need help

[realworksuks]

Hey I just joined this message board and i've been wanting to get sega saturn emulation working for years. I've tried a couple different emulators, saturin, and ssf, I couldn't get SSF to even boot, but saturin I can get the cd player thing to load up and that's all. I have a ton of bios files that are 512 KB, but I am not sure it's the bios I need to use ISOS. I have A few ISOS, Dragon Force and Shining force 3 scenario, but I can't get them to work, i'm really lost and I don't know where to start. I'm not a total idiot with emulation, I play lots of snes, nes, game boy, genesis, and i've gotten a playstation one to kind of work. But I can't get this one to work. Can anyone give me a dummy walkthrough on how to make ISOS work on any saturn emulator? something really easy to understand?
any help would be SO much appreciated!

 

[Agozer]

The most likely reason you couldn't get SSF to boot is because you don't have an SSE2 processor. If you do however, you messed up somewhre along the way.

A rather rudimentary question: What have you tried in order to get the games working so far? I'd also suggest trying Satourne. And although this is just my opinion, neither of the two emulators are as good as SSF, although Satourne does have a slight speed edge since it uses OpenGL for rendring instead of software like SSF does.

 

[realworksuks]

oops, yeah the emulator I spent all my time trying out was actually satourne, not saturin, my bad. But what else can I say, I got all the plugins to work, all the bios seem to be in place, but like i said i just have a bunch of them that are 512 K, and I know you need 2 bios's, one for using cd's, and one for ISOS, so i'm not sure I have the right one. I want the one for ISOS. Like I said before I just can't get the games to load, it seems to me like everything else is in place, but it just loads up the CD player, I have the emulator in ISO mode. I don't know much about this emulator so what else should I tell you to make it less Broad. Oh and also I don't know what a SSE processor is. I have a 1.67 ghz athlon, but that's all i know off the top of my head.

 

[Agozer]

The processor needs to support SSE2 instruction or else SSF won't even run. AMD Athlon64 and older + Intel Pentium 4 and older support SSE2 instructions. Older processor models support just SSE.

Regarding your problem, unfortunately I haven't got enough experience with Satourne and I certainly didn't know that it need to BIOS files depending on whether you want to run CDs or CD images. Ideally, sing an emulator should only require you to start the emulator, make sure that the emulator reads the disc data from the right drive, mount a CD image into a virtual drive or put the CD into your CD-ROM drive, and start the emulation.

(I still find it hard to believe since technically the Saturn has only one BIOS with several revisions. I think you are talking about plugins, not the actual BIOS; then again, I really can't say for sure.)

 

[realworksuks]

Have you actually gotten Saturn Emulation to work using just ISO's? By that I mean just loading them off of your computer without burning them to a CD? Or have you had to burn them to CD's first? If you have gotten Saturn Emulation to work, could you please tell me exactly how you did it?

 

[Borisz]

Rip your disc into some kind of raw image (CDRWin Bin/cue, Blindread, Clonecd, etc).
Mount the image with Daemon Tools.
Set SSF to use the daemon tools virtual drive, and set up the correct region for it.
Restart SSF.

If you downloaded something, skip step 1.

 

[realworksuks]

I still haven't gotten this to work, what do you think is the most noob friendly emulator out there, so I can start over and maybe get it to work.
If you can, give a walkthrough of that noob emulator too, that'd be awesome

 

[Borisz]

SSF runs like a real saturn. It doesn't support bullshit like iso/mp3 loading for example. It will only read CDs.

However you can use DAEmon Tools to "emulate" CDs from your hard drive. So you just need to copy your game onto the harddrive, mount it up in Daemon, and specify the Daemon Virtual CD Drive to be used in SSF.

 

[realworksuks]

that sounds easy enough. So if I get this SSF, and I have an original Saturn CD, I should be able to get up and playing within minutes of installation? That sounds too easy. I have the bios files. But I don't know much else, it just sounds too good to be true. I hear Athlon processors aren't good for this. I have an Athlon..
AMD 64 processor 3800

 

[tye stik]

I can't get my satourne emulator to work either... how do you get it to work?

 

[Borisz]

that sounds easy enough. So if I get this SSF, and I have an original Saturn CD, I should be able to get up and playing within minutes of installation? That sounds too easy. I have the bios files. But I don't know much else, it just sounds too good to be true. I hear Athlon processors aren't good for this. I have an Athlon..
AMD 64 processor 3800

Regular Athlons will not work, only Athlon 64 and above. So you should be fine.

And yea, aside from obvious things like setting up controls, its pretty much a "point emu to cd drive" thing.

It is recommended to create a backup copy on your HDD and use it with Daemon Tools however, for better performance.