Emu porting/writing to sega saturn

[danielt3]

Hi all

I'm thinking about porting several console emulators to Sega Saturn. I got really happy to see that Rockin'-B already done that with a snes emu. The question is: can Saturn run console (genesis and snes) games at full speed if I'd be able to write a good code for the emus?!?!? I didn't tested Rockin'-B's Snes9x on sega saturn. He says that he does not know about the compatibility (i'd be glad to test it as soon as i get my romset dvds back) and the speed is slow, altough he did not optimize the code. Is he going to release the source for this particular emulator he ported to sega saturn??!

Thanks for the attention

Daniel

 

[RockinB]

Originally posted by danielt3+Sat, 2006-04-08 @ 01:53 AM--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(danielt3 @ Sat, 2006-04-08 @ 01:53 AM)</div><div class='quotemain'>Hi all

I'm thinking about porting several console emulators to Sega Saturn.

[post=145552]Quoted post[/post]​

[/b]

Cool, we still need a NES emu. When you are porting a bad-coded emulator to Saturn, you'll probably have problems with endianess and unaligned memory accesses. Another challenge is the limited RAM, especially for emus of 16 bit systems. But apart from that, porting emus to Saturn is just as easy as for any other platform.

Originally posted by danielt3@Sat, 2006-04-08 @ 01:53 AM

The question is: can Saturn run console (genesis and snes) games at full speed if I'd be able to write a good code for the emus?!?!?

[post=145552]Quoted post[/post]​

Until someone can proove me wrong, I'd say: No. The snes emu got a little faster and I'm still working on speed. For the genesis emu, it might be difficult to even get it running at all, because those 68k cpu core emulators are that much bloated. You definitely would have to try different cores than the default ones.

Originally posted by danielt3@Sat, 2006-04-08 @ 01:53 AM

I didn't tested Rockin'-B's Snes9x on sega saturn.

[post=145552]Quoted post[/post]​

How could you, it's not released.

Originally posted by danielt3@Sat, 2006-04-08 @ 01:53 AM

He says that he does not know about the compatibility

[post=145552]Quoted post[/post]​

I do, it's great after I could fix some bugs.

<!--QuoteBegin-danielt3@Sat, 2006-04-08 @ 01:53 AM

Is he going to release the source for this particular emulator he ported to sega saturn??!

[post=145552]Quoted post[/post]​

[/quote]

If it will be released, then with sources, too.

BTW: what projects have you been working on, before?

 

[mic]

When you are porting a bad-coded emulator to Saturn, you'll probably have problems with endianess and unaligned memory accesses.

It's not "bad-coded" - it's "optimized".

 

[RockinB]

Originally posted by mic@Sun, 2006-04-09 @ 05:43 PM

It's not "bad-coded" - it's "optimized".

[post=145593]Quoted post[/post]​

Sure, but sometimes for the cost of portability. Only few where working on big-endian Saturn right from the start(OSwan, snes9x). Even some of those who have a big-endian compile flag were never really tested on such machines, because there were bugs left (gnuboy). Some don't even have these flags (NeoPop).

EDITED:

(the SH2 can access the CS2 area in little endian mode (set bit 12 of BCR1 register), but afair the cartridge RAM is in CS0 space. What is attached to CS2? It's at least not listed as prohibited area.)