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Nova Saturn Emulator Updated to Version 0.7The Nova Saturn emulator got its first update in more than five years. Its creator, Steve Kwok, announced version 0.7 on his Patreon page on Christmas day. It can be downloaded from that page without being a subscriber to his Patreon. The emulator has been in development since at least August 2017. Hundreds of changes have been made since version 0.6 was released in October 2019 — from improving graphics displayed by the VDPs to fully emulating the sound chip’s DSP to rewriting how the CD block is emulated. It seems that Kwok is trying to make his emulator run on weaker harder, similar to SSF , another Saturn emulator. “I have set a goal when I started the project, Nova should run at full speed with a 2.0GHz CPU,” he said on X. Nova definitely has a ways to go, though, as many games that use 3D graphics don’t work: Either they don’t boot at all, like Fighting Vipers, or the 3D parts just don’t appear, like Bulk Slash. Kwok has acknowledged his emulator’s difficulty with 3D right now.  Daytona USA looks fine and music plays, but there are no sound effects or speech.  2D games fare better. Cotton 2, for example, looks and sounds fine.  Quite a few homebrew games don’t work on Nova, sadly, like GalaXmas, which completely crashes the emulator, and HellSlave, which throws up an illegal instruction after the initial loading screens before showing the title screen’s 3D environment. SlideHop works, though!  “The HLE BIOS is not perfect yet, if some games don’t work with the HLE BIOS, you can use a BIOS file and try again,” Kwok said on X . “If you found some games don’t work with the HLE BIOS, use the official BIOS file and try again, or report to me which game doesn’t work with the HLE BIOS so that I can improve compatibilities of the HLE BIOS.”  Nova does feature some things that other emulators don’t, such as a wide range of graphics filters that resemble various displays — from CRT televisions with large and small aperture grills and slot masks to Game Boy screens to phosphor scanlines. Nova can combine any of those filters with reversed colors and monochrome, too. Nova can open a wide variety of executable files, too, including .ABS, .B, .BAL, .BAL, .BAS, .COF, .COFF, .CPE, .ELF, .OBJ, .S and .SRE. Many of them are legacy formats used in Saturn development — for example, .ABS, .SRE and .BAL are binary formats on the Sega Developer Technical Support CD, while .CPE files are from the PsyQ development kit.      Nova can even emulate the SAROO and the Satiator ODEs.
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