Sega Saturn emulation guide

This guide was created with the thought in mind that you know virtually nothing of computers and emulation, so hopefully anyone could boot up a game with these instructions. Enjoy!

This guide provides instructions on

• Getting the emulator
• Getting the game
• Converting the MP3 files
• Creating a playable image file
• Configuring the emulator

Getting the emulator

The first thing you will probably need, is a decent emulator. Get Cassini (which is essentially a patched-up version of GiriGiri), as it has pretty good compatibility and help files, that should explain some things. Don't expect miracles, as the emu works with some games, but the speed is often quite crappy. You also need to get a BIOS file, and place it in the same directory as the installed emulator. The file should be renamed BIOS.BIN for GiriGiri, and EURO.BIN for Cassini.

Getting the game

Then, download the game you want. There are some on the EP tracker, and another few on the main page too. If you don't know how to open Bittorrent files, read this. I recommend using Panzer Dragoon for test purposes, it works nicely, and is a rad game to boot! So, you've got yourself an archived file, probably. If you don't already have it, download and install WinRAR, it handles most file formats. If it has the .7z extension, you need 7-zip. So you've got the tools, now extract the files in some directory, which you'll be deleting shortly, anyhow. If the archive contained a CUE and a BIN file, you're almost set, skip to the last part. If it has an ISO file and some MP3s, you've got to convert them, first.

Converting the MP3 files

You need the MP3 files to be in uncompressed WAV format. The Cassini emu has a tool packed with it, called Saturn MP3-WAV converter. It's easy to use, just select the MP3 files you want converted (In the case of Panzer Dragoon, something like PD01.MP3, PD02.MP3... ) click the Add to job list button on the right, then MP3 -> WAV. Soon, you'll have the .WAV files. For some weird reason, this did not work for me, though.
So, an alternative method to convert the MP3s to WAV is using a free converter, like dBpowerAMP. Install this little prog, and after that you can either start it up and then select the files that need to be converted, or open the folder where the files are, and select them. Right click, and there should be a new option, Convert to... Anyhow, now you need to set the output format. Select WAVE, 16 bit, 44100Hz, 2 channels, these are the defaults for CD quality. Click Convert>> to start converting.

Creating a playable image file

Now you have the audio tracks in WAV format, the rest of the data in an ISO. If you already have a proper CUE file, skip this part. You can use a proggy called Sega Cue Maker to create a CUE file. Just put it in the folder with the ISO and WAV files, launch it, then input the name of the CUE file to be created (for example, Panzer_Dragoon).
Mount the CUE file with a virtual CD drive, like Daemon Tools. Installing this will create a small lightning shaped icon in the tray in the lower left of your screen. Left click on it, then select Device 0. Select the CUE file, and now it should be mounted. You should have a virtual CD drive, with the contents of the game. So that you can play it easily later, I recommend creating a proper CUE/BIN image. Get Alcohol 120%, it's a pretty decent disc copying program. Start it up, select Image Making Wizard, then select the virtual drive you've mounted the game to. Choose CDRWIN Image file as the image format. Once it finishes, you have a normal image file. You can either play this on an emulator, or burn it to a disc with the Image Burning Wizard function of Alcohol 120%.

Configuring the emulator

Now, start up Cassini! On the Config page you can set the controls for the players. On the General set the resolution and the CD drive, if you are running the game from disc. I prefer using the image itself. Now, select Run CUE/BIN, and locate the image file you made. Now, it should launch. If it goes to the BIOS, giving you an error message, you need to alter the region of the game. First, set the language to English, so that you know what you're doing. Choose the middle button in the top row, then the second option. Select English, obviously. After that is done, exit the emu. The next time you start Cassini, have Force Region enabled, and the region selection should be something that's most likely compatible with the game. Or you can use the Country Code Changer program to much the same effect, it displays other useful information, too. Another program that does almost the same is the Saturn Region Patcher, but it can add multiple area codes.
A very important note: You can't have the image file of the game in the same folder as the emulator, or it will show a "Disc not suitable for this system" error. Just create a subfolder and put the game in there. This made me waste quite some time.
Another thing that I learned the hard way: Don't use long filenames with spaces in them. Open the CUE file with notepad and edit it accordingly, if you have to rename the BIN image.

And that's it, you're set! If you used my example, now you should be playing Panzer Dragoon!



Leave me some rep if you find this guide useful. Suggestions/corrections are always welcome.

And I thought I already had a nice, nearly-complete guide... In the newer version, the interface has been rearranged quite a bit, so some things will be different from what you were used to. When you run the installed emulator, you'll have five options to choose from, none of them are exactly self-explanatory.

Run / Configure CD in Drive

Here, you can select which CD drive you're going to read the game from. Setting the region is important. If you get the "Game disc not suitable for this system" error, that is what you'll need to adjust. The Force Region option won't do anything, since you can't patch a read-only CD to another region. The Auto-choose CD-ROM Region option doesn't seem to work either. Read on, and you'll know the other reasons why playing from an image file is much more favourable.

Run Saturn Image / Configure

Load Disk: In the left side you can see a directory selector, and your favourite directories. You can save/remove favourites, but there isn't much use to this if you keep all your games in one directory. The Change BIOS button doesn't seem to work, and it's obsolete anyway, there's another option for changing the BIOS file. The edit ActionRplay.ini lets you edit the language files. The Edit Conf.ini button does just that, let's you edit that file. This was previously named BASE.INI, storing data on the game to be played. It's probably unused now, since there isn't even need for an extracted TOC anymore. So, once you've set everything up, double-click the image file in the lower left, and after displaying some messages in the window to the right, the game should start. Simply single-clicking the file will only display some useful info on the game, like region, name, ID, and release date. This is pretty much the same as the CUE / BIN Info option under Tools in the previous versions.

Action Replay: This new option allows you to add cheats and hacks, and search for them. As of this writing, I couldn't get built-in codes to work, searching did seemingly nothing. So, if anyone can provide a method to use this part of the program, I'd be grateful.

Configure Cassini: Select the resolution, whether you'd want it to be fullscreen, select language of the menus, and configure the controls for player one. Take note that you'll have to double-click the gray boxes to be able to change the associated button. This works fine with one player, but I recommend using the old configuration tool, Configure.exe to set up the second player. By using the Edit User.ini button, it's possible to set up two players with gamepads, but I can't try this out, so the theory will only be added on demand.

Cassini Tools

Country Code Changer: It's the good old satconv.exe, use it to change the region of a game if you have trouble playing it. (You might need to patch the game to European to play it with a European BIOS, and so forth)
Cue Maker: Runs the segacuemaker.exe in the Tools\CueMaker directory under the emulator's main directory. This has little use this way, refer to the guide above on creating CUE sheets for Saturn games with this tool.
Install SFPI/ASPI: Installs ASPI drivers for your CD drive... You might consider doing this if the emulator reports read errors for no obvious reason. Provided you use CUE/BIN files instead, you won't need this option.
Get Saturn ID: Drop a BIN file of a Saturn image into the text box and it will extract it's unique identifier. More on this in the Miscellaneous section of this guide.
Create CD Image: Uses the ASPI drivers you can install with another option to dump an image to hard drive. You'll only be able to select a drive by entering that three-number code the check button provides you. After that, select country, and enter the directory and filename, without extension, where you want the file to be created. This will leave you with an ISO, CUE, TOC.BIN and BASE.INI files. I guess the latter two aren't necessary anymore, since the emulator runs BIN/CUE images without problems, could be that this version auto creates those files from the image.
MP3 to Wave Converter: Converts MP3 files to WAV, so you'll be able to mount the ISO+WAV as a proper disc. Be sure to right click the Joblist window and set the Output Directory under Preferences to an existing directory, or the program will freeze.
Saturn Movie Player: A cool little Japanese movie player utility. I couldn't get all of the text to display properly in the menu, so I had little luck tweaking around the options. For some reason the movies didn't show up properly for me, though they converted to AVI nicely. A major bug was that the second half of the movies always got cut off.
Cassini ASM Code: Opens the Cassini.ASM in Notepad. Source code, all in Assembler. Get that stuff away from me. Seriously, you won't need this, unless you're a coder.
Debugger: A debug version of the emulator, not really meant for playing. Basically, if you're using this part of the emulator, you don't need this guide.
Audio Extractor: Extracts CD audio via the ASPI manager. You could do this with any other program that you'd normally use to grab audio CDs.
User Defined Script: This seemingly does nothing except run the User.BAT batch file in the emulator's directory. What could possibly be achieved by command line arguments is beyond my knowledge, as no such functions are documented... In other words, this seems useless so far.
CD ID & Ripper: Has the functionality of a basic version of CDMage. It allows you to scan an image for errors, possibly repair them, and also extract data from images. You could use it for trying to fix corrupted image files, I suppose.

Cassini BIOS

You'll have six buttons for choosing a BIOS. What this does, is extract the BIOS files from the archive in the BIOS folder, and put the selected one in the emulator's main directory as CASS.BIN. So, if you want to use your own BIOS file, simply put it in the emulator's directory and rename it to CASS.BIN.

Cassini Help

This section contains some semi-useful help files, but I believe these forums would be a better source of information in all of those areas. The Cassini ASM button opens up the Cassini assembler source in Notepad. In other words, don't waste your time here.

Miscellaneous

• Sound lagging in movies and transparency seem to have been improved in this version. If you have such issues with an older Cassini, give this a try.
• The Games.dat file stores the hacks for games. You can add your own entry just by mimicing any other entry, putting the Saturn ID of the game of your choice in the brackets. The lines starting with a semicolon are just comments. So, if your game is showing graphic corruption that a similar game doesn't, you could try checking if there is an entry for said game. For example, only the japanese version of Guardian Heroes had some hacks installed in the Games.dat file, copying that under the ID of the US game will fix some graphics issues.
• Running in low resolution is more favourable in the case of some games. For example, Radiant Silvergun uses a line to inform you on the health of boss enemies. What sucks is that this line is always 1 pixel wide, which means it will barely be visible in any resolution higher than 320*240.
• You can use some function buttons during play to modify certain settings. F4 shows you the framerate, F10 lets you pause the emulation. F3 changes layer priority, and the numbers 1-6 let you turn individual background layers on and off, the button 0 switches sprites on/off. These can come in handy where some of the graphic features isn't emulated correctly, for example flying through the dark spiked room in Dracula X.
• By tweaking the VSync, CDWait and FrameWait values in the Games.dat for a game, you can sometimes gain a lot of speed. The tradeoff is compatibility, and the drawback to this method is that this still won't rid you of slowdowns. In some situations, the emulation will be sluggish, no matter what.
• If all else fails, try updating your video/audio/gameport drivers, including Direct X, it never hurts. The emulator WILL run crappy no matter how fast your machine is (certain games are an exception), and there's little you can do to make it run faster.

Thanks go to SegNin, Myst, LordOfTheCynics, and everyone else who contributed to this guide!