OK, so i have a nice 24" monitor, and have my Dreamcast hooked up to it with a VGA box (looks amazing ^_^)
Now ive thought about hooking up my saturn to it but i cant seem to find a way to do it properly… so i had an idea, Saturn emulator developments been goign on for a while now, and my computers got a lotttt better since when i first tried it out, so im guessing games should run ok on them? And look pretty good too
So whats the best one(s) out at the moment? Can’t wait to see how they look 
SSF. It’s not perfect, but it’s the most advanced that we have so far.
My question is: why can’t you hook up your Saturn the same way you did the Dreamcast, through a VGA box (that is if you aren’t using th Dreamcast specific one).
You can find a pretty cheap VGA box that will work well considering the Saturn’s lower resolution, or you could spend a little (a lot?) more a get one that scales the resolution to that of you monitor natively. I have limited experience with this but I did use one for my the original Xbox and it looked great. The 360 has it’s own VGA cable so that’s what I’m currently using.
This is something along the lines of what I’m talking about, you’ve probably seen these before though.
hmmm well apparently VGA doesn’t really work well with the saturn (i read something about verticle/horizontal resolution not being enough or something)
I would love to hook it up properly, but now the idea of seeing crisp visuals through the emulator is starting to appeal to me 
oh yeah solo… you know when girigiri first appeared, i know you took some nice hi-resolution screenshots of panzer (about 1600px or something)
Was this just using the emulator maximised?
Reason beaing is because i read that the emulator (refering to SSF) displays games at 704x480 upscaled
Was this the same with girigiri? Because those screenshots came out pretty nice =)
Do none of those Saturn emulators have filters to tweak visuals? Like say cel-shading for example?
I saw a topic with images from Playstation games with tweaked visuals and some of them improved a lot. Some would add anti-aliasing for example.
I would love to see the Panzer Dragoon games with such transformations.
Do you mean these ones? panzerdragoon.net/screenshots/pd … ots_01.php
They’re 1024x768. I think there was an option to choice the resolution in GiriGiri to 1600x1200 but I can’t remember if it looked much better or not.
Your options in that are limited to none…
GiriGiri and such will have nice crisp visuals if you increase the resolution. From what I have heard, it turns the shapes into 3-D objects to be handled by Direct3D, and then it can make them whatever size you need (all crisp and nice-looking). But these emulators have been abandoned and they like to crash / mess up a lot.
SSF’s goal is emulation as accurate as possible. Doubtless some of you have realized that SSF looks kind of chunky in full screen. Make it as big as you want, it is still running at 320x240 (ugh).
And ePSXe filters? Oh man, I wish. Simply put, way more people worked on PSX emulation than on Saturn, not to mention the Saturn is harder to emulate. First we’d probably have to get to the point where emulators can handle higher resolutions and such.
At the rate things are going I think it could be done, but I don’t know if SSF creator is interested in going that route. Yabause is way behind, but it is open source 
1998 has come and gone and we are still constantly reminded of how the Saturn was a commercial failure. Even by emulating projects 
I mean you need to be hardcore to want to work in such a project in the first place, might as well aim for the top!
Thanks for the info Karmaha and welcome to TWotA. I’m actually getting my first computer graphics subject at university this semester. Open GL no less. Maybe I can help out Yabause eventually. Or not
This applies to the Playstation emulator pSX, but it seems to cover the same issue of general resolution crispness… sounds crispy. Crisp.
[quote=“pSX FAQ”]Q. Why is everything so blurry? I already set the resolution higher, but it doesn’t help! Can I make the graphics look nicer in pSX?
A. pSX does not, and will not, attempt to enhance the graphics of your PlayStation games, but rather, attempts to faithfully reproduce their original graphics because the goal for pSX is to make an accurate emulator that reproduces the gaming experience from the real PlayStation. As such, the games running on pSX will not look much better than on your television screen. The most you can do is enable bilinear interpolation, which smooths the image out when stretching it (not unlike how the image looks on a TV when it stretches the image). If you want an emulator that does enhance graphics, pick any PlayStation emulator that supports the PSEmuPro plugin spec (which includes ePSXe, PCSX, SSSPSX, PSXeven, and many others).
Q. How is it less accurate to enhance graphics?
A: With the method that many of the graphics enhancement plugins in PSEmuPro-based emulators use, graphics objects from PlayStation games are translated into Direct3D or OpenGL objects, which are not direct analogues to the native PlayStation objects, and so they may lose information possibly important to the game. As such, accuracy is sacrificed for enhanced graphics. This is something that pSX strives not to do.[/quote]
Apparently one big things Yabause needs right now is a rewrite of the way it uses OpenGL. I’m actually interested in doing emulation now… although I’d have to start elsewhere.
If I knew any Japanese I’d ask and find out if the SSF creator has any intentions of hardware rendering…
A saturn through a vga box is possible, although it will look horrid. It’s a piece of equipment from an age that is starting to fade.
Even tho I have 2 saturns sitting at home, while at uni I’ve been using SSF, i’m impressed with its progress. Apart from random slow downs every now and again I’ve recently been very impressed with how far this emulators got. i’ve been able to play Panzer Dragoon Saga, Radiant Silvergun, Sega Rally, Burning Rangers and more… all with a xbox360 controller. Was slightly sureal. Although full screen doesn’t really work quite right on my machine.
If I remember rightly, you can put antianlising (excuse the wonderful spelling, dyslexic!) on and that takes off some of the jagged edges. The goal would be fan based tho… Have any of you seen the recent fan made texture packs for the n64? They allow the graphics to look amazing. I think we’re a long way off from that tho.
If I remember my emulator history wasn’t GiriGiri brought by sega? and they decided not to continue the project?
Either way the dual CPU’s and everything else make the saturn a challenge to emulate. I’ve done a couple of simple emulators and they confuse me enough as it is… lol. If anyone wants to get involved in that kind of programming, first learn how to make a chip8 emulator. It’s nice and simple, then go for something a bit more adventurous.