Dreaming: The Future of Saturn Emulation

[racketboy]

Let me preface this by saying I have the utmost respect and appreciation for those involved in developing Sega Saturn emulators. As a professional programmer myself, I know the hard work, frustration, and bits of genius that goes into hardcore programming. And considering how complex of a machine the Saturn is, the dedication is only multiplied.

Now, I would just like to ask a few interview-style questions of those that work on Saturn emulation or know a respectible amount about the subject.

1) How do you see the future of Saturn emulation in general?

2) Would you like to see a Saturn emulator modeled after another emulator such as ePSXe? (plugins, etc)

3) What games do you think will be the most difficult to emulate perfectly? and why?

4) What time period do you realisticly see Saturn emulation reaching near-perfection at full speed? and on what type of hardware?

5) What has been your biggest thrill in Saturn emulation thus far?

6) What is your favorite non-Saturn emulator?

 

[fistedjustice]

Originally posted by racketboy@Feb 12, 2004 @ 02:02 PM

Let me preface this by saying I have the utmost respect and appreciation for those involved in developing Sega Saturn emulators. As a professional programmer myself, I know the hard work, frustration, and bits of genius that goes into hardcore programming. And considering how complex of a machine the Saturn is, the dedication is only multiplied.

Now, I would just like to ask a few interview-style questions of those that work on Saturn emulation or know a respectible amount about the subject.

1) How do you see the future of Saturn emulation in general?

2) Would you like to see a Saturn emulator modeled after another emulator such as ePSXe? (plugins, etc)

3) What games do you think will be the most difficult to emulate perfectly? and why?

4) What time period do you realisticly see Saturn emulation reaching near-perfection at full speed? and on what type of hardware?

5) What has been your biggest thrill in Saturn emulation thus far?

6) What is your favorite non-Saturn emulator?

1) It will eventually be decent.

2) The plugin system is nice but not needed.

3) Don't those obscure dating games always end up being the impossible games to emulate in the long run?

4) Time period: Whenever someone takes the time. Emulation could be full speed right now on modern processors, you just need a good enough coder to take the time to properly emulate the hardware.

5) Probably when I turned my saturn on and played it on a tv, emulation and it's best.

6) NeoRageX

 

[ExCyber]

1) How do you see the future of Saturn emulation in general?

Right now emu authors are working on just getting things working properly, which is the main reason you see such high system requirements for some Saturn emulators - optimizing something that doesn't work just makes it harder to fix at best, or breaks more stuff at worst. I'm confident that playable Saturn emulation will be a reality on weaker (sub-GHz / low-wattage systems) at some point.

2) Would you like to see a Saturn emulator modeled after another emulator such as ePSXe? (plugins, etc)

Plugins shouldn't be necessary for a good emulator, but wouldn't hurt anything. They were invaluable to PSX and N64 emulation back when those were highly experimental and processors were weaker, but I don't see the benefit now that hardware and APIs have matured more.

3) What games do you think will be the most difficult to emulate perfectly? and why?

Probably NiGHTS and Burning Rangers because their engine (I hear) makes use of concave quads, VF2 because (IIRC from a Suzuki interview) it's madly optimized for master+slave and probably has some timing quirks, and anything that otherwise uses gobs of custom DSP code and/or inter-CPU communication (Grandia maybe based on some rumors I've heard), Phantasy Star Collection because there's a good chance it's pulling some dirty emulation tricks on at least PS1, Most of Capcom's arcade ports because they most likely make heavy use of VDP2 raster effects, and anything by Treasure because Treasure is kinda known for doing some oddball stuff for the sake of neat effects .

4) What time period do you realisticly see Saturn emulation reaching near-perfection at full speed? and on what type of hardware?

Well, When It's Done[TM], but if you want to twist my arm I'd say some good stuff should happen within 2 years or so if work continues at the current pace, sooner if collaborative work on the open-source Saturn emu picks up. Will probably take at least a 2000+ Athlon or 2GHz P4 to get fullspeed without sacrificing quality initially, as I said before maybe down to sub-1GHz once optimizations have been hammered out (yes, optimizations are that important - idle loop skipping is the only reason Psikyo's SH-2-based games run at playable speed in MAME).

5) What has been your biggest thrill in Saturn emulation thus far?

N/A. Will be when I can fire up Radiant Silvergun flawlessly scaled/antialiased to 1024x768 or thereabouts.

6) What is your favorite non-Saturn emulator?

MAME.

 

[Runik]

1) How do you see the future of Saturn emulation in general?

GiriGiri showed the path. Expect something similar in the near future (no, I can't say more, sorry )

2) Would you like to see a Saturn emulator modeled after another emulator such as ePSXe? (plugins, etc)

Satourne already uses plug-ins, and we agreed with Stefano Thieso (author of SSE) and Fabien to work on a common plug-in base in the the future. We just need to find time to settle this down ...

3) What games do you think will be the most difficult to emulate perfectly? and why?

For me it's just games using dual sh2 :lol: (yeah, it's just about 99.99% of games).

But those using the DSP should be a real pain in the ass to emulate ...

4) What time period do you realisticly see Saturn emulation reaching near-perfection at full speed? and on what type of hardware?

Like ExCyber stated, it's a bit early for the predictions. And predictions are meant to be wrong. But computers are getting faster everyday, so the optimisations should be a lesser problem in the future (booh ! seems like a lazy programmer ! )

2 years sounds reasonable ...

5) What has been your biggest thrill in Saturn emulation thus far?

The first day Saturnin showed graphics : it was the 23 december 2002, 8 months after the beginning of the project ...

The first game booting was quite cool also

6) What is your favorite non-Saturn emulator?

UltraHLE. For what it represented when it came out ... It's outdated now, but it's still my favorite.

 

[M3d10n]

2) Would you like to see a Saturn emulator modeled after another emulator such as ePSXe? (plugins, etc)

A plugin system is necessary, IMHO, because currently, SSF aside, all other Saturn emulators are using HW acceleration to emulate the VDP1 sprites. While it's awesome to have the 3D games at a higher resolution, and the 2D games have super crips zoom, the drawbacks are obvious: texture warping (because each quad is split in two pre-transformed/2D triangles) and visible triangulation in non complanar quads or with gouraud shading. But I heard that there is a hack to perform a passable perspective correction on pre-transformed triangles...

I'd love to see a software graphic plugin capabe of quad rendering and shading.

3) What games do you think will be the most difficult to emulate perfectly? and why?

Grandia. Period. Nights and Burning Rangers both run with really minor graphic glitches in GiriGiri and the pre 0.7 SSF'es. Nights, in particular, looks near perfect, while Burning Rangers has some gouraud shading flickering and a few transparency problems, since the composition mode it uses is not properly emulated in GiriGiri (SSF gets it right, but it flickers). Grandia won't boot in *any* emulator, and GiriGiri can only make it to the title screen (that displays garbage) before hard-crashing while trying to play it's unique video format.

The "raster" effects in Capcom games are usual VDP2 scanline stuff: emulate the VDP2 and you're set.

5) What has been your biggest thrill in Saturn emulation thus far?

Even if it was not legal, seeing Panzer Dragon Saga run flawlessly

 

[SamIAm]

Damn, seeing those screenshots of NiGHTS reminded me how much better RGB is than composite or S-Video. Why oh why is there no such thing as NTSC SCART?

 

[ExCyber]

The "raster" effects in Capcom games are usual VDP2 scanline stuff: emulate the VDP2 and you're set.

The problem I anticipate is not emulating the functions, but getting the timing correct with respect to the rest of the system - MSHvSF won't even render correctly at 50Hz , and that's with a 100% VDP2 implementation. That's probably a bug/missing feature in the game, of course (counting lines for a 60Hz display when the display is not 60Hz), but that's just a timing bug that we know about. Who knows how many other silent assumptions are made about the order or priority of events because the code was just tweaked until it worked?

Why oh why is there no such thing as NTSC SCART?

I don't think anyone can give a definitive answer on this, but AFAICT:

1) Because Americans won't buy into a French standard (SCART = Syndicat des Constructeurs d'Appareils Radiorécepteurs et Téléviseurs)

2) Because the IBM PC and Apple Macintosh weren't made for hooking up to a TV, most other major things we had to hook up until DVD players were natively composite/S-Video (videotape, laserdisc, earlier computers; video games were just an amusement for the kids, who don't buy TVs), and DVD players are natively color-difference, so we got that instead of RGB. I don't know if it took off in Europe because of technical idealism or because they actually had something to plug into it (Amiga perhaps?)

 

[Scared0o0Rabbit]

NTSC = Never The Same Color twice. With that said, I'd love it if rgb was available on us tv's. Either that or I wish rgb to component transcoders were readily available.