SSF - A Near Perfect Sega Saturn Emulator


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I'm sure many of you have seen this but I have to tell you that this emulator is the best Sega Saturn Emulator out there!  It runs Virtual Fighter 2 near perfect.  It runs Radiant Silvergun perfectly!  It also runs Panzer Dragoon Saga near perfect and tons of other Sega Saturn games.  It was developed by a Japanese developer codenamed Shima.  The source code is not open but it would be nice if someone (like ekianjo) can reach out to this guy to port it over to the pandora.  
 
port it over to the pandora.
Could you estimate whether it would work well if it were ported?

e.g. something that takes 16% of a 3GHz x86 core would (very, very roughly) use most of a pandora's processing power.
 
Because people have re-written those games from scratch, using cross-platform capable methods (ie, OpenGL etc.)

Edit: I suppose they could be source ports, if the engine source codes were released. This is what happens with most ID engines. Things like XCOM need to be rewritten from scratch because nothing is available
 
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Because people have re-written those games from scratch, using cross-platform capable methods (ie, OpenGL etc.)


Edit: I suppose they could be source ports, if the engine source codes were released. This is what happens with most ID engines. Things like XCOM need to be rewritten from scratch because nothing is available
Good to know it's doable.
 
Use's direct X. This won't work at all.
Sorry for my stupidity but can I ask why the games FreeSpace and FreeSpace2 use Direct X as well but ptitSeb made it work on the Pandora?
FreeSpace was modified to be multi-platform, with many renderer (Direct3D, Glide, OpenGL and Software). I ported OpenGL-> OpenGLES. Porting Windows/D3D/x86 -> Linux/GLES/ARM can means a looot of work (specialy for an emulator that may use some dynamic recompilation and so). It really depends how it has been developped to know if it's feasble or need a total rewrite...
 
Use's direct X. This won't work at all.
Sorry for my stupidity but can I ask why the games FreeSpace and FreeSpace2 use Direct X as well but ptitSeb made it work on the Pandora?
FreeSpace was modified to be multi-platform, with many renderer (Direct3D, Glide, OpenGL and Software). I ported OpenGL-> OpenGLES. Porting Windows/D3D/x86 -> Linux/GLES/ARM can means a looot of work (specialy for an emulator that may use some dynamic recompilation and so). It really depends how it has been developped to know if it's feasble or need a total rewrite...
Thanks for the education.
 
If you have an old single-core Atom netbook lying around try clocking it at 1GHz and see how SSF runs. This would give you a very rough ballpark idea of how a similarly optimized version would run on a 1GHz Pandora. My expectation based on what little data I could find is that SSF won't run most games well even on a 1.6GHz single-core Atom netbook.

The amount of work needed to even port it to ARM Linux may be high. Depending on the recompiler design a conversion may not be trivial, and even a more straightforward effort would involve a fair amount of busy work. Any hand-written SSE code would have to be converted to NEON which may fit poorly, and even where it maps nicely there's definitely a learning curve involved for anyone uninitiated with NEON. Especially if you want to get it to run well on Cortex-A8s or A9s. I think the graphics are actually all software rendered, so the issue of porting from DirectX to something that runs on the Pandora (hopefully direct framebuffer access) may not be as big of a sticking point as it sounds.

To be totally frank, if the allure of Android and/or iOS hasn't compelled him to make an ARM version already, and he wasn't already drawn to the Pandora then I doubt he'll be very interested now. What Pandora and the rest of the ARM world really needs is a new highly optimized, preferably open source Saturn emulator. Ari64's work porting his excellent recompiler to SH2 and Yabause was on the right track, but it takes a lot more than this for Saturn emulation - you need very efficient VDP1 and VDP2 emulation and Yabause is a far cry from having either.
 
If you have an old single-core Atom netbook lying around try clocking it at 1GHz and see how SSF runs. This would give you a very rough ballpark idea of how a similarly optimized version would run on a 1GHz Pandora. My expectation based on what little data I could find is that SSF won't run most games well even on a 1.6GHz single-core Atom netbook.


The amount of work needed to even port it to ARM Linux may be high. Depending on the recompiler design a conversion may not be trivial, and even a more straightforward effort would involve a fair amount of busy work. Any hand-written SSE code would have to be converted to NEON which may fit poorly, and even where it maps nicely there's definitely a learning curve involved for anyone uninitiated with NEON. Especially if you want to get it to run well on Cortex-A8s or A9s. I think the graphics are actually all software rendered, so the issue of porting from DirectX to something that runs on the Pandora (hopefully direct framebuffer access) may not be as big of a sticking point as it sounds.


To be totally frank, if the allure of Android and/or iOS hasn't compelled him to make an ARM version already, and he wasn't already drawn to the Pandora then I doubt he'll be very interested now. What Pandora and the rest of the ARM world really needs is a new highly optimized, preferably open source Saturn emulator. Ari64's work porting his excellent recompiler to SH2 and Yabause was on the right track, but it takes a lot more than this for Saturn emulation - you need very efficient VDP1 and VDP2 emulation and Yabause is a far cry from having either.
OK.  The Master has spoken!  I rest my case. -_-
 
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