A friend of mine is saying that there are rumors about that soon the VC may include Saturn titles. As far as I know getting the Saturn emulated on anything is a bitch, but that may have changed since last I looked into it (granted, I imagine there's a reason the Saturn "Sega Ages" stuff tends to be ports of the PC/ST-V versions). His argument is that the N64 is more powerful than the Saturn and those games run fine on the Wii. Anyways, any insight from you guys on this?
I'd call that horse crap. The n64 is more powerful, but the saturn has much more managment going on, which needs layers upon layers of code to properly sync and conduct, and the CPU/GPU have only got so much to offer per cycle.
If Sega were involved in its production, there would be no reason why the Wii couldn't emulate the Saturn. The horsepower is there, it's just a matter of knowing the internals well enough. -hl718
a "fast" gamecube capable of emulating ALL the nooks and crannies of the legendary harsh-code saturn? It's a bit hard to diggest that one
Dude you need new friends... The Saturn was designed by aliens.............from mexico: nobody knows how the fuck it works or how to make it work, so there's no good emus out there. Now, lets say the craptastic G4 on the Wii can do it, so whats on SEGA's part? they couldnt do a decent SegaCD emu even when Gens was doing it since quite a while.... There wont be a FULL Saturn emu, maybe a 2D but even then if some games appear on VC I'm 100% sure they will be recoded for the Wii.
You can't compare the emulators that hobby coders have written in their spare time based on minimal system documentation to what a company like Nintendo or Sega would produce with the resources they have available. I have no doubt that the Wii would be capable of emulating the Saturn at full speed. It won't, though. ...word is bondage...
SEGA could put together some kind of emulator for whatever games they wanted to release on VC. It wouldn't be that hard. Ofcourse it wouldn't be the ultimate end-all perfect interpretive emulator. It'd be something like a hacky dyna-rec design. Something that is tested to do what they need it too and not much more than that. But really, what the hell would the point be? What games would really need to be on VC? And if its SEGA, they could more than likely port the games. Now if you were to take some Saturn games to put on VC, I'd like to see some stuff like Radiant Silvergun.
I think a bigger problem would be that they wouldn't reasonably fit on Flash storage - people would need to buy big cards to store the saturn games, as the 512mb of flash inbuilt will last only a very short amount of time.
i m with the_steadster on this one. I m sure panzer dragoon saga would be an amazing experience to replay, but where to save it if not on a single DVD at least? In the light of such games though, I wish SEGA would/could make a Saturn emulator for X360 or Wii, even if the games are on disc media.
I'm not sure these rumours of Saturn emulation on the Wii's virtual console are from either Sega or Nintendo, and probably just stemmed from fanboys who believe obvious choices like NiGHTS could be on the way. Getting actual Saturn code to run on what is essentially a souped-up GameCube seems highly unlikely, especially when Sega's own hardware R&D unit failed to emulate this very system for Dreamcast. However, there's nothing to rule out remaking classic Saturn titles from scratch for the Nintendo platform...
Nobody here remembers Sega's Giri Giri Saturn emulator for the PC? I'm sure it could be pulled off, I just don't think it will happen (due to reasons explained above).
I remember Giri Giri and I ve used it. It's not bad..it's not that good either. It did start as an independent effort nevertheless, as did Satourne (Which in my opinion has alot of work put in to it)
With multi-core processors and Vista we'll see much better emulation for multi-chip systems like the Saturn and PS2. It should be interesting.
SSF is apparently working quite well these days I hear. Not had the time to try it out in several releases.
I think it was stated that Princess Crown for PSP uses a saturn emulator. They licensed one of the homebrew emu out there (Cant remember which one tho). Also the issue is space more then emulation. Even tho the wii has 512MB flash, you only get about 230MB of it. (remember first that 512MB will be improperly calculated to 512,000,000 vs 512 * 1024 * 1024 (= 536,870,912) plus space eaten up by the internal firmware).
