There is a Saturn emulator on Dreamcast!

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There is a Saturn emulator on Dreamcast!

Post by Help Me »

Old article, but was this product ever leaked? I imagine it had to exist in some for, maybe it can be leaked and used?

http://www.suneet.com/soniczone/news/ar ... 0999d.html

Well it's official, now! SEGA has announced the Satcast. The Satcast will run by first, putting the Satcast CD into Dreamcast. It will load the program into the RAM. Then eject that CD, and insert the Saturn game. Satcast will also improve the graphics for Saturn games slightly. Here's what Magic Box Said:

Sega has officially announced SatCast for Dreamcast, a Sega Saturn emulation software that allows you to play Saturn software on DC, and SatCast will also improve the 3D effects on the existing Saturn software. But since certain Saturn titles require a large amount of memory to save game data that the VMS could not handle, Sega needs to solve this problem before releasing the software. SatCast will be released this summer for 3300 yen.
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Post by BlueCrab »

Nope, it was never released, and never will be. There are few high-quality Saturn emus for the PC, and they probably require about 1 GHz to be full-speed. The Dreamcast is 200 MHz (1/5 of 1 GHz).

The Saturn is just too complex for this to realistically happen. Its just about impossible that an emu will come out, and is even less possible that if one were to ever come out that it would achieve full speed. (We haven't even gotten a SNES emu to run full-speed, full-compatibility on the DC yet!)
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Post by Ian Micheal »

Snes emulators dont use the dreamcast hardware or 3d power and use the main cpu to render and emulate the games no wonder it is slow. But the saturn is very complex machine and there is not one that can do it or wants to .
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Post by Krut »

Krut: Any other emulation related (or not) proyect?

Fabien: Mmmmh...I'm planning to buy a dreamcast and try to port my emu to this platform. It won't be simple but since the dreamcast uses a SH4 (compatible with the SH2 at the binary
level) I think it could be really fun to write a saturn emu for it.
That was a while ago tough ...

http://satourne.consollection.com/
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Post by mink03 »

also the saturn emulator was gonna be made by sega right? they know how to properly emulate...while snes isnt made my sega therefor they cant take the full advantage of the dc's capabilities...get what i am trying to say?
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Post by Sweater Fish »

I'm pretty sure that it was established that the whole SatCast thing was a hoax, wasn't it? There's also the fact that Ryu has a Saturn he can play in Shenmue, that started a lot of rumors. I don't think there was ever a verified official announcement about a Saturn emulator for the Dreamcast, though.

I mean, one thing that should be a clear giveaway that it's not real is the fact that the emulator has a 1337 scene-ish name like "SatCast," to my knowledge no official 1st party emulators ever get names like that. The Smash Pack emulator has no name, nor do the N64 or NES emulators for the Gamecube, etc.

Now, as for whether it's theoretically possible to emulate the Saturn on the Dreamcast, my opinion is that some of the brilliant, skilled, professional coders working at Sega Japan could, with access to all full documentation, write and emulator capable of running many games. Some games such as Virtua Fighter 2, NiGHTS or Guardian Heoroes that are really optimized and make good use of all the Saturn's processors in unison would probably still be impossible, though. 'course, I'm not an expert and I don't have any technical experience with any of this, so take my opinion with a grain of salt.


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Post by Ian Micheal »

Shenmue 1 was first made for saturn there was even a rare demo floating on the net once. I think sega made a saturn emu and the dvd add on but lost hope with the dreamcast.
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Post by BlackAura »

The problem with emulating a Saturn is that you have two main CPUs which need to run synchronously, or many games just won't work. I doubt the DC could even emulate that at full speed.
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Post by Ian Micheal »

I doubt it to but sega built and made the saturn so If any one could they could . And they may have found a way to directly use the SH4 chip in some way shape of form since the sh2 code does work on the sh4 or the author of Gleam the first nes emu was pulling every one's leg they claims to have a working sh2 asm core that works on the sh4 chip.

And ive read sh2 asm will working on a sh4 in some mode and that the sh4 has software changing modes even for overclocking and underclocking.

Might be a bunch of rubbish.
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Post by BlackAura »

The SH-4 can run SH-2 code, but the Saturn has the SH-2s in big-endien mode, and the Dreamcast is in little-endien mode. So unless someone writes some kind of funky dynamic recompilation thingy it wouldn't be possible. You'd have to swap all the instruction words around, and try to work out what data to swap around, or replace 16- and 32-bit accesses with 8-bit accesses. Which would be painful but not, I suppose, impossible.
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Post by BaldMonk »

Right... I'm confused... all these big and little indians :) I'm off to bed ;)

Oh, Ian, I saw some photos of the DC DVD player, and the MP3 VMU, they were a real nice chrome silver. The DC DVD player just looked like a regular DVD player, but with 4 controller ports and a modem. It looked soooooo nice and flash. Oh, and check your PMs over at your forums.
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Post by Ian Micheal »

BlackAura wrote:The SH-4 can run SH-2 code, but the Saturn has the SH-2s in big-endien mode, and the Dreamcast is in little-endien mode. So unless someone writes some kind of funky dynamic recompilation thingy it wouldn't be possible. You'd have to swap all the instruction words around, and try to work out what data to swap around, or replace 16- and 32-bit accesses with 8-bit accesses. Which would be painful but not, I suppose, impossible.
Yeah Some sega programers im sure could of written that with out to much trouble. Even some freeware pc emulator coders could do it not me but people that have done this type of thing before. Then you could maybe get not an emulator of a normal type but some sort of simulator.

In the style of Bleemcast which is not a true emulator but more a complex simulator/emulator.

Satcast could have been done but were talking a project that would of cost a lot of money and have all the unreleased sega docs even the creator of the saturn working on it and of course sega.

Not in the scope of a hobbest programer. Just geting some Sh2 code running on the sh4 would be the proving ground i would think. The problem is there are 2 sh2 cpus to simulate.. Ahh but hardly any game used the 2nd cpu at all. I dont know saturn well but to me it looks like a few things could get it much faster then a pc which has hardware worlds apart. You would have to write the simulator/emulator directly to the hardware not some saturn pc port. Ground up sh4 hand tuned asm.

That to me is the only way saturn would of run fullspeed on the dreamcast with better grafix modes. And uses the sh4 in that way would of to my way of thinking reduced the need for a 1gh x86 cpu.

There is a growing saturn homebrew scene out there with games and apps being programed. looking at the source code to them some sort of interpreter maybe could be written to get saturn homebrew games working on dreamcast.

IMO.
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Post by BlackAura »

Homebrew games maybe. The other problem with the Saturn is it's video system, which is unimaginably complex, and contains two VDPs, and some other funky stuff. As with the SNES (probably more so that the SNES, actually) it would be an pain in the butt to emulate properly, or at least enough for commercial software to work.
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Post by Alexvrb »

Yeah. Plus, a lot of the methods to increase speed tend to cripple compatibility. Even if you do get halfway decent CPU "emulation" and get the VDPs emulated (rendering quads with triangles would let the PVR get in on the action more)... you've still got the sound to emulate. I think that'd break any chance of decent speed emulation, assuming you had a chance in the first place.
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Post by Mask of Destiny »

I don't think emulating both VDPs would be a huge problem since they serve different functions; however, dealing with the massive parallelism of the machine. Two SH2s, a DSP for matrix calculations, a Sound DSP, and a 68K (technically there's an SH1 as well, but it's a black box as far as a program is concerned). Just swapping out all the registers in and out will cause a sizeable hit. Also if the processors aren't synchronized properly a lot of software will break. If it is possible, it would be an incredible mess to pull off.
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Post by dcemuler »

I doubt sega really made that emu :roll:
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Post by sappel »

LOL! a Saturn emu for the dreamcast?
My 1Ghz can't even play NiGHTS with more than 10 FPS :P
the Saturn has a lot of processors so it's imposible to emulate
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Post by doragasu »

SEGA released a Saturn emulator for PC and due to it was made inside SEGA I suppose it was made with all available Saturn documentation. I tested a leaked version some time ago and it ran a bit slow on my 933 MHz P3, so I think it must be impossible to get it to work in the DC with a decent speed even for SEGA coders.
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Post by Mask of Destiny »

Sega's Saturn emulator is just a juiced up version of GiriGiri. Sega didn't develop it themselves; however, all the official Saturn technical manuals are available on the internet. Of course, these manuals don't tell you everything.
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Post by DeGamer »

Ian Micheal wrote:Snes emulators dont use the dreamcast hardware or 3d power and use the main cpu to render and emulate the games no wonder it is slow.
What about the full speed SuperCast :mrgreen:
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