The History of Sega Saturn Emulators - Part 3

Yabause (2003)

Yabause

Frenchman Guillaume Duhamel and Canadian Theo Berkau, known as CyberWarriorX, created the Yabause emulator in 2002, which more than a decade later would become popular as the best-known Sega Saturn emulator. The project also had help in its development from joostp and Piratero and as webmaster of Romanito. Its first release was in September 2003 for Linux. Guillaume's interest in developing the project was that the Sega Saturn had no emulator for the system in question. In February 2004, it gained support for the SDL multimedia library. In May 2004, the emulator's bios screen began to load. In June 2004, it was ported by Lawrence Sebald, known as BlueCrab, to the Sega Dreamcast under the name Yabause-DC. In July 2004, the Windows and MacOS X versions appeared, created respectively by Theo Barkau and Adam Green, with help from Weston and menace690.

Yabause 0.5.0 (Interface/Menus)

Yabause 0.7.0 (Interface/Menus)

Adam was also known for porting the Virtual Jaguar emulator for the Atari Jaguar console to Mac OS X in 2003. Although the project began in 2003, it was only in December 2004 that it began to run commercial games on the emulator, as well as having its own front-end. Also in December 2004, it added support for CD-ROM, automatic detection and manual selection of the game region, bios and automatic saving to the console's RAM. In September 2005, it added Action Replay for cheating in the game, Stephane Dallongeville's SCSP and 68k cores, a debugger, support for ISO and BIN/CUE formats, expansion cartridges and rewrote all the code in C for better portability and speed. In August 2006, it began supporting video selection via OpenGL, sound via Direct Sound, and control via DirectX Input, frameskip, in addition to adding the Help menu, with the address of the Website and Forum, bug reports, project help and information about the emulator version in question.

Yabause 0.9.1 (Interface/Clockwork Knight)

In June 2007, it began to support cheats and OpenBSD systems, in addition to changing the settings for sound, video and input from buttons at the bottom to tabs at the top. In November 2007, it added the emulation menu with the reset option, in addition to the save state option. In January 2008, it added the capture screen (screenshot) function. In May 2009, it added the Record Movie video recording functions, in YMV (Yabause Movie Video) and Record AVI formats. It created a new front-end in January 2013, consisting of a logo-shaped options bar, with all the main options, such as play, pause, stop, open ISO, save and load state, settings, video (OpenGL) and sound (DirectX and SDL) plugins, frameskip, full screen, screenshot and others, with all the options in the classic top menu, in addition to the classic processor and chip debugging function.

Yabause 0.9.15 (Interface/About/Batsugun)

This version also changes its logo and adds support for Portuguese, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Lithuanian and Swedish. These versions become known as QT Yabause, returning to its name as just Yabause in November 2014. In December 2013, it began supporting 64-bit versions and games in .MDS format. In August 2016, it added support for games in .CCD format, bilinear filtering, 68k Musashi processing and loading of music extracted from SS games in .SSF format. In addition to the updates mentioned, Yabause now emulates all processors, microprocessors and chips of the device, synchronizes the Sega Saturn clock with the PC, has good emulation of the SH1 and 2 processors, as well as providing shortcuts to various emulator functions via the controller (keyboard or joypad), and in its latest version brings support for 19 languages ​​in total.

Yabause 0.7.1/0.8.6 (About/Interface/Menus)

Regarding game compatibility, the emulator ran 319 games optimally, 46 satisfactorily, with some errors and bugs, and 94 with no possibility, or almost no possibility, of being run, out of a total of 459 games tested. Its compatibility was above average in relation to the emulators that started their projects first. The project initially had the contribution of Fabien Autrel of the Satourne emulator, with its source code, Chuck Mason of the Semu emulator, with source code and processor emulator and Runik of the Saturnin emulator, both Sega Saturn emulators, Stephane Dallongeville, of the Gens Mega Drive emulator, and others, such as the segadev website and Romain Vallet who won the contest to name the emulator. The last version of Yabause released was in August 2016.

Yabause 0.9.15 (Menus)

In June 2013, it arrived on the BizHawk multi-emulator. Yabause is considered the Sega Saturn emulator with the largest number of ports released. In addition to those already mentioned, considered in quotation marks official, we also have for Debian and FreeBSD in August 2006, Ubuntu in February 2008, Nintendo Wii in June 2008, PSP in August 2009, Xbox in November 2011, Android and iOS as Saturn.emu in August 2011 and Android as Yabause - Android Edition in March 2012 and an official port in May 2016, among others. In June 2009, it even had a port for Windows called Yabause ReRecording, which brought video recording support that the original version did not. 

UOYabause

Yabause had a famous port made by Shinya Miyamoto, creator of the classic Sega Saturn emulator, Girigiri, now using the pseudonym devMiyax, called uoYabause or UnOfficial Yabause, which appeared in July 2015 for Android. In March 2016, Miyax created a version for Windows called Yabause-devMiyax, which was a hack of the emulator, with only improvements. It was part of the uoYabause project. In April 2016, he changed the name of the emulator to uoYabause. Miyax also released versions for iOS in September 2016, Nintendo Switch in November 2017 and Linux/Ubuntu in December 2019.

Yaba Sanshiro

Both the Android and Windows versions already came with support for games in .BIN, .CUE, .ISO and .MDS formats. The .CCD format arrived in the emulator in July 2016. Interestingly, support for this format arrived first in uoYabause, and only the following month in the original Yabause emulator. In August 2017, the creators of Yabause did not allow their name to be used in the emulator, and Miyax changed it to Yaba Sanshiro (Yaba from Yabause, and Sanshiro from the character from the Sega Saturn commercials, Sagata Sanshiro). Although it was not allowed to continue with the old name, it is the direct continuation of Yabause.

Yaba Sanshiro v3.4.2 (About/Magical Drop 2)

We don't really understand this, since Miyax helped update the original Yabause. Its graphic emulation is based on OpenGL ES 3.x. Some of its differences from the original version are its video recording and its compatibility list. Of the 1626 games tested, 156 ran well, 439 average and 1031 poorly. The number of games running well was lower than the official Yabause, perhaps due to differences in the criteria of what is average and what is good compared to Yaba Sanshiro.

Yaba Sanshiro 2

In October 2020, they had problems with the Play Store for finding the cheat mode in the emulator to be something that violated their rules, so Miyax had to change the name of the application to Yaba Sanshiro 2 (they have no luck with fixed names). In April 2021, they also changed the name of the emulator to Yaba Sanshiro 2 in the Windows version. Its latest version came out in August 2022. Regarding its front-end, the project continues to use the same interface as the original Yabause, being modified only in May 2019, when it increased the size of the logos with quick options. Its versions for Android and iOS were updated in October 2024.

Kronos

Kronos (Radiant Silvergun)

Kronos was another port of Yabause, already taking modifications made by uoYabause/Yaba Sanshiro. Created by the Frenchman François Caron, with the first version being in February 2018, it uses graphics emulation by OpenGL 4.3 and had versions for Windows and Linux/Ubuntu. Its differential is its great game compatibility. Of the 2110 games tested, 1923 are playable, 16 are almost playable and 159 are not. Miyax helped François with some improvements in the creation of his emulator. The emulator ran games in .ISO, .BIN, .CUE, .MDS and .CCD formats since its inception, coming to load games in .ZIP format in September 2018 and .CHD in January 2020. Its latest version was released in September 2024. Around September 2018, it started to be part of RetroArch. Kronos also used the same front-end as the original Yabause. Yabause was marked as the first open-source handheld Sega Saturn emulator.

Nova (2017)

Nova

Nova was the last Sega Saturn emulator created from scratch and the last to be created since 2003. It was also the most recent emulator created for consoles and handhelds from the 1980s and 1990s, with most of them having been created until the mid-2000s. It was created by Steve Kwok in 2017, but as shareware. Perhaps this prompted him to dedicate himself to such an intense work as emulating Sega Saturn. Its first version was released in October 2017 for Windows. As of May 2018, it also began to emulate Sega Titan Video games. The requirements for its emulation include 2.0GHz processors, 1GB of RAM and a graphics card with DirectX9 support. The emulator is still experimental, so it does not have many tools. It does not run games on CD, but it does run game images in .BIN, .CUE, .CDD, .MDS and .ISO formats, since its first version. It also does not support save states or control configuration, being playable only with a keyboard or with an external program like JoyToKey. Despite this, it has good video emulation, with good speed, and with 60 frames per second loading.

Nova (Interface/About)

However, many games only load the opening and others don't even load, and the sound support still has noises. The emulator also supports 10 languages, including Brazilian Portuguese and Portuguese from Portugal. The emulator is the one that had the most games tested, with 515 games running perfectly, 178 running reasonably and 330 that go as far as the menu, or that don't even work. Steve received help from several influencers in the scene, such as Charles MacDonald, who created the Genesis Plus emulator in 2002, with research on the subject, Theo Berkau from Yabause, with information on the CDBLOCK command, Benjamin Siskoo, translator of the emu-france website and of several Sega Saturn emulators into French for various help, the SegaRetro website for information on Sega Saturn games and peripherals, in addition to the Zlib data understanding libraries and Libzip for zip files. The latest version released of the emulator is dated June 2020.

Other Emulators

There were other emulators for the console, such as UltraSat, Semu, PC-Saturn and Hyperion.

MedSat (Mednafen) and Beetle Saturn (RetroArch)

The Sega Saturn also became known for being run on multi-emulators, such as MAME in 2003 (through Sega Titan Video emulation) MESS in 2007, BizHawk in 2013 (by Yabause), Mednafen in 2016 (through the MedSat emulator, developed exclusively for the multi-emulator, by Paul Met) and RetroArch in 2020 (through a port of MedSat, called Beetle Saturn, by twinaphex). A curiosity about MedSat. It was developed to work on the Mednafen system, but uses the multi-emulator system to create its own Sega Saturn emulator of the same name. It is even considered a good emulator for the console.

A curiosity. There was a project between 1999 and 2005 to create a Sega Saturn emulator for Dreamcast, called Saturation, by WMC Murra. Its creator had done a lot of research and developed material, but the project never got off the ground.