History of Videogame Emulators: The History of Sega Saturn Emulators

Satan - Sega Saturn (tm) Emulator (1998)

Satan

The first Sega Saturn emulator arrived in 1998. Its name was Satan (pronounced Saturn in Japanese). Created in January 1998 by the Japanese team Eschaton Enterprises, its first version was released between January and February 1998 for Windows, as an alpha version. Although it never ran games, the project was quite promising. The emulator allowed the console's games to be selected via the CD-ROM, where it displayed game information, such as title, manufacturer ID, product number, game version, release date, compatible areas and peripherals, and device information.

Satan (Installation/Configuration)

The Eschaton team was trying to write a code called thunk, which would allow them to play any Saturn CD, and even support the 3DO console. They were also developing a Master System and Game Gear emulator, and their plans were to create an emulator that would support all Sega consoles and handhelds up to the Saturn, and the System 8 arcade boards (for which they were also already developing an emulator) and the Sega G-80. Unfortunately, none of these projects came to fruition. A second version was supposed to be released in late February 1998, but this never happened.

A-Saturn (1998)

A-Saturn

The second Sega Saturn emulator to be developed was also Japanese, by the Azuco group, in 1998, with Big Hello at the forefront. Its first release is dated February 1998 for Windows.

A-Saturn v0.15d

A-Saturn v0.15

The emulator's initial design was to run not only Sega Saturn games, but also games from Sega's arcade game, the Sega Titan Video. Although the emulator ran the console's CPU and BIOS, it never ran any games. It had several unsuccessful versions released. The project was closed in August 2000 with the last version released.

SSEMu (1998)

SSEmu (Installation/Interface/About)

SSEmu, or Sega Saturn Emulator, was created in 1998 by Marshall Gladstone. Its first release was in March 1998 for Windows. Although it never emulated games, it did emulate the SCU, a system coprocessor, the three Hitachi processors partially, and CD-ROM audio. The emulator had only one more version in July 1998.

Sat'On'Em (1998)

Sat'On'Em

Sat'On'Em (Saturn On Emulation), or simply Stom, was created by TyRaNiD in late 1998, having released the first public version in November 1998 for MS-DOS. Similar to SSEmu, it emulates some aspects of the console, such as 89% of the processors, and all of the memory, but without graphics and sound. It also competed with A-Saturn in this quest for game emulation. The emulator was for MS-DOS, but an emulator for Windows called Lucifer was developed, which was never released. Its latest version is dated March 1999.

SSF (2000)

SSF

SSF was undoubtedly a paradigm shift in the Saturn emulation scene. Known as the Sega Saturn Emulator, its acronym, SSF, was inspired by the audio format extracted from Sega Saturn games, known as the Sega Saturn Sound Format and with the .SSF extension. The project was created by the Japanese Shima in December 1999, with its first release in January 2000 for MS-DOS. One of his first recommendations, back in February 2000, was the use of processors such as Pentium 2 or Celeron with 450Mhz, 128MB RAM, Sound Blaster PCI 64-bit or higher, and Voodoo 3 video cards onwards. In August of the same year, they began testing commercial games on the emulator. In September, a Windows version was released, with several games already working, and with support for the device's 2 and 4MB RAM cartridges. Thus, it was the first emulator to run Sega Saturn games. At first, it only ran games, and the few games that ran, worked with errors, no background and other problems. In November 2000, a version was released that ran a larger number of games. The January 2001 version already ran several games from the console. And so on, until a good emulation was developed and most of the games from the device were played, with little or no problems. In 2005, the possibility of running ROMs from the device emerged through the CD-ROM image emulator, Daemon Tools, meaning that the original Sega Saturn CDs were no longer needed to run the device's games. For CD console emulators like SSF, this was a major breakthrough. In March 2006, version 0.07 Beta R3 was released, which allowed games to run without the BIOS.

SSF (DBZ: Idainaru Dragon Ball Densetsu)

The downside of this is that games with the BIOS often have greater compatibility. In addition, they provide better management of the device's internal memory content, in addition to configuring the system clock. From this version onwards, Sega Titan Video games also start to run. Although the emulator also promises to run games from the Sega Titan Video arcade board, this never happened. The last stable version of the emulator is dated June 2013. In July 2017, it returns with a test version and a definitive version in November 2017. In April 2019, a series of updates begins with the so-called review versions (previews) released practically every month. As of the end of this article, it was in version R27 from September 2021. We don't know exactly when, but starting with the review versions released in April 2019, the emulator began to support .cue files accompanied in the same folder as .iso files, as well as sound and video recording and automatic loading by region. In addition, in a general overview, the emulator also supported scanline, wide screen, vsync, bilinear filtering and gamma correction. In the sound part, it had filtering, volume increase and buffer rate of up to 2048. It supported all types of joypads, including the Multi Termina 6, which gave access to 6 Sega Saturn controllers. You could also change several functional parts, such as settings for the SH2 processors, VDP (graphics), DSP, GPU, and others. And finally, it also supported save states and snapshots. In its early days, SSF ran only 30% of CD-ROM, 10 and 5% of graphics processors, 20% of 68k, 60% of SH2 main processors, among others.

SSF (Menus)

In one of its last stable versions, from June 2013, it already ran the video processors at 95%, the SH2 and 68k at 100% and the CD at 85%. As of September 2021, the only advance is the emulation of one of the video processors at 100%. In its first years of development, emulation was so difficult that neither good cards like AMD's Radeon, nor processors like AthlonFX and Pentium 4 at 3Ghz each, nor features like Direct3D, were enough to emulate the console satisfactorily. The emergence of GeForce graphics card models, and Intel processors, like the i3 in the late 2000s, began to allow for actual emulation of the console. In the last stable version, from June 2013, processors like Intel's Core i5, 2 Duo or AMD's Phenom I and II were required, and more than 512 MB of RAM to run it. As of September 2021, the latest recommended configuration to run the emulator is Core i5 to i9 or AMD Ryzen, 1GB of RAM and DirectX 11. In June 2019, along with the Preview R2 version for Windows, Shima released the emulator for Android, still as a test version. Among the games compatible with the emulator, we have 311 with excellent performance, 11 with reasonable performance and 66 with malfunctions, out of a total of 389 games tested. These numbers were created based on the lists of compatible games posted on the websites SSF Tribute, Lus Space FE and Tradu-France, and tested on several versions of the emulator, including older ones. In addition, several games were not tested, so the number of compatible games should be much higher. In July 2021, a patch was created by Battery Shark, called CHDSFF, which allows SSF to run binary files in .CHD format. Its latest version for Android is released in August 2022, and for Windows in June 2024.

GiriGiri (2000)

GiriGiri

The GiriGiri project (which in Japanese means at the right time) was started in 2000 by Japanese developer Shinya Miyamoto, also known as MegaDeath. In August 2000, the first version for Windows was released. It only emulated the timer configuration screen. The emulator was released only as a debugger, that is, a program that seeks to find and reduce software defects. In September 2000, the emulator was translated from Japanese to English. In December 2000, it began to support CD-ROMs, but with some problems. In February 2001, it was already running some games, but only technically, because practically nothing appeared on the screen.

GiriGiri (Daytona USA/Panzer Dragoon)

The project ended in March 2001. In its last release, it could run 32 games from the console. Most of them had scores between 1 and 2, such as games that wouldn't start, and games that would start but weren't playable. The game with the best compatibility was the racing game GT24, with a score of 3, which was playable, but still slow. The game opened and worked until the car selection screen, according to the author. In my tests, it continued to be a jumble of graphics with no logic whatsoever. Although it was just a test emulator, like the others, it required an advanced computer to run, with 700MHz processors like Athlon and Pentium 3, and video cards like VooDoo and GeForce.

GiriGiri (Interface)

Although it never really consolidated itself as an emulator, it brought several tools with it, such as video resolution settings up to 1366x768, full screen, frameskip of the VDP2 (video processor), and textures for the VDP1, in addition to texture filters. You also had emulation of all Saturn processors and chips, such as VDP1 and 2, SCU, SMPC, SCSP, MC68k and the SH2 central processors (we do not know the percentage of emulation of each of them). It also had 13 game area choices. After its termination, Shinya was hired by Sega and his work was developed to create software that ran Sega Saturn in an online service called Cyber Disc / B-Club.

GiriGiri Gav (Panzer Dragoon II Zwei)

GLaucher

When the emulator was already online by CyberDisk, it was hacked (or ported) by Gavionne and released as GiriGiri Saturn (also known as GiriGiri Gav) in February 2003. Because it is based on an official Sega emulator, GiriGiri Gav has superior graphics quality to any other emulator, including those that came after it. Despite this, its compatibility is low. Of the 416 games tested, 119 did not work or worked poorly, 192 worked reasonably, with slowness and bugs, and 105 worked perfectly. The emulator worked via the command line, so it came with its own front-end, Glauncher. This front-end was simple and was original to Sega made by Shinya for his online emulator. But despite this, other front-ends were recommended for the emulator, with more options than the original.

GiriGiri Loader

GGM, GGL and GoGo GSaturn Launcher

GiriGiriHack and GiriTool

Among the front-ends created by third parties, we have GiriTool, created by Xeo and sprout, with the option to change the region and load ROMs via .BIN files. GiriGiri Loader, created by the Polish MiC, with the option to set resolution in windowed and full-screen mode, choose the game's region, load games via CD and BIN/CUE, configure the joypad, CD-ROM drive, among others. GSFREND, of Japanese origin, with the loading of binary files. GGM, created by the Japanese Chu Chu. Both four were created in April 2003. Then comes GGL (GiriGiri Saturn Loader) in May 2003, with the loading of .ISO files, and GiriGiri Saturn Tool in December 2003, with the loading of .CUE files. GiriGiri Gav had versions released until April 2003.

Cassini (GT24)

In July 2004, GiriGiri Gav got a hack called Cassini, created by The Cassini Team and headed by Snail. The emulator came with the GLaucher and GiriGiri Loader front-ends in modified versions. Regarding its compatibility list, of the 358 games tested, 147 ran well, 56 ran with some kind of error or bug and 155 did not run at all.