.2 and 3.3, and dragon force 2, what japanese saturn games do you actually need a translation to play

Oh, I dunno, the heaps of 2D JRPGs & VNs the system is famous for?

I was asking you, specifically, what games because they seem so important to you that they are preventing you from investing in the system in the slightest

why not many of the great games with excellent game play that are very light on story

...

when you grow up loving the n64, realize you only have like 20 games, there's a strong sense of disappointment anyone would feel when you discover you only missed like 5 or 6 games throughout the entire library of a system you thought was so great.

Then the sense of dread kicks in when you see people who had saturns and playstations had actual hundreds of games they missed out on growing up.

You monolinguals are cute.
I only played localized games as a kid. Nowadays my games run in English, which is the language of choice by Western developers and usually provides the highest quality of voice acting.

Sorry to break your narrative, but PC master race here. There was absolutely no point in owning a console during the later 90s outside of Japan. And if you were a normalfag, you had a PSX.

oh, he's a redditor. nevermind. Sorry, this isn't the right thread for you, may I suggest the (((overwatch))) thread?

...

The 2000s were dark, dark years when the ability to count on the best console games getting crummy if better-than-console PC ports mysteriously vanished, right when their platforms were un-emulatable.

So what?

Generally it depends on where you are in the world.
Over here post 1995 Nintendo and Sega basically vanished, dudebros bought PlayStation and proper video game stores sold PC games only. This stayed this way until about 2007.

Just imagine he's saying "Saturn" instead of "Dreamcast" and there you have a good N64-Saturn comparative as well.

ZIMBABWE!

You'd have a point with the PlayStation but the Saturn had hardly any games released in the west. You had mostly arcade ports and the other games were also on the PlayStation.

I bought a Saturn first as a kid and then got a n64 later on. I think I was the only person in my school that had one, you either had a ps1 or 64.

yes that's nice we were all kids at one point. but we're here now and accessing these foreign games isn't a problem, so do you have an actual point?

Oh, your opinion is worthless then.

Actually it's famous for shmups and fighters.

The VN machine would be the pc-98.

you're correcting a person who doesn't have a clue what he's talking about, you don't need to give him any attention.

He's lives in a nation that has nearly been cucked to death. Are you that shocked that he is throwing a tantrum when reality rears it's ugly head?

So how pretentious am I for being interested in the saturn from a programming standpoint despite having no knowledge of the games on it at all outside of ports like Quake 1 and what have you?

I can't help but be fascinated by the Saturn for how ahead of its time it is, am I just being a faggot?

nice

Weren't the wintel platform's PC competitors like PC-98, MSX, and X68k dying on the vine by the time the Saturn hit its stride?

No, its architecture is pretty uniquely demented. If you want to be a real weirdo, write 32X homebrew

saturn's hardware is mainly good for 2d. There still isn't a more advanced piece of dedicated 2d hardware.

The MSX was an 8-bit computer from the 80's, so yes it was long dead.

As far as the other 2, they never competed against Windows in the traditional sense. It's not like Japanese people would ever use a computer manufactured outside of Japan. Pc-98 used a modified version of DOS anyway.

The MSX was repeatedly upgraded clear to 1990 alongside its competitors, and from my admittedly limited knowledge, had a few years of significant inertia left after that as a gaming platform.

Sure, but the same could be said of many platforms in the era, which used somewhat MS-DOS compatible OSs and/or licensed MS Basic environments. And it was still a somewhat incompatible platform that directly competed with fully standard wintel machines.

Pretty good get. Fuck weebs.

They could have done it on Saturn because the setup of CGI Backgrounds and basic 3D were plenty feasable on Saturn and were in talks with Sega about switching because Saturn sales in Japan were far stronger than PS1 sales (PS1 was almost reaching flop status in Japan and Kutaragi was running out of time with Sony's board as it had only been a success in Europe so far). But Square knew Sega weren't doing so well elsewhere so they kept their options open. They even talked to EA about co-funding and publishing on PC-CDROM and Console but in the end Sony offered the most cash and also were giving access to their film division and facilities in Japan. That's what pushed Square to the big "Betrayal" and signing their games as exclusives to PS1 (With later ports on PC).

An enhanced port of TR2 which included a few TR1 levels was being planned at Eidos and confirmed by Eidos themselves to a lot of British magazines. Till Sony signed a massive multi-million moneyhat with Eidos for console exclusivity which meant development on TR2 on N64 and Saturn was cancelled.

Sony started doing a lot of that once the PS1 started really selling.