Sega Saturn Emulator Ymir Update Includes Peripheral Support
There are emulators for just about every older console, but some still get short shrift. The Sega Saturn is an example with there being a few generally accepted decent emus for it, notably Mednafen, Yabause, and SSF. However, Ymir is a promising alternative that recently reached version 0.1.7, which includes support for Arcade Racer and Mission Stick peripherals.
Ymir is the work of Ivan “StrikerX3” Oliveira, a Brazilian Platform Engineering Specialist who works on the emulator in his spare time. Although it’s still far from a 1.0 release, this latest update reflect’s Oliveria’s dedication, and is being helped along by others in the emulator community.
“My main focus right now is Ymir, which I aim to turn into a robust, user-friendly, and highly compatible Sega Saturn emulator,” Oliveria posted on his Patreon. “I want it to be a powerful tool not just for players, but also for homebrew developers and TAS (tool-assisted speedrun) creators. There’s still a lot of work to do, but with community involvement and continued iteration, I believe we can get there.”
“The community has already been amazing – testing builds, reporting bugs, submitting pull requests, helping others, sharing feedback, posting screenshots and videos…it all makes a huge difference.”
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Running Rings Around Other Emus
The latest version of Ymir includes various bug fixes, but most noticeably adds support for Arcade Racer and Mission Stick peripherals (in both three- and six-axis modes). It’s also now possible to take raw screenshots and more, as Oliveria said on the official GitHub page.
“(It includes) new video options to improve frame pacing in windowed mode and make better use of high refresh rates when synchronizing video, a global exception handler to catch unexpected emulator crashes, and even the debugger got some attention this time – the SH-2 debugger is finally actually useful and has been an invaluable asset to help investigate and troubleshoot many bugs!”
The Ymir depository also includes regular Nightly builds, which are potentially unstable versions of the emulator, but they also allow those who’d like to help contribute to code with testing various features before they get added to an official build release.
Oliveria also notes how game save states now work: “Save state files created by any stable release are guaranteed to be forwards-compatible with any future version of Ymir, both stable and nightly. Save state files created by nightlies have no such guarantee. Save state files are not backwards-compatible.”
Compatible Games
One reason for the low number of Sega Saturn emulators compared to, for example, NES and PS1 emus, is largely down to the hardware. Most notably, the Saturn used eight processors compared to the PS1’s two. This, together with things like games that were coded in particular ways to meet the console’s requirements (such as NiGHTS into Dreams and Virtua Fighter 2), make emulation less straightforward than it can be with other games consoles.
Even so, Ymir can currently run 368 tested games with either very minor issues, or no issues at all. These include Quake, Saturn’s version of Bomberman, and Wipeout XL. The community has put together an extensive list of games, including supported titles and ones yet to be tested, and it looks good for Ymir’s future that it can already handle the majority of Saturn titles run through it.
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