Saturn

[Seb]

i become patreon too, at least for all the job already done for us

[Sarge]

If this happens, then... wow. I will truly be impressed.

[djsquare]

Seemed like everyone said it wouldn't be possible...I want to believe so I will

[KremlingKuthroat19]

A lot of people think Saturn is impossible for MiSTer, but at the same time it's a lot of armchair developer talk. I'm not a programmer or an expert by any means but if srg320 and Sorgelig (who happen to be FPGA geniuses) think it's possible, then I'll trust them. If srg320 is so confident in it that he's making a Patreon, then it seems like it's going to happen. Where there's a will there's a way, and Sorgelig mentioned that it's the core he's most interested in so there's plenty of passion behind this core.

A Patreon is great for supporting developers because they deserve to get paid for their hard work and making such a great contribution to the community, but it also creates accountability that the core gets released and completed some day (no rush of course). srg320 has released amazing cores such as SNES, Sega CD and TurboGrafx CD, so I trust that he'll release another stellar core one day, being the Sega Saturn core.

TLDR: The Sega Saturn might be the most challenging core yet for the De10 Nano hardware, but there's so much passion, accountability, and skill on the development side that I think some programming wizardry and elbow grease will make it come to fruition at some point.

[Sarge]

I wonder if a hybrid approach is what we'll see here - offload some of the core functions to the ARM chip (like CD-ROM controller), and implement the rest in FPGA logic. I don't know how well the two sides synchronize, though, so that might be a challenge.

[Milspex]

Even if it doesnt work out, the process of development of this core will lead to a whole bunch of new stuff in the end anyway so it is all good.

Saturn and PSX are my dream goals.

[dmckean]

Even if if it doesn't end up running on DE-10 Nano hardware, the work is still valid and it will be able to be utilized on other FPGA hardware in the future. It's a worthy cause.

[MadDog]

It would be srg320 to do it, after the amazing MegaCD core! Ah! I'm super excited! Geniuses! Next challenge... N64!

(probably not on the DE-10)

[Fallon]

Would a DE-10 Saturn implementation run 2D games only if say you removed one of the dual video chips from the design?

Let's make the Saturn as it was originally intended to be!

[ExCyber]

Would a DE-10 Saturn implementation run 2D games only if say you removed one of the dual video chips from the design?

Let's make the Saturn as it was originally intended to be!

Not really. To the extent that one of the VDPs can be construed as "the 2D one", it's VDP2, which basically handles backgrounds (though they can be scaled and rotated akin to SNES Mode 7, so are also usable for some things in 3D games). VDP1 handles both sprites and polygons. As far as I understand it, if there's any truth behind the legend of the 2D-only iteration of Saturn, it's probably based on a misunderstanding of someone explaining that the addition of VDP2 freed up VDP1 to render more polygons (since VDP1 would otherwise also be responsible for backgrounds).

There might be a few games that ended up more-or-less using VDP1 for everything, but I don't think you would see any neat split between 2D and 3D games. If anything, I imagine the split would be more like "games that were/weren't ported from PlayStation as fast and cheaply as humanly possible".

For anyone who wants to know more about how VDP1 and VDP2 are used in games and how their limitations interact, this video is pretty good:

[FoxbatStargazer]

My understanding is that both sprites and polygons on the Saturn are implemented as "quads" running on VDP1. Its kind of an extension of their super-scaler arcade tech, based on the idea that you could scale, rotate, and warp multiple 2D images. Seeing as this tech was rooted in games like Afterburner and Outrun, its pretty remarkable how they adapted it to build 3D models like in Virtua fighter, but it wasn't quite as efficient at that purpose as texture-mapped triangles that are still the industry standard for 3D acceleration.

Anyway moral of the story is, sprites and polygons on the Saturn are implemented by the same underlying "quad" tech in VDP1, so you can't really support one without the other.

[Waifu4Life]

I want to support this development, but he doesn't have a Patreon Alternative

[tontonkaloun]

I want to support this development, but he doesn't have a Patreon Alternative

https://www.patreon.com/srg320

[dmckean]

I want to support this development, but he doesn't have a Patreon Alternative

https://www.patreon.com/srg320

He was asking about a Patreon alternative, as in a way to donate but not through Patreon.

[Waifu4Life]

He was asking about a Patreon alternative, as in a way to donate but not through Patreon.

I've emailed Sergey regarding this, he said that Paypal didn't forward to Ukraine banks. I then wrote to subscribestar.com, they said they can transfer payments to a Ukraine bank, so I've forwarded this to Sergey. Let's hope he'll open an account there because as much as I love the SEGA Saturn, giving money to Patreon makes me nauseous.

[crusher talos]

Whats wrong about Patreon?
Not being patronizing, just not well informed, curious to know.

[MostroW]

They probably take a cut to cover for their 'expenses'

[darksakul]

meh, back on the old forums, people use to say that SEGA CD, NEO-GEO, GBA and SNES SA-1 probably wouldn't be possible until they actually got released. Where there's a will there's a way I guess. My theory is that we'll get PS1 and N64 first and after that, the top dogs in FGPA development will bang their heads together to produce this final important console core.

The one issue with that line of logic is but because something that was thought impossible was made to happen, does not mean it apply to every scenario.

Sega CD, Neo-Geo and GBA were all well understood consoles and they have some sort of low level software emulation (simulating every chip in software) already up and running. Or in the case of the Neo-Geo Furtek has decap and studied every chip and made hardware replicas of those proprietary chips.
The Low Level Emu were just very system resource intensive on PC, you need alot of CPU and Ram to run the emulation as PC CPU computation can't do parallel, so the CPU has to make up the difference in the speed of the CPU and lots of ram. Only recently did PC hardware gets to where BSNES don't put high end PC rigs on it's knees.

Big reason people say were never going to get a Saturn, 32X or N64 cores is that there isn't any LDL Emulation on PC yet to provide a roadmap.
N64 in particular only has HDL emulation that sacrifices accuracy for performance. We got beautiful performance out of some N64 Emulators, but its a scaled performance. The visuals aren't the same as the original hardware, as too much of the original hardware was a mystery so guesses had to me made and rendering engines are swapped out for more modern rendering that ended up changing how the whole game got rendered. The N64 never had all it's chips simulated, the Emu just provided a API layer for the Roms to run on non-native environment. There still Roms that had to get patched to run correctly in Emulation. Which may or may not cause a issue in the future if we do get a N64 Core.
32X was not considered for low level ultra accuracy as you are emulating 2 sets of systems simultaneously, 3 systems if you want to factor in 32X CD games. When the SNES was a challenge to run accurately, the 32x was not even considered.

Is the concern that we'll need a tophat with 2 SH-2's because the FPGA on the DE-10 won't be able to handle the SH-2's and all other processors concurrently?

The DE 10 Nano should have enough logical elements. So far there no core yet that actually tax the FPGA
The painful part is getting everything to connect together as they should.

Also the issue with a Tophat is there isn't that many I/O pins available, even if we give up the I/O board.

[Chris23235]

The Mame emulation of the Sega Saturn hardware (SSV) is a low level emulation and it runs fine on PCs for years now.

[retrorepair]

Also the official HDL of the N64 was leaked a while ago. I'm not suggesting it's a good idea to port this to MiSTer but the secrets of that hardware has been out there for a while.

[darksakul]

The Mame emulation of the Sega Saturn hardware (SSV) is a low level emulation and it runs fine on PCs for years now.

Mame is high level. Mame never been about accuracy.

[Waifu4Life]

The one issue with that line of logic is but because something that was thought impossible was made to happen, does not mean it apply to every scenario. etc.........

Guess we'll see in a year if we got a good working PS1 and Saturn core.

[Chris23235]

The Mame emulation of the Sega Saturn hardware (SSV) is a low level emulation and it runs fine on PCs for years now.

Mame is high level. Mame never been about accuracy.

Mame is low level it has always been low level emulation and Mame always strifed for accuracy. I don't know where this "Mame [has] never been about accuracy" comes from, the Mame contributors are known for their love for accuracy for years now up to the point of implementing the emulation in a way that makes it unplayable performance wise.

Cycle accuracy is something completely different. Not every low level emulation is cycle accurate. These are different things.
Low Level emulation means (very simplified) emulating the individual instructions of the source platform's chips instead of interpreting them in a way that makes use of features in the chips of the emulation target platform. This has nothing to do with cycle accuracy.

Cycle accurate emulation is rare, this is true but a low level emulation of the Saturn doesn't have to be cycle accurate.

[darksakul]

Mame was never accurate, you need a powerful CPU for software accuracy and Mame can run on a toaster powered by a potato

[dmckean]

Mame was never accurate, you need a powerful CPU for software accuracy and Mame can run on a toaster powered by a potato

It most certainly doesn't. The versions of MAME ran on low powered hardware like ARM are 15 years old now.

[dmckean]

MAME strives for accuracy but human readable C code has always been just as much as a priority. So compromises have been made to say the least and it is what it is. Anyway, to have a good experience all around with current versions of MAME you need a CPU with a Passmark single threaded performance score of around 2500 or more.

[Chris23235]

And with such a CPU many of the demanding games won't run fullspeed. Many games in Mame don't run fullspeed on any machine available because of the high demands of the low level emulation. If you want to see how demanding Mame can get have a look at Bio Freaks.

[breiztiger]

with a i7-8700 (three years old cpu) you have a solid 100% (max 150%) on bio freaks with mame

[Chris23235]

Good to know there must have been a lot of work done on the driver since I last tried the game last year on my Ryzen 1700 (Passmark score 2000). It was so far away from fullspeed then that I didn't thought they achieve fullspeed anytime soon. But maybe it was just an Intel vs. AMD thing, I saw some games run better on Intel CPUs in Mame.

[Hodor]

with a i7-8700 (three years old cpu) you have a solid 100% (max 150%) on bio freaks with mame

That CPU isn´t precisely a toaster powered by a potato