The idea sounds preposterous but the achievement is real: a primitive form of ray tracing has been successfully prototyped on the Sega Saturn console. A video was recently posted by developer XL2, demonstrating a rudimentary but genuinely real-time ray-traced lighting solution running on the classic Sega console. The chances of this ever appearing in an actual game are basically zero, but it's a fascinating insight into how the hardware of yesteryear occasionally does the impossible when coded by talented developers in the modern era.

The creator of this demo certainly has the credentials. XL2 has already created an "impossible port" of sorts - a two-level recreation of the first brace of levels from Epic's Unreal. This new ray tracing demo is more of a proof of concept, however. It's a single room scene, with the RT system seemingly working by checking all vertices through the BSP (a BSP being a clever mathematical method used to organise a 3D environment into a 2D "tree" structure) and using part of the last dynamic light - in this case, the muzzle flash from the view weapon - as the primary light source. There are no actual static lights within the demo scene as such: every visible shadow and lighting change is generated in real-time via XL2's RT technique.

Of course, there's a gigantic gulf between the Saturn demo and the components of ray tracing in today's games. There are no surface normals or distance fall-off, so the overall look is blocky and somewhat harsh. That said, there is some evidence of basic denoising: shadowed regions appear in large, chunky blocks as the camera moves, revealing the extreme sampling limitations. However, the fact is that nothing like the technique seen here ever shipped on a Saturn game during its lifespan. What has been achieved here is unprecedented for a machine of this vintage.

And you can't help but wonder whether the technique seen here could have had some kind of use in commercial games of the era. Traditional lighting of the era - baked lightmaps and textures - consumed a relatively large amount of memory and could demand frequent disk access - a heavy burden for a game pulling off data from a CD. Even a heavily simplified real-time lighting solution had the potential to save memory and reduce disk reads.

Under the hood, it's reasonable to assume the demo leans on both of Saturn's Hitachi SH-2 CPUs and both VDP1 and VDP2 graphics processors - practically a requirement to achieve anything this ambitious on Saturn. The machine has long been described as a “programmer's playground” - challenging, even hostile, but rewarding to those who invest the time to understand its eccentric multi-chip architecture. In some ways, it anticipates modern developers' comfort with balancing workloads across multiple processors, even if properly utilising all of the system's resources was a notoriously challenging task to developers of the era.

Witnessing the Saturn brought back into the limelight for just a short moment reminds us of a broader point: Sega itself seems reluctant to celebrate what we still believe to be a truly fantastic console with a rich, diverse range of great games. Alongside the similarly underserved Dreamcast, there's a lack of mini-consoles, retro re-releases or other attempts to remind of a failed, but still brilliant era in Sega's history. These machines still resonate - and as community projects like this highlight, the Sega Saturn still inspires genuine enthusiasm and creative exploration of its unique hardware configuration.