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Saturn hardware emulation breakthrough in the latest Mame

T

Tain

Member
The latest MAME, .103, emulates ST-V games like Shienryu and Radiant Silvergun at full speed on an Athlon 64 3200, or so I've heard. I'm on my shitty laptop right now, but Shienryu runs at 80% of the speed. This is a gigantic improvement.

Yeah, SSF has been great, but the audio has supposedly sucked and the emulator required either a Pentium 4 or AMD64 processor; Athlon XP processors wouldn't work.
 
Imagine creating a perfect translator between two languages, and making sure that it's as fast as possible.

The native software is made to run on an exact set of hardware, and an emulator needs to adapt these to standard x86 instructions.

I'm no expert, but I'd imagine that it isn't easy.
 
Shawn128 said:
How hard is it really to create an emulator?
Click to expand...
Its one of the easiest things ever. The only reason you dont see more is because no one thinks it's worth the 5 hours of casual coding
 
That unconventional architecture sure is a tough nut to crack, I mean how long would it take something like PS2 emulation to run decently across many games?!
 
HomerSimpson-Man said:
That unconventional architecture sure is a tough nut to crack, I mean how long would it take something like PS2 emulation to run decently across many games?!
Click to expand...

you know, they have RE4 alright running though it does have a lot of graphic glitches it's running at a decent speed though the emulator is still early and a lot of the code needs to cleaned up. Some games like Disgaea and Phantom Kingdom Brave run at VERY good speeds, but they're mainly 2d games mixed with a bit of 3d.

I just want a Saturn Emu so I can play my Dragon Force, NiGHTS, and a couple of more games I can't play with a broken saturn & broken controllers.
 
I wonder if Cotton 2 and Cotton Boomerang will run well now ?


oh and for a while now I've been wanting to play another ST-V / Saturn game by the same company that made Cotton

Guardian Force
gfpic1.jpg

gfboss1.jpg
 
Shawn128 said:
How hard is it really to create an emulator?
Click to expand...
When you're dealing with dual processors sharing the same RAM, along with some other weird design choices, it can take quite a while.

It's free, quit griping.
 
Holy shit. I just played Radiant Silvergun for the first time in years. BELIEVE THE HYPE. MAME 103 IS THE NEW HOTNESS!!!!!
 
Someone PM me with some "details" on the breakthrough (wink, wink, hint hint, PLEASE?)


I would love to play my Shining Force III smoothly. Any word on how that runs? And PDSaga? And Nights?
 
qcf x2 said:
Someone PM me with some "details" on the breakthrough (wink, wink, hint hint, PLEASE?)


I would love to play my Shining Force III smoothly. Any word on how that runs? And PDSaga? And Nights?
Click to expand...

Since it's MAME I'm sure only arcade games that used Saturn based hardware will work.
 
qcf x2 said:
Someone PM me with some "details" on the breakthrough (wink, wink, hint hint, PLEASE?)


I would love to play my Shining Force III smoothly. Any word on how that runs? And PDSaga? And Nights?
Click to expand...

It's just the arcade games that use the SH-2 board, not Saturn games. I'm sure we'll see some Saturn action later this year.

EDIT: SH-2 games that were also Saturn games:

Radiant Silvergun
Die Hard Arcade
Virtua Fighter Kids
Soukyugurentai
and a bunch of others.

Also of note, Virtua Fighter runs fine, for the first time. Does this mean Model 1 has been fixed around the board?
 
Saturn was my favourite 32/64-bit console, and although I have an extensive collection of Saturn games, I more than welcome this news.
 
pretty good. I just played Radiant Silvergun for the first time in my whole life.
Athlon64 3200 here

its actually playable compared to the last time that I tried -- when it booted RS but I couldnt really play it cause it was much much to slow. major improvement.


I also played Shienryu for the first time ever - its very playable on my machine.

now I gotta try the Cotton games and Guardian Force
 
The best ST-V game by a million miles was the bitchin' Athlete Kings, better known in these parts as Decathlete. Not sure if there was an arcade version of Winter Heat though.
 
CO_Andy said:
Wow, i can't imagine how long it might take to get a PS3 emulator running.
Click to expand...

I'm more worried about how long it will take until we have computers CAPABLE of running a decent PS3 emulator. I'd say 10 years, at the very least.
 
What's the breakthrough?

Cassini emulates everything pretty well....Nights full speed...with filtering....
 
Shinobi said:
The best ST-V game by a million miles was the bitchin' Athlete Kings, better known in these parts as Decathlete. Not sure if there was an arcade version of Winter Heat though.
Click to expand...

There was, I have the ST-V cartridge. The home version had more events, though.
 
GiriGiri already ran many Saturn games at full speed at much weaker hardware than A64 3200 :\

Cassini is apparently even better.

*edit* Oh, reading up on it, no surprise Cassini is good, it's a hacked version of GiriGiri, which is basically a Saturn emulator made by Sega.
 
Marconelly said:
GiriGiri already ran many Saturn games at full speed at much weaker hardware than A64 3200 :\

Cassini is apparently even better.

*edit* Oh, reading up on it, no surprise Cassini is good, it's a hacked version of GiriGiri, which is basically a Saturn emulator made by Sega.
Click to expand...
Actually IIRC Sega only licensed/bought the emulator for some commercial applications (game downloads I think). I could be wrong though.
 
Yeah, it's kind of Sega's bastard project. Or whatever.

But the games run well. Nights, Panzer Dragoon Zwei run well.

What Sega needs to do is sell the emulator on XBLA and then let you put Saturn CDs into the Xbox 360 and play games. Make the emulator 20 bucks. Sega would make a killing. They could offer titles compressed over XBL or the Revolution service if they want to, but that seems less feasible.
 
Y2Kevbug11 said:
Yeah, it's kind of Sega's bastard project. Or whatever.

But the games run well. Nights, Panzer Dragoon Zwei run well.

What Sega needs to do is sell the emulator on XBLA and then let you put Saturn CDs into the Xbox 360 and play games. Make the emulator 20 bucks. Sega would make a killing. They could offer titles compressed over XBL or the Revolution service if they want to, but that seems less feasible.
Click to expand...

You do realize the Saturn is a failed system (and most people have long since sold/traded in their collection) right? With the size limit per game imposed on XBL compression wouldn't do much. No money to be made here.

Actually since this is such an economically bad idea, maybe Sega WILL do it!
 
CO_Andy said:
Wow, i can't imagine how long it might take to get a PS3 emulator running.
Click to expand...
How about PS2 first?

Actually IIRC Sega only licensed/bought the emulator for some commercial applications (game downloads I think). I could be wrong though.
Click to expand...
Correct. The emulator was only intended to play specific games, but was hacked to support all Saturn games. It was a pain in the ass to use for that reason, but it worked VERY well back when I tried it (years ago). Extremely solid emulation.
 
Y2Kevbug11 said:
What's the breakthrough?

Cassini emulates everything pretty well....Nights full speed...with filtering....
Click to expand...

But it doesn't support controllers and is a pain in the ass to use.
 
I always had trouble with GiriGiri, though. Half of my library wouldn't even run. I mean, yeah, it was also a pain in the ass, but even what ran had some pretty big troubles.

Given how anal/low-level MAME is, I'd imagine that compatibility won't be nearly as big of an issue for it.
 
junkster said:
You do realize the Saturn is a failed system (and most people have long since sold/traded in their collection) right? With the size limit per game imposed on XBL compression wouldn't do much. No money to be made here.

Actually since this is such an economically bad idea, maybe Sega WILL do it!
Click to expand...

It could be done. XBL demos are consistently over the size of a regular CD, and that's uncompressed Saturn game data.

Barring that, they could sell the emulator with games for 5.99 each, but I was just trying to see which scenario would maximize profits for sega. Is someone who has a ton of games more likely to buy a more expensive product or are newer gamers more likely to be interested in individual sega games?
 
Most Saturn games are tiny, with redbook CD audio.

Compress the audio, and most of the time, you have something well under 50 megs. Is that the XBLA limit?
 
AtomicShroom said:
I didn't say 10 years until we saw a PS3 emulator, but at least 10 years until we see one that doesn't run at 0.3fps.
Click to expand...

I think transistors will be replaced sooner than 10 years...allowing for a massive leap in computing. What was that one thing HP was working on?
 
Just tried a few of the supported games, and it makes me want to re-buy a few of the ones I sold off (Soukyugurentai, Guardian Force) 4-5 years ago. I feel like I'm seeing them through different eyes now. Definitely don't have much interest in picking up Purikura Daisakusen again, though.

I wonder how the eventual near-perfect emulation of Radiant Silvergun will affect the market price of the Saturn version? Emulation of other Saturn shooters (as well as the way the Saturn import market was capitalized upon by Japanese sellers) killed their market prices, relatively speaking.
 
qcf x2 said:
Someone PM me with some "details" on the breakthrough (wink, wink, hint hint, PLEASE?)


I would love to play my Shining Force III smoothly. Any word on how that runs? And PDSaga? And Nights?
Click to expand...

Shining Force III runs pretty decently on SSF. Also, I played all the way through Panzer Dragoon Saga with no problems, except it crashed once during the ending. Just do a search for "SSF", you'll find it.
 
trying cassini and having trouble loadingPanzer Saga up from cd. The dash treats it as an audio cd and then tells me the cd format it invalid :p

original copy.
 
some good news:

*Cotton 2 works reasonably well

*Cotton Boomerang plays a litte faster than Cotton 2

*Golden Axe: The Duel is very playable - but a bit slow

*Soukyugurentai / Terra Diver plays decently (another awesome vert shooter)


this is all 1000 % improvement over previous ST-V emulations
 
will CPS3 emulation be far behind?
Click to expand...

lol! Is it even worth the effort?

Code: 
JoJo's Venture (full set)
JoJo's Bizarre Adventure Heritage for The Future (full set)
Street Fighter III 2nd Impact (full set)
Street Fighter III 3rd Strike (full set)
Warzard / Red Earth (full set)

I do want to play Red Earth tho.
 
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