Alrightey then. Yes, you may have heard that for the longest time, Sega Saturn emulation was a pain in the butt. Fortunately, there has been major advances in Saturn emulation. Traditionally, you had a choice between Yabause or SSF. Yabause is, to this day, a very good Saturn emulator. But if you’re looking for 100% accurate emulation, you won’t find it here. Graphical glitches here and there, maybe the audio glitches out and goes max volume on occasion. It can be overlooked, in the larger context of enjoying a Saturn game.
Another fairly huge happening occurred in mid 2016, where “Prof. Abrasive” managed to dump the SH-1 rom (via the MPEG cart port at the rear of the console). This was not a trivial hack to perform – the man himself explains how he did it here. Basically? It’s bonkers, this man is a legend, and soon Saturn owners may have a means by which to play games on the hardware, bypassing the CD.
I have more experience with Yabause than with SSF, but I do have SSF installed (as should you all). It’s pretty much a rule of thumb to have as many good emulators for X systems as you can get your hands on. In the early days of SNES emulation, some worked better with ZSNES, while others worked better with Snes9x. Things are obviously different now, but I think you catch my drift – having alternatives is a good thing.
Recently, the RetroArch multi-system emulation platform added Saturn emulation.
Setting up Yabause
01. Download the latest build of Yabause for your system from their website here.
02. Find & download the various BIOS files you need (many emulation sites will lead you in the right direction, subtle like).
03. Install Yabause to your preferred directory. Some people dgaf & install it anywhere – other people (like me) have partitions dedicated to just emulators. Your choice.
04. Make a “bios” folder within the root directory of Yabause, and copy/paste the extracted BIOS files to it.
05. Configure the emulator – I recommend just looking over their helpful wiki here.
06. Have a game ready to run on the emulator – typically you’d try to stick with .cue, but loading the .bin file directly should be fine *most* of the time.
07. Enjoy?
If your particular game is not working, or there’s something messing things up, remember that your issue has likely come up before. First of all, double check that your game is good. Next, check that your install is good (corrupted/interrupted installs happen all the time). Next, check the Yabause compatibility chart here – perhaps your game just won’t work well (or at all) on Yabause currently. It happens. Not those things? Check their forums – search for keywords that have to do with your issue (e.g. “<game name> glitch can’t exit”). See if threads exist. Also, check Google.
That’s all for now. I’ll talk about SSF emulation in the next post in this series. Peace!
