A five-month wait for owners of the MiSTer FPGA ended this week when the hardware emulator's Saturn core got its first update since November.
Developer Sergey Dvodnenko, aka SRG320, published new code Monday on his Github that makes a litany of improvements to his core's performance. His Patreon page listed fixes for emulation of the CD-ROM drive, both VDP graphics processors and the SCU co-processor. It also denotes that the core supports the 1 MB and 4 MB expanded RAM cartridges — aka DRAM — for the very first time.
The latest version of the core, which comes in two versions for one or two sticks of RAM, can be downloaded from the "unstable nightlies" channel on the MiSTer Discord server. It also requires users to run the unstable main MiSTer build that was posted to that channel March 26.
Users on the MiSTer Discord server reported games like Street Fighter Zero 3 and Vampire Savior, which both require the 4 MB expanded RAM cartridge, running well. Other games showed improvements, like Bulk Slash displaying skyboxes, Panzer Dragoon Zwei playing sound and Last Bronx running at full speed.