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Sega Saturn Appreciation and Emulation Thread

I usually keep a few games in my watch list just in case I see that $15 off $75 or more or similar deal. I bought Bloodlines with it a few weeks ago.
 
funny, my eBay rewards of .79 cents just came in

TIME TO TRACK DOWN SHINING FORCE PREMIUM DISK

Fantastic fan service. Good luck getting. The price has gone down a lot since when I got mine years ago.

What sucks is I had all three games when they were new but didn't realize you could get the premium disc until after the campaign had ended. I believe they were even allowing people to use their Western SF3sc1 disc's UPC to get a copy too.
 

piggychan

Member
AXb1OtC.gif
 

Galdelico

Member
My goodness... The Saturn's RGB picture is so clean (testing some profiles with the OSSC in Line4x/5x and the new monitor), that is putting me on the fence of ditching fake scanlines entirely, and go full sharp pixels for basically everything. *_*
 

piggychan

Member
Regarding the OSSC, Grandia's FMV doesn't seem to like it. I have no problems getting an image during in-game but when the FMV cut scenes appear it just gives me a blank screen.
 

Galdelico

Member
That's odd. I'm testing the game right now on my white Model 2 Japanese Saturn and they run just fine, both in 480i Line2x and 480i Line4x (Euro AV RGB scart cable on an Asus VG275 monitor).

Edit - Any chance you're on 480i Line3X (laced) mode? As far as I know (also judging from various reports on SHMUPS forums) that one output is extremely picky, resulting in a black screen pretty much 9 times out of 10.
 

Galdelico

Member
Yeah, if you didn't touch anything, you're in default bob deinterlaced line double. Did you try any other 480i game, such as Virtua Fighter 2, to see if you're having problems with interlaced contents in general, or if it's an odd quirk only involving Grandia?
 

piggychan

Member
Yeah, if you didn't touch anything, you're in default bob deinterlaced line double. Did you try any other 480i game, such as Virtua Fighter 2, to see if you're having problems with interlaced contents in general, or if it's an odd quirk only involving Grandia?

Think I got it sorted after playing around with stuff. Yes I was getting an issue with 480i and Dead or Alive didn't display anything with the default OSSC settings. Although that has quite a few resolution modes that makes the screen unstable in some transitions.


3joYHgx.jpg

NHoXtzf.jpg
 

Galdelico

Member
Very nice!

And yeah, similarly to the Framemeister, resolution changes (i.e., 240p loading screens and 480i in game graphics, as in DoA) cause the OSSC to lose sync too, and go blank for a second or so. Many games on the Saturn do the same: Virtua Fighter 2, Fighters Megamix, Fighting Vipers, Winter Heat, Astra Superstars... Even 240p CAPCOM games make the sync drop, as the boot-up/logo animation is 480i.
 

Timu

Member
Very nice!

And yeah, similarly to the Framemeister, resolution changes (i.e., 240p loading screens and 480i in game graphics, as in DoA) cause the OSSC to lose sync too, and go blank for a second or so. Many games on the Saturn do the same: Virtua Fighter 2, Fighters Megamix, Fighting Vipers, Winter Heat, Astra Superstars... Even 240p CAPCOM games make the sync drop, as the boot-up/logo animation is 480i.
That is what I hate so much about resolution switching!
 
i have a spare 4mb RAM cart kicking about if anybody in the uk wants one for free. just send me your address via pm and I will post it asap. goes without saying that the first response gets it.
 

leroidys

Member
Speaking of OSSC, anyone have recommendations for a gaming monitor to pair with it? < 1ms lag with perfect geometry, upscaling and scan lines sounds like a pretty good bvm alternative to me.
 

Khaz

Member
Very nice!

And yeah, similarly to the Framemeister, resolution changes (i.e., 240p loading screens and 480i in game graphics, as in DoA) cause the OSSC to lose sync too, and go blank for a second or so. Many games on the Saturn do the same: Virtua Fighter 2, Fighters Megamix, Fighting Vipers, Winter Heat, Astra Superstars... Even 240p CAPCOM games make the sync drop, as the boot-up/logo animation is 480i.

I wonder why it takes them so long. It shouldn't take more than two frames to notice a resolution change and compute the new resolution timings. Let's say four frames for buffering and post-processing. The 10 seconds pause on the framemeister is pretty insane.
 
I wonder why it takes them so long. It shouldn't take more than two frames to notice a resolution change and compute the new resolution timings. Let's say four frames for buffering and post-processing. The 10 seconds pause on the framemeister is pretty insane.

I've heard it's not because of anything the OSSC or Framemeister are doing because of the resolution change, its the HDMI handshake, thank HDCP for that.

I don't think I've ever seen the Framemeister take 10 seconds on the resolution switch, maybe 5 - 6 on long ones, but I've never had mine go take 10 seconds.
 
Hi, I own this. It's basically a proto-version of Power Stone by people who were neither Capcom nor working on a 3D powerhouse like the Dreamcast. It's still reasonably fun. It is quite uncommon on ebay, though, I bought mine last year because it popped up in one of my saved searches. Costed about 45€.

I imagine it had a limited run what with both the publisher and developer being non-entities. The publisher Masudaya didn't stick around for long nor had many titles under their belt. The developers are a completely unknown, apparently. I was trying to find more info about them to spice up this post a bit, but nada.



Oh, and yeah, this probably didn't help matters at all.

That describes a lot of Japanese Saturn games to be honest. Saturn in Japan was home to a lot of random titles from small studios that stopped existing after Sega moved on to the Dreamcast. At least as far what I've seen from various wiki pages of games I've thought about buying on ebay
 

Saoshyant

Member
That describes a lot of Japanese Saturn games to be honest. Saturn in Japan was home to a lot of random titles from small studios that stopped existing after Sega moved on to the Dreamcast. At least as far what I've seen from various wiki pages of games I've thought about buying on ebay

It also describes many of the Dreamcast ones, too, to be honest. If I recall right, with the impeding doomsday approaching (i.e. PS2's launch), Sega of Japan went into full desperation mode and started giving away devkits for free to just about anyone who asked.
 

Galdelico

Member
I wonder why it takes them so long. It shouldn't take more than two frames to notice a resolution change and compute the new resolution timings. Let's say four frames for buffering and post-processing. The 10 seconds pause on the framemeister is pretty insane.
Just for your information, it doesn't take that long on the OSSC: I never timed the whole sequence properly, but I'd say it's something around 2 seconds? In fact, it wouldn't even bother me at all, if it wasn't that every time it happens my monitor's AV channel indicator pops up, right in the middle of the screen, and boy that's annoying. :D
 
Is there a good site that lists what CIB would be for Saturn releases? We ran into a bit of trouble so I need to sale a few of my games and I want to make sure I label everything right.



That's perfect thanks.

Keep us updated if you decide to sell through GAF instead of ebay.
 

Wereroku

Member
Keep us updated if you decide to sell through GAF instead of ebay.

Should I do GAF? I wasn't going to be able to give any good deals because we need the money so bad but I will ask before trying other places. I am looking at selling my complete Shining Wisdom, Holy Ark and probably MKR but I wasn't sure it seems insane that it is going so high now.
 
Should I do GAF? I wasn't going to be able to give any good deals because we need the money so bad but I will ask before trying other places. I am looking at selling my complete Shining Wisdom, Holy Ark and probably MKR but I wasn't sure it seems insane that it is going so high now.

I don't own a US copy of Shining Wisdom so PM me a price and we can work something out if you're interested.

As for MKR, it was the last officially released US Saturn title so it's super expensive. I just have the Japanese version for that reason. If you're not attached, I would definitely recommend selling it off.
 

Timu

Member
There's a Shining the Holy Ark going for almost $600 on Amazon!! lol I really want to play this game and I have no ways to do it.

SEGA needs to get to porting those Saturn titles or something. How can there be so many gems with no way to play them? It's frustrating
That's brand new. Used is much lower.
 
There's a Shining the Holy Ark going for almost $600 on Amazon!! lol I really want to play this game and I have no ways to do it.

SEGA needs to get to porting those Saturn titles or something. How can there be so many gems with no way to play them? It's frustrating

Don't buy retro games off Amazon. Also, what people are asking for something doesn't set the standard for what people pay for something unless you want to buy my Switch for 3 grand.
 
Don't buy retro games off Amazon. Also, what people are asking for something doesn't set the standard for what people pay for something unless you want to buy my Switch for 3 grand.

I wonder if those ever sell. Maybe I should list all my stuff at inflated prices and see if I get any bites, lol.
 

cj_iwakura

Member
I don't own a US copy of Shining Wisdom so PM me a price and we can work something out if you're interested.

As for MKR, it was the last officially released US Saturn title so it's super expensive. I just have the Japanese version for that reason. If you're not attached, I would definitely recommend selling it off.
What's funny is MKR stayed low in price for years, then people caught on. I bought a like new copy in 2004 for $50.
 

piggychan

Member
That doesn't sound good. Hope you manage to fix it and, if you do, please share what you did -- it's always important to document repair experiences on vintage, collectable hardware like this.

well I sent it into a store that did electrical repairs on anything a few weeks back and they just got back to me saying the is a fault on the motherboard and they cannot obtain any new parts and no one is selling them on ebay either so it looks like this is going to be retired.
 

Galdelico

Member
Saturn-GAF, I've got a bit of an odd question.

How many 240p resolutions is the NTSC Saturn able to output? I'm curious because, now - thanks to OSSC - it's easier to me what consoles do, once connected to my display, in terms or screen resolutions and refresh rates.

With the NTSC Mega Drive, for example, I only encountered 2: 320×224 (for games line Sonic or Streets of Rage) and 256×224 (Street Fighter II, Fatal Fury...).

Now, once I setup an optimal profile for what I thought it was the '240p' standard mode on the Saturn (which is the resolution that commands the start-up menu, the whole UI, and games such as Real Bout and Groove on Fight), I found out it screws things up pretty badly with other games, such as CAPCOM or SEGA ports (SEGA Rally, for example).

Are there other intermediate video resolutions, in between those two, and of course the interlaced ones for titles such as Virtua Fighter 2 and Dead or Alive?
 
I don't know all the resolutions Saturn can run at - I know some seem to run a bit wider than 320x240, for instance, as I'm pretty sure NiGHTS does - but I do know 256x240 isn't supported for some reason, hence why Symphony of the Night looks so bad, and why Mega Man X3 has to be letterboxed.

Glad to see there's active interest in Saturn emulation
I mean, Mednafen's Saturn emulation got so good that it got rolled into BizHawk to replace its prior Yabause implementaiton, so it's not like Nova's the only one in the running, either!
 

Galdelico

Member
I don't know all the resolutions Saturn can run at - I know some seem to run a bit wider than 320x240, for instance, as I'm pretty sure NiGHTS does - but I do know 256x240 isn't supported for some reason, hence why Symphony of the Night looks so bad, and why Mega Man X3 has to be letterboxed.

Sega Retro has a list of all the resolutions Saturn can do.
Wow, seems like I need a second OSSC only to devote all its available profile slots to the Saturn alone. :D
 
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