Raspberry Pi 4B 4GB and the Sega Saturn

ecto

@manwichman44 Same here. I always assumed that this is a "feature" of the imperfect Saturn emulation. It doesn't happen in all games though, does it? From the top of my head it happens is "The House of the Dead ".
I was just thinking: I have most Saturn games as chd. Maybe it has something to do with that? Some games won't work at all as chd for me.

Manwichman44

@ecto Well so far I'm having issues with Daytona USA and Panzer Dragoon so I'm not sure. It's almost as if the Pi's sd card can't process the music fast enough if that makes any sense.

T1moth

@firebird_ws6 HI, I've been reading through this thread and I am a bit overwhelmed. I understand that you have given a link to the most up to date and working version of the .sh and patch but I don't know how to use it. As an utter noob I really need some help. Can I simply copy the text from the .sh and the patch, save them with the right names and place them in the appropriate folders (as given above by quicksilver) then choose the option from the experimental modules section of retropie? Also what is the correct bios required? I'd be most grateful for any help with this. I don't think its very complicated but very unfamiliar to me. Thanks.

sergioad

@t1moth I am also wondering how to install it, why it is not on the RetroPie setup?

T1moth

@sergioad I think it is not in the retropie setup because it is unfinished and someone other than the developer has used a patch to get it working. I have now managed to get it to install by copying and pasting the files from here: https://github.com/joolswills/RetroPie-Setup/tree/lr-yabasanshiro/scriptmodules/libretrocores and placing them in the directory /home/pi/RetroPie-Setup/scriptmodules/libretrocores/. The diff file needs to be in a folder called lr-yabasanshiro. Make sure you save them with the correct .sh and .diff extensions. I know this is a clumsy way to do things but I have not really got to grips with git yet and this worked for me.

sergioad

@t1moth I think I will wait, although being able to play SFZ2, NW, MM8, MvS, XvS and other cool 2D games on their ultimate form is enticing

notthesame

@sergioad alot of reasons its not on the list and
, It is not ready for noob users, issue it has is the graphics get scrambled in random, crashes in few games, not all games run at full speed some 3d do like battle arena toshinden remix from what i have tested it runs great but with vsync off so things are reversed or damaged, this is just some reasons but once you install it runs most games great, with newer updates to mesa some games i had are now broke like die hard arcade and some run better, i did play dracula x the whole game thru out the castle and plays perfect no glitches, only glitch i did see is in the water cave where the fish dudes come out.

Most games do run great and enjoyable but games like virtual cop 1 or 2 run slow, you can play export and it runs faster not sure if it speeds up yo make the game harder or what.

I have tired alot of imports most worked but games like xmen vs street fighter no go crashes and runs super slow.

Id say it is enjoyable and playable on rpi4 with no overclocking

Stay away from Doom has alot of glitches and bugs so no go and besides its not the best port.

But This is mainly why i bought the pi4 for this castlevania on saturn and runs at full speed.

A list of games that run
Dracula x
Batman forever
Battlemonsters
Battle arena tosihden remix
Elevator action 2
Darious gaiden
Golden axe the duel
Daytona usa 45fps to 60 so not bad music does skip
Shinobi
Magic carpet
Marvel super heroes
Mass destruction
Street fighter collection
Street fighter the movie
Street fighter alpha 1 and 2
War craft 2
Mortal kombat trilogy
King of fighters 96
Bomberman
Clock work knight 1 and 2
Contra legacy war
Hercs adventure
Ironman manowar
Legend of oasis
Rampage world tour
Umk3
Raident slivergun
Alien trilogy
Astal
Coton 2
Crypt killer
Three dirty dwarfs
Tomb rider

This mostly why its not on the list but retropie needs a some what work friendly emulator for the community im sure once some things pick it will run most games at full speed in time will tell.

To install try to find a how to or im sure someone can help i could never get it going since i had my own version fixed around the same time buzz and retropie team fix there version.

sergioad

@notthesame thank you very much, as I said I will wait as I am not that advanced, how does Marvel Super Heroes Vs Street Fighter or Night Warriors work? When the issues get fixed and I could get it from the script if both of them work I would be set to play a little bit of Saturn :)

barbudreadmon

@sergioad said in Raspberry Pi 4B 4GB and the Sega Saturn:

how does Marvel Super Heroes Vs Street Fighter or Night Warriors work

Just making this clear because there is a tendency of people exagerating the "good" state of saturn emulation on pi4 :

i didn't hear of a single game that run full speed on pi4 if you disable the auto-frameskipping, meaning some games might run "full speed", but that's at the cost of non-smooth animation since they won't render every frames
expect 3 frames of input lag as the best case scenario, i've seen some of those games going up to 7 frames of input lag
lots of those games are arcade games already available on mame/fbneo, with far lesser input lag (sometimes down to 0 with runahead), no frameskip, and no known glitch. another part of those games is available on psx, in a far better state of emulation too.

All of this to say : "Marvel Super Heroes Vs Street Fighter" and "Night Warriors" are perfect examples of games you should never even think of playing on yabasanshiro.

sergioad

@barbudreadmon got it, thank you very much, sadly neither got a port to the Capcom CPS Changer with practice mode included, if they did I would pick them there instead of the inferior PS1 ports because I like fighting games for the training mode

barbudreadmon

@sergioad you could probably make something similar to a "training mode" by using cheats

sergioad

@barbudreadmon I will check it out

barbudreadmon

@sergioad said in Raspberry Pi 4B 4GB and the Sega Saturn:

@barbudreadmon I will check it out

i'm never too sure what people like about those training/practice mode, but if it's only about having infinite everything to go all out, i know pretty much any fighting game has cheats to allow that, using cheats might be less convenient than having a practice mode though, idk.

sergioad

@barbudreadmon it is not only having everything, but having an inmobile punching bag and being able to swap characters on the fly

h2805270

Here's an appropriate challenge (skip to 37:45)

SEGA Rally Championship was one of the bottleneck titles of the system. If you can get it to run on a Pi, you can automatically run anything.

I think the issue is that nobody made any special Dynamic Re-compilers for any of the Emulators. Saturn Emulation has always been heavily CPU reliant.

barbudreadmon

@h2805270 said in Raspberry Pi 4B 4GB and the Sega Saturn:

I think the issue is that nobody made any special Dynamic Re-compilers for any of the Emulators

You are wrong though.

This video is the perfect illustration of how bad sega saturn emulation is on pi4 despite the fps counter sometimes being close to 60, it's crazy how high the auto-frameskipping gets, i'm wondering how many frames it actually shows out of those nearly 60, feels more like using microsoft powerpoint at this point, it's almost hilarious in street fighter alpha 2 (one of the saturn 2D games reported as "being perfectly playable" on pi4 ?) when the flickering fireballs sometimes won't even be visible due to all the visibility frames being skipped.

dankcushions

@h2805270 said in Raspberry Pi 4B 4GB and the Sega Saturn:

I think the issue is that nobody made any special Dynamic Re-compilers for any of the Emulators. Saturn Emulation has always been heavily CPU reliant.

yabause has had an sh2 dynarec forever.

barbudreadmon

@dankcushions said in Raspberry Pi 4B 4GB and the Sega Saturn:

yabause has had an sh2 dynarec forever.

Yeah, furthermore the bottleneck for saturn emulation has always clearly been the rendering part with its 2 VDPs. Pi4's GPU is just way too lacking to handle that...

Zering

@barbudreadmon So, being realistic, we can't expect Saturn emulation to improve until the next generation of Pi computers?

barbudreadmon

@zering I suspect a big part of the problem to be in pi's GPU drivers, but yeah having a superior GPU (assuming pi5 will have that) would certainly help. Otherwise you could also consider buying a better SoC, like the odroid n2 which was available long before the pi4.