SNES emu status update

April 24th, 2006, 10:49 Posted By: RockinB

The snes emulator for SEGA Saturn has been optimized a lot in the last weeks. It now uses a homebrew Saturn library (a replacement for the SGL), which takes less cpu time and less RAM space because both are crucial for the snes emu on SEGA Saturn. The fast assembler cpu core from DreamSNES has been ported to Saturn. It's compatibility is not yet as good as with the C core, but the speedup is very good. A lot of unused code could be removed, improving locality and making more high work RAM available. The memory usage has been optimized too, such that ROMs of up to 3.5 MB size can be loaded. Some compile flags did a good job, too. Rendering is now set to palette mode and the Saturn system clock has been increased by 10 percent.

All in all this results in speed being between 2 and 3 times as fast as before. Homebrew SNES Demos are quite fast and sort of playable, with frameskip. The asm core is compatible with more commercial ROMs than I thought and though these are slower in general, some games (like Desert Strike, Contra 3 and others) show the potential to become playable if the GFX rendering could be speed up.

Here are some screenshots (noncommercial ROMs).

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