/vr/ - Retro Games

I'm sure somebody made a Saturn portable sometime or another.

The same emulator that runs Saturn pretty perfectly on the PC, Yabause, is available on android.

That doesn't mean anything though. Though not for a lack of community support for the idea, the concept of emulating the Saturn has never really taken off. The emulators for the PC that exist out there aren't that accurate, but are decent enough to play a large portion of the library without too much discrepancy between the console version and the emulate version of a game.

That being said, Saturn emulation creeps along at a slow pace, and while Yabause exists on Android, it's not very good.

Outside of that, no there really isn't. There's a bigger market behind emulating the Dreamcast and NAOMI arcade hardware. Saturn doesn't get much love.

There are also certain hardware idiosyncrasies that I've read about that make emulating the Saturn slightly counter productive, despite the hardware spec of most affordable laptops.

I can imagine that if there was a bigger, more driven for survival market behind the Saturn (Such as what exists for the Dreamcast), that might be different.

Saturn is a real underground, niche based console. It didn't sell well at all and was quickly phased out for the Dreamcast. It spent just barely 3 years on the shelves in NA, which is an incredibly short lifespan in comparison to the other successful consoles of the era.

The Dreamcast, despite how people represent it as being this unknown console, has quite a big following after death, almost like the Dreamcast has achieved some sort of martyrdom status in terms of it's library, which is full of hidden gems.

Which isn't to say the Saturn isn't. Clockwork Knights is one of my favorite 3D Platformers of all time, and I absolutely loved Sega Rally Championship, and I believe that the Sega Saturn version of Sim City 2000 is the definitive console port of that great game.

You can't even emulate the Saturn all that well on PC, let alone on a portable.

>>863037

>This whole post.

Sad to read that, but thankyou for typing all of that, kind anon.

I have a Sega Saturn already but I wanted to know if I could take it to Uni with me, but I guess not. Oh well! Guess I should buy a CRT for home instead.

>>863050
Don't sell yourself short yet, there are other alternatives. The Saturn is a little clunky and it's not quite portable, but if you don't have a TV in your dorm/flat, you can actually just get yourself a mini-TFT, Zenith made a portable one exclusively for game consoles. All you need is a regular 4-Pole RCA 3.5mm Cable (One end has a regular 3.5mm Headphone jack-type end, the other a regular Y/R/W RCA Video and Audio output), and some Female to Female adapters to join all your RCA Cables together, and obviously your Sega Saturn, and you can do that, it's fairly easy to stash at that point to, and you can enjoy vidya in bed with your console on the nightstand and the monitor on your headboard or wherever you want to put it.

I used to do this a lot when I was younger before I got a gameboy, and me and my parents would go places, but rather than get a miniTFT or anything like that, I'd just connect it to the video camera we had. It'd let me use headphones and record some of my gameplay straight to tapes!

Works for any consoles that use straight RCA inputs, and any monitor that accepts video input via the 4 Pole 3.5mm cable.

LISTEN UP EVERYONE

This myth that Saturn emulation is unplayable has to stop once and for all.
SSF emulates SEGA Saturn perfectly as of some years now, and that's a fact, if you find a game that doesn't work with it you'll be incredibly lucky.

Unfortunately SSF is Windows only and you need a sort of half decent PC to play it, and I don't mean a powerful machine, just don't expect getting it to work with your mom's old netbook.

That being said, to answer OP's post there is no portable console that can run Saturn, the closest you can do is with Yabause, but that emulator is terrible, and can only work with handful of games.

>>863073
I dunno, man, I always had a lot of trouble getting SSF to work. I got Super Robot Taisen F to work once, and then...it never worked again, and I have no idea why. Nocturne in the Moonlight wouldn't work, either.

>>863198
http://www.segasaturn.org/Japan%20update.htm

You're definitely doing something wrong
They both work.

>>863037
>The same emulator that runs Saturn pretty perfectly on the PC, Yabause

What the hell, man.

>>863037
What the hell is "pretty perfect" about Yabuse? Just looking at the project page, it's barely updated anymore, and the compatibility list is pathetic, with half of the games not even listed as "playable".

SSF is the best Saturn emulator, with the majority of games running in a perfectly playable state. That being said, there really aren't viable portable options.

>>862993

No.

There is ONE good emulator for it. SSF, which is JP, closed source and only for Windows. We need a good, open source emulator that scales well. Yabause maybe could be, if it didn't suck.

>>863037
>The same emulator that runs Saturn pretty perfectly on the PC, Yabause,

>>863073
>SSF emulates SEGA Saturn perfectly
No, it doesn't. Perfect emulation would mean that it would be 100% accurate.

>>866483
If you want to be nazi about it let me rephrase.
The games run perfectly, though it's not cycle-accurate emulation.

Not even the MAME wizards or byuu could make a cycle accurate Saturn emulator and the games still be playable on a consumer grade computer.

>>866505
They easily could, the problem is that it would take a LOT of time because the Saturn has just so many hardware functions.

>>866531
The SSF guy has been working on this thing for more than a decade now, I can't imagine how long it would take to make a cycle-accurate one.

>>866505
You're still using the word "perfect." I'd rephrase that as "SSF emulates Saturn games well enough to play them without much problems"

>>866569
Let's not argue about semantics please, you know exactly what I mean.

>>863037
I apparently had the dreamcast after its death or near its death, and only just learned about a month ago that it wasn't a thriving console when I recieved it. And I literally don't know anyone who would characterize the DC as unknown. Who says that?

>>863073
If I can play dota 2 on my computer can I emulate saturn games?

>>866695

I don't know. I'm 28 now and got mine at launch on 9/9/99. Sega made a pretty big push in the NA market to hype it up. I remember being able to play it at what was then Electronics Boutique months before it actually launched. From what I remember, it sold really well at first but then the hype train for the PS2 started up.

>>866696
Probably.

>>866556
The SSF guy does it as a hobby and rewrote the entire thing at least 4 times (the last time just now).

I know for a fact that a good emu coder (ex. Steve Snake) could get it done near perfect in a year or so, minus for the unknowns that need reverse engineering / research.

>>866806
I friggin' love Fusion.

>>866806
Fusion is not 100% cycle accourate though

>>866881
Stop calling out on buzzwords you don't even understand.

>>866948

>>866948

what is there not understandable? is it common to have inter-family relationships in your, well, family?

>>867201
>what is there not understandable?

This entire sentence(?).

>>863597
The map glitch in Albert Odyssey nearly burned out my retinas. But I forced myself to carry on. There's a point in Magic Knight Rayearth where I couldn't continue because the layers got screwed up. I couldn't fix it.

I never had much luck with the other Saturn emulators though. I still though ti had some Saturn discs but I can't seem to find them. I thought SSF won't work with ISOs or you have to mount them or something. Too much trouble for me really.

>>867217
You just need Daemon Tools Lite
It's not rocket science

>>867217
Mounting an iso takes around 3 seconds once you have your virtual drive set up, which takes a minute.

Just buy a Saturn and a mod chip. At most you will be paying 60-70 doll hairs total.

>>863073
SSF?

>>870031
Depends in which country you live, in some it's really rare.

>>870036
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=what+is+ssf

>>870031
>Just buy a Saturn and a mod chip.

But then >>867217 has to actually burn his CDs and put them in the console. That's even more work than mounting an image to a virtual drive! That's too much trouble for him, really!

Someone needs to write a good open source Saturn emulator or improve Yabause if its codebase isn't too much of a trainwreck.

Being stuck with a closed source windows-only emulator doesn't bode well for Saturn emulation in a future where mobile ARM devices are becoming increasingly important.

>>872478
I've noticed that Japanese rarely do open source software, I wonder if it's a cultural thing or just coincidence

>>872984
>I've noticed that Japanese rarely do open source software

I've noticed this too. Most Japanese-written emulators that are CD-based don't have a "load ISO" option and require you have the physical disc. I guess in japan most players that care about those systems probably have the games already.

It's a shame Japan in general doesn't embrace open source like the rest of the world does. Imagine people doing translated source ports of old, obscure Japanese PC games for modern PCs. That'd be pretty cool.