Sega Saturn emulators: Yabause

Last night I finally checked out Sega Saturn emulators. The easiest
among them to use is Yabause. You set it up and it goes and does it. No
plugins needed, though you do need to supply a Sega Bios ROM and a game.

I think it was meant to read game CDs directly, because I was testing it
with a game disk image file, and after a few times, the emulator refused
to load the image. Thankfully I had written it out to a data DVD before
messing with the emulator, and it ran the image off that disk just fine.

I had trouble trying to exit the emulator. On the PSX one, you just hit
ESC and it bows out of the way gracefully. The Readme file for Yabause
says to hit Q, but it didn't work. So among the times I had it running
full screen and having to use the XP Task Manager to shut it down,
something corrupted the disk image file on the HD.

I recommend you set it up to run as a window, about 700x525, and then
burn your backup images to optical media when using it with Yabause.

Others I tried were SSF and Satourne. Because of the AMD Athlon
processor, SSF wouldn't work. I read elsewhere that a certain
instruction set needed to be supported for SSF to work and Athlon
processors don't do that. That doesn't mean SSF wouldn't load and run,
it did, I just didn't get far enough to see what it could do.

Satourne looked complicated, but needed plugins which I may look for so
that there are 2 options for a Sega Saturn emulator. That's because once
Yabause is set up, it writes out an INI file, and each time you run it
after that first time, it doesn't throw up a config box to let you set
certain things again unless you delete the INI file. That's OK if you
use optical media and have each game on a separate disk. But if you have
more than one disk image on the same disk, you have to do something with
the INI file.

CORRECTION: Dreamcast game disks are what is known as a Megabit disk. They have a
different format and layout from any other kind of CD sized disk, and
you need a Dreamcast unit to read them if you want to make an image to run
on your emulator, and people have worked on this a lot. If you try to
copy a Sega Dreamcast game disk in a regular PC CDrom drive, you will get
the CD track only, usually audio, and nothing else. A neat way for copy
prevention by most but the exceptionally dedicated. I don't know how
emulators on a computer will read those game disks, unless they are
using images obtained elsewhere.