Why is a Sega Saturn so expensive?
And why can't I find it anywhere? I know it wasn't very popular when it was out, but is there really a huge demand for it now? I remember 7 years so, I could walk into a retro game store and see a console for $45.
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I think Saturn emulation is one of the more difficult ones to get working right. I would go emulation, but a lot of the games I want to play are multiplayer and multiplayer on a PC just isn't as fun.
@GreenCrush At least nowadays Saturn emulation works pretty well. With the right settings, it is like emulating Playstation games. My PC CPU is from 2013 and it works fine (with a GTX 1070). I am using RetroArch, but that is another complicated software suite to get into. But the Saturn core (a plugin in RetroArch) I am using is basically part of the standalone emulator suite Mednafen: https://mednafen.github.io/ . (Edit: Sorry I forgot that I used an additional program called Mednaffe: https://github.com/AmatCoder/mednaffe, that is a GUI for Mednafen.) So if you want get into emulation for Saturn, I would recommend starting with this, if RetroArch isn't your thing.
Has Mednafen been made more user friendly? Because last time I used it, it very much was not.
@ArugulaZ My bad. I thought the default Mednafen has a GUI. What I used in the past was another program called Mednaffe as a GUI for Mednafen, which I highly recommend if you don't like RetroArch. If you understand commandline applications, then Mednafen is easy to get into. Otherwise, I can see why its not user friendly. I'll edit that part of my previous reply.
That's fair. It took a good amount of work to get my emulation working well enough to play some of my old favorites.
One of the biggest hurdles I had was learning to play Saturn games on a modern controller; the Saturn controller had 6 face buttons lined up in two rows of three, while all the controllers out today copy the xbox/playstation setup of 4 face buttons in a diamond configuration. It was a real pain to remap the controls for some games.
If you want a more authentic experience, Retro-Bit made some officially-licensed Saturn and MegaDrive replica controllers including USB and Bluetooth versions. Or you can get a DIY Bluetooth conversion kit for Saturn controllers from 8bitdo.
It's been working great on the Retroid 2+ though, and imagine it's even better on the newer ones. It's become a lot easier recently