What emulator should I get? I got a good PC and just want to play some games. I looked for ages, but the emu scene is so full of crap. Tony
Saturn emulation is terrible. The best one out their currently is an updated girigiri that Sega made, which requires you to jump through hoops to get anything working on it.
AFAIK the SSF emulator actually works on most games and can be found here. http://www.worldlingo.com/wlservlets/Translate?wl_url=http://www7a.biglobe.ne.jp/~phantasy/ssf/index.html&wl_lp=jp-en&Translate=Translate A compatability list can be found here: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/almighty.clint/ssfcompat.htm .
SSF is very good, but it doesn't work with certain CPU's. I tested Daytona, Sega Rally and Radiant Silvergun, they all worked pretty flawlessly. Only the sound had some glitches, and the occasional slowdown...
It requires SSE2. Have just looked up on wikipedia, and heres the list of processors which Do support SSE2 AMD Opteron AMD Athlon 64 AMD Sempron (Socket 754 versions only) AMD Turion 64 Intel Pentium 4 Intel Pentium D Intel Pentium EE Intel Pentium M Intel Celeron D And which Don't AMD Athlon AMD Athlon XP Intel Pentium III Intel Itanium Intel Itanium 2 more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSE2
Sounds like this is the sort of situation where it's easier to nip up Gamestation and get a second-hand Saturn for £20, and wire in switches. About the same cost of messing around getting a Saturn USB pad shipped? I understand that you just wanna play a few Saturn games on your existing PC, but with this much technical arsing around it seems real hardware may be the best answer. It certainly seems more complex than firing up SNES9x. Anyhow, good luck in your mission. Hope you manage to get things working nicely.
I've had a good test of all the working ones know. Sadly every single one had crippling problems. Cassini was the closest to acceptable but... I can't believe it's 2006 and we still don't have a decent Saturn emu. I want Sega Rally, Daytona and Sonic R in 1600x1200 with FSAA :-( My saturn looks shit on my new HDTV... Ah well, I'll keep waiting. Off Topic, Isn't anyone else dying for Scud Race and Sega Rally to be made playable in MAME. Is no one working on these things any more?
Of course those didn't use Saturn hardware in the arcades. Model 1 and Model 2 respectively. I haven't tried those games on my laptop (which is a couple hundred MHz slower than yours even), but I did try Baku Baku Animal and Cotton 2 just out of curiosity when I first got into MAME. Those were both ST-V games (ST-V was the arcade equivelant of the Saturn architecture) and I was really surprised to find that they ran at all. They're not playable, maybe something like 5-7fps, but even that impresses me for Saturn games on a 750MHz PIII laptop. Seems like they might actually run playably with 1.5GHz or so. Of course, both the games I tried wer 2D and may only be using small bits of Saturn's architecture, the MAME driver might be optimized for those low use sorts of games. What are the specs needed to use Saturn emulators like SSE2 and GiriGiri smoothly? ...word is bondage...
Wrong way around, Virtua racing is model 1 and daytona model 2, but I'm sure you knew that already SSE2 is the instruction set your processor must include to run SSF. Basically as fast as possible, but I've had nothing but problems with saturn emulators.
