I'm not quite sure if this is the right spot to put this, so please delete if necessary, however this is a question for you Jon.
Apparently the Sega Saturn was a hard console to program for, however it was apparently a bit of a power house.
Could you share any of your experiences working with the Saturn/Sega (both good and bad) in comparison to something like the PlayStation?
I really wouldn't say the saturn is hard to program for, from my experience systems where it is claimed that it is difficult or hard to program for I often find it stupid easy, often easier than ones they say are easy to program for.
But then again I find most things easy to program for. The issue is you have to take the time to learn how to trick the systems into doing what you want them to, or optimizing your code for said systems. Which often takes more than a 10 second google search, that most programmers now a days boil down to using. I'm not saying their bad but depend too much on things to the point where if they didn't have google or a autocomplete IDE they would be completely lost never mind the devs that just pay for engine usage like most do now a days, in which most never access the lower levels within them or externally to clean up the engines themselves but most of the time their terms of usage disallows modification to them. Because they don't want someone improving their engine into something much far better, because it makes them look bad.
Honestly I would love to program for the saturn but their cd copy protection would prevent homebrew outside of emulation.
The major issue I see with saturn development is the usage of quadrilateral polygons for 3d games, which is what most people were complaining about from what I have seen from the actual devs, and most of those complaints stemmed from not being able to do clean ports from other platforms.