How Likely Will A Sega Saturn Emulator Be?

[daemonaholic]

There was already plenty of talk about this. Not all CPUs need to be emulated at low level, some of them do specific tasks (like CD controller), and can be handled without emulating them as CPUs.

I understand, this is why I said no less than *5* (with sound)....the following chips are pretty much guaranteed to be used by most games, quite frequently:

* Two Hitachi SuperH-2 7604 32-Bit RISC processors at 28.63 MHz (50-MIPS) – each has 4 KB on-chip cache, of which 2 KB can alternatively be used as directly addressable Scratchpad RAM
* Custom VDP 1 32-bit video display processor (running at 7.1590 MHz on NTSC Systems, 6.7116 MHz for PAL Systems)
* Custom VDP 2 32-bit video display processor (running at 7.1590 MHz on NTSC Systems, 6.7116 MHz for PAL Systems)
* Custom Saturn Control Unit (SCU) with DSP for geometry processing and DMA controller (running at 14.3 MHz)

Not to mention that when you have sound emulation enabled, the following will be emulated as well:

* Motorola 68EC000 sound controller (running at 11.3 MHz / 1,5 MIPS)
* Yamaha FH1 DSP sound processor, "Sega Custom Sound Processor" (SCSP), running at 22.6 MHz

The SuperH's, VDP's and 68EC000 will probably require low-level emulation for the best accuracy (especially since Saturn games are notorious for using different aspects of the Saturn chips)...however, this doesn't rule out HLE completely; I'm just not a fan of HLE myself due to inherent lower-compatibility.

Cortex is not out-of-order BTW.

Heh, my bad...I was thinking of the A9 =/

Aside from yabause, are there any other emulators that are OS? A quick search on google reveals a lot of emulators, but most of them with websites that either aren't in english, or haven't been updated in a long time. I did find one called Satourne, which looks promising, but I have no idea if the source can be obtained.

A search on sourceforge doesn't appear to show anything either.

Yabause is the only decent Open Source saturn emulator. Satourne and SSF are both much better, however. SSF especially, having about 90-95% complete emulation. Unfortunately, they are both closed source.

QUOTE
I know, even onto the PC there is no really useful SATURN Emulator, why should it be more easy to code one for the Pandora?
It's not even sure if we will get a playable NDS or N64 Emulator or even a Full Speed (Full sound, full everything...) PSX Emu (AFAIK every project for Pandora is still "Software mode" because of missing Hardware Drivers but I can be wrong of course, I just read "software only" since a Year...)


Sure there is; SSF and Satourne are both pretty good.

 

[dak]

mAKE sega saturn work on pandoora right now

mmmmmm k

 

[the_vipah]

I know, even onto the PC there is no really useful SATURN Emulator, why should it be more easy to code one for the Pandora? :lol:
It's not even sure if we will get a playable NDS or N64 Emulator or even a Full Speed (Full sound, full everything...) PSX Emu (AFAIK every project for Pandora is still "Software mode" because of missing Hardware Drivers but I can be wrong of course, I just read "software only" since a Year...)

Err..SSF for PC works like a charm, plays Shining Force 3 and Panzer Dragoon Saga etc.. perfectly. Not sure where you're getting that info from.

 

[jbr]

The Saturn is my favorite console, and certainly my favorite console to emulate.

I've tried most of the working emulators, and I can tell you that although SSF and Satourne are both very good emulators (SSF is marginally better in every category), they are not open source and do not originate from an English speaking author. SSF is Japanese, I think, and Satourne is Italian, as far as I can remember.

Saturnin and SSE aren't even worth using.

None of those, however, are open source or have any likelihood or being open-sourced.

The only open source option is Yabause. It emulates about half of the games I've tried, and it has a nice opengl rendering feature that can render 3D saturn games at your computer's native resolution rather than at the Saturn's blocky original resolution.

Yabause also has a very good chance of working on the Pandora, since it is actually designed to be cross platform, having been ported (officially) to Windows, Mac, Linux, BSD, Dreamcast, and Wii. That list includes at least three processor architectures, FYI: X86, PPC, and RISC. Since the Dreamcast port is already designed to run on ARM, that would be the one to base a Pandora port off of. Oops, I was thinking of the unofficial PSP port, but the PSP isn't even ARM either. It's MIPS

 

[Tinnus]

So, uh, what did I miss? The Dreamcast is ARM? :huh:

 

[jbr]

Oops, I was thinking of the unofficial PSP port, but then I realized that that didn't make sense either. Stupidly, instead of changing the "ARM" part of that sentence, I changed the "PSP" part.

It's struck out now.

 

[Exophase]

Unfortunately (as has been mentioned before in this thread), Yabause isn't very fast. It really needs recompilers for the emulation of the SH2 and SCU cores, at the very least. The VDP2 soft emulation code also looks woefully inefficient.

On the other hand, from what I've heard of SSF's performance, I would be surprised if it would run that well on Pandora, even if tuned for ARM. It does have recompilers, but it may be limited by other factors because the CPU requirements to run it are pretty steep.

For Saturn emulation to even have the smallest chance of running well on Pandora it would need an author who is very good at writing very efficient emulators.

 

[daemonaholic]

I've tried most of the working emulators, and I can tell you that although SSF and Satourne are both very good emulators (SSF is marginally better in every category), they are not open source and do not originate from an English speaking author. SSF is Japanese, I think, and Satourne is Italian, as far as I can remember.

Agreed, though I don't think the language matters too much since we don't have access to the source anyways, heh.

None of those, however, are open source or have any likelihood or being open-sourced.

Agreed. As I mentioned, I'm more interested in taking a look (unlikely, sadly) at SSF simply because the author has reverse'd most of the functionality of the Saturn's processors, something Yabause and even Satourne are still struggling with. This gives it the most accurate emulation of all the saturn emulators, even if it isn't the fastest. In addition, the dynarec engine in it would probably be pretty informative.

Yabause also has a very good chance of working on the Pandora, since it is actually designed to be cross platform, having been ported (officially) to Windows, Mac, Linux, BSD, Dreamcast, and Wii. That list includes at least three processor architectures, FYI: X86, PPC, and RISC. Since the Dreamcast port is already designed to run on ARM, that would be the one to base a Pandora port off of. Oops, I was thinking of the unofficial PSP port, but the PSP isn't even ARM either. It's MIPS

Perhaps; however it's a bad emulator with a much lower compatibility than the freeware options. Porting it would probably be much easier, however optimizing, extending and maintaining it would end up being more hassle than it's worth.

On the other hand, from what I've heard of SSF's performance, I would be surprised if it would run that well on Pandora, even if tuned for ARM. It does have recompilers, but it may be limited by other factors because the CPU requirements to run it are pretty steep.

For Saturn emulation to even have the smallest chance of running well on Pandora it would need an author who is very good at writing very efficient emulators.

I'm not sure, either. Satourne's requirements tend to be much lower than SSF's, but as mentioned it's accuracy isn't on par with SSF's. Perhaps the recompiler is superior in Satourne, though?

This (in addition to a media player, heh) is definitely something I'd want to work on if I had a devboard or a Pandora, once it's out.

 

[darkstorm classic]

I've tried most of the working emulators, and I can tell you that although SSF and Satourne are both very good emulators (SSF is marginally better in every category), they are not open source and do not originate from an English speaking author. SSF is Japanese, I think, and Satourne is Italian, as far as I can remember

Satourne's author is french and can speak english.

 

[Prophet]

For Saturn emulation to even have the smallest chance of running well on Pandora it would need an author who is very good at writing very efficient emulators.

How about that gpSP guy? He seems good at efficiency & optimization.

 

[RajTakhar]

A Sega Saturn emulator is going to some that may eventually happen on the Pandora After about a year - as people get to grips with processor and SGX - personally I dont think it will be ever 100% as there was some well over the top processors in the saturn - more likely we will see specific games being either re-written for the Pandora or having a bog standard Saturn emulator re-compiled and tweaked - I think it will be ages before a Saturn emulator which is able to play most games is ever released - but I hope I am proved wrong and a number of die-hards come up with a solution.

I think it is more likely that we will have the Sony Playstation, Sega Dreamcast and Nintendo N64 emulators, up, tweaked and working before we ever see the Sega Saturn one.

====
gp32_console + :gp2x and Hopefully Soon a andora1:

http://gp2xwizandpandora.blogspot.com/

 

[Alpha2]

not sure how you think a dream cast emulator could be ready before a saturn one. surely the system is way too powerful for decent, playable speeds. The playstation emulator will probably be ready the first WEEK.

 

[paddy]

theres only one sega saturn emulator on pc that is really any good and always worked on,tho its not open source and uses advanced cpu chipset instructions for newer pentium 4 chips,so it is highly unlikly it will be seen ported to anything.

i really dont rate any other saturn emulator,ohh and the saturn is better than
the psx in many respects and has some awsome games on it,theres at least 25 10/10 rated games on that system,i still cant beleve some choose to emulate atari jaguar over the saturn ??? crazy or what and for like 3 good jag games of wich 2 of those games are on other systems.

there wont be a saturn emu unless someone writes one from the begining for pandora - not going to happen,just buy a saturn.

 

[bustaballs]

Screw it. I'll make it. Where do I begin to learn how to do this?

I'll be back in five years to let you guys know about the progress.

 

[Exophase]

Agreed. As I mentioned, I'm more interested in taking a look (unlikely, sadly) at SSF simply because the author has reverse'd most of the functionality of the Saturn's processors, something Yabause and even Satourne are still struggling with. This gives it the most accurate emulation of all the saturn emulators, even if it isn't the fastest. In addition, the dynarec engine in it would probably be pretty informative.

Personally, I doubt that anyone has really done a lot of reverse engineering on Saturn because all of the information can be found in Sega's documents (albeit, in usual very difficult to read format but it's there). Unfortunately, even with all the information, doing a highly accurate Saturn emulator is just difficult. I think people would be pretty happy with an emulator that doesn't have world class accuracy though, in this case.

Dynarec is dynarec, unless SSF is doing some very sophisticated techniques that no one has heard of (unlikely) then it's just a matter of sitting down and doing it.