6 replies to this topic

[JohnnyBlaze]

After the whole Sega Saturn fiasco, and since I'm also looking to get a TurboDuo, my friend gave me the idea of getting a netbook and using the VGA connector to put it on my HDTV. Now, this sounds like a good idea, as this netbook is the same price as a Saturn and TurboDuo. My only concern is that while I know that it can run TurboDuo via Magic Engine, will a netbook run Sega Saturn games?

Here is the specs:

Genuine Windows® XP Home Edition SP3
160G, 2.5inch, 5400RPM SATA Hard Drive
1GB DDR2 SDRAM
Intel® Atom™ Processor N450 (1.6GHz/667Mhz FSB/512MKB cache)

Will it run with these specs? I'd like to know before tomorrow as Dell has a deal where it's $279.

[mbd30]

JohnnyBlaze, on Mon Mar 15, 2010 9:09 PM, said:

After the whole Sega Saturn fiasco, and since I'm also looking to get a TurboDuo, my friend gave me the idea of getting a netbook and using the VGA connector to put it on my HDTV. Now, this sounds like a good idea, as this netbook is the same price as a Saturn and TurboDuo. My only concern is that while I know that it can run TurboDuo via Magic Engine, will a netbook run Sega Saturn games?

Here is the specs:

Genuine Windows® XP Home Edition SP3
160G, 2.5inch, 5400RPM SATA Hard Drive
1GB DDR2 SDRAM
Intel® Atom™ Processor N450 (1.6GHz/667Mhz FSB/512MKB cache)

Will it run with these specs? I'd like to know before tomorrow as Dell has a deal where it's $279.

I doubt it.

"A DirectX 9-compatible graphics card and a minimum of 256 MB of RAM are required for the emulator to run. A Pentium 4 at 3 GHz or higher, an AMD Athlon rated at 3000+ or higher, any Core2, or any AMD Phenom are required for games to run at proper speed. If the processor is not fast enough, the emulator will, depending on settings in the options, either do a frame skip for full speed (resulting in choppy animation), or will render all the frames (resulting in slow-motion gameplay)."

[Jibbajaba]

Saturn emulation is pretty rough. Personally I wouldn't bother, and would just wait until you get a working setup.

Chris

[goldenegg]

The only system I've got SSF running at any decent frame rate is my Core i7 desktop. It requires some major resources to run properly. It would never run on a Netbook. You'd even have issues running it on most laptops. The same goes for Dreamcast emulation.

[mbd30]

goldenegg, on Mon Mar 29, 2010 2:28 AM, said:

The only system I've got SSF running at any decent frame rate is my Core i7 desktop. It requires some major resources to run properly. It would never run on a Netbook. You'd even have issues running it on most laptops. The same goes for Dreamcast emulation.

Saturn emulation is on par with DC in terms of resource requirements? That means that Saturn emulation is much more demanding than N64 and Playstation emulation which is bizarre.

[goldenegg]

mbd30, on Mon Mar 29, 2010 10:17 AM, said:

goldenegg, on Mon Mar 29, 2010 2:28 AM, said:

The only system I've got SSF running at any decent frame rate is my Core i7 desktop. It requires some major resources to run properly. It would never run on a Netbook. You'd even have issues running it on most laptops. The same goes for Dreamcast emulation.

Saturn emulation is on par with DC in terms of resource requirements? That means that Saturn emulation is much more demanding than N64 and Playstation emulation which is bizarre.

Not really all that bizarre. It all depends on the architecture of the original system, making a Saturn quite a difficult system to tackle.

[Video]

Saturn is up there with Jaguar with hardware complexity. (maybe moreso) It's not that anything requires particularly much power on the Saturn, or Jag, my netbook (acer, they all seem to be using the same 1g memory and atam 1.6 processors at the moment though) runs PSX ok, and neither of those systems are amazingly more advanced than that, it's just they are just so crapily designed, it's just hard to emulate.

Don't know about the popularity of the Saturn, it seems to be WAY more popular than the jag, so it may see a useable emulator in the future, the jag is probably out of luck.

For the cost of a system though, I'd just say, get a Saturn. They seem to cost less boxed than a Jag unit does, and that's not that much either. You'd be much happier with the results, and it'll be yet another cool system to add to you're collection.