Hackers Have Cracked Open A Sega Saturn Emulator Inside A Commercial Switch Release

Saturn is an amazing console, but I just could never wrap my brain around Radiant Silvergun. Just couldn't get into it, no matter how hard I tried. Is it because I played Ikaruga first and got spoiled?

Saturn emulation has always lagged behind the rest, but it's great to see that in it's current state (20 years later, as pointed out by the article!) things are running pretty darned smoothly!

And SHOUTOUT to BATSUGUN, that's such a great shooter that appeared on the Saturn, as well!

SATURN APPROVED

time to do some 🎶Super Sonic Racing🎶

@BloodNinja Saturn always gets forgotten as it was steamrolled over in the sales department by the PS1. There's some cracking titles there, but I feel like there wasn' t a huge amount of quality 1st party titles, outside of the AM2, Virtua Cop & sports titles of course. I miss the Dreamcast more though. Such a fabulous console with innovative features.

Hopefully this grows into something. I was meaning to check out Panzer Dragoon Saga a while ago, but wasn't in the mood to troubleshoot a finicky emulator at the time.

Would love more Saturn games. Or could we see Saturn as part of NSO?

@sikthvash Outside Japan, the Saturn was indeed steamrolled, but it definitely went toe-to-toe with the PS1 in the Japanese market. The tide arguably turned only after FF7 was released.

Short of the likes of the WonderSwan, which was exclusive to only one region, the Saturn probably has the biggest disparity in available games by region - far, far more Japan-only games than non-Japan-only or worldwide releases.

Never owned one of these systems but wanted to. Got every Other Sega system besides the master system.

@sikthvash Emulation is saving that system, honestly. Saturn build quality makes them feel so fragile. When I used to collect, I went through 4 purchases before finding one that was able to withstand being shipped!

Ive been playing around with this for a while now.

It's pretty good aside from the nasty input lag in some games. But that's apparently a common issue with the 'SSF' Saturn emulator that this is a modified version of.

Still, it can get 100% speed on 2D games in even handheld mode at the lowest base clock speeds which is nuts. But because of the input latency it's not the ideal way to play most Saturn games.

I'd rather have the newer guardian heroes ported over, along with shining force III and dragon force. Oh and firepro would be nice, either the sega saturn version or port the ps4 version over.

@BloodNinja That's why I learned to repair consoles and mod them lol.

Saturn was such an epic disaster of a machine, but man did it have a handful of games making it worth the time decades later. The systems architecture for rendering 3D images was so insane and nonsensical. Quads? Why? Everyone is using Tri's! Why Quad why? I can understand supporting both and for a time GPU's did, but to have to bow tie in order to get the geo you needed, just simply nonsense. Machine was clearly designed for 2D graphics with sprites in mind lol. Primary reason emulators have so much trouble, a lot of conversion going on there to anticipate intent. You can't just tell a modern GPU to do a quad as it literally just creates to triangles to do it. You got it right with the build quality. Good god the cartridge for added storage. Not very well thought out. Can you imagine what a tower of power would have been like for that thing.

Hopefully this means we can see certain titles like an rpg featuring a certain dragon in the future.

I remember going to Wal-Mart back in '99, a few months before the Dreamcast launched, and they had a grip of unsold Saturns, brand new, all slashed to $25. I bought one, because why not, but I don't remember if I ever actually played anything on it or if I owned any games for it.

@GeneJacket Ya I saw something similar in K-mart, The system was 25, Panzer Dragoon Saga and a handful of other games all slashed down to 8 to 10 dollars. Should have just unloaded the entire shelf in to a cart, credit card debt and fiscal responsibility be damned. You were clearly the wisest of us at the time lol.

@NotSoCryptic I lack the technical knowledge to get what you are referencing, but I do see the benefit in learning repairs.

@NotSoCryptic I guess, lol. I remember hooking it up once, but I cannot for the life of me remember ever actually playing the thing.

I had that thing for years, but finally sold it with a bunch of other old hardware I never used in like 2005-ish. Ended up getting more than what I paid for everything, so I guess that's good?

@BloodNinja try mmmonkey that site is a goldmine of repairs and mods virtually every system worth owning has guides I learned to repair and mod my Saturn and megadrive with great results

@SolidSnake684 if you can check PDS out it’s one of the most beautiful, atmospheric, haunting RPGs I’ve ever played. One of the best battle systems I’ve ever played too. Truly one of a kind

Fill yer boots City Connection! We have been waiting years for Saturn re-releases!

@Gs69 Thanks! I no longer collect, though! I'll keep them in mind in case I need to modify/repair the Switch though!

@CactusMan shining force 3 was great. I was very jealous of the JP market for getting the other 2 chapters…

@MrBelmont Yeah its for sure on my list! I love how unique it looks compared to other jrpgs. Just wanna make sure I'm in the right mood before I start it. Gotta be feeling it, otherwise I'll never finish an rpg haha

This is both cool and annoying. I am becoming increasingly convinced that it's because of the ever growing number of ways to pirate roms and run them on unsupported hardware that actual companies know they cannot compete.

In fact, I think that's the main reason Nintendo shifted from Virtual Console to NSO for their now very limited legacy support.

This is pretty cool, but SEGA has been ignoring Saturn rereleases for years now. I doubt this release will change that.

Even the Saturn game we do see the ocassional rerelease of, like Nights and Sonic R, are typically based on a PC version, not the Saturn original.

@PhhhCough Let’s add Virtual On, Hyper Duel and Batsugun to that list! Oh what I would give for a Saturn revival of some sort.

@BloodNinja it's literally my favourite shooter of all-time, HD version on 360 is much better though.

@BloodNinja @BloodNinja So buy a saturn then?

@BloodNinja 100% agree!

So does this mean Sakura Wars and Tokimeki Memorial might finally get localized?

@BloodNinja Radiant Silvergun probably takes more memorization than R-Type does.
To be effective at it, you not only need to know each weapon combo by heart, you also need to know when to use what as to level it up properly.
It's completely bonkers and needlessly complex.
Great, but probably one of the more casual play unfriendly Shmups out there

@Einherjar Yeah, I just never got into it! But I'm glad it was so well received, because it gave us Ikarua, which I adore.

@YANDMAN I had a Saturn, but I recently moved to a tiny place so my collection shrunk significantly. Emulation is the way, the future, our Lord.

@SolidSnake684 yeah very true! It takes roughly 15-20 hours to get through

@BloodNinja The interesting thing is, i've exclusively met folks who like either one or the other, never both

Personally, i lean more towards Silvergun, i enjoy its more colorful presentation more, but i find both to be too "puzzly".
It's just way too much routing for my taste ^^
Great games though, when they click.

@MrBelmont Oh cool, reminds me of Chrono Trigger's length. Which is nice, I don't have as much time as I used to haha!

@Einherjar That's an interesting discovery, I'm sure there are people out there who like both, but now that I think of it, I haven't come across anyone yet either.

@GeneJacket Oh ya absolutely it's good hah. You had the chance to at least toy with it a little, but ended up giving it a good home. It would have eventually ended up at a liquidator and then tossed out by 2002, so you might have made someones day.

I've never owned a unit new. Every console I own from Sony or Nintendo (with the exception of the Wii and GameCube), i've bought at launch new or new. So you can imagine the number of individuals let down by the poor reception neglected the hardware. I've had all kinds of crazy issues I've had to learn to fix. How to reshield the output in order get rid of a nasty audio buzz over the various output cables and dirty signal mostly attributed to damaged ports. To bad lenses. To what ever else. So you got good bank for a good quality unity. A+. If your games were in good condition even better as Saturn has the worst made CD's after the Sega CD for the Genesis/MegaDrive. Not only were most of them not chemically treated properly leading to premature disc rot to how easily they were damaged. That isn't even getting into those boxes they used that they had sony made for their games lol.

@BloodNinja Well the thing I can knock out easiest was that Saturn used four points to create a polygon. A quad. So your models would need to be constructed of this geometric shape. So in order to create a triangle you'd have to flip the order in which the points were connected between each other. So instead of going 1, 2, 3, 4, You'd do something like 1, 3, 2, 4. Essentially you'd take a piece of paper and turn one end 180 degrees. The end result was what is referred to as a bow tie, two triangles pointing at each other. So you'd fold geo around that way to create round images and things like that. It would make things kind of faster, but it also made creating models much more difficult. My guess is that was never intended to be used in that way. The addition of an extra component for the Z-axis was something they added much later. Given the nature of the CPU and them slapping a second one on the system, resulted in a multi threaded monster with very inefficient math. I draw that conclusion in part from how it was executed in addition to what the saturn was initially intended to be base don interviews: A 2D game console not intended to compete with arcades. We see a lot of awesome 2D titles on Saturn, but the added complexity also resulted in a more complex 2D pipeline that made transparencies difficult to execute.

It's where you take brilliance and then change the spec half way through to fix a design flaw, but don't delay to do it right. Which is why the PlayStation was so much easier to work on. Ken Kutaragi had been working for years to get to that point with 3D. The PS1 kind of made 2D a bit of an optional last gen concept that could be done with a little jiggering. Kept to standards like Triangles instead of rectangles. Nintendo was also already working in the same direction as sony as seen by the Ultra 64 and their time with SGI (Silicon Graphics). Only thing they did wrong with the N64 was stupidly low texture vram and borking the storage medium by insisting on using cartridges. That's a story for another day.

@NotSoCryptic Ugh...the PS1 longboxes. Coolest looking, absolute worst storage solution ever created. I can't tell you how many original PS1 games I picked up back in the day where, upon opening them, would either find a loose disc rattling around in their cardboard coffin or would immediately fall out of those horrible things and get scratched instantly, and how many I had to return because they were ruined before I could play them.

@GeneJacket nowadays a nearly mint Saturn would net you a lot more.

@khululy No doubt, but the secondary market has absolutely exploded into sheer ridiculousness over the past couple of years. Everything sucks, so people are returning to what made them happy as kids. I totally get it, I'm certainly guilty of it myself, but some of the prices I've seen...good lord, calling it "highway robbery" is being kind.

Can a Dreamcast version of this be done next? Please?

Can we get Elevator Action Returns now?

The quality of those early titles like Virtua Fighter, Virtua Cop & Sega Rally made buying Saturn an easy decision. But when PS1 arrived with Wipeout, displaying fire & explosions as blocky opaque sprites suddenly seemed very old fashioned.
I still think Saturn had the best ever version of Bomberman, if local play is your thing.

@BillyB we were poor and I got the saturn for christmas when it came with the three games and was 100 bucks

I also bought madden 97 with shoveling money - along with the demo disc - that's all I ever got for the saturn.
what a fantastic console - I've ALWAYS wanted to play more Saturn games - that will be my midlife crisis: overpriced Saturn gear.

I have so many modded systems it’s ridiculous but none have any Saturn titles - been waiting for years to hear news of someone finally nailing it and this seems like a big step forward. So I guess I’ll have to keep an eye out for modded systems that start including Saturn games that run well.N64 and Atari Jaguar are also beasts to emulate as I understand it and if anyone scoffs at my mentioning the Jag yea I get it but the system had a few gems on there I’d love to be able to play!

While this is a nice discovery, I hope this doesn't mean we'll see more lazy Saturn emulation ports in the future using this emulator.

WOW that is running incredibly! I didn't think the Switch could do that - it takes a pretty beefy PC to emulate Saturn properly. I would absolutely kill for portable versions of some of the system's games - it warmed my heart to see Burning Rangers, Die Hard Arcade and Croc in that video! I was just thinking the other day that they should port Croc to Switch... he was originally Yoshi and made by the Star Fox developers afterall

@BloodNinja @Einherjar I like both a lot, but I vastly prefer Silvergun. I think partly because I love the look of well made low-res low-poly games, and because it ran at full screen on a 4:3 monitor rather than the TATE mode of Ikaruga which is fine in the arcade but made it feel small and cramped in the home ports.

I love Silvergun so much that I actually bought an ST-V arcade machine from ebay back in 2002 to play it with no loading times and proper arcade controls. 😍 (also, as a Saturn fan, I knew I would be able to buy more carts for the cabinet and have an MVS style multigame cabinet - I eventually got Die Hard Aracde, Baku Baku, Virtua Fighter Kids and Steep Slope Sliders. I wanted the 2 Cotton games but never found them at an affordable price)

@samuelvictor [laughs in rotating monitor]

Jokes aside, I totally get the preference. Ikaruga is nearly unplayable on the Switch (for me!) unless I use it in TATE mode. I gotta get one of those TATE things for when I play in handheld.

@BloodNinja lol yeah. For me, I first experienced Ikaruga on Dreamcast and Gamecube, on my (at the time) ginormous 34" 4:3 CRT TV. There was absolutely no way I could have rotated that bad boy without risking breaking my back or setting my house on fire!

Nowadays I have a dedicated mame cab with a TATE screen specifically for vertical games (and another for standard 4:3 next to it!). I've not even tried Ikaruga on the Switch as I only have a Switch Lite so playing it on its side isn't really an option, and a vertical game with so much going on on that tiny screen will be hard if not impossible to see. All my cabs are Western style wooden ones, one day I'd love a Candy Cab with a rotating screen like one of the Tato or Sega ones!

@samuelvictor I just belly-laughed at the thought of rotating a CRT TV. A 34" must have weighed at least 125lbs! Those things were so tanky. Ah, those were the days. Amazing how technology evolves.

I'm jealous that you have a dedicated mame arcade! That must be amazing. Did you built it from scratch, or buy it? How did you set it up?

@NotSoCryptic I never did see Panzer Dragoon Saga in stores back in 1998, and I looked around. I guess I didn't look in the right places. It was a shame because I was really excited to play it. As for the quads, I seem to recall Sega's 3D Model boards used quads. That could be the answer to the question of why. If their hardware partners, Martin Marietta I believe, provided hardware that rendered in quads, Sega may not have realized that was going to be problematic for them.

@BloodNinja Did you play the SOTN Saturn Port? It's so good yet it always seems to get forgotten about

I'm excited for this. There are so many Sega Saturn games that got forgotten about. Now that we have a working emulator that seems to run quite a bit of commercial games, sky's the limit! Hopefully Panzer Dragoon Saga or the Saturn port of Symphony of the Night gets a re release

This gives me false hope for Switch ports of Golden Axe: The Duel, Dynamite Dekka (or even Die Hard Arcade if Sega can afford the license again), and Fighters Megamix, all three of which I'd probably get sick of after 20 minutes anyway.

Give me Dark Saviour, the unoffical Landstalker sequel, loved that game, especially as the start of the game determines the storyline you are going to follow.

@Sora181 I never played it, but I’ve heard of the differences they added, such as Maria (name?) as a playable character.

@BloodNinja Thanks! I've had to move a few times over the years because of my career, but when I've been lucky enough to be in a house large enough I always like to have a dedicated small arcade. In the past I've had original Daytona, Outrun, Mortal Kombat II and a few other cabinets that I particularly loved the look of as a kid (as well as a 6 slot MVS and S-TV like I mentioned as I could easily collect the carts) and other things like pool table, fruit machines, pinball table, capsule dispensers etc.

Just before Covid started I moved to Paris as I was meant to be shooting a movie there, and stayed in a very small Disney appartment - I sold most of my bigger stuff and just put the 2 main MAME machines (normal and tate) in my mum's garage whilst I was away. Looks like I'll be moving to Toronto in Spring after London Film & Comic Con, I hope to be able to get a large enough place to source some local cabs, I miss having one, playing on my PC isn't quite the same, even with a nice arcade stick.

The 2 cabinets I've kept have sentimental value of sorts. As I kid I used to go on holiday to a few places around West Somerset - Minehead, Watchet, St Audries. Most of the arcade cabinets in holiday camps, takeaways, pubs etc all belonged to the same guy who rented them out. He imported the boards from abroad and got generic cabs from a UK company that were all the same style design, so these are the most nostalgic generic cab designs to me.

Around 2005 he retired and was scrapping everything, I bought 10 of the generic cabs for £50 each - with MVS 4-slots in them! I sold the 4-slots on ebay separately, then converted all the cabinets to MAME machines with PC parts inside myself using i-pac setups and building custom SF2 style control panels. I kept 2 of them so that I could have one for tate, and sold the other 8. Made a tidy profit, so I then started actually custom building machines from scratch to order with MDF. It was a fun hobby until too many people started doing it and the prices went down and down and people expected faster and faster service, and it became a hassle.

Every now and again I get asked by friends to help them build or convert cabinets, I'm friends with a lot of UK retro game YouTubers and I'm a member of Retro Unlim and MORG and I do the Play Expos etc. so the subject of retro style cabs is never too far away

@BloodNinja Yep. She's much more fun compared to her PSP version. Also new areas and items to get are always nice

Nintendo: Can we have it and charge another $30 tier for it?

@Sora181 Oh cool! I wasn’t aware of new areas or items. I’ll have to track it down! I appreciate the info!

@samuelvictor That’s a freaking amazing story and that made my day to hear it! What a great find...only 50 quid?! Impressive. I plan on building on at some point. I’m a woodworker by hobby, so I can build the cabinet easy. Probably just “fill” it with a small PC for emulation and use an 8-Bit Do arcade stick.

@BloodNinja Oh, nice! Well if you are good at woodworking, and also know how to set up emulators on a pc, you're 90% of the way there.

I use 8bitdo pads for emulation and they are excellent, so I assume the arcade sticks are good too and should be simple enough to drill holes in your cab for buttons and sticks, disassemble the shell of the arcade stick and push them in place. But bare in mind a cheaper and possibly easier way is to just build your own - you can get generic "buttons to usb" controller boards with a the wiring loom already set up for like £12 on ebay, and use whatever sticks and buttons you want (sanwa are generally the best, but even most cheap generic buttons are decent) or theres plenty of sellers selling 2 sticks, 12 buttons + start + credit buttons, AND a USB board and loom for around £40-50 total. No electronics knowledge or soldering etc is needed, each wire on the loom will be labelled with what button/direction its for, and they just clip on (each microswitch has two metal pegs the stick ou, and the wires of the looms have clips that just slide onto them and grip in place).

And also, lol yeah, no way you'd find a nice quality cab for £50 nowadays, let alone with an MVS and game carts inside it! Retro prices have gone through the roof in the last decade or so. Back then, people were just throwing stuff away thinking it was worthless!

@samuelvictor Glad you got to save some of those cabs from being thrown away! Oh, how I miss arcades...I have a dream to acquire a single-player Virtual On cabinet...just need a larger living space first! Thank you for the tips and the great story, that was nice to hear after a long day of work.

@BloodNinja Fair do's

It would be a little easier to tolerate Switch Online's new price if they released Sega Saturn games on it.

It would even make more sense since the Nintendo 64 and Sega Saturn are consoles of the same generation.

This is great news... If it wasn't closed source then there would be a chance that the emulator could get ported to different platforms or a fork of the emulator could be developed.

I'd love to see Virtual On come to the Switch