Mednafen Saturn Setup Tutorial

[DOS76]

@angelobodettidid you ask the same question again because you are unsatisfied with our answers? Compatibility is very high so far for me. No PAL support yet though from what I understand.

[Lordmonkus]

You can "fix" pal games with the Saturn Region Patcher tool but the results of that are 50/50, some games work fine with it others sort of work with weird side effects.

[angelobodetti]

No.

My 1st question was if anyone got the RA core working.

My 2nd was if Mednafen was better than Yabuse. 

[Lordmonkus]

You made that post 2 times though

[DOS76]

Didn't know that read on some forums early that there was no PAL support but it was a from like the 8th or 9th its funny to be talking about advances in Saturn emulation in terms of changes happening in days instead of years.

[DOS76]

so was your 3rd that was why I asked.

[Lordmonkus]

Yeah officially it doesn't support PAL but one night in chat with Zombeaver he mentioned the SRP and we messed with it with mixed results.

Examples being Keio Flying Squadron worked perfectly, while Discworld loads but at the screen where it says to "Press Start" the game doesn't recoginise that the button is being pressed so you can't go beyond that. Discworld II loads and plays but everything is pink.

[Zombeaver]

Yeah the program is SRP 3.0 (Sega Saturn Region Patcher)

I've converted over Discworld, Frankenstein: Through The Eyes Of The Monster, Jewels of the Oracle, Keio Flying Squadron 2, and Z. Discworld is the only one that hasn't worked for me and according to monkus Discworld 2 has issues as well.

[DOS76]

Okay so you guys got them working somewhat nice work gentlemen

[angelobodetti]

3 minutes ago, DOS76 said:

so was your 3rd that was why I asked.

Gotcha, posting from my phone browser so it must be duplicating or submitting twice. 

[Zombeaver]

Yeah the program is pretty easy to use as well. You just direct it to your .bin and then uncheck the region that it is currently (which will be PAL for this purpose) and then check North America and save. It's been better than 50/50 for my testing.

[Zombeaver]

I actually got the idea to look into it because of Deep Fear. Deep Fear was never released in NA, but there was a prototype version that was discovered (and ripped) that was based on the PAL version. I noticed that it worked fine in Mednafen (despite the fact that Mednafen doesn't support PAL currently and that game was never officially released in NA, but the prototype is NA region coded).

My guess is the issues with Discworld 1 and 2 will present themselves to a larger audience once PAL is added in. I doubt them adding in PAL support will suddenly fix it or that region patching the roms is actually the cause of the problem.

[airbikecop]

It's very possible the PAL games are PAL optimized and may present issues on real hardware.

However I will tell you if you use a Japanese KOF 95 ISO with a PAL KOF 95 cart rom (just rename it per the instructions) it does work great! I think the PAL and Japanese release use the same cart though so it may not count.

[angelobodetti]

Can you tell me how to do full screen in LaunchBox with this? I know alt/enter does the trick, but was hoping it could automatically load in full screen with a command line in the launch settings?

Thank you!

[Zombeaver]

It remembers your settings so if you hit alt+enter and then close the game while it's fullscreen it'll go back to fullscreen when you launch again.

[Thanos Reigns]

I'm having a bit of an issue with it. can't seem to get the game window to fill the 4:3 screen all the way. there's quite the gap at the bottom. I'm using a 1920x1080 monitor. also using Rocketlauncher for the bezel support. Now I know it's not RL causing the problem because it does this when i launch Mednafen all on it's too. Any suggestions?

[Lordmonkus]

A couple of things could be done to possibly to alleviate this.

One thing to look at first is are you using integer or non integer scaling in the video settings ? Integer will leave black borders at the top and bottom, especially on a 1080 screen.

Also take a look at setting a custom resolution to resize it to fit the screen better but this may cause issues in other games since not every game uses the same resolution.

Try setting your aspect ratio to 4:3 and integer scaling to off. This should get you full top to bottom screen fill unless the game ran at a weird vertical resolution. This will also have the possible side effect of ugly scanlines if you use a crt shader, some shaders do not work right with non integer scaling.

[Thanos Reigns]

Thanks for the help. Much appreciated. 
 

[Boomerps2]

Why in the Mednafen_Saturn core do I have to keep setting the language and time for each game I play?

Edited January 20, 2017 by Boomerps2

[Lordmonkus]

You should only have to do it once per game, it's just a limitation of the core itself right now. The stand alone version does not have this if you want to use it but lose out on the Retroarch features.