Post subject: Saturn emulation issues
Joined: 7/5/2018
Posts: 2
Hello, I've recently gotten into Bizhawk and I love everything about it thus far. But, I'm trying to get Saturn emulation working on it properly and I'm coming up short on knowledge. When running a game (I've tried Nights Into Dreams, and Shining Force 3, just for reference) it peaks at just over 40fps, making everything choppy like crazy. I've been googling for solutions for hours, and when I change any setting (sound buffer, throttling, anything) it doesn't seem to change anything with the emulation. Does anyone have any tips for me, or can point me in the right direction to learn about what I'm doing wrong? It would be much appreciated. Thanks! Relatively potato-ish system, but it seems to do much more intensive stuff than this (including more modern emulation) without too much complaint. AMD 6-core at 2.7ghz 8gig ram GTX760
Asnivor
He/Him
Editor, Emulator Coder
Joined: 11/27/2017
Posts: 87
Location: United Kingdom
It could be your system (although I'm not much good at comparing proccessors). The saturn core comes from mednafen, which does have reasonably hefty requirements. From the mednafen website:
Mednafen's Sega Saturn emulation is extremely CPU intensive. The minimum recommended CPU is a quad-core Intel Haswell-microarchitecture CPU with a base frequency of >= 3.3GHz and a turbo frequency of >= 3.7GHz(e.g. Xeon E3-1226 v3), but note that this recommendation does not apply to any unofficial ports or forks, which may have higher CPU requirements.
Joined: 7/5/2018
Posts: 2
That's what I was afraid of. I was hoping someone would have a nice trick up their sleeve =) But, I guess I can mess with my OC settings until I upgrade my PC (it is very potato-ish these days...) Thank you very much for the response
Joined: 1/19/2010
Posts: 146
As I've said in another thread fairly recently, if you're just looking to play games, it's worth trying Mednafen itself, because Bizhawk seems to run the Saturn core slower than normal. I tried Radiant Silvergun in Bizhawk with an fps between 40-60 or something like that iirc, while Mednafen itself gave me a solid 60.