Best Saturn Emu for Testing?

[slinga]

Hey guys,

I'm finally programming on saturn again (and enjoying it :cheers) after a farily long hiatus. What emulator do you guys use to test your binaries on? I know using an emu has it's drawbacks but I prefer this method because 1) I'm a lousy programmer who can't afford to burn each of his tests, 2) I don't have a commlink card and don't intend to buy one.

I'm using Satourne debugger Dynarec v01102002 WiP, which is OK for testing, nothing great. This version I have seems to have some issue in regards to sprites. I can see the sprites on Satourne, but they don't show up on the real hardware when I burn an iso. Need to look further into that. I tried some of the newer versions of Satourne, but I felt they were actually a step back. I used to use Giri Giri for a while, but I don't think that had binary support.

 

[MasterAkumaMatata]

Yes, GiriGiri does have binary support. See attached pic.

On a related note, here are some screenshots I made for El Piratero running his Sega Saturn binary demos in GiriGiri.

 

[Runik]

Originally posted by slinga@Mon, 2004-12-06 @ 01:22 AM

I tried some of the newer versions of Satourne, but I felt they were actually a step back.

That's just plain wrong. The latest Satourne version is way better than the previous one, the only problem I spotted is related to the cdblock which isn't used for binaries ...

The next version of Saturnin will be nice for binaries also, it's still in alpha stages but stuff made by VBT works nicely on it (it wasn't the case earlier)

 

[Borisz]

I find SSF to have by far the highest compatibility.

This stands especially true for the 0.07 version, however you should note that the 0.07 version lacks the VDP2 backgrounds (last version to have them was 0.06 alpha 4, which is also included on the homepage for this very reason).

 

[RockinB]

@MasterAkumaMatata:

What kind of GiriGiri is it on the screenshot? I got the debugger 6a, which is very old, I think.

@slinga:

You really should get your hands on a commslink card. When you wasted some hours just because of a bug in the emu and not in your program, you will wish you had one .

For me, Satourne finally works now on XP(never did before) and it is the fastest for me(got only 500MHz K6-2, Duron got broken ). But it doesn't support all background transformations.

SSF would be my choice, but newer versions need SSE 2, so I need to take an older version. Slow.

 

[Borisz]

the newer versions work fine on my Athlon XP which does not have SSE2, only SSE.

the emu on the screenshots is Girigiri-gav.

http://web.axelero.hu/fka2636/girigiri-gav.rar

 

[RockinB]

Thanks for the file.

Unfortunately, it doesn't work. One of the files included got a really weird name, absolutely unreadable.

Starting glaunc the first time, it fails loading this file, although the displayed filename is slightly different.

gsaturn doesn't work after this. I really hate these error messages noone can read...

 

[Borisz]

bios should be named as bios.bin, although its included in that pack I linked to.

the file âTâ^ü[âôXPâpâbâ`.sdb is some driver or whatnot which is needed, doubleclick on it and it should install. under add/remove programs, you will see it as サターンＸＰパッチ (Saturn XP Patch). Afterwards, it should work fine.

if you get any other file errors, plz give a screenshot or something. Remember that you either start it up as "gsaturn.exe -disk" to read games from CDs, or launch glaunch.exe for running bin/cues (which you first have to set up with gentoc).

its really not hard to get it working.

 

[CyberWarriorX]

the file âTâ^ü[âôXPâpâbâ`.sdb is some driver or whatnot which is needed, doubleclick on it and it should install. under add/remove programs, you will see it as サターンＸＰパッチ (Saturn XP Patch). Afterwards, it should work fine.

You don't want that installed. It actually forces girigiri to run as if it were running in windows 98 or something like that(It's been a while since I looked into it). Anyways, it renders the cdrom support useless if you had any thoughts of using it.

The switches that gsaturn.exe is supposed to support are:

-DISK(for cdrom support)

-i(for images)

Only use glaunch to initially set up the emulator or for changing the button mappings. Aside from that, it's better to use gsaturn itself or another launcher.

Cyber Warrior X

 

[Borisz]

CDROM support is broken in Windows XP anyway, so it won't do jack shit. I remember that I had to install it once to get girigiri working, now after uninstalling it, it still works fine though.

 

[CyberWarriorX]

CDROM support is broken in Windows XP anyway, so it won't do jack shit.

Works fine for me.

Cyber Warrior X

 

[Borisz]

Originally posted by CyberWarriorX@Wed, 2004-12-08 @ 05:12 PM

Works fine for me.

Cyber Warrior X

[post=125520]Quoted post[/post]​

the original girigiri-gav does not read CDs in winXP. At least I couldn't get it working no matter what ASPI I installed.

 

[CyberWarriorX]

the original girigiri-gav does not read CDs in winXP. At least I couldn't get it working no matter what ASPI I installed.

It's not supposed to use ASPI in win2k/winxp. If everything is setup correctly, it uses SPTI.

Cyber Warrior X

 

[Borisz]

SSF just got updated to 0.07 R12 a few days ago, but I can't try it as I'm on an Athlon CPU which doesn't support SSE2.

Can someone check it out on what improvements are in it? It's supposed to have the VDP2 back and a nice speed boost as well.

 

[MasterAkumaMatata]

The trick with GiriGiri is not to run from a CD-ROM, but to run from a small BIN+CUE image file (e.g., a NetLink BIN+CUE image) found in the same directory as your GiriGiri files. You just need something that works so that you can get to the the emulator window where you can go to "File" and "Load Exec" to load the binary you want to test.

Rockin'-B and slinga: check your PM.

 

[slinga]

Thanks to MasterAkumaMatata, I now have my answer: GiriGiri is the best by far for devers.

Supports loading binaries, and it's quick too. Takes me less than 10 secods to launch and load a binary, whereas with the old version of Satourne it would take a minute or so (even with the logo disabled!!).

 

[Runik]

Originally posted by slinga@Thu, 2004-12-16 @ 12:02 AM

Thanks to MasterAkumaMatata, I now have my answer: GiriGiri is the best by far for devers.

Supports loading binaries, and it's quick too. Takes me less than 10 secods to launch and load a binary, whereas with the old version of Satourne it would take a minute or so (even with the logo disabled!!).

[post=125928]Quoted post[/post]​

Why are you still using the old satourne ?

Let me say it again : the last version of satourne is fast, it loads binaries fast too, and i don't see why everyone still state that it doesn't work

Improvements can be made to the GUI, but that's the only flaw I found so far ...

All the useful debug options are there too, so just give it a try

 

[slinga]

Runik: I gave the newest version on the website a shot. It's version 1.1. I loaded all the plugins, but it still will not run. I'll post the exact error message I get, but it's definitely an improvement of Satourne 1.01 which I think was the last plug-in build of Satourne I tried.

 

[Runik]

Don't forget that you have to load the vector tables before loading a binary ( ie start the emu, then pause it, and finally load the binary)

 

[RockinB]

Thanks for the help with GiriGir,

but unfortunately it still gives me an error message [attachmentid=926], regardless which launcher I use.

Maybe some system requirements of GiriGiri are not met by my PC. It's an AMD k6-2 500 with only 128MB. My PC got broken, so I had to downgrade...

But now that I know some of the bugs of Satourne, testing code works for me. It's very unstable though. Testing multiple binaries without restarting Satourne soon ends with a hanging system.