Saturn Emulators

And the answer is....

None!

That's right, at the current time, all emulators are pretty bad. You need a very beefy PC to get anything like playablilty and none include sound yet. Still, the best of the bunch is Satourne. Everything you need is in the Emulation section.
 
Originally posted by Curtis@Mar 24, 2003 @ 05:52 AM

And the answer is....

None!

:agree Good answer.
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Not to mention available - I'm not aware of Sega offering their own emulator for sale at this or any future time
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Currently, the best Free saturn emulator is Satourne.. It still needs lot of work before we start playing Saturn games at Full speed with full sound, but it's progressing to a plugin system.. This should speed up development.. I've gotten Radiant Silvergun running on it at 50-60 fps.. The required specs for the emulator is rather high, and some tweaking is needed to run games, but it shows good progress..
 
Originally posted by fivefeet8@Mar 25, 2003 @ 05:58 PM

Currently, the best Free saturn emulator is Satourne.. It still needs lot of work before we start playing Saturn games at Full speed with full sound, but it's progressing to a plugin system.. This should speed up development.. I've gotten Radiant Silvergun running on it at 50-60 fps.. The required specs for the emulator is rather high, and some tweaking is needed to run games, but it shows good progress..

just curious, fivefeet8, what are your specs?
 
Originally posted by racketboy@Mar 25, 2003 @ 03:02 PM

just curious, fivefeet8, what are your specs?

athlon Xp Barton Core 2800+

2.08@2.2 ghertz

333@360 mhz FSB

1 gigbyte PC3200 DDR ram 400@360 mhz CAS2.0

Geforce 4 ti 4600

Voodoo 5 5500 pci

Abit Nf7-S mobo

40 gig Maxtor 7200 rpm ata100 hd

80 gig Maxtor 7200 rpm ata133 hd

Winxp Pro

To make Satourne run faster, you need to actually tweak the emulated SH2 to lower hertz.. Usually setting it to 15 mhertz from the original 22 mhertz speeds up the emulation a lot.. But like I said, Satourne is progressing to a plugin system which should speed it's progress..
 
Heh - a fairly beefy PC then.
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For the sake of getting the thread right off topic, why do you have the voodoo5? Doesn't this cause a few problems?
 
Originally posted by Curtis@Mar 26, 2003 @ 05:07 AM

Heh - a fairly beefy PC then.
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For the sake of getting the thread right off topic, why do you have the voodoo5? Doesn't this cause a few problems?

No.. I have a triple display setup.. 15" computer monitor connected to the voodoo 5 pci to play old glide games and used in PSX and N64 emus using glide.. 19" Monitor connected to geforce 4. 36" and sometimes my 50" theater TV connected to the TV out of the Geforce 4.. I actually have the displays setup for panning from one to the other..

There is no problems with have dual video cards as long as they don't use the same driver sets..

One more thing, I'm also using 2 sound cards at one time as well.. The abit NF7-S comes with Onboard AC97 sound which works just as good as my SBlive Audigy.. I use them both because I use the Gameport on the SBaudigy.

I posted some shots of Radiant Silvergun running on Satourne at www.ngemu.com once..
 
Considering the emulator is counting on raw clock speed for it's performance, what do you think?
 
Originally posted by mal@Mar 27, 2003 @ 03:28 AM

Considering the emulator is counting on raw clock speed for it's performance, what do you think?

well I know that, but by how many FPS?
 
Radiant Silvergun will crash if you underclock the SH2 too much. I got 20fps in my Duron 950MHz, when running it at 16MHz or so (or was it 14MHz?). Anyway, when I lowered, the speed went up, but the game itself crashed (first thing started going weird under low clock speeds - glitches appeared and the collision detection seemed faulty sometimes, then it crashed after a while).

I got 60fps with Panzer Dragoon, tough. It could survive under obscenely slow clock speeds (like 10MHz).
 
I'm trying to understand this... how could underclocking an emulated SH2 make the emulated game FASTER...?? By all accounts it should slow down... or does this somehow have to do with devoting more CPU time to emulating the other Saturn subsystems? ... And are we talking about underclocking just one of the SH2's, or both?
 
It's just as you guessed, slowing down the emulated processors means less work is needed to emulate them. Games like Radiant Silvergun aren't exactly processor-limited and there should be a fair chunk of games that make little or no use of the second CPU. On the other hand, as M3d10n discovered, mucking with the speed can cause games to stop working in a number of interesting ways.
 
Lowering the Sh2 cpu does make Radiant Silvergun look like it's stuck at certain points.. But I usually just set it back to default speeds.. The game will continue and then after that point is passed, I lower it again to speed it up.. But yeah, after a while, it does crash at some point.. I wanted to get to the later levels.. They are awe inspiring..

I can't wait for the next Satourne release though..
 
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