Yabause for PSP Released - Sega Saturn Emulator for PSP

[troom]

i was not trying to bash exo i just think a coder of his caliber should just ignore stupid release . also i use his emu all the time and in my opinoin its the best one out there.

[danknugz]

you got to love the righteous rage of Exophase! caller out of Bu!!sh!t ! Slayer of Hosers! Smacker-down of Smacktards! i bow to thee, pwner of the mighty GBA!

[armyStrong]

I've gotta agree with Exophase on this one...

Nice idea, but essentially a worthless release.

[Exophase]

Has it occurred to anyone that ports like this probably aren't for for attention grabbing and are most likely made as a proof of concept.

It has occurred to a lot of hapless wishful thinkers, yes. A proof of concept is a demonstration to show the validity of a new idea. The reason why people say "it's just a proof of concept" is because it is showing that something new can be implemented, but the given implementation is not production quality. You give a proof of concept to show, for instance, that a new algorithm works, even if the implementation given is not useful in the real world.

I understand how it can look like a proof of concept, but it isn't one. That's because it's not proving anything new. Everyone already knew that Yabause could be ported, or at least the people who are knowledgeable enough knew.

So why else do it but for attention?

Also I don't see what Exophase's problem is, who cares if it never reaches fullspeed.

My problem is that there has already been a lot of pointless debate and confusion regarding Saturn emulation on PSP. For instance, this one guy on another forum spent months pretending that he was doing one and arguing about it. When a port like this happens it causes everyone to believe that the platform will reach fullspeed. They think "so and so said it was impossible, but here it is. Therefore anything should be possible, including fullspeed emulation of this platform!"

Everyone gets their hopes up. A lot of people don't understand the difference in work between porting an existing emulator and optimizing one to be several times its existing speed for a given architecture. They don't understand that it takes a lot less expertise to port something, in fact it's a totally different kind of thing. They all think something will come of this and nothing will.

So now we'll probably get this many more people nagging devs asking for Saturn emulators. And when all is said and done years from now when there is no high performance Saturn emulator they'll be blaming all the devs, while praising SofiyaCat for "at least trying." The same way StrmnNrmn gets slack for Daedalus "not being fullspeed even after all this time." Most people in the PSP scene have no idea how things work, they have no idea why fullspeed Saturn emulation won't happen, all they know is that SofiyaCat did "something" and is therefore automatically placed above every other dev who didn't do anything because they know better.

And since there's no good reason to do this (it's not a proof of concept, it's not a tech demo) all we can assume is that SofiyaCat is doing it to get the attention she knows she doesn't deserve.

[SpacemanSpiff]

Princess Crown PSP actually is running on an emulator, the source code for the original Saturn version was lost so there was no other way for it to be ported to the PSP. You people need to realize that there's a big difference between how easy it is for a company to write an official emulator when they have full access to the hardware documentation versus a fan project where everything has to be reverse engineered.

[SpacemanSpiff]

BTW how well does this run on the Dreamcast? Probably not too good I'd imagine.

[BlueCrab]

As a copyright holder on a portion of the source for Yabause, I hereby request that the source be released for this project. I know that these types of tirades got me in trouble before, but I will NOT permit anyone to stomp on the hard work that I've put into Yabause by not releasing source to a derivative work.

[Exophase]

Princess Crown PSP actually is running on an emulator, the source code for the original Saturn version was lost so there was no other way for it to be ported to the PSP. You people need to realize that there's a big difference between how easy it is for a company to write an official emulator when they have full access to the hardware documentation versus a fan project where everything has to be reverse engineered.

That is nothing but speculation. I know exactly where you're getting this from, the Atlus message board where they said that a translation couldn't be done for "undisclosed technical difficulties", which could mean anything (or could be a front for them just not wanting to do it). And if they did a Saturn emulator I can guarantee you they would have used it for more than just Princess Crown. Is it really believable that a company like Atlus, a very major Japanese gaming company that has released dozens of titles, is capable of losing source code from a game circa 1997? That they had no backup for it at all? It sure isn't to me.

The files being half the same shows nothing, except that it uses the same data files (of course...). Actually, if it was being emulated you wouldn't see a filesystem at all, because the Saturn CD-ROM has to be emulated at a lower level than that.

If it WAS being emulated they'd be limited to using a single 222MHz CPU on the PSP like every other game from that time.

And you're wrong about enthusiasts.. because pretty much every enthusiast doing an emulator has access to either the same official documentation or superior reverse engineered information. For instance the specs on SNES that exist to this day are many times better than anything you'd ever find in official documentation (check out Anomie's doc). Same goes for GBA/DS (thanks to No$'s work). It's nice to think that everything is reverse engineered, but let's be honest, all console dev starts with leaked material. Docs, source, and SDKs.

Other than that, professional developers don't have secret knowledge about how to optimize a developer that surpasses what an enthusiast is capable of. PSP doesn't have a lot of high performance low level coders working for it but if you look at high end emulators for the PC then you'll see that they do in fact rival commercial offerings.

You can find the official documentation for Saturn within 5 seconds of google searching. Go try it. It's illegal, but Sega is hardly going to care at this point, or that site would have been taken down ages ago.

[BlueCrab]

As a copyright holder on a portion of the source for Yabause, I hereby request that the source be released for this project. I know that these types of tirades got me in trouble before, but I will NOT permit anyone to stomp on the hard work that I've put into Yabause by not releasing source to a derivative work.

The source is up now, which makes me at least a bit less pissed, but this "coder" stripped copyright notices from files he/she modified from the sdl version of Yabause, which is still illegal.

[SpacemanSpiff]

That is nothing but speculation. I know exactly where you're getting this from, the Atlus message board where they said that a translation couldn't be done for "undisclosed technical difficulties", which could mean anything (or could be a front for them just not wanting to do it). And if they did a Saturn emulator I can guarantee you they would have used it for more than just Princess Crown. Is it really believable that a company like Atlus, a very major Japanese gaming company that has released dozens of titles, is capable of losing source code from a game circa 1997? That they had no backup for it at all? It sure isn't to me.

The files being half the same shows nothing, except that it uses the same data files (of course...). Actually, if it was being emulated you wouldn't see a filesystem at all, because the Saturn CD-ROM has to be emulated at a lower level than that.

If it WAS being emulated they'd be limited to using a single 222MHz CPU on the PSP like every other game from that time.

And you're wrong about enthusiasts.. because pretty much every enthusiast doing an emulator has access to either the same official documentation or superior reverse engineered information. For instance the specs on SNES that exist to this day are many times better than anything you'd ever find in official documentation (check out Anomie's doc). Same goes for GBA/DS (thanks to No$'s work). It's nice to think that everything is reverse engineered, but let's be honest, all console dev starts with leaked material. Docs, source, and SDKs.

Other than that, professional developers don't have secret knowledge about how to optimize a developer that surpasses what an enthusiast is capable of. PSP doesn't have a lot of high performance low level coders working for it but if you look at high end emulators for the PC then you'll see that they do in fact rival commercial offerings.

You can find the official documentation for Saturn within 5 seconds of google searching. Go try it. It's illegal, but Sega is hardly going to care at this point, or that site would have been taken down ages ago.

You could be right but they did also release a Devil Summoner PSP port at around the same time, so it makes more sense that they developed an emulator for both of them rather than waste resources porting them both over separately. I don't know how deep Atlus's back catalog of Saturn games is but maybe they didn't perform well enough at retail to justify releasing any more games, who knows?