Former Sega hardware engineers Kenji Tosaki and Junichi Naoi confirmed a Saturn Graphics Accelerator was in development

Ever heard the rumor that Sega was working on a Saturn add-on to enhance its graphics? I hadn’t. Apparently it really happened, though, or at least someone tried to make it happen.

In an interview with Japanese outlet Beep21, former Sega hardware designers Kenji Tosaki and Junichi Naoi confirmed that Sega really had sought out to create an add-on to help the Sega Saturn produce much better graphics than it could on its own. Essentially, this would’ve been the same thing for the Saturn that the 32X was for the Genesis/Mega-Drive, in that it would have its own line of Saturn games that would require it be attached to the console in order for those games to function. What’s more, the cancelled Saturn version of Shenmue, as well as a planned Saturn port of Virtua Fighter 3, were both planned to utilize it.

These two had quite a lot to say about this cancelled hardware expansion, so join us after the break if you wanna hear more.

According to Kenji Tosaki, henceforth Tosaki-san, the project was known internally as “Project TRIP” and began in 1996, one year after Saturn made its retail debut in the US and EU. Tosaki-san went over to ask Junichi Naoi, henceforth Naoi-san, about it since he was part of the team working on it at the time. Naoi-san had previously worked at Hitachi, where he helped design their SH-1 and SH-2 processors. That’s the same SH-2 that was doubled up and used as the two main processors in both the Saturn and the 32X. He then moved over to Sega in 1994, during the final months of the Saturn’s pre-production, to help finalize its design with cost reduction in mind.

Work on Project TRIP started with the very same thing that pushed Sega’s designers to equip the Saturn with 3D acceleration in the first place: Virtua Fighter. Naoi-san and his co-workers at Hitachi were playing Virtua Fighter almost constantly, and he found himself especially enamored with Virtua Fighter 3 as that was getting ready to debut in arcades. Being a Model 3 game, of course, creating a Saturn port of Virtua Fighter 3 even half as faithful to how the arcade game performed was an impossibility. Naoi-san set out to create a hardware add-on that could allow the Saturn to produce something reasonably close enough. He spoke with Japanese semiconductor company NEC to help him come up with a variant of Hitachi’s SH-3 processor with a good balance of power and cost-effectiveness, which resulted in the SH-3E. It was the same as an ordinary SH-3, but with a floating point unit added to easily render quality 3D graphics. It could outperform both of the Saturn’s SH-2 processors combined by about 8x by itself.

The article ends there with the promise that more will be revealed in a later interview. Special thanks goes to our friends at Sega Saturn Shiro, who actually paid for a subscription to Beep21 in order to see the entire, unabridged interview and human translated it. They also had extra info to share based around their own research.

Coming from an anonymous source close to Sega’s hardware team that Sega Saturn Shiro had been in contact with, Project TRIP, in its final form, would’ve taken the form of a small cartridge going into the Saturn’s cartridge slot, much like the Saturn Backup Memory or the Extended RAM Cartridge. It would also handle all the 3D rendering tasks while the Saturn’s built-in SH-2 processors handled less taxing elements such as UI and skyboxes, similar to how the 32X worked in tandem with the Genesis. Shiro also pointed out how Beep21 had done an earlier interview with Tosaki-san where he had mentioned Shenmue was retooled to take advantage of Project TRIP before it was retooled again to be a Dreamcast game. In the end, both that and Virtua Fighter 3 skipped the Saturn completely and came to homes everywhere as Dreamcast titles. The Dreamcast itself used a single SH-4 processor as its main CPU.

We appreciate Sega Saturn Shiro for reporting on this exciting never before known history and invite you to read their whole account of it here to learn even more. We’re certain they’ll be the first to tell English-speaking fans all about part 2 of this interview when it goes live. Until then, tell us all what you think. Would you have liked to see a 32X-style add-on for Saturn? Would it have been worth it to get Saturn versions of Virtua Fighter 3 or Shenmue? It might be fun to imagine how differently history could’ve played out in the comments section below.