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Saturn Emulation on GameTap... or not?
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Mystaria? Albert Oyssey? StHA? Those two games are pedestrian compared to PDS. Burning Rangers and Dragon Force are saved due to their gameplay.
I think some people are drastically underestimating PDS. The presentation and design alone still outclasses games.
And it sure isn't worth the insane prices people expect for it.
Mystaria and such are underrated, so they deserve some attention. The PDS hype has everyone thinking it's the greatest and only Saturn game that NEEDS to be played, and it isn't.
Doesn't mean that those of us that had a Saturn and played these games during their prime time can't feel like PDS is the best game on the system.
I loved all of the aforementioned games. They're good, but personally, I feel that PDS is better for many many reasons.
I loved playing that game in the arcade, but to the best of my knowledge, it never received a home port.
My Collection
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/39/SATURNBOARD.JPG
Here we are
Nintendo Friend Code: SW-0689-9921-0006
Thanks. Now it's time go to retcon my posts!
I have the game.
Every time I see that picture I... I get frightened.
Also. I spotted a Saturn at a used bookstore today.
...but I had no money.
My PC copy of Abes Exodus has playstation buttons in the menu screen.
My PC copy of Sonic R also has Saturn buttons.
[reads]
I wish someone here had the PC version of Bug! so I could make some comparison screencaps.
Did the PC version really have the Saturn BIOS startup screen that popped up when starting up any Saturn game? I dont have a Saturn, but I've looked at Youtube videos of other Saturn games and I can confirm its the exact same startup. And like I said before, shouldnt there be an "exit" or "return to windows" option somewhere?
EDIT: This is what I'm talking about.
I don't remember the PC version of Bug! having a saturn gamepad in the option screen, however. It was released during the same time that VFPC, Sonic PC, Comix Zone PC, Ecco PC, and Panzer Dragoon PC, and if I remember correctly, you mapped controls in those games via a drop down menu.
But, to be honest, I don't remember a saturn gamepad in the saturn version of Bug! either. When I get home to houston this weekend, I'll track down my copy of Bug! and check it out with screenshots.
SD cards.
And DOTS, I didnt think Saturn games were much bigger than N64 games, although I can see FMV adding quite a bit of space. Are they?
It mentions the buttons by saturn convention? Then yes, the PC versions of the games did that. You mapped buttons for L, R, A, B, C, and Start.
And Saturn games were mixed mode CDs. Actual games sized ranged from between 100-175 MB, way larger than N64 games. The largest N64 game was 512 megabits, or 64 megabytes. The rest of the CD was occupied with audio, which usually took up around 300 MB.
A total saturn game weighs in at around 500 mb. Of course a saturn game is bigger than an N64 game.
It would take a firmware update to get Saturn emulation anyway, might as well throw in the ability to run games from SD cards or USB mass storage devices while you're at it.
I promise you, the Wii is not powerful enough to emulate the Saturn.
I fucking promise you.
Seeing as how Bug is running on my POS Pentium 3, care to explain why? Maybe it's not hard to emulate the Saturn if you actually have a motive to do so and are being paid to do it.
Wasn't it established that to emulate a system, you must use a system that is more than twice as powerful? I don't know if a Wii is twice as powerful as a Saturn.
There already is an emulator that Sega used.
Well it was THE Saturn game in the US when the system was initially being hyped. Panzer Dragoon (deservedly) stole its thunder in the long run but Bug! was the game Sega was really behind during the lead up to the Saturn launch.
Once they actually launched it early and people realized that Panzer Dragoon existed though it was all over for said failed Saturn mascot.
That hurt Bug! more than anything, Sonic even has a cameo in the game during a race mini-game portion. Everyone was discontent that instead of trying to make a new franchise they didn't just make a new Sonic game instead. Bug! even ends in a very blatant "omg get ready for the sequel" way.
Prior to release, Clockwork Knight was also supposed to be a huge deal, again, failure.
The Dreamcast games run in their own app too. Like Toy Commader and ChuChu Rocket, both of which never came out on PC AFAIK.
Oh, I know. I'm just pointing out that the amount of internal memory is not the issue here.
If you'd like me to, gladly.
First of all, the saturn has 2 Hitachi SH2 CPUS which run in tandem with one another, 2 VDP GPUs, and custom build audio processors. All this without a central timing CPU. They all ran at seperate clock speeds, without any centralized processor to make sure everything kept in sync.
the actual processors themselves had no checks to make sure everything was running, and you could poll from the same resource at the same time, resulting in bad, bad, very bad crashes. Getting games written natively for the sega saturn to run on the sega saturn was hard enough.
So this brings us to Bug! running on gametap. Proof, as some people have said, that the saturn is being emulated. I'm remaining skeptical, but not ruling it out. It's possible that someone out there has been working on a kick ass saturn emulator. It's possible. So why would a game like Bug! be able to run on such a lowly system? Because most early saturn developers simply didn't know how to write saturn games. Rather than using both SH2 processors in sync, and both VDPs in sync, they wrote to one. Bug!, like games such as Virtua Fighter (which was a terrible port) and so forth used ONE CPU, ONE GPU, and the sound processor. They took the multicore saturn, and made it a single core machine.
This is why the sega saturn struggles to run Virtua Fighter (A model 1 game), but can run a much upgraded VF2 (a model 2 game) almost on par with it's arcade big brother - improved Saturn 2.0 SDK that was sent out. So this leads to one possible theory - someone did make a saturn emulator, but it's emulating low-level stuff. When dealing with only a single CPU and GPU, timing is not essential, hence why a low-level Pentium 3 can run it.
If the machine isn't fast enough, as is the case with your Pentium 3, then you can simply begin to drop frames, or make the machine wait a little longer. With only 1 CPU and 1 GPU to worry about, if the game runs slow, everything will still work because the CPU polls the GPU. They are not independent of one another. However, if this is the case, then that means seeing more impressive saturn games is not possible.
When you throw in the second CPU and second GPU, timing becomes critical. If the machine is not fast enough to emulate the CPU, it can't resort to simply taking longer to calculate and compensation with dropped frames. Why? Because if one CPU takes too long, the other CPU (which works independant of the first CPU) might begin to do it's calculations early. Timing will get screwed up. The saturn will crash. The game won't run.
Get it? Unless you can be absolutely 100% sure that the games will run at 60/60 fps with no hickups, timing will cause the saturn to crash.
But I see all of you out there saying "Wait! The Wii is way more powerful than the saturn! How could it have trouble with such simple graphics?"
Thus we arrive at the second great problem with emulating the sega saturn. The way the VDPs work are unlike any other 3D render out there. While modern games are calculated and rendered using triangles, the saturn was very unique in that it used quadratics. Allow me to explain.
Say you have 3 dimensional space which extends out in all directions infinitely. You can represent a single point in these 3 dimension as a vertex, (x, y, z). that is, you move left or right x spaces, then up or down y spaces, then forward or back z spaces. Conventional rendering GPUs take 3 vertexes and draw a triangle around them. This triangle is called a face, and it is a polygon. They throw a texture on it, and boom, you have a triangle floating around in 3D. They put a shitload of these triangles together and make a 3D man.
The saturn used quadratics. Rather than using 3 vertexes to render a triangle, it would take 4 vertexes and render a square. It COULDN'T render a triangle. Thus, any graphical edge the Wii, or modern PCs, have over the saturn is neigh moot - they're working off of fundamentally different principals. So you have the secondary problem to worry about - how the fuck are you gonna convert the saturn code, which will be pumping out surfaces with 4 points, and have your expensive GPU, which accepts surfaces with 3 points, and have it render the game?
There are a couple of ways, but all are taxing and very CPU intensive. Or you could offset the work to the GPU, and have it render 2 triangles for every 1 square (you can put 2 triangles together to make a square... take a square and draw a line bisecting the square from the lower left point to the upper right point. Viola, two triangles), but then your powerful GPU, which was supposed to be an asset, starts getting taxed heavily. You have 1 GPU which is emulating 2 GPUs, doing double the work each GPU would normally do.
And then there's the problem of RAM. The Saturn was made to be a 2D powerhouse, and had a ton of ram to work with. It had 1 MB of SDRam, 1 MB of DRam, 1.5 MB of VRam, 4 kb of color ram PER VDP, 512 kb of CD Audio Ram, 512 KB of CD Cache, 32KB of non-volitile RAM to write saves to, and 512 KB of Bios Ram. All this has to be emulated. Not to mention the 8 MB ram expansion if you want perfect emulation.
I'm not sure how much ram the Wii has, but truthfully, it probably has enough for all that. What it probably DOESN'T have enough ram for, however, is audio. And that brings us to another great problem with saturn emulation. Space.
The wii has 256 mb of space available to work with. Saturn games, with audio, normally takes between 400 and 500 mb. Storing a saturn game is tough. You could offload it onto an SD card, yes, and that would make storing the game possible, but what about downloading it? The Wii store is already slow... it takes me minutes to download an 8 MB N64 game. How long will we wait for a saturn game that's 500 mb?
Yeah, some people will say "they could compress the audio into an mp3!" and this would be a fantastic idea... until you realize that decompressing MP3 audio is CPU intensive and would also take up a bit of ram. So you are suggesting that, the solution to getting around the saturn's intensive file size, is to compress audio which will tax the already very, very taxed CPU and RAM in order to decompress audio on the fly. MP3 won't work.
Then there is the second theory - Bug! is the PC port of the game. This has not been ruled out, and until I get to play the gametap version, I can't confirm if it is or not.
But, hey, if they get the saturn running on the Wii, more the power to them. I'm all up for them proving me wrong. but everything I know about hardware, software, and the saturn tells me that it's pretty fucking impossible. Sorry if I smothered some people's dreams.
I have the saturn version here in austin, actually. I can rip the game and see how big the BIN is, if yall give me a bit.
I guess it was too early for me to assume that it was the Saturn version. Sorry.
I think it is around 150.
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