Yes there is a system that actually works and without pain in ass to boot up is called... Sega Saturn (console) on serious note SSF Is very reliable and stable emulator but it require a powerful PC order run emulator smoothly. you just better off getting actual console.
Really a powerful PC ? what type like a quad core or something like an asus rog ? actually had a saturn console model 1 it broke and have my games still and wanted to emulate it.
I remember playing Saturn games on my PC straight from the original disk and it wasn't neither slow or complicated. My PC isn't anything good neither, 3 GHZish Core 2 Quad, 8 GB of RAM and a 5770 Radeon.
Yabause is fine for most use and is "lighter" than SSF. I played 10 players bomberman with it and it was fine on a old core2duo and 4GB ram (on ubuntu IIRC). Of course there's small issues, it's not a way to play you all time favorite. But it's nice for trying games or on the road.
reply Hey those sounds like good specifications, my pc is a dual core laptop with 8gbs of ram and some sort of nvidia graphics card 256mb or 512mb speed.
SSF is pretty accurate in my experience, though I've only tried a few games. Any PC made in the last 7-8 years ought to be able to run it just fine. Even my previous PC, which I built some time around 2006-2007, could run it with no problems.
Which makes it only 500+ times more powerful than the Saturn. My netbook, around 200 times more powerful than the Saturn, AFAIK still can't reach real-time speeds with any public emulator.
I usually test various Saturn emulators whenever I upgrade my PC: Pentium III / 512 MB RAM, Windows 2000 - Not a chance in hell (Satourne, SSF) Pentium 4 / 1 GB RAM, Windows XP SP2 - Reasonable to fullspeed for the most part with a little optimization! (SSF) Core 2 Duo / 6 GB RAM, Windows 7 (and anything onwards) - Basically as good as the emulator can run with maxed out settings. Played Panzer Dragoon Saga for an hour or so with no problem. If it took roughly 15 years for a cycle accurate SNES emulator to surface (bsnes, which to be fair came out in 2004 but has been a constant WIP since), and about 25 years for a cycle accurate Genesis/MD emulator (Exodus).. How long do you figure it might take for a cycle accurate Saturn emulator to come about, or will AI androids accomplish the task in some nearby distant future instead.
I think a discrete graphics card is very important when it comes to SSF/Yabause. I couldn't run 2d or 3d games with only onboard graphics (intel i3), but it seems ok once I got a proper graphics card. nb: the i3 is more or less a "budget" chip, so of course test it out on your system before you upgrade. Maybe the integrated graphics on newer CPU's can handle it.
WTF. --- SSF on Windows is a near perfect emulator with some great goodies (like shitty-dithering transparencies to 3D mesh). Its a shame in the last version there's a problem with Nvidia cards, white lines blinking on screen, and it hasnt been fixed.
Obviously it is way more powerful than the Saturn, but when I hear "high specs" today I think about an hexacore i7 with 16 GB of RAM and a 600$ recent Nvidia video card, which is light years away from my 8 year old CPU. Clearly a 1.2 GHz Intel Centrino will never, ever be able to emulate the Saturn considering how is software developed this days.
As far as I know, Intel doesn't make a 6-core i7 processor. They're all quad-cores. They do make Xeons that have up to 12 cores (maybe more).
Discrete graphics is almost never necessary for emulation, especially for Saturn where the emulator will have a software renderer. Single-threaded performance is still the primary benchmark that matters for emulation. Even for HLE of more modern consoles the integrated graphics will probably do the job. Right, (ridiculously) "high specs" will not be necessary but my point is that neither average or low specs today will guarantee reasonable performance with inefficient emulators. My Atom is about as typical to find in use as your Core 2 Duo, but it's nowhere near as capable. Even my AMD APU from just last year isn't any faster than your going-on-8-years CPU... It's very conceivable someone can go buy a computer today and still not be able to run numerous emulators full-speed (the APU struggles with Exodus for example).
