|
||||||||||||||
Saturn News Roundup: Achievements, Myths Debunked, Japanese Sales NumbersHere’s a quick look at some of the things the Saturn community has been talking about this week. Retro Achievements coming to Yaba SanshiroShinya “DevMiyax” Miyamoto posted on social media Tuesday that he’s testing out adding Retro Achievements to his Saturn emulator, Yaba Sanshiro. DevMiyax showed it working in Sega Ages After Burner II in a YouTube video: It’s unknown when a public update will add the achievements integration or what versions of Yaba Sanshiro will get it — the Android , iOS and Windows versions often get updated at different times. Up to this point, Saturn games had Retro Achievements only through the Mednafen cores in RetroArch and Bizhawk . TrekkiesUnite debunks emulator, memory cart mythsA prominent member of the Saturn community, TrekkiesUnite, took to YouTube this week to debunk a couple old Saturn myths. One myth is that Saturn emulation still struggles to be a viable option. He used Virtual On, comparing three emulators — SSF, Mednafen and Yaba Sanshiro — with three hardware-based options: one running the original disc, one using the Satiator ODE and one using the SAROO ODE cartridge. He doesn’t reveal which is which until near the end of the 26-minute video, during which Yaba Sanshiro shows a noticeable visual glitch and the SAROO crashes the game after a couple matches in arcade mode. There’s otherwise virtually no difference among the various options, aside from the original disc clearly loading slightly slower thanks to disc read issues that affect all real CD-ROM drives. “For those not doing development, emulation can be an excellent option to enjoy the Saturn’s library,” Trekkies says in the video’s introduction. Not satisfied, Trekkies made another video today to show that there’s no slowdown for Metal Slug when using the 4-megabyte expanded RAM cartridge vs. using the 1-megabyte cart. The video removes loading times to sync up the game’s attract mode, during which they appear perfectly in sync. Another video from Trekkies left in the loading times, with one version occasionally beating the other by one to three frames — an anomaly that might be chalked up to CD read times. “This should once and for all put an end to this old discussion,” Trekkies said in the description of the video that left in the loading times. “I too used to believe the 1MB cartridge gave better performance for Metal Slug, but as you can see here, there is no difference. They jury is still out on Marvel Super Heroes though.” TheBigO² unearths Japanese Saturn sales numbersA poster on SegaXtreme has been plumbing Sega Dreamcast Magazine as well as its successor, Magazine Dorimaga, to find sales numbers for Saturn and Dreamcast games in Japan, and he’s been collecting his findings in a thread . Of interest to Saturn fans, TheBigO² just today compiled the top 100 best-selling Saturn games in Japan as of March 2000, the same month as the final Saturn retail release. He added the caveat that the list does not include rereleases of games. “A lot of games on it got either a Satakore budget rerelease or were rereleased as a bundle,” TheBigO² said. “For example Panzer Dragoon 1 and 2 were rereleased as a bundle in late 1996.”  The far-right column shows each game’s Japanese release year. There are a lot of observations that can be gleaned from this data, but here are a few quick notes:
|
||||||||||||||
