Another vote for Mednafen. It’s played everything I’ve thrown at it on the Sega Saturn, and I’ve thrown some fairly obscure stuff at it and it all runs fine (including Saga!). I mean hell, I got Soukygurentai and Princess Crown working on it! Now, Mednefen requires some beef from your PC, but if you have anything approaching a modern gaming PC, you’ll be fine. Just don’t run Mednafen on Grandma’s toaster.
Mednafen is a bit clunky to use in that it doesn’t come with a proper GUI so it’s a bit weird setting up a PC controller and other settings, but there are some youtube videos on how to set up Mednefen. And once you do, you’ll never want to touch another Saturn emulator ever again.
I attempted Mednafen a couple weeks ago, but after setting everything up I couldn’t get a game to work. The interface and menus were all over the place. Maybe I was doing something wrong I don’t know…
I did exactly what it said in the video but it didn’t work. Downloaded win 64 bit version as that is my operating system. When I set it to use as admin, and opened it up I got this message:
“No command line arguments specified”
It then made the new files in the folder.
Next, I added the fix files. Then after dragging the CUE. of a game into the Mednafen exe I got this message:
“Error opening CD/unsafe…”
I tried multiple versions of the CUE and bin files from different games and nothing loads. I only get that message…
Open up your cue file in Notepad++ and see what it says. A CUE file is essentially a very tiny document that is meant to tell burning software where exactly the file to be burned is located at. Obviously, we’re not burning the file, but Mednafen would use this file to determine where the ISO is located at. However, if the location specified in the CUE file is not where your ISO is at, then you’re going to get errors, naturally. You wouldn’t want Mednafen to run whatever random garbage is located at whatever you might be telling it to run.
I second what Hukos said. It sounds like the CUE file is pointing to some specific directory or file that isn’t the same name or location of your files. Disk one should look something like this:
FILE “PANZER DRAGOON SAGA DISC 1 OF 4.BIN” BINARY
TRACK 01 MODE1/2352
INDEX 01 00:00:00
TRACK 02 AUDIO
PREGAP 00:02:00
INDEX 01 60:59:23
TRACK 03 AUDIO
INDEX 00 61:07:60
INDEX 01 61:09:60
The file name obviously needs to match. I ripped my own and the program you use to rip them sometimes injects a file path where the name is. Make sure the name is just the name of your bin file (case sensitive). You can edit this file in notepad or notepad++ or something like that in Windows. On a mac (or Windows) you can also use the Atom text editor.
Every ISO I have is in its own separate folder. So, I have a folder called “Sega Saturn Games”, then within that folder I have individual folders for each game.
I tried Magic Knight Rayearth for example:
It is in its own folder only containing two files: the bin and the cue file as follows:
It looks like the file path in the CUE file is different from the one you described (likely because the folder structure has changed since the CUE file was created). This video explains how to see what the current file path is in Windows 10:
When I drag the .cue file into the Madnafen exe I get the same error message:
“Error opening CD:Referenced path “C:\Users\nxjta\Desktop\Saturn Roms\060 Magic Knight Rayearth (U).BIN” is potentially unsafe. Contains colon. Contains backslash. Refer to the documentation about the “filesys.untrusted_fip_check” setting.”
So, what am I doing wrong? Do I need the “FILE” and “BINARY” parts at the beginning and end of the file name? Do I even need to write the whole thing out like that? And does editing and saving it in notepad change its directory? And what about the .bin file does that directory need to be corrected as well?Nothing seems to be working…
Yes, those are flags needed by the system. Having the path as part of the name in the cue file only causes issues with emulators IMHO. Only remove what I said above. Make sure you haven’t renamed the bin or cue file. Based on your cue, the bin/cue need to be named 060 Magic Knight Rayearth (U).BIN and 060 Magic Knight Rayearth (U).CUE
Thanks everyone for your help! It’s working now. Man, I really wish this emulator had a proper interface/menus.
Although, I think I’ll test out Yabause for now and see if I can play PDS all the way through.
I dread the day when my physical copy of PDS stops working correctly and I’m forced to emulate the game. Hopefully, our PDS discs will last for a few more decades!!
Is there a way to make a save state and load a save state in this emulator.? I know you have to manually go into Notepad++ to turn things on and off but is there a hotkey for it like the controller config?
Alt + Shift + 1 -> Set controls for Player 1
Alt + Shift + 2 -> Set controls for Player 2
Alt + Enter -> Full Screen
0 - Save Screen Snapshot
F2 - Save Game State
F4 - Load Game State
F11 - Toggle FPS Text
You can also edit the mednafen.conf file settings:
;Automatically load/save state on game load/close.
autosave 1
;Cache entire CD images in memory.
cd.image_memcache 1
The first setting has Mednafen save your state when you hit escape and when you load that same Rom it just loads right to were you were. memcache 1 normally speeds up loads and decreases load artifacts. You can also save manually using the commands above along with change controller settings, etc.
Most of this is explained in the video I linked to previously.
I mean, there are 3rd party GUI programs designed to interact with mednafen, but they’re use at your own risk as they’re separate from the makers of mednafen.
They also tend to be complicated. I have started working on the GUI I mentioned, but I’m also in my last semester of Grad school, so it might not see significant time investment until January. There was one large complicated GUI Medlaunch I tried, but it was overly complex. A lot of these GUis are Windows only. Ideally I would like to make it platform agnostic.