I’m not sure how Segata Sanshiro would feel about this.
Recently, City Connection put out a collection of three games originally made for the Sega Saturn for the PS4 and Switch, all of them shmups in a collection titled Cotton Guardian Force Saturn Tribute: Cotton 2, Cotton Boomerang, and Guardian Force. Which, naturally, got some gears turning over on the GBATemp forums.
And what they found out was that it was very possible to inject other games into the emulator used for these games. And said emulator is actually pretty damn good, probably because it has to be, considering the fact that it’s meant for commercial products.
This is actually fairly significant news, because despite having released over 25 years ago, the Sega Saturn really didn’t have good, functional emulation until comparatively recently. Part of this was down to just how over engineered the Saturn was.
But I digress. The GBATemp users found that, with just a little tinkering, you could get many of the Saturn’s best games running on this emulator. They’ve since come to the conclusion that this emulator, named ZebraEngine, is likely a fork of SSF, which was a closed-source emulator that’s been in development for over 20 years. This is borne out by that compatibility ZebraEnging has: SSF has perennially had good game compatibility, even during the years where emulating the Saturn was incredibly resource intensive.
Granted, it’s not like all of these games run perfectly, here. Even the games that came with Cotton Guardian Force Saturn Tribute have a few hiccups; notably, input lag, but still. That said, a surprising number work just fine through the emulator. To that end, YouTuber Stranno has put together some showcase videos highlighting how well they run.
The community on GBATemp is now trying to figure out how to extract ZebraEngine, with the hope that they’ll be able to create standalone injects for Sega Saturn games on the Switch. You might be familiar with the concept if you’ve ever been in possession of a hacked 3DS or PS Vita; it’s fairly common in the former’s case to have injects of Game Boy, Game Boy Color, and Game Boy Advance games, at the minimum.. It just makes keeping things organized and accessible fairly easy.
There is one massive downside: you need a hacked Switch to do any of this. And since that either requires a launch-era Switch, or hardware mods, they’re in somewhat short supply. Still, this means big things down the line, if older systems are any indication. And it really is a marvel to see Sega Saturn games running on the least powerful system this gen, and at decent quality, to boot.
Source: Kotaku
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