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New MiSTer Main Update Breaks Saturn Game SavingGame saving is broken for anyone using the latest stable Saturn core after the main MiSTer branch was updated last week. Alexey Melnikov, aka Sorgelig , the father of the MiSTer project, pushed a new update to the main MiSTer core Aug. 28 that ties into a change to how games are saved in the latest “unstable” Saturn core — but that change hasn’t been added to the latest stable Saturn core that players download when they use the “update_all” function. Two days prior, a change to the save index to enable save file selection was committed to a new version of the Saturn core, called “unstable” because it’s essentially still in beta testing. It can only be used by manually downloading it from the unstable nightlies channel of the official MiSTer Discord server , putting it into a MiSTer’s “consoles\cores” folder and selecting it from the MiSTer’s core menu.  The main Saturn core asks to clear save RAM but shows no free blocks. (Photo by
HasdelBora
)
The new main MiSTer core is referencing that save index change in the unstable Saturn core, so anyone using it will have no issues. Once they’ve been tested thoroughly, the unstable cores’ updates eventually are added to the stable Saturn core. But until a new update is pushed for the stable Saturn core, anyone using it who have updated the MiSTer’s main branch will have issues with their games automatically loading save files. As for why the stable Saturn core hasn’t been updated since June , more testing is required, according to Zet-sensei, who works closely with core developer Sergiy “SRG320” Dvodnenko to test updates. “We’ve been trying to resolve the remaining SMPC issues for the past couple of days and have been doing some pretty intensive testing before making a stable release, so the timing isn’t ideal,” Zet-sensei said. There’s been only one update in recent days to the SMPC, the System Manager & Peripheral Control chip, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a lot of work going on behind the scenes. “SRG320 is currently tackling advanced SMPC tests,” Zet-sensei said. “He has already completed some of them. And probably seen a possible issue with it too, we need more information from Celeriyacon.”  The bottom of Bomberman Fight’s title screen logo disappeared when it zooms into the screen
on the Saturn MiSTer core
until an update last week fixed it. (Photo by
TeddyRuxpin22
)
Celeriyacon first became involved in the core last summer when they contributed a sound chip testing tool . That effort has expanded to creating tools to test many of the Saturn’s circuitry. As for how Celeriyacon makes the tests, he’s never said — “very secretive,” Zet-sensei said. Quite a few other problems have been fixed in the unstable Saturn core over the last month, though. According to the project’s GitHub , these are the updates that have been made since the last time SHIRO! reported on the Saturn core and ST-V Titan arcade core Aug. 8 :
Dvodnenko first released a playable build of the core to the public in May 2022 and has updated it many times since then. It was first added to the main MiSTer branch in October 2023, indicating that it was mature enough to be available to all MiSTer users rather than as an optional core that had to be added manually. Anyone interested in supporting Dvodnenko can do so at his Patreon . The MiSTer is a field-programmable gate array, a chip that can be changed by programming it to physically emulate retro video game consoles. It includes an SD card reader from which “cores” and games can be loaded. The cores are the programming that tells the FPGA chip how to configure itself to reproduce the performance of a console. There are cores for a wide array of consoles, from the Atari 2600 to the PlayStation — and, of course, the Saturn.
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