SNES emu for Saturn released

[Xiaopang]

great news!

I'm just wondering: if you turn transparencies off by default an awful lotta games have to be quite unplayable. on your page you say that you tested zelda. when i turn transparencies off in dreamsnes the ground link is walking on is turned off and you can't see where you're walking. how does it look on your emu?

also interesting to know: how about performance? how playable are the games speedwise?

[inlovewithi]

You have to be kidding me, a SNES emulator for the Sega Saturn? That's like mind bogglin. It's like making a regular Nintendo 8 emulator for a SNES. That would be cool, but sounds as impossible as a SNES emulator for the Saturn

[steve06x]

lmao ur right

[RockinB]

also interesting to know: how about performance? how playable are the games speedwise?

You would say the emu is slow, from my point of view I'd say some demos run quite fast. Homebrew games can be played with an appropriate frameskip setting. Commercial games are slower in general, but some run significantly faster than the average game speed. These ones could be made sort of playable, if someone is willing to put some hundreds of hours into adding hardware rendering support to the emu. It's far from being full speed.

You have to be kidding me, a SNES emulator for the Sega Saturn? That's like mind bogglin. It's like making a regular Nintendo 8 emulator for a SNES. That would be cool, but sounds as impossible as a SNES emulator for the Saturn

There are two reasons why it's possible:
1) the main cpu of the snes runs at slow speed (3-4 MHz) and
2) Saturn's main memory can be extended with a RAM cart.
A Mega Drive / Genesis emu would be a hard task. Last time I had a look on that topic, the 68k emulator core alone was way too huge to fit into RAM.

[fox68k]

A Mega Drive / Genesis emu would be a hard task. Last time I had a look on that topic, the 68k emulator core alone was way too huge to fit into RAM.

I do not think so. C68k and FAME fit perfectly in 2 MB RAM. I do not know about runtime code required to get things up, but it should not be larger than 500 KB with everything in.

Memory usage briefing (aproximately):

- Runtime code: 500 KB.
- FAME: 580 KB. (C68k gets even smaller)
- Z80: 50 KB.
- Rest of emulation code: 400 KB.

So we have 1.5 MB occupied by the whole running emulator. There is 0.5 MB left to load many Genesis games.

[RockinB]

I'd like to consider a Genesis emu port to Saturn one day.

Oh by the way, fox68k, how is faze (Z80 core written in sh asm) going?

[fox68k]

FAZE is in the debugging stage. I have fixed many bugs until now and currently it is able to run the ZX spectrum BIOS as well as some game code. No game is playable at all. Indeed, there are a lot of bugs.

Some interesting point will be its reduced size. Of course, it is optimized for speed over size. I believe we will have the core between 30-45 KB depending upon generation options.

[RockinB]

Good to know, seems to be a lot more work for you than I thought. I'm looking forward to faze. If it's compatibility is good enough, it might give a nice speed advantage in some emulators on Saturn. Especially because of it's small size.

[fox68k]

Well, there are good news about FAZE

Surprisingly enough, last saturday after fixing several bugs, the core was able to run many games in ZX4ALL (ZX spectrum emulator by Chui) with some minor errors (gfx and input).

There is still work to do, but this is very promising. I guess we can have something useful in the next weeks.

Cheers.

[gxb]

Maybe it is a good idea to code a NES emu for Saturn , since PSX can run some NES games smoothly with sound .