joystiq.com/2009/05/14/gamet … goon-saga/
What the heck? As far as i know and as far as i?ve seen SSF can emulate the game on my computer near flawless, so whats the problem with those guys? Pure lack of effort ?
I think Panzer Dragoon Zwei was actually available on GameTap at one point, but from what little I read it had quite a few problems. One of their ex-employees later revealed they had a working version of Panzer Dragoon Saga, but it was never released. To be fair, SSF has been in development for a very long time and it can only run the games in the same resolution as the Saturn did. Releasing it commercially would mean running it on an emulator that can render the game in higher resolutions. GiriGiri and Yabause are capable of that, but they still needed work. Sega has abandoned GiriGiri (after they bought it) long ago, and I’m not sure if Yabause is still going to get any updates.
It should do, the developers only do a major release every few years or so and don’t post much in the way of news updates but if you dive down to the core and look at the commits to the source (sourceforge.net/projects/yabause … Repository) there are source code updates continuing to happen behind the scenes. As long as those continue it shows the developers are still working towards the next release.
If anyone’s interested, I’ve made a post on the Yabause forum about PD Saga emulation, and Guillaume was kind enough to fix a few of the key problems with Yabause’s emulation of PD Saga:
http://forums.yabause.org/index.php?topic=6846.0
I compiled the latest version, I’m surprised how much better the GUI looks now, I never realized there was still such progress being made.
I managed to compile the latest version of Yabause, here’s Panzer Dragoon Zwei in OpenGL mode:
Man it looks amazing, HD versions must happen :s
Wow it’d been so long since I checked Saturn emulation, how stable is Yabause? Last I checked SSF was the only viable emulator which did an ok job.
I’d still recommend SSF for anyone who wants to try Saturn emulation. Yabause is a good alternative though, and it’s interesting to try out the OpenGL mode.
Well I missed this so thanks to the spam bot…
Zwei looks great in high resolution, care to post that Yabause windows binary?
I?d also be interested in the precompiled package if you can provide it. I admit to being a total novice to compiling anything more than a C++ project with a handful of headers and only the most simplistic compile-time conditions.
Does that run at a playable speed? If so, I suppose the next question is what your PC?s specs are. I imagine that my 2.4 GHz dual-core Opteron on a socket 939 motherboard with 4 GB of PC3200 may have a bit of trouble; I seem to recall Yabause being quite CPU-intensive even for games that weren?t playable by any normal definition.
Regardless, it?s nice to be reminded that Yabause exists and apparently still receives development. It?s been over a year since SSF was updated, which isn?t a good sign if you ask me, as it was updated pretty frequently up until that point. I didn?t expect support for upscaling to appear soon even when it was being regularly developed, although I understood the author?s reasoning (which was posted somewhere, probably its official forum) for not including it, at least initially. I?d just be happy to see any development now! But it?s already a hugely impressive program, especially for a single author as I always say, that emulates most aspects of the Saturn almost perfectly.
Something else that?s worth mentioning as a PS to the discussion of emulators is that AamirM of Regen (accuracy-focussed Mega Drive emulator) fame was also developing an emulator of the Saturn (and one of the N64). The last public update was in August of 2011, though.
I’ve been using Satourne, but I cannot patch the thing. 