I have both of those mulators and they are not complete, you are missing the pioint, you can easily emulate saturn its an ancient hardware after all, the problem is making it 100 percent compatible witht he original hardware, because of the architechture,. The problems was that because you had all those options a lto fo developers were experimental and tried different things. some games ran ONLY 1 Sh2 and 1 VDP, then nothing else was ran.
Other games ran BOTH VDPs and 1 SH2, others still ran ONLY the 68K and 1 or two VDPs, its because of the different combinations that were availabel emulation is near impossible, becaus eunelss you have the source code youc an not program the corect setup.
JUST having all the chips emulated isnt enough because you have to write instructions telling the emulators which chips to run, this was doen ont he start up in original Saturn. NiGhts was one fo the very few games that ran EVERYTHING at once, makig it one of the most difficult games to emulate, now you can write all the proper intructions and boot the disk normal but you have to have an emulator that can emulate both VDPs and BOTH Sh2's and the 68K all at once, and even for a pentium PC thats not an easy task, not so much for the machines but for the programmers, the LATEST emulators out for saturn still only emulate teh SH2s at 85 percent, so yo can PLAY most games witht hat but NOT all and a lot of games wont run properly. And NiGHTS doesnt have to be emulated 100 percent to look pretty because it ws MOSTLy prerendered backgrounds, you went in circles.
You have to understand how it works, even SEGA said that emulating Saturn would be a nightmare hence the reason Dreamcast wasnt backwards compatible either and it ran on a SH4 which is a step up above the SH2 so tehy ahd similar architechture except Sega chose to forgo the extra processors when DC came out.
EDIT ( for clarification think of it this way teh VDPs were 2d Processors that could be used for special effects when in 3d mode, the SH2 were risc chips that could run 3D accelaration and had sclaing and rotation capabilties, you needed one or more VDP to do texture mapping but they didnt have any fo the fancy effects that we have now, not even Z Buffering, and the Motorolo 68000 chip was teh same as Genesis, itw as 16 bit chip with very limited capabilities.) So does that make more sense? Yo would need an emulator that can emulate 2 32 bit risc chips and 2 VDP chips that had virtualy unlimited sprite lines and could handle texture mapping as well as background images. heres an example. Virtua Cop ran only 1 SH2 for rendering all the character models and ran teh 68K for painting the mackground images, that didnt even rotate or have any animations. To emulate that yowould have to write the code for a sigle Sh2 and the 68K, then Virtua Racing ran the dual SH2 but didnt even bother with the vdps at all, there were no texture mappng and the back groudns agian were drawn on the 68K, then Daytona USA rendered everything on 1 SH2 and used the second for Environments and used a single VDP for Textures and the 68K as sound chip.
What makes emulating saturn difficult is that the 68K was desgined to be a sound chip, but since Saturn had CD audio capanbilities programers coudl record soudn fiels as wav files and then play then back when needed and program the 68K as a extra graphics chip, which makes emulating it harder because the BIOS loaded Main SH2 first then IF instructiosn were there loaded the SLAVE chip, if the load up intructions werent there the Slave laid dormant and could not be called latter. This makes emulating crazy because every game was different and theres litteraly no way to test every single game to ensure they work properly, which is why so few Saturn games get ported to newer systems.
Topic: NiGHTS Revolution! (Read 42308 times)
