Saturn emulation

RetroArch Android devices
#1

I’ve used both Beetle and Yabause in Retroarch on Windows and they work pretty well. On my Shield TV however I either get a black screen (Yabause) or very poor performance (Beetle). I put this down to the Shield simply being underpowered.

However I’ve since tried a standalone version of Yabause on my Shield (it goes by the name “Yaba Sanshiro”) and it works well. Not 100%, but pretty damn good.

Can anyone shed any light on what’s going on with Saturn emulation for Retroarch on Android TV? Is there a light at the end of the tunnel?

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#2

The most simple answer is a lack of dynarec emulation for CPU instructions.

Yaba Sanshiro also uses hardware OpenGLes3 to emulate the quad 3d rendering while the Saturn emulator cores in RetroArch all use software rendering making them far more taxing on the weaker Shield TV ARMv8 CPU. Yaba Sanshiro also uses modern GPU features like Tessellation to fix various issues with hardware rendering.

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