What About Saturn Emulation?

[Rivroner]

What do you think?

I know that is a very difficult machine to emulate but i think it worth the effort.

A lot of incredible 2D stuff is awaiting for us in Saturn

Astal, a lot of 2D Shoot em up games, rpg´s,...

Also in 3D we have Virtua Figther 2, Sega Rally, Panzer Dragoon Trilogy, RPg´s

I hope that some "coder hero" tries to emulate this machine.


Thank you for you answers.

 

[jakshep2]

It can't be done, mainly because it has a crazy amout of processors, or something like that, which makes it incredibly hard to emulate.

 

[timofonic]

HLE emulation maybe it's possible, or making mono-emulators emulating certain parts and implementing some of them in a native way. Who knows, but it's still a quite hard effort too (and requiring tons of reverse engineering for each game).

 

[carlgeorge]

I have a great Saturn Emulator on the Dreamcast. Runs rather well.

And yes I know that Sega made both machines, but architecturally they are completely different and therefore relevant to this discussion.

So I think a Saturn Emulator would be possible. Whether or not anyone wants to write it is another matter entirely.

I'd like a 3DO emu. I liked my 3DO

 

[Brockway]

It can't be done, mainly because it has a crazy amout of processors, or something like that, which makes it incredible hard to emulate.

It just had 2, didn't it? Dual SH2's or some other mips stuff that was a pain for developers. Or maybe I'm thinking of the 32x. I forget. Very annoying stage in the industry, with 3DO and endless Genesis add-ons gumming up the works.

 

[Babrios]

HLE emulation maybe it's possible, or making mono-emulators emulating certain parts and implementing some of them in a native way. Who knows, but it's still a quite hard effort too (and requiring tons of reverse engineering for each game).

I'm not into programming. But I'm curious, why would each game need some reverse engineering?
I always thought emulators were exact duplicates of hardware done in software.
Like building the exact duplicate of a processor or chipset, then connecting it with the other emulated chips, interfaces etc. in the same way the mainboard does, and then it should behave like the hardware did.
Is that view of emulation naive or are there different (simpler) methods used in emulation which might be less compatible in many ways?

No doubt, doing it the way i understand emulation, would be a crazy shitload of work in case of saturn-emu.

 

[Exophase]

I have a great Saturn Emulator on the Dreamcast. Runs rather well.

No it doesn't, unless a typical 10% real time speed is your idea of running rather well. On the other hand, that emulator isn't really heavily optimized at all (no recompilers for one thing).

QUOTE
HLE emulation maybe it's possible, or making mono-emulators emulating certain parts and implementing some of them in a native way. Who knows, but it's still a quite hard effort too (and requiring tons of reverse engineering for each game).


HLE? Maybe for some things, but I don't know what kind of libraries were being used. Writing custom routines for every game is not emulation, that's a port (at least partially). What's a mono-emulator?

QUOTE
It just had 2, didn't it?


The programmable parts that thoroughly resembled CPUs were:

Two SH2s
A 68k
Two DSPs
Some 4-bit supervisor controller that had no business being there
An SH1 CD-ROM controller that was massive overkill

The latter two don't have to be emulated at a low level because they can't run custom code, and do pretty high level things to begin with. Actually, a lot of CD-ROM platforms have general purpose CPUs controlling the CD-ROM part, but no one emulates them like this (to my knowledge). Any of these that aren't used by the game can possibly not be emulated. From what I hear, the audio DSP is often not used.

The VDPs are also programmable in a sense, but they probably tend to have a high work to instruction ratio.

 

[Rivroner]

Exophase, do you think is feasible to have a Saturn emulator in Pandora running at mid-speed?

And what are the major issues do you see?

Thank you for your answer.

Sorry for my bad english.

 

[timofonic]

QUOTE
HLE emulation maybe it's possible, or making mono-emulators emulating certain parts and implementing some of them in a native way. Who knows, but it's still a quite hard effort too (and requiring tons of reverse engineering for each game).


HLE? Maybe for some things, but I don't know what kind of libraries were being used. Writing custom routines for every game is not emulation, that's a port (at least partially). What's a mono-emulator?


I explained wrong, sorry. I did mean with mono-emulator the approach taken by companies like Square when porting games to PC in the past, making an custom emulator just for running their games of PSX or PS2. So yes, that can be a partial emulation and certain part implemented natively.

The idea is that we want to play certain games of certain systems so much and the platform itself is unable to being emulated, right? So if there are so much interest and there are devs interested, maybe that kind of partial emulation can be done for some of those games.

What about making bounties for this? Maybe making this will not be as attractive to a dev as porting an emulator, as there will be more effort and having less positive results than having an emulator that runs at fullspeed so the same effort can be applied to tons of games instead one or a few.

 

[Exophase]

Exophase, do you think is feasible to have a Saturn emulator in Pandora running at mid-speed?

And what are the major issues do you see?

Thank you for your answer.

Sorry for my bad english.

I don't know if it's feasible or not. It's worth trying. I've talked about it a lot here in the past, don't feel like digging those up just right now :B

QUOTE

I explained wrong, sorry. I did mean with mono-emulator the approach taken by companies like Square when porting games to PC in the past, making an custom emulator just for running their games of PSX or PS2. So yes, that can be a partial emulation and certain part implemented natively.


I always kinda wondered if some ports were done this way, but do you have a reference for it? Especially for PS2 games. Of course, they have source code so that changes a lot. Would also like to know where the term "mono-emulator" comes from, would be interesting to see if there's more background to all of this than I'm aware of..

QUOTE
The idea is that we want to play certain games of certain systems so much and the platform itself is unable to being emulated, right? So if there are so much interest and there are devs interested, maybe that kind of partial emulation can be done for some of those games.


It's just one of those things that people aren't going to be interested in doing unless there's a major financial motivation for the games in particular (like with ports, or Bleemcast)

QUOTE
What about making bounties for this? Maybe making this will not be as attractive to a dev as porting an emulator, as there will be more effort and having less positive results than having an emulator that runs at fullspeed so the same effort can be applied to tons of games instead one or a few.


Bounties won't motivate anyone unless you can collect like $10,000. They've never done anything in the past.

 

[carlgeorge]

I have a great Saturn Emulator on the Dreamcast. Runs rather well.

No it doesn't, unless a typical 10% real time speed is your idea of running rather well. On the other hand, that emulator isn't really heavily optimized at all (no recompilers for one thing).

Well, due to your rude response I went and dug-out my Dreamcast & tried it. I have to concede that you are in fact correct, its rubbish. I don't know why I remembered it being good. Anyway, just to clarify, it is rubbish. Other emus on the DC are good, but the Saturn one is rubbish.

 

[Exophase]

Well, due to your rude response I went and dug-out my Dreamcast & tried it. I have to concede that you are in fact correct, its rubbish. I don't know why I remembered it being good. Anyway, just to clarify, it is rubbish. Other emus on the DC are good, but the Saturn one is rubbish.

How was I being rude?

 

[Zor Prime]

Well there's a Jaguar Emulator, which isn't a lot better off than the Saturn for the most part (I guess?).

I don't think there's a game on the Saturn that people are as psychotic about as Tempest 2K that would make someone want to run through a brick wall to write an emulator for, though.

Indeed it would be cool, as I never owned a Saturn and I love 2D stuff.

 

[ashdjones]

I don't think there's a game on the Saturn that people are as psychotic about as Tempest 2K that would make someone want to run through a brick wall to write an emulator for, though.

I never owned a Saturn...

Well then, how would you know?

 

[Zor Prime]

I don't think there's a game on the Saturn that people are as psychotic about as Tempest 2K that would make someone want to run through a brick wall to write an emulator for, though.

I never owned a Saturn...

Well then, how would you know?


Why wouldn't I know? I don't buy games at random and chance them being ultra cool or terribly lame. Tempest 2K for instance I scored that first thing when I had a chance to go down town to the mall right after it was in stores. I knew about it well in advance.

And evidently no game on the Saturn has compelled anybody to write a good working emulator for it, whereas the Jaguar surely isn't any easy task to write an emulator for either (unless it was all done with the Motorola CPU which I doubt).

After the realization of writing this, it's amusing that a game system with more titles has not one game compelling as much as one written for a far less known game system.

 

[anexanhume]

It's been discussed many times, and yabause.org may offer a glimmer of hope. As far as I can tell, the source is freely available on their site, so that could be the basis for a port I suppose. However, since the hardware is so esoteric, no one has put much faith in an emulator running well on the pandora.

For the mention of 3DO, that has been discussed to, and I think someone brought up someone having an active project that may have benefits for the pandora. That's been a while though.

 

[Exophase]

And evidently no game on the Saturn has compelled anybody to write a good working emulator for it, whereas the Jaguar surely isn't any easy task to write an emulator for either (unless it was all done with the Motorola CPU which I doubt).

Your reasoning is facetious and your claims are inaccurate. There are more, better, and more efficient Saturn emulators than Jaguar emulators. The best Saturn emulator has very high compatibility, just a lot of people don't realize it exists even though it has been in development for several years. There are ones behind it that aren't bad as well.

Jaguar is also significantly easier to emulate than Saturn, and Saturn is significantly more powerful.

And Saturn has far more games recognized as being high quality than Jaguar does. Look on gamerankings.com. Saturn has at least 100 games that score 70% or higher, including 51 that are 80% or higher. Jaguar doesn't even HAVE 100 games, and only 8 scored 70% or higher (and a miserable 4 80% or higher). That's TERRIBLE in comparison.

After the realization of writing this, it's amusing that a game system with more titles has not one game compelling as much as one written for a far less known game system.

Man, I don't know what alternate reality you come from, but you look like you got lost on your way between here and atariage.com. What good games does Jaguar have? T2K? Alien vs Predator... maybe? A lot of the other games considered at all "good" were ported to other platforms. While Saturn has Shining Force 3, NiGHTS, Panzer Dragoon series (including Saga), Virtua Fighter 2... hell, it even has a port of Tempest 2k, although that looks much worse in comparison with all of those other big name titles.

 

[ashdjones]

Going by the previously stated logic, there should be a good Nuon emulator by now - to play Tempest 3000 of course. I just checked, and there is only one (stated as being very slow).

 

[Series-8]

I think instead of a Bounty method for the whole completed 100% full speed emulator.

A Ransom technique would be better;

Develop the whole program, then post 100's of teaser pictures (and video) to convince the community to fund the completed stage. (and to continue work on the next)

When a certain donation amount is set; Release of a optimized binary and source code.

-Phase 1:
Minimal Emulation of early/simple games at 'playable' (70%) speeds.
(Say 2D only games, and ones that did not take full advantage of the hardware)

-Phase 2:
-Complete emulation of 3D hardware, at any speed (it just needs to work, even at 5 fps)

-Phase 3:
-Dynarec optimized code for better speed of 2D/and some 3D games. (say 15-20 fps)

-Phase 4:
-High performance assembly optimized code that runs hella fast for most games

Ect.

 

[Balzac2m]

Saturn has Radaint Silvergun and therefor is one of the best systems of all time.