The developer Yaz0r is currently decompiling Panzer Dragoon Saga and already has working builds you can try out. What this means, when it’s finished, is we will be able to get widescreen support, 4k hd textures, and even being able to adjust the game’s difficulty which, as we all know, is sorely lacking.
According to his posts on bluesky, draw distances and the 2D field plane, do not have memory contraints, meaning we will be able to improve the draw distances, as well as any other graphical improvements later on down the road. He did warn that it may break the game logic if taken too far though.
Here is a video of the game running on pc, courtesty of Video Game Esoterica: https://youtu.be/LlMNW1g8c8s
This is NOT emulation. This is the game running natively on PC. Decompilation is all about going under the hood with Ghidra, and basically reverse engineering the game from the ground up. This allows one to change all the Sega Saturn CPU instructions into x86 instructions etc etc to allow the game to run natively on whatever device you are using. Decompilation is superior to emulation, and even FPGA because we have access to the underbelly of the game and can mod and improve it however we wish. The only downside with decomps is they take a while to complete - this project, in particular, already has taken significant time because there are currently no toolsets, other than Ghidra, to decompile Sega Saturn games…unlike the N64, which is seeing a new golden age of static decompilations across the board, thanks to well written documentation from many developers.
Exciting times. When this is finally finished, Panzer Dragoon Saga will finally get the credit it deserves as being the best game ever created.
