It's a shame the scene is so quiet as the Saturn is a fascinating machine. If you use something like Jo Engine then it's not too difficult to get up and running. If you want to roll your own and still have something that performs it gets messy. Stuff like dealing with bus contention between the SH2s, the VDP access timing/slot system, that funky little DSP. You can see why it took so long to get decent libraries for it. It's still fun to see how far you can push the hardware.
Reading through source code for old games is always fascinating. Any developer worth his salt should take the time to explore this area. The tricks that the engine programmers used to squeeze every last ounce out of the hardware are truly inspiring.
I can appreciate how much effort has gone into this project. For years, I've been working on disassembling and commenting the Sonic 2 Master System engine (https://www.sonicretro.org/asm_svn/Sonic%202%20SMS%20Disasse...) and it's still only about 80% complete.
