GoKawiilRumors about a missing hardware link between the Sega Saturn and Dreamcast have swirled mysteriously for many years. Now, thanks to a series of interviews published by Japan’s Beep21 gaming magazine (machine translation), the truth is out. An ex-Hitachi, ex-Sega, and ex-Sony engineer has confirmed that he proposed and developed a Saturn graphics accelerator, codenamed TRIP, based on Hitachi’s SH‑3 processor.
The Sega Saturn console launched in late 1994 / early 1995, as Sega’s fifth-generation machine, going up against Sony’s first-generation PlayStation. Sega became concerned about leaks pointing to great PlayStation (PS One, PSX) performance. So, a few months before the launch, it reconfigured its Saturn with an extra Video Display Processor (VDP). Thus, the machine ended up with ‘processor soup’ made up of dual Hitachi SH-2 (28 MHz) RISC processors, two VDPs, plus co-processors dedicated to 3D geometry, sound, and I/O.
With its previous-gen console, the Genesis (AKA Mega Drive), Sega didn’t hold back from iterating with the Mega-CD, 32X, Sega Channel network, and more. But rumors about an accelerator for the Saturn came and went with no hardware ever released, nor revealed, until now.
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TRIP accelerator with SH-3 processor
The missing link between the Saturn (1994) and Dreamcast (1998) was an accelerator for the former, internally known as the TRIP. Beep21 heard about this elusive project from an engineer called Junichi Naoi.
According to the source story and interview, Naoi was a Hitachi engineer who was in the team that developed the SH-1, SH-2, and other CPUs and ASICs. For the SH-2, he implemented several Sega-requested enhancements into the design. However, in 1994, Naoi would join Sega and help the firm develop cost-optimized revisions of the console over its lifecycle.
In 1996, a couple of years after Saturn first hit the market, and a couple of years before the Dreamcast would splash down, Sega felt that its current console was losing its shine. Not only was the PlayStation 1 doing amazingly well, but 3D accelerators were starting to establish PCs as very capable modern gaming machines.
Thus, the TRIP project was born at Sega. The proposed accelerator module for the Saturn would include a Hitachi SH-3. This chip was expected to significantly boost graphics and geometry calculations on the Saturn. According to the report/interview, the TRIP was judged to be good enough to propose that future Dreamcast classics Virtua Fighter 3 and Shenmue be launched alongside it.
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