Notices

Well, I didn't think I'd be doing this today, but I found a Pandora port of the Yabause Sega Saturn emulator over at the openPandora boards ported by the amazing Ari64.

http://boards.openpandora.org/index..../4583-yabause/

Upon transferring his overclocked binary to my trusty old N900 I ran a chmod 777 on it and god damn it if it didn't run like clockwork!

A little tweaking of the config file later, I've got myself one hell of a proof of concept! So far it's slow but controllable (so much faster then say, the Nintendo DS emulator) so it's not that bad for a proof of concept.

I haven't noticed any increase in game speed if I disable audio or overclock the N900, both were tricks used in the past to speed up Nintendo64 emulation after that was ported from the Pandora port.

Anyway, here's the youtube video of the emulator in action playing the RPG Magic Knight Rayearth for any of you doubting Debbies:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9lh07LZZSM

(could be the slowness is exasperated by all the music and FMV in this game. As I rip my other Saturn games to .iso files, I'll upload more videos)

The assembled files are available here:

http://drolyag.tripod.com/N900_Yabuse.zip

I don't have a debian system or Scratchbox setup to make this into a .deb file right now, so if someone want to package it up that would be great.

Until then, just do this:
Copy the .zip file to your N900 and unzip it.
After that, as root, type: mkdir -p /opt/yabause
After that, as root, type: chmod 755 /opt/yabause

Then copy the files from the unzipped folder to the following locations on your N900:

yabause to:
/opt/yabause/

yabause.ini to:
/home/user/.config/

yabause.desktop to:
/usr/share/applications/hildon

Saturn.png to:
/usr/share/icons/hicolor/48x48/apps/

Then, as root type chmod 777 /opt/yabause/yabause

(You may need to reboot or restart hildon-desktop for the icon to show up as anything more then a blue square)

You should now be ready to rock! But the game .iso files anywhere you want, you can point to them in the GUI's preferences as a virtual CD disk drive.

Control f to toggle on/off the full screen.

Use the preferences menu to change the game .iso file location (defaults to /media/mmc1/games/Saturn/Rayearth.iso since that's the game image I tested this with) and to set your controls.

Then just hit Control r to start the game!

The controls as delivered in these files are mapped like so:

up, down, left, right = mapped to the arrow keys
L =Q
R =W
A =Z
B =X
C =C
X =A
Y =S
Z =D
Start =Enter


I would have fiddled with the config file to try and increase the game speed by twiddling with the frameskip and video options, but I've got a two year old in my lap that won't go to bed and who's not letting me near my bash terminal as much as I would like.

Besides, I just couldn't wait to hand this over to the hive mind.

If anyone comes up with some config file tweaks to improve performance, please share!

You need to "tweak" the source not just some config file

To get a greater level of GPU utilization, yes. But never under estimate the advances you can get from Frameskip, Resolution, and other config file tweaks.

While this is a great proof of concept, I don't think it will ever be possible to get playable saturn emulation on the n900 tbqh.

It is nowhere near that slow on the Pandora. Looks like you forgot to enable frameskip.

Yabause doesn't have particularly high CPU requirements. It needs a somewhat faster CPU than N64 emulation, but not much. Trying to get it running on the N900 is pushing things a bit, but it runs okay on atom netbooks as long as you use the dynarec.

the link is down:

http://drolyag.tripod.com/N900_Yabuse.zip

The only such "tweak" mentioned in the thread on boards.openpandora.org is the CLOCK_DIVIDER option in the "yabause-underclocked" build.

http://wiki.yabause.org/index.php5?t...#CLOCK_DIVIDER

any chance of uploading the N900_Yabause.zip else where please?

i'd quite like to play around with this emu

thanks

Looks like the daily bandwidth for tripod was exceeded but it's working again now.

In case you have problems again, here an alternate URL:

http://www.besh.com/~chad/N900_Yabuse.zip


I've been trying the game Macross on FrameSkip = 4 or 6. Better, easier to control, but still not great.

The CPU really isn't the bottleneck, since I see it not going above 90% or so when running. It never sits and stays for long at over that like some other CPU intensive emulators do.

The youtube video of Macross playing with frame skip enabled is uploading now, but I'm in an EDGE only area right now, so that video upload is gonna take a while....

thanks bud much appreciated