Mednafen Saturn early feedback

RetroArch General
#1

Hey there libretro devs. Just wanted to thank you for the WIP Mednafen Saturn core! Was testing it out today and thought I would give some general feedback on it. (I’m running Windows 7 on Retroarch 1.3.6)

Firstly, the compatibility and emulation quality seems very good. I tested Guardian Heroes, Radiant Silvergun, Soukyugurentai, Panzer Dragoon 1 and Burning Rangers. All worked just great with no slowdowns or glitches.

As for performance, all the games seemed to hover between 30-40% CPU usage on my i5-3570k system. For reference, the Yabouse core is around half that, 15-25% CPU usage.

I did find some games that didn’t work correctly or exhibited major glitches like Galactic Attack and Astal. Would you prefer that I add that to the libretro mednafen saturn issues tracker or post details about that here?

#2
  • Bios settings on every new game could be looked out. Have each region configured once.
  • Can the .bcr .bkr .smpc be saved in another folder but system?
  • Overall haven’t seen any problems yet, tested about 25 games.
#4

I had Astal hang with music on the first stage. Another time it worked quite far after the fire level, “sea of clouds or something” where I just stopped.

Then Advanced VG hanged before the last boss on mednafen stand-alone, while here on libretro it hanged earlier on a different character loading.

I think that’s just how the emulator is right now: it can glitch on CD access here and there.

#5

Emulation issues should probably be posted where Ryphecha, author of the emulation core, will see them, which would be in this Saturn core bug reports thread on the Mednafen forums.

#7

Oh, true. Yes, reproduce in Mednafen standalone first.

#8

Yes, I had the same problem with Astal. It randomly hangs and also the music was glitching badly.

The second problem I found was no CDDA music in Galactic Attack. I tried two dumps, and both worked fine in Yabouse.

I’ll try the standalone Mednafen. If the problems are only in the libretro port, should I report them to the issue tracker?

[QUOTE=Tatsuya79;45104]I had Astal hang with music on the first stage. Another time it worked quite far after the fire level, “sea of clouds or something” where I just stopped.

Then Advanced VG hanged before the last boss on mednafen stand-alone, while here on libretro it hanged earlier on a different character loading.

I think that’s just how the emulator is right now: it can glitch on CD access here and there.[/QUOTE]

#9

Some problematic dumps can be “fixed” by importing them into either CDMage or IsoBuster and re-exporting them to a new image. Now I don’t know if this is a proper fix or not but dumps that I had issues with seemed to have been fixed by doing this.

Edit: I just tried Galactic Attack and it was working working perfectly fine for me, it was a Darkwater dump, just a cue + bin file with no external audio files.

Edit 2: Here is a quick demo video of Galactic Attack, please let me know if there are any issues that you see in the footage.

#10

Also, you can convert MAME/MESS Saturn chd dumps into bin/cue using the chdman utility that comes with stand alone MAME. You use the extractcd command:

chdman extractcd -i gamename.chd -o gamename.cue
#11

Good to know if I had any chd dumps :wink: