Yeah, I guess that was the issue in the original post.
Standalone’s last version is still 1.32.1 from 2024. But the Retroarch core never got to that version until these new updates. It was based on 1.29 from 2022 all this time.
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It got 30% faster here on win x64.
It can now run arcade st-v games from MAME too.
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I feel like the input lag got worse or it’s only me? I do remember Duke Nukem shooting on the 8th frame and now it does on the 10th. But it’s not the core’s fault, the older core also does the same. So maybe something else broke? Or maybe i’m seeing things.
In terms of gameplay; SEGA TITAN VIDEO (ST-V). This is one of the changes I’ve been most looking forward to with the core update, although they can currently be run, but MAME is slow and Kronos requires Vulkan.
The Mednafen website displays all updates in a dashboard format, and they’re also listed in the log (at the top). If you search for “SS:” you can see everything that’s changed since version 1.29.0.
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Ok, I see it now under the “releases” tab and then “changelog”. If the RA core was brought up to current there are quite a lot of Saturn fixes listed.
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Tested ST-V games and works perfectly. MAME already supported ST-V games pretty well (though I think not quite to the same level of accuracy compared to Mednafen Saturn 1.32) but Beetle Saturn should be a lot less demanding in order to reach full speed.
If you can’t load the ST-V zipped games with Beetle Saturn, you might need to update the core’s info file (Online Updater > Update Core Info Files) as it added ‘zip’ to its list of supported extensions.
The core uses the same sets MAME uses. Just like with MAME you need the zipped ST-V bios placed in the same folder as the game itself.
My old Fighters Megamix save worked fine here.
(Double image of the screencapture is just the result of using the default ‘weave’ for the deinterlaced option)
Fighters Megamix is interesting in that -in addition to all the wacky stuff added like playing as the Daytona car, the game is basically a Saturn port of Virtua Fighter 3 in terms of gameplay (VF characters have all their VF3 moves, there’s the sidesteps introduced etc). The stages are really basic compared to the Arcade/Dreamcast of course and don’t feature the changing terrain elevation featured in the original but other than that it’s pretty impressive for the system, even more so than the already great VF2 port imo.
With regards to the issue of some saves not working, first thing to check to determine the cause I think would be to see if some saves compatibility did not change with Mednafen itself between 1.29 and 1.32.
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I did manage to get the save working, I had delete the saves and re paste them back into the folder. However I think I found another bug whenever I play something like sega rally go to close content then open another game like daytona usa the second game seems to run at like 30fps with crackling sound.
(TL;dr below)
Okay, I think I may (emphasis on ‘may’; haven’t tested this super thoroughly) found the cause with the save compatibility problem and how to fix (though ultimately it looks like it’s a bug with the newer core).
Tested with Street Fighter Alpha.
Okay, so an old save made with 1.29 already exists. With 1.29, I go in the menu, adjust the difficulty from 1 to 2, save in the game. Quit, reload (still with 1.29). And I see the save worked:
So now, let’s see if the save I just made with 1.29 works with 1.32…Load the game:
One star, same as the old save (the game’s default with no saves is four stars so that’s not a problem with the game not reading any saves) So what is going on? Well, both 1.29 and 1.32 are evidently reading/using two different saves.
Saves made with Beetle Saturn produce 4 files for each game (unless you’ve enabled the option to share the saves in the core’s opt).
- Street Fighter Alpha - Warriors’ Dreams (USA).bcr
- Street Fighter Alpha - Warriors’ Dreams (USA).bkr
- Street Fighter Alpha - Warriors’ Dreams (USA).smpc
- Street Fighter Alpha - Warriors’ Dreams (USA).srm
bkr is the same size as srm…so it looks like it’s a backup (as in BacKup Ram, I guess) of .srm. Remember that the Saturn -unlike the PSX, had an internal RAM as well as external backup memory cartridges.
So, after doing this, I restored my original, unmodified save files. Change difficulty to 2 again with 1.29…but instead of trying with 1.32 I deleted the srm, renamed the bkr to srm then tried with 1.32 and sure enough: two stars.
TL;DR: Possible Fix (no guarantees) Delete the old .srm file rename the bck file to srm and you should be able to use the old save with 1.32.1
Important note/caveat : It looks like once 1.32 loads the save it rewrites the old bck to the current srm…So this method might not work if you have already loaded the save with 1.32.1
Real TL;dr The problem looks related to the backup .bkr file.
edit: Yeah, it seems to work pretty consistently. Here’s what you’ll probably see when trying to use an old Saturn Resident Evil save made with 1.29 or older:
If you delete the srm file (if there’s one present) and rename the bkr file to srm it should work:
Again, make sure to rename it before trying to load the save in 1.32, otherwise your old bkr save will get overwritten.
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Actually there is a ton of updates lately on this core
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It’s nice to see all that progress, but unfortunately, I have no idea what most of it means in real life improvements. 
Fighters Megamix is a Saturn exclusive and one of the most amazing fighting games of its generation. It incorporates elements from VF2 and VF3, but the game is based on Fighting Vipers, particularly its sequential combo mechanics. It’s more like Tekken than VF.
MAME has recently improved 3D compatibility, but ST-V is still in the beta stage. It may cause random errors and runs significantly slower on modest hardware.
Here are the ST-V Dats for creating a playlist, for both Mednafen and Kronos.
Added a ‘Save Method’ to the core now. Defaults to Mednafen (bkr), but you can also set it to Libretro (srm). I would recommend Libretro because there will be no disk I/O going on up until the time it has to actually write to disk (which RetroArch controls, not the core). But basically the ‘default’ should protect your bkr saves now
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Just tested updated core saves seem to be working fine however I tested with Virtua cop and the game seems to be running at half speed with crackling sound can someone else test this unless its just me.
Virtua Cop is probably more demanding than the average Saturn game (along with games like Virtua Fighter 2 or Sega Rally Championship ) but just tested it and was able to maintain full emulation speed. The game itself runs at 30fps. For reference; my PC is around 2018 -Ryzen 7 2700x cpu.
The game -especially in the beginning of the 1st stage, does looks kinda slow. But if you’re getting this it’s playing at the right speed.
In my experience one of the most demanding of all Saturn game is DecAthlete. The game runs at 60fps, looks pretty detailed (for a Saturn game anyway) in terms of polygon counts AND it runs in Saturn’s higher resolution mode, so it’s a good benchmark to test one’s system’s ability to run Saturn emulation full speed.
Thats strange I am pretty sure on one of the older versions of the core the game could run normally.
After updating the core to the latest version, the performance I got on the same Android device took a noticeable dive, it’s basically unplayable.
The version I was using about three weeks ago worked vastly better and I could use fast-forward to speed up loadings, now, it can barely maintain full speed.
Has anything substantial changed over the past two weeks? How can I get the .so file from two weeks to a month ago? I don’t have a backup that far back.
the commits in the past week have been pretty minor, so dunno what would cause your experience: https://github.com/libretro/beetle-saturn-libretro/commits/master/
there hasn’t been much in the past 2 weeks, in general.
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It’s indeed a mystery, I don’t think the latest updates would cause that, I’m at a loss about what happened here. The latest builds just underperform and it’s now unplayable, like, trying to but never getting a stable performance.
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Is there anything a log could tell? Here’s what I did: Installed the normal Retroarch.apk from the stable buildbot folder (version 1.22.2). Didn’t change anything, only downloaded Bettle Saturn and Genesis Plus GX to test performance, Saturn games basically doubles or almost triples normal in-game speed when fast-forward is active, Mega Drive ones flies possibly above 500. Then I installed the most current nightly build of the normal Retroarch.apk and it works just as well as the stable.
The AArch64 build I’ve been using for a few years just can’t compare with the normal release.
I’d like to find what’s causing it, and even if it’s worth investigating further, that’s because I tried disabling/changing/defaulting every video, sync, latency setting I could. Disabled shaders, sustained performance ON/OFF, etc.
I might be wrong, but it feels as if this specific build is not using the performance cores of the device, the difference is staggering with the non AArch64 build.
Saturn.emu, which is a standalone emulator based on Mednafen runs really well, on par with Mednafen standalone on Windows, that’s why I considered that specifically the Retroarch AArch64 is underperforming, but as always it might be something I’m missing, what can I do to tell if RA AArch64 is fully utilizing the CPU?