Sega President Explains Why A Sega Saturn Mini May Not Be On The Cards Just Yet

That's a shame. I'd have considered picking this one up alone for Daytona and Virtua Fighter.

Oh... and I'm calling BS on his excuse. Our cell phones are tiny and capable of PS3 graphics. Ratcheting down to Saturn level shouldn't be a difficult task for modern Sega engineers.

@Uncharted2007 In their defense, this does have to be a low-cost device, so it will be less capable than even a $200 phone.

Also, we're talking about emulation, not native ports: remember that the PS1 Classic Mini already struggled to run some games at full speed. The Saturn is a complex beast, and is a lot harder to emulate than the simple PS1.

I've said this before, but Sega should just bring their back catalogue to modern platforms. Offer ported or emulated versions of all of those classics (and oddities) that have been missed: Skies of Arcadia, Burning Rangers, the Panzer Dragoon series, JSRF, Ecco: Defender of the Future, even Chaotix!

Or do a Saturn Collection containing 20 games, or whatever.

As far as the difficulty of emulation, any semi-modern platforms should be up to the task, including Xbox One, 10-year-old PCs, and probably the Switch.

@smoreon
I imagine any Saturn Mini will be poorly emulated. I much prefer your option of bringing the older games to modern platforms. I think porting isn't possible with some of the games because they have lost the source code to some games.

@smoreon spot on , Saturn emulation is much more demanding than PS1and as you say, ultimately this needs to be affordable

@smoreon @Uncharted2007 Yeah, frankly a $1000 PC struggles to accurately emulate a Saturn. Admitedly I haven't tried for a couple of years or so, so maybe the emulators have come on further since then but at least back then, there was no emulator that could play all the games I wanted without glitches and problems. Some of them were perfect, otehrs weren't even 75% there.

While its surprising, much more powerful consoles like Dreamcast, PS3 or even Switch are much easier to emulate on cheaper systems, as you don't need to emulate as many non-standard chips all at once.

The really weird architecture of the Saturn's many chips and the way they all interact with each other is what casues the problem - many of teh most impressive and popular games actually achied their graphical effects by essentially using unexpected glitches due to teh hardware and taking advantage of them to squeeze extra emmory holes or force transparencies where they shouldnt' be allowed... therefore the emulation has to be 100% perfect of all chips working in the exact same order, perfectly synced in order for them to work. I don't think anyone's fully managed this yet, not even with fpga cores.

On an affordable device like a mini console, we'll see Dreamcast long before Saturn. However, why they don't put out a system or collection of the most impressive Megad CD and 32X games I don't know... ditto their early arcade boards. A Rasberry Pi equivalent can propbably replicate a Model 1 or even Model 2 board relatively painlessly, let alone their old 2d board like teh superscalers and System 16/32 - which we saw a glimpse of with the Astro City minis and stuff from Arcade 1Up.

@samuelvictor Saturn emulation was pretty rough about 10+ years ago, but it has come a long way since then. I admittedly haven't spent much time with it either, but it looks like a majority of games are playable with minimal bugs on emulators like Mednafen. I have a fairly old PC, too, but it runs well.

I'd also be up for collections from those platforms you mentioned! Sega/Mega CD, 32X, and Model 3 have all had an especially terrible record (i.e., close to zero) for re-releases so far. MD/Genesis collections are everywhere, which is great, but there's still so much Sega history trapped on arcade machines and, well, every other platform that's not Genesis.

@smoreon Yeah agreed about Sega basically ignoring everything thats not Genesis. Its very frustrating especially when outside of Saturn, all their systems and boards are easy to emulate.

As for Saturn, yeah its Mednafen that I had the most success with when I last properly tried a couple of years ago. Some of the games were absolutely perfect and I was impressed how far things had come. But many of the games I wanted to play had graphic glitches at the very least, and some were unplayable - admitedly I have a bias for many of the later titles that really push the system to its limits as far as grahpical effects etc. Also, at the time I couldn't find a solution where the interlaced graphics modes looked passable (for example Virtua Fighter 2). Perhaps its improved since then - at the time I just gave up and modded my Saturn to have a HDMI output and read games from a memory card. Thats been my goto solution for playing teh games for the last couple of years. Perhaps I should go back and try Mednefen again when I have time to copy across all the isos etc to my gaming pc

@samuelvictor I wouldn't know about interlacing (I personally try to stay away from it!), but there are emulators that support arbitrary high resolutions, so you can do full 1080p, or I suppose there'd also be 704x480 progressive, if you want something semi-authentic.

IIRC, Yabause is one that does HD, but is less accurate, while Mednafen has accuracy, but is stuck with native resolution. Still not ideal, in either case.

@smoreon Thanks for the info. Obviously I'm not a fan of interlacing either! I wasn't trying to upscale or anything like that, infact its important to me when emulating that its at the original native resolution or integer scaled so it looks the same as on original hardware.

What I meant was that many Saturn games use a "high res" mode for some or all of the graphics, which on original hardware double the vertical resolution by interlacing 240p to 480i (for example Virtua Fighter 2's 3d layer does this) - others just use it for static screens like title screens and menu / maps so the text is more readable... but back when I last used Mednefen, these graphics ended up with a really awful interlace combing effects and I couldn't find any settings to adequately create a non-combed progressive picture.

Again, this might be fixed nowadays, considering how many games use this "hi-res" mode, I expect it was/is high on the list of things to fix. I should give it another try and see if things have improved.

@samuelvictor Yeah, there are a few emulators out there (for various systems, not just Saturn) that insist on accurately replicating interlacing... which is fine as an option, I guess, seeing as it's authentic. But most of us just want a clean, progressive picture!

I knew that the Saturn had some 480i games, which is why I suggested upscaling to 480p, as it should be about as close as you can get without enabling the ugly comb effect. I wasn't about to assume that you wanted 480p, though, as some people are sticklers for having the most accurate output- even if it seems (to me) to be a very strange preference in some situations!

@smoreon Yup. I'd never personally choose an interlaced picture! I just want the old interlaced stuff to look "right" in progressive.

As someone in the film & tv industry I'm very glad people are no longer filming on interlaced cameras, I've never understood the appeal, it always looks bad. While I understand emulators wanting to be cycle accurate, the combing effect always looks like the picture isn't being correctly put together.

It must be possible to just shift the edgesof every other line by 1 pixel to match, or something - or at worst, if this isn't possible, just ignore every other line and render the 480i stuff at 240. Seeing everything have wobbly jagged edges is just so distracting to me on a modern clear flatscreen. If I'm honest I'm not even sure what is happening or why interlaced content looks that way - in video editing its just a single click fix and it just aligns everything properly so I've neevr thought to hard about it and always thought of it as an error rather than the true intended look - I don't remember even noticing it on my crts back in the day.

For parts sure. For emulation understandable but I mean Cotton on modern platforms is emulating the Saturn.

I mean Digital Eclipse did Jaguar and Lynx with Atari 50 and it's excellent. Whichever studios (Digital Eclipse, M2, whichever others out there) are available to do the work on emulating the games if we don't see a Mini I'm fine with.

Saturn/Dreamcast people want but if it's not 'sales' and more so a partner to make the Minis with/parts to work around then fair enough but I mean Dreamcast collection on OG Xbox probably didn't do much either sales wise.

I assume but I'd rather them just port/emulate them on modern platforms or make a collection with some major Dreamcast/Saturn games if they can't do a mini console.

Cosmic Smash VR is something but so many others to experience. I know no Sega GT/Sega Rally due to car licenses though grrr. That custom car builder feature though in Sega GT on Dreamcaast.....

@samuelvictor Interlacing on a CRT does give the illusion of a crisper image than would otherwise be possible with just 240 lines. There's a bit of fuzziness, but the comb effect isn't usually noticeable on CRTs (with some exceptions).

Your solution in video editing probably involves combining every two fields into one frame: you end up with 30 solid frames instead of 60 fields (or "incomplete frames" with gaps in them, if you will). This works well on 30fps content, but 60fps content (games like Virtua Fighter 2, as well as many old sitcoms and soap operas!) looks terrible with this deinterlacing technique, as every one of those 60 fields is unique, and splicing them together in pairs just creates a comb-filled mess.

Ignoring every other line, like you mentioned (called "bob" deinterlacing), is a better way to do things on 60fps content, and it's an option on the PS2 emulator, PCSX2. Not sure about other emulators, however.

PS: Hope that all makes sense. It's kind of hard to explain without picture/video examples- there are better explanations on the internet, but there's also a lot of misleading info floating around, which conflates 30fps progressive and 60fps interlaced.

@smoreon Yes, that does make sense, thank you!

So what I'm taking from that is there is no perfect way to get the full picture without combing because the 2 images don't match for whatever reason (maybe because its 60fps and everything's moved a bit making because in reality the "A" frames are running at 30 fps and the "B" frames are running at a different 30 frames, one frame apart?).

So bob deinterlacing sounds like the best solution for modern screens even though this reduces the "resolution" from what we would have originally percieved on teh crt screen. Hopefully mednefen supports this nowadays. I wonder if it would be possible in the future for an emulator to use some kind of high level injection code to force the game to just output at 480p instead of alternating the frames. Again though Saturn emulation is taxing enough anyway without that overhead!

@samuelvictor You got it. With 60 different images per second, A and B (even and odd lines) will never match unless there's no motion at all!

The high-level hardware rendering offered by many emulators can bypass the whole issue of video signals (see basically any N64 emulator, for example!), though this is a less accurate approach than a software renderer that closely mimics the original console. You may find that a lot of Saturn games only work well with software rendering for now, but high-level emulators with 480p and HD support should eventually offer the nicest experience, if their accuracy keeps improving!

@samuelvictor I liked when, at one point, someone had written a CRT filter for bsnes. Obviously should be a later step after an emulator is already pretty well feature, but for a console like the 8- and 16-bit era, an extra option emulation of crappy RF interference (if it could be done) would be a representation of how many of us ACTUALLY experienced the games back in the day. Though the most notable console is the NES, for at least in NTSC (I've heard PAL worked sufficiently different), the actual colors seen could vary widely between different TVs, and thus it would be hard to say which was the developer-intended experience for each game. The Mario games are just one example, on some TVs you'd get the blue sky people usually see and on others the sky would be lavender. You might've even seen that variance in magazine screenshots back then.

@smoreon Yeah, I get that now, thank you for explaining. This was what I was thinking when I said "High level" emulation, literally thinkign about how most N64 emulators work. I'm sure that's a loooong way off with Saturn but may eventually be possible. That will be awesome

@KingMike Ah, you are a prime candidate for appreciating the games I'm developing then! I created an engine that uses a true 240p native resolution (using the same widescreen res as Sonic Mania) and then perfectly integer scales to 720p for Switch and 4k for Xbox/PS5/PC, meaning everything properly aligns to the grid like a real retro game would (sadly a rarity in pixel art games) and looks 100% crisp and clean. For screen resolutions where perfect integer scaling isn't possible, you have the option of having it scale at the correct aspect ratio but with half pixels to fully fit the screen (giving slightly soft edges) or having a perfect integer scale with a black border.

But then I spent about a month making my own propriatary CRT shader with a tonne of presets to emulate different tvs and monitors, and also completely tunable to recreate the exact look people might want - scanlines, rgb separation, warping to emulate screen glass curvature, roundness of corners, edge rolloff of light distribution, gamma correction, and analogue/RF interferance (noise/grain) with each setting able to be turned on and off and cycled through different levels.

Even though its for modern retro-style indie games, I was inspired by the many options and settings we retro enthusaists go through with both modding our retro consoles, and tweaking our emulators, to try and get the picture looking exactly how we like it. You can have everything from crystal clear crispy 4k pixels on a flatscreen all the way down to a poorly tuned 14" portable TV from the 80s that looks like a fishbowl

@electrolite77 "I’d pay good money for the likes of PD Zwei, PD Saga, Nights and Fighters Megamix on my Switch."
You and me both! 😍 It pains me how little Sega utilise their back catalogue - and Nights is especially weird to be missed out considering the modern remake/port is available on darn near everything except Switch. I'd kill to have that portably.

I think another issue is how many games have licensing issues outside of Japan.