So after doing a routine update on my MiSTer FPGA after far, far too much neglect, I was shocked to find that the venerable Sega Saturn was added to the list of consoles that are officially supported. I guess the experimental core is out of beta and into the official release! After some brief testing with a patched version of Bulk Slash, I can actually confirm things run really well.
This is super nice. Every attempt I've made at emulation via desktop has been plagued with some manner of issue - Graphical hiccup, timing issues, slow framerate, audio crackle, control responsiveness. Plus, there's not really a friendly ecosystem of emulators available for the Saturn, at least in my experience. With the MiSTer able to play things with reasonable fidelity, I'm all set to delve into the world made possible by none other than Segata Sanshiro!
Uh... Except...
I don't know anything about Saturn games. It was an era in gaming I entirely missed.
Does anyone have suggestions on "Must Play" Saturn games? I'll be playing through Bulk Slash, since I love me some mecha, but beyond that and maybe Virtual-On I don't have many plans. I'm not much of a SHMUP gal, I confess, but anything else is fair game. Any suggestions would be appreciated!
Oh, goodness. I had a Saturn growing up (the first console I paid for with my own money as a kid) and it's easy to develop blindspots for that thing. I also feel like the issue with the Saturn library over all is that how you define "must play" depends on your capacity to deal with unusual niche games that maybe aren't even that good, but only exist on the Saturn, because Sega itself was in kind of a weird place. Particularly Sega of America, which objectively refused to localize a lot of the Saturn's best.
So when I say "must play" in the following games I am not saying "must finish." Feel free to get a taste, poke at them a bit, and then move on. It's fine. Some of these are just going to be curiosities, but they are curiosities you can only find on the Saturn.
⭐= a game I've never personally played, but have heard buzz about
- NiGHTS into Dreams... (and Christmas NiGHTS)
- Astal
- Clockwork Knight (1 & 2, it's a Sonic 3 & Knuckles where its technically two halves of one game)
- Shining the Holy Ark
- Shining Force III⭐ (only episode 1 is officially in English, translation patches for 2 and 3 are forthcoming)
- Legend of Oasis
- Dragon Force⭐
- The Panzer Dragoon trilogy (1, Zwei, Saga⭐)
- Baku Baku Animal
- Deep Fear (UK/Japan only)⭐
- Enemy Zero⭐
- Fighters Megamix
- Keio Flying Squadron 2
- Bug! (and if you can put up with some of-the-era racism in later levels, Bug! Too!)
- Magic Knight Rayearth⭐
- Mr. Bones
- Powerslave (structurally very different from the PS1 version)
- Saturn Bomberman ⭐
- Shinobi Legions⭐
- Super Tempo
- Tryrush Deppy⭐
- Willy Wombat (Japanese game, has full English dub already)
- Grandia⭐ (there's a translation patch; supposedly plays best on Saturn)
- Silhouette Mirage⭐ (a translation patch just released, and again, the game supposedly plays best on Saturn)
- Mega Man 8 (contains secret, unique, throwback robot masters)
- The Mansion of Hidden Souls⭐
- Gungriffon⭐
- Die Hard Trilogy
- Dark Savior⭐
- Three Dirty Dwarves⭐
- Guardian Heroes⭐
- Radiant Silvergun⭐
- Virtual Hydlide⭐ (Beware)
The Saturn was also where Sega pushed hard at "bringing the arcade home" so it has a handful of decent-to-good home conversions of Sega's arcade games of the era. You can probably just emulate these in MAME, but some of them have bonus content and are worth looking into:
- Virtua Fighter Remix⭐
- Virtua Fighter Kids⭐
- Virtua Fighter 2
- Daytona USA Championship Circuit Edition
- The House of the Dead (tough without a lightgun)
- Virtua Cop⭐ (same)
- Virtua Cop 2⭐ (same)
- Sega Rally Championship
- Sega Touring Car Championship⭐
- Last Bronx⭐
- Fighting Vipers⭐
- Die Hard Arcade
- Decathlete ⭐
I'm gonna be the party pooper, though: I'm not convinced the Saturn core was ready for official release.
The most egregious issue is the sound. There are glaring sound issues that still aren't ironed out from when it was considered unstable, such as "all the music just stops playing, entirely" (Clockwork Knight 2) or "the music and the sound stop playing entirely" (Shining the Holy Ark) or "the music is really quiet for some reason" (Daytona USA) or "the sounds should be melodic but are a bunch of weird white noises instead" (the NTSC-U BIOS screen fading in or telling you the drive is empty). I feel like these alone should be showstoppers, but what do I know.
Likewise, there are still visual glitches that haven't been ironed out - Gouraud shading is rendered backwards on some quads, like in this image:
as opposed to a more-accurate emulator, Mednafen (as run through BizHawk's "Saturnus" core):

Sometimes color doesn't get applied, or a weird unrelated color gets applied instead, like with Tomb Raider here. Again, paired up with Mednafen screens to illustrate how it looks on actual hardware.
Starting position:

Moved forward three taps:


The most obvious thing is that the yellow color from Lara's lifebar is completely gone, but something the screenshots may not make immediately obvious (but which is noticeable when actually playing) is that the lifebar actually went from black to white as Lara moved forward three steps. The bar shouldn't be arbitrarily changing shade depending on Lara's position or the camera angle, so I don't know how that one happened.
Not even 2D games are free of bugs, necessarily. There seems to be some kind of layering errors going on with the fog effect in Sonic 3D, causing level graphics to turn transparent when they shouldn't be. Sometimes that's as benign as the columns or grass in Rusty Ruins being transparent, other times graphics that would've normally be hidden away by the now-transparent layer make it way more apparent something's amiss.








Also, sometimes games just won't work. The "PRODUCED BY or UNDER LICENSE FROM SEGA ENTERPRISES,LTD." screen will show up indicating successful detection of the game, and then... nothing. Black screen. I made a slight lie when I said the audio completely died in Shining the Holy Ark back up at the top - that's what happened on earlier, but still very recent, versions of the core. On the most-recently-available core as of writing, dated 2023-10-10, StHA refuses to boot at all. On the bright side, if I go even further back, StHA runs at the speed of molasses (it didn't have a great framerate to begin with, admittedly, but it's definitely more slow than normal), which isn't the case on that later core that still had it working, so it isn't like no progress is being made.
All in all, all of these compound to make me wonder why this got moved to update_all status. I mean, obviously cores can launch with bugs and get patched up later - that's part of what update_all is for, after all. Are they usually this obvious, though? Was it moved up to this level so bug-reporting would flow more freely? Maybe my misgivings are entirely based on a misfounded belief that going to update_all means it's truly ready for prime-time when that isn't the case at all. I could be wrong! I have been before!
I don't want to cast shade on the core author, Sergey "srg320" Dvodnenko. It is still a tremendous achievement that we got this far, especially since he is producing this while living in an actively-war-torn region of Ukraine. The games (usually) run! Just with all the issues I spelled out above, so it's a bit questionable if you'd want to right now. Temper your expectations; consider this more of a curiosity to toy with and see how games you're familiar with fare on the core, but not a great way to play a game you've never tried through to completion.
