Well it has been proven that the phantasy star collection has all its games emulated, but the problem lies in how the emu operates as well as the roms being split to work with the emu and the saturns ram, they have tried inserting roms and seeing if it works, but alas it does not.
about Sonic Jam... so they are all roms? What about Sonic 1 in which they gave Sonic his STH2 dash attack? wouldnt it been a huge pain in the ass to add that new function to an existing rom? Thanks
for one last time lets clearfy this, phantasy star emulated, thunderforce possibly, sonic jam is DEFINETLY ported.
The classic games of Sonic Jam are definitely not emulated, as each takes up considerably much more space on disc than the cartridge ROM files and some (but not all) of the music is in a kind of looping format. Also, there are slight graphical differences between the Saturn and MegaDrive versions. For example, the water in Sonic 3 didn't originally have a shimmering effect on its surface. Then again, it's odd how Sonic Team didn't remove the music - if #10 of the Sonic 2 sound test really is its theme - and icons for the Hidden Palace Zone, so at least you can give them a 9/10 for accuracy with these ports... unlike other companies I could think of!
This will probably shock you but the original Japanese Mega Drive version of Sonic does have the water effects but the PAL version doesn't. I have no idea why this is but I'm guessing it has something to do with the slower speed of the PAL system. Yakumo
I've not actually played the Japanese version of Sonic 3 (either on a MegaDrive or through emulation), so I would never have known that rather interesting fact. My guess is that the water surface effect happened faster than a 50Hz display could keep up with, or perhaps it was removed altogether - remember how the clouds were animated for the later Japanese release of the first Sonic game and static for all other editions?
Well, in fact, the 50hz version would have *more* power to do such effects... think about it, you need to do less frames per second (50 instead of 60), so you have more time per frame.
"I looked through the disc, I didn't see any ROM headers or anything else that would lead me to believe that it's emulated. " Can be compressed. Since those games were coded in asm 68K, it is logic that they used the 68K of the sega saturn, isn't it? "Well, in fact, the 50hz version would have *more* power to do such effects." 50hz makes the cpu virtualy more powerful (more cycles per frames). I've heard that some games even slowdown in 60hz. For the rpg, it can be emulated with ease since dropping 3/4 of frames isn't a problem (10fps for a rpg looks same than 60fps for 90% of gamers). "ps: I'd like Naka to leak out his primitive NES emulator for MegaDrive. " True, assuming how the nes cpu is weak, it is possible. Any more info about it?
Wasn't it this infamous NES emulator that got Naka his first role as a lead programmer at Sega, which ultimately led to his work as the head of AM8/CS3? I can't imagine it being too exciting today (apart from for the obvious nostalgic factor), though what's more unbelievable is that I didn't realise a game running at 50Hz would require less processing power than its 60Hz counterpart - after all, it's common sense!
its funny as many times as naka has mentioned it, hes never once showed, though of course it was never released due to sega being a rival and such, still it be intresting to see a prototype of this device, or better yet have him answer all the questions about the sonic beta.
It's my understanding that it wasn't a "device" per se, but rather a software emulator. Naka must have found some good optimizations in order to emulate a ~1MHz NES on a ~7MHz Genesis. I wouldn't imagine it to be impossible, but I could see ROMs requiring pre-processing (perhaps he might pre-convert the NES tiles to Genesis tiles, for example).
Yes. A couple years ago sega purchased the rights to use what at the time had been coded by fans for saturn pc emulation. They then tweaked the code to be more accurate and released it online, as well as certain saturn games which were modified slightly to work with it. A while later Gavione (I think that was his nick), along with Ex-Cyber (both from SegaXtreme) created a hacked version which would allow ripped games (through some modification tools) to run. Despite being made by sega themselfs (at least partially), the emu was not perfect, and many games had graphical and audio glitches, but it was non-the-less the best saturn emu to date. Unfortunatly, the legal issues that surrounded it soon caught up and it dissapeared from the net to one degree or another. I still have a copy (along with some stuff I put together to make it more user-friendly). Its interesting, but far from the 'perfect' saturn emulator everyone who still likes the system seems to want.
Atleast, I know for a fact that the Goldpack editions use the SS FM synth (or perhaps an emulation of YM2612, which is unlikly though).
Yeah, but on a lot of consoles the CPU is underclocked a bit when running games at 50Hz. I know the NES and C64 did this - can't remember if the MD did... Times like this I wish I had an oscilloscope...
It's not so much that they're deliberately underclocked, but on systems like that, the CPU clock is usually somehow derived from the dot clock, which of course differs between PAL and NTSC. That's the same reason that NES 2A03 and C64 SID music has a different pitch between PAL and NTSC (the 2A03 simply because the CPU and sound generation are on the same chip, the SID because it's fed with the CPU clock). Besides, the difference in the MHz count is so small, that you generally gain more on PAL from the increased number of cycles per frame, than you lose in raw cycles per second. Of course, with games that rely more on raw CPU power than cycles per frame (realtime 3D games tend to fall in this category), then you'll gain a very slight speed increase on NTSC. But, for the most part, early PAL systems can do more onscreen because they can handle more calculations before the next frame comes around. This is the main reason that the PAL C64 demo scene beats out the NTSC scene in terms of pushing the hardware. I don't think the MD slows down on PAL, because it seems to have more separate buses (as opposed to the NES and C64 where everything is more or less on one bus, with the exception of the NES' PPU memory). I don't know exact numbers, but I'm fairly sure that the only major difference on a PAL MD is the number of frames per second, and thus the cycle count per frame.
