SSF
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You are currently reading a thread in /vr/ - Retro Games
You are currently reading a thread in /vr/ - Retro Games
Trying to get some Saturn Emulation up on my PC, Have all my settings and BIOS configured, but I'm having trouble getting games to work properly.
I downloaded Virtua Fighter of Emuparadise and The .rar had a .mds and .mdf file. I converted these into a .bin and .cue file and when loading the .cue in Virtual Clone Drive, the game starts up, but has no CD audio and the graphics are very messed up.
Any idea as to what I'm doing wrong?
>>2819873
Try Yabause. Also emuparadise is kind of shitty. Try finding Saturn isos elsewhere.
>>2819878
I'll give Yabause a try If I can't get SSF working better, I heard Yabause has lower compatibility in exchange for ease of use.
Where would you recommend finding better Saturn rips?
>>2819879
here is one I've used before.
http://edgeemu.net/browse-saturn.htm
>>2819884
Bingo. Use that for everything but PSX Redumps.
>>2819879
The ISO Zone
>>2819873
I'm in the same boat, only it comes up "corrupted disc" or some such at boot
The internet is riddled with shitty Saturn isos
Download from a different place until it works
And no, don't use Yabause. SSF is the way to go.
Op here, tried a different rip and now the graphics aside from background flicker, looks perfect.
only issue is I'm still not getting any CD audio, so no background music on VF, I used Sega CUE maker to make a new cue sheet after turning the bin into an ISO, but still have no music.
Is there any audio setting that would fix that or is my cue busted?
Virtual Clone Drive supports cues now? In my experience, only Daemon Tools could ever load them properly.
>>2819986
Might be what I'm doing wrong, I'm only loading the bin/iso.
So try Daemon tools for loading cue?
>>2819878
Yabause has awful compatibility and is slow.
>>2819873
Virtual Clone Drive has issues with SSF. Some games will boot, many won't.
Use Daemon Tools. You can mount the MDS/MDF directly with it as well.
>>2819878
Yeah, Emuparadise is kind of awful for getting game ISOs. As an offhand example, the Omega Boost image for the PS1 has broken, stuttering FMVs.
Tried Loading the Cue on VF, still no music, Sonic Jam worked fine though.
I'm not sure what else to try, other than finding a different rip.
>>2819956
Most of the time its only messed up cue files. You can fix them if you know what you're doing.
Guys...It should not be that hard to find good Saturn rips. Download them, verify their CRC32 with Redump, and start getting your game on.
Holy fuck.
>>2820051
Once again...Go to fucking Redump, download autgen'ed CUE, play.
Really simple folks.
>>2820051
Trust me there's a shitload of bad Saturn isos out there, and threads like these really do prove it because they happen all the time here. And people say "hurr saturn emulation doesn't work" just because how notoriously bad is the dumps out there, and people just assume it's the emulation not working. We're talking about isos with wrong cue files, isos without the .wav files, isos with mp3 files instead, a shitload of stuff. The saturn is notorious for bad rips for whatever reason.
And I'm not saying I can't find proper isos, I surely can. But the general crowd will just google it or go to coolrom or whatever, so these threads and the "saturn emulation doesn't work" meme continues propagating itself forward.
>>2820107
This was an informative post.
>>2820107
Saturn emulation _does_ work, but only for a given value of "work" (it's no BSNES).
Honestly, the PSX had similar legacy until recently; tons of incomplete/bad dumps, lots of assholes running around who actually didn't know shit from shinola.
>>2820107
Op here, guessing this is why some games work no problem and others are just fucked.
Other than general apathy and laziness why are Satrun rips so god awful?
Loving SSF but no sound on some games Is just tempting me to pick up a Satrun sooner than later.
>>2820117
SSF is obviously not perfect, and as far as features it's pretty barren (and being closed source and windows exclusive only makes it worst), but as far as making games playable, yeah it works. Hardly any game that matters is broken, and even if it is, it probably works in a previous version. SSF compared to the good emulators of other systems it really is kinda shit, but given the complexity of the Saturn it's a fucking miracle.
>>2820120
>why are Satrun rips so god awful?
I honestly have no clue. My theory is that most rips are originally from snesorama and for some reason their standards were fucking low. Don't know if they even exist anymore.
>Loving SSF but no sound on some games
Again, that's just a bad rip, not an emulation problem.
A typical proper rip contains an iso/bin file, a cue file and a bunch of wav files (that's where the music comes from). And if you don't have the wav files, yeah there's not going to be any sound besides the sfx or the music that actually uses the saturn sound chip.
>>2819873
could I use one of these to run actual saturn games from my pc. just like epsxe ?
>>2820125
>I honestly have no clue. My theory is that most rips are originally from snesorama and for some reason their standards were fucking low.
It is a variety of factors, but the two most common are low standards and (this sounds like what OP might be running into a bit here) a desire to reduce upload/storage/download size. A common tactic is to strip the audio and FMVs out of shit leaving only the game itself and whatever sequenced music/SFX is incorporated into the main binary or binaries. Doing either or both can take a standard 650 MB rip down to around a hundred megs no sweat, and that's before they apply the crazy power that is RAR compression.
Personally, I despise the practice of stripping games.
>Don't know if they even exist anymore.
They do indeed, but forum-only and on their deathbed despite the high quality they exhibit nowadays.
>>2820313
Is this bait, I can't tell.
In case it isn't, yes that's what an emulator is for.
>>2820491
OP Here, the whole stripping this sounds plausible, but my Virtua Fighter BIN clocks in at 467 MB and the CUE is 2mb which sounds about right.
I went on redump and compared CUE sheets and found the Redunp one was layed out differently and was one MB larger.
Do I copy this CUE over and replace the oe that came with the BIN or is it more complicated?
>>2819878
>Yabause
Not even once.
>>2820107
>>2820125
wav files aren't essential, it's just certain groups that chose to package them that way. All the same data is present in a cue/bin image. It's just different ways of doing the same thing really. There wasn't really a standard set in stone and there still isn't a perfect way of doing things. Information on the best way to dump things wasn't easy to find either. Quite often the only images you'd be able to find would be the iso rips that only had the one data track. Snesorama used to be a good source for decent rips, then there were groups like Darkwater who had everything, and finally Redump who push their own weird methods.
Speeds were very slow, bandwidth was expensive and among the most popular distribution for a while were sites like Rapidshare and Megaupload. Any sites that hosted their own dumps were either paid for or only supplied the squished dumps. Often it was a choice between the shitty dump and no dump. Some people thought cue+iso+mp3 was the perfect solution; either convert the mp3s to wav or convert to cue/bin and it's just like having the full dump! People openly criticize the practice now, but hindsight is 20/20. Of course, anyone recommending cue+iso+mp3 nowadays is probably an idiot.
>>2819873
why are you emulating the saturn port of virtua fighter when the model 2 emulator works fine
>>2820736
>that abrupt day when suddenly all megaupload links stopped working
The internet died a little that day
>>2820720
Yes, try that first. It will likely remedy your problems for the most part. But you have a far more pressing issue: verifying the CRC32 of your image. If the checksum doesn't match the Redump database (or, alternatively, you can't verify it's from Trurip) then this is all bullshit anyway.
>>2820736
>Snesorama used to be a good source for decent rips, then there were groups like Darkwater who had everything, and finally Redump who push their own weird methods.
Redump or Trurip is now the gold standard. Darkwater is obsolete and should no longer be used.
>>2820838
Aye. ;-;
>mfw it could have more than 30 Gb of only shitty isos rips
Fuck
What is the best place to download saturn isos then?
>>2824968
As already said, search for redump, trurip and tosec rips
Here's a bunch
http://www.neofighters.info/forum/showthread.php?14031-Sega-Saturn-NTSC-U-248-248-83-4GBs-PAL-243-243-90-9GBs
>>2820838
that's what you get for relying on non-p2p methods.
>>2826331
>implying most torrents and trackers don't die out eventually
Nothing is ephemeral Anon
What's a good place for none ripped version of dreamcast games?
With SSF the only thing that works is Daemon Tools, find a pre-adware version and mount the cues/ccds with that
>>2826346
Can't link it without system thinking the post is spam:
pastebin.com/nLN9UABv
>>2826379
Thanks
>>2819873
I heard that Virtual Clone Drive does not support cue sheets properly, nor does WinCDEmu.
Try using Daemon Tools Lite, free version, and make sure you disable the bundled adware when installing. DT has been able to mount damn near everything for me since a decade.
>>2820874
>Redump or Trurip is now the gold standard. Darkwater is obsolete and should no longer be used.
Redump does not verify a lot of its dumps though, and their ripping method is so long and ridiculous that it just invites errors. Most of their images are good, sure, but some games ripped to their "standards" end up horribly broken (the worst examples were a dozen prototype discs dumped by drx a long while ago).
Darkwater already has all USA games dumped fine anyway. Those rips are pretty easy to find, and will work good on emulators.
I think Emuparadise has changed all their Saturn downloads to the good quality bin/cue rips a long time ago. Try using those.
>>2820125
>and as far as features it's pretty barren
It can give you infinite save memory (as in, memory cart has infinite size), deinterlacing, and can turn meshes into proper transparency on a hardware level. It can also do autofire, and record sound+video. That's about everything it needs.
>>2826410
>and can turn meshes into proper transparency
Did the Saturn even had transparency? I saw the games flaying around with the dithering all the time. I remember someone mentioning that some games managed to implement alpha channels on a software level, but I don't think I ever saw any examples
>>2828217
Burning Rangers uses it. I forget the technical reason behind it but when there's transparency the Saturn is limited in other areas. Which is why Burning Rangers also still uses dithering for a lot.
>>2828217
It could do addition based transparency, but it was extremely slow (the VDP1 was awfully slow already, transparency slowed it down even further). And transparent polygons showed up opaque on the VDP2 backgrounds, unless you took special care for that too.
Also, since the Saturn drew quads, it overdrew pixels when drawing deformed quads, which caused overdrawn pixels to apply transparency multiple times.
That's why most companies said "fuck it" and used meshes.
However you could apply transparency between any background, and some sprite types + any background, with no speed penalty. That's what Sonic R does for the fogging.
The downside was that if you did sprite to background transparency, pixels inbetween the two got destroyed. Look at Guardian Heroes.
Remember that the Saturn also could do a mode 7 3d ground, and could also apply transparency to that, for free. Panzer Dragoon Zwei did that on the fish boss.
>>2828251
Burning Rangers did two pass rendering. It drew the polygons that needed to be made transparent, then copied them over to VDP2 memory, and displayed them as a background (with free transparency), while drawing the rest of the polygon scene. It was a crazy complex trick, but it worked.
Makes you wonder how many other tricks the Saturn could do if it was kept alive for a few more years. We already have a bump mapping demo for example. Yeah, on the Saturn.
>>2828259
I love Burning Ranger's style. I don't know why but seeing all the shadows and explosions being dither effects while having the transparency in the background just looks cool. The level with the dolphin especially.
Did Panzer Dragoon Saga do any tricks? I'm going to play through that game this week.
Also does the emulator capture these tricks? I'm using real hardware but I'm just curious.
>>2828217
Oh, and no console until the N64 had alpha channel. Alpha channel means you have a pixel value for the R, G, B colours, and another for the amount of transparency. On a modern system this used 32bits to store a single pixel (8 bits per channel).
Playstation and Saturn worked with 15-bit colour most of the time. They could do 24bit but were limited by that (Playstation had too low framebuffer, Saturn could only do it for backgrounds, or display 2048 colours out of 24bit-palette). And in practice they used much lower resolutions to converse memory and speed; many games used as low as 4-bit polygons for example.
Transparency on Saturn and Playstation was based on doing math between the old pixel (the one already drawn) and the new pixel (the one that is to be drawn. This involved reading back the entire pixel from framebuffer, which made transparent drawing 2-3x slower than an opaque one. Saturn only had one mode for polygons (old / 2 + new / 2), and 1/32 opacity steps for backgrounds (background transparency however did not slow down anything).
Playstation had 4 modes:
- old pixel / 2 + new pixel / 2
- old pixel + new pixel
- old pixel - new pixel
- old pixel + new pixel / 4
... and enough bandwidth that it never really slowed down in practice. Look at Omega Boost, which does nonstop motion blur just by using those modes.
>>2828259
Bump mapping doesn't really require anything special. There are demos for it on PS1 and N64 as well.
>>2828259
Jesus christ the edges on that additive blend are fucked
>Panzer Dragoon Zwei did that on the fish boss.
Shit that's right
>>2828259
>We already have a bump mapping demo for example. Yeah, on the Saturn.
Do you have a link to that fellow Anon?
>>2828275
I think that was a trick using the paletted textures.
>>2828697
It was on one of the later development kits. The dude who wrote it was one of the STI eggheads who worked on Sonic Xtreme and Comix Zone.
http://www.dcemu.co.uk/vbulletin/threads/118343-Saturn-Lua-Player-released!
Note that emulators don't play it fine.
>>2828693
>Jesus christ the edges on that additive blend are fucked
The transparent 3d polys were rendered at half resolution, and sometimes they are updated out of sync with the rest of the geometry (like the scene is updated at 20fps while the transparent part moves at 30).
>>2828802
Heh, the bump mapping isn't really perceptible on a static image, I'd imagine it looks better in motion.
are there any iso compilations, like some best of selection or something? I can't be arsed to go at them individually but I'd like to have saturns games in my hard drive in case one day piracy becomes harder/impossible
>>2830950
If you mean PS2 style stuff where they fit 30 games on a dvd, then no, that thing is not possible to do for numerous reasons. One being that some games take the size of an entire CD.
>>2830950
You doomday piracy preppers sure are some weirdos. Even if piracy in the near future becomes a thing that governments crack down more heavily upon, they sure as shit aren't going after people downloading 20 year old sega saturn isos.
And if Disney didn't fuck everyone over, this kind of shit should already be in the Public Domain.
Not to hijack the thread but is Dreamcast emulation a thing at all?
I want to play some Evil Dead.
>>2831187
>If you mean PS2 style stuff where they fit 30 games on a dvd
no, I meant a single rar file containg the best saturn as to offer, I'm sure the file size would be big. Basically I just didnt want to individually download a bunch of isos(that might not even be good)
>>2831812
Still, better safe than sorry
unrelated, but I'm just curious..
>And if Disney didn't fuck everyone over, this kind of shit should already be in the Public Domain.
..how so?
>>2826293
thanks f@m
Ive been playing a game on ssf and there are a few hiccups, is yabause worth looking into or should I try older versions of SSF instead?
>>2837327
What game and what hiccups? SSF generally runs even better than the real hardware, except for a handful of games which have very obvious issues.
Yabause is only worth checking if you are doing development.
>>2837350
I've been playing Dark Savior and there are certain parts where it freezes/becomes ultra slow and it takes a few a minutes to get back to normal. It's not a major problem but it can get really annoying.
I used to play it on the Saturn without those issues so the problem isn't in the game itself.
>>2837381
Have you tried setting the emulator to a higher compatibility mode?
>>2837497
Pretty sure I have it on the highest compatibility at all times. I've also watched a lets player on youtube and he faced the same issue I have.
When is the fucker who develops SSF make it open source?
>>2837558
Why should he? All that would end up happening is that it would get rebranded without any improvements as well as being Retroarch's latest victim.
Take Yabause for instance. It's been open source for years and dead for even longer. Rewriting the interface and fixing ui bugs don't count as improvements.
>>2837381
I beat dark davior on ssf years ago with no problems whatsoever. I believe the version I used was somewhere between 8.0 and 9.0
>>2837568
>retroarch
>first comprehensive emulator framework ever
>"victim"
Nigga u best b trolln.
>>2837558
Never, the Nips fear open _anything_ like the goddamn plague.
>>2826410
>Redump does not verify a lot of its dumps though...
All of which are notated as "unverified" in their open-access database.
>..and their ripping method is so long and ridiculous that it just invites errors.
I find your reasoning highly dubious. The price of being thorough is always high.
>Most of their images are good, sure, but some games ripped to their "standards" end up horribly broken (the worst examples were a dozen prototype discs dumped by drx a long while ago).
Prototype discs give _everyone_ fits like that, because they tend to do some highly weird and not always kosher things regarding disc layout.
>Darkwater already has all USA games dumped fine anyway. Those rips are pretty easy to find, and will work good on emulators.
Darkwater neither publishes their ripping methods nor provides a freely accessible database detailing disc layout. The issue is whether another 1:1 copy of the media in question may be produced using their rips, not whether "it go gooder in emu gais!!!!!111".
>>2831812
They'll go after whatever they're paid to go after. And the BSA and ESA (which likely have a claim on Saturn games thanks to Sega being a member of one or both) have already shown that they're willing to pay very, very, handsomely...
As to the Disney comment, that's already well-known among the poor fucks like us who keep track of such things. What's your point?
>>2834415
>..how so?
Google: "Mickey Mouse Protection Act".
When this country was founded, copyright was originally only 20 years + 10 year (optional) renewal before it went public domain. Its intended purpose was _never_ "to pay the artist" but rather the far more noble goal of "promoting the arts and sciences, in the service of the public good". Over the years it was gradually extended and extended, until with the rise of Big Media and the Disney corporation it exploded to life of author +70 years and just went batshit insane.
buy a saturn
Exactly. Buy a Saturn, it's got very high compatibility for Saturn games
>>2838630
People make errors while doing things, this is a common fact.. The longer process it is to do something, the higher chance for an error. So as long as ripping requires more then
1. adding filename,
2. clicking button,
then any user submitting their data will have a potential to have bad data, which cannot be verified.
You need to automate the dumping process, or else you'll get lots of shit.
Once you have your process automated, you'll get only as much shit as your process lets through.
And as far as disc layout goes, prototype discs are in no way different than any other CD, burned or printed, otherwise they wouldn't work on the target systems.
>Darkwater neither publishes their ripping methods nor provides a freely accessible database detailing disc layout.
>Darkwater
Darkwater never claimed 1:1 copies, only "good dumps".
Redump claims, but does not actually provide, 1:1 copies.
>The issue is whether another 1:1 copy of the media in question may be produced using their rips
You cannot create 1:1 copies of a media format that was based on the assumption that you can interpolate over unreadable data.
>>2838630
>Darkwater neither publishes their ripping methods nor provides a freely accessible database detailing disc layout.
http://wiki.darkwater.info/wakka.php?wiki=MainPage
And sometimes also in the NFO.
And the disc layout matters fuck all, if you want to do a database lookup then what matters is the CD image CRC, and those are available on their website..
>>2838686
> And the BSA and ESA (which likely have a claim on Saturn games thanks to Sega being a member of one or both)
http://www.theesa.com/about-esa/members/
http://www.bsa.org/about-bsa/bsa-members
If they are, they're not listed.
is there no way to load the isos directly? is a virtual drive required?
that's bullshit
