Sega Saturn on Steam Deck! Beetle Emulator on RetroArch Tutorial for Steam Deck! Emulation Fun!

hey everybody welcome back to video game episode Taylor continuing series on the steam deck and more importantly getting some awesome retro consoles and handhelds running on it and today we're taking a look at the Sega Saturn and this is a video a lot of people have been asking me to make and I wasn't planning on doing it because last time I checked Sega Saturn emulation out it was definitely rough no judgments against the people that make the emulators they do an amazing job but apparently it's been a few years since I last checked out Saturn emulation and I was pleasantly surprised just to find out how good it really was before we get too far envaldo do me a huge favor go down below hit like And subscribe that notification Bell definitely helps us out if you feel something kind of want to support the channel we got a patreon link down below as well bomberman's a member maybe you should be too or don't doesn't really matter to me but honestly this is very impressive stuff Sega Saturn on the beetle emulator is running perfectly on Steam deck for the games that I tested let's get into the setup guy because it does take a little bit of work you're going to see all the files we're working with here and there's one file that's the most important that's going to be Saturn bios.zip I can't link this to you but if you Google it's going to be really easy to find and if you take a look inside of the archive we're going to need two files out of this we're going to need Sega underscore 101.bin and the MPR file this is going to allow us to play games from Japan Europe and North America those are the regions that you're going to want to deal with you get out five files in the zip we just need to use one now it's going to be looking for bin and Q files that's what I'm using for here so all you need to do is just make sure you unzip whatever games you want and it's perfectly fine if there's more than one bin there just needs to be a bin and a queue for this tutorial and you can organize your folder sometimes they download as nested folders and you don't need those zip files anymore I just highlighted them because I wasn't paying attention but copy those bios files or whatever you want over to your SD card or USB stick and you're good to go once you get into desktop mode you're going to go ahead and mount that stick using whatever dock you would like and the first thing we're going to do is deal with getting these Saturn bios in remember we want MPR and and Sega underscore 101 because I'm using the trackpad I'm copying these over one at a time but go to wherever you have mu deck installed go over to emulation and the BIOS folder you don't need to Nest the folder here just copy both bios files to the BIOS folder and that'll be all you need to do now just because you have the files doesn't mean they're technically correct I've seen a few people get bad bios files and the checksum does not check out so you can check the checksum I'll leave a link below But A good rule of thumb is if you go back into the MU deck operating system here and you go ahead and click check bios it's not an operating system it's an app ignore me you will see that the Saturn bios is detected I'm not aware if that's checking checksums or not but the checksum will be below now there is one weird Quirk about putting the games onto wherever you installed mu deck if you've watched my previous tutorials you know that there are folders for each game but for Saturn there's a Saturn and a Saturn JP that would make you think that you need to put the Japanese region Sega Saturn games in that folder but first we're going to copy the North American ones over to Saturn and we're just going to make sure we get all our files in there they can be in folders it's the most easy way to organize them in my opinion but if we put the files the Japanese games in Saturn JP they will not be found steam ROM manager is not going to find them if you make this mistake just go ahead and go into that Saturn JP folder and open up another tab or window for your file browser you don't need to copy them back over just open up or detach that Tab and then we'll navigate back to the ROMs folder and we'll go back into Saturn I don't know why there's two folders here it's kind of confusing and I've had a couple of people say why aren't my Japanese games working this is why so if that happens to you just go ahead and highlight and drag them from one folder to the other it's like any other Windows or Macintosh based operating system just happens to be Linux and this instance once we've gotten all of our games in the Saturn folder not Saturn JP we'll come over to steam ROM manager we'll hit preview and we'll generate the app list this will show us all of the games we put in there and sometimes it'll give you the correct art and sometimes it won't I am not going to show you guys how to change the artwork it's at the bottom left hand corner of every photo it's just like changing a thumbnail out but you will see we got our Saturn games here and that's all that matters they were in the Saturn folder they have been adjusted by steam ROM manager we're good to go if everything shows up go ahead and hit save app list that'll pop it over onto more of the handheldos version and you just click return to gaming mode and underneath your collections you're going to see all the Sega Saturn games we just added or you just added ready to play right here and right off the bat wow is Saturn emulation coming a long way from the last time I tried it I do have an original Saturn with probably now a couple hundred games so it's not like I've been using emulation all that much and it is under development for Mr fpga as well but I am highly impressed with Beetle this is working absolutely spectacularly in all the games I tested I saw no visual or audio bugs there are a lot of different menus we can play around with but off the top just taking a look at this it is extremely impressive and the steam deck is 100 handling everything we're throwing at it for Saturday we will get into some more complex games in just a little bit but there's a ton of options in the core menu that we can talk about so we'll go through them kind of one at a time I'll tell you which ones are important which ones are meaningless if you go down two core options by default Beetle Saturn should be selected if it's not definitely change it over to that as far as the scan lines are concerned I don't touch them whatsoever if you want to play around with them by all means now you'll see cartridge memory it'll Auto detect and you can share internal memory or backup memory with different games I leave these off this allows you to have a full internal memory and backup cart for each game I think it's absolutely spectacular it works so well Auto region detect Works 99 of the time every once in a while I have to put it to Japan I'm not sure why but definitely remember that that is in there and there's a couple other options like bios language where you're not going to be getting into the menus too much and everything else on there it'll automatically set the real-time clock on game load if you're connected to the internet but playing Virtual Fighter 2 it's a ton of fun I do wish and maybe it just didn't notice it but I don't think it's there there was a de-interlace option because Virtual Fighter 2 does run this way but one thing I did notice that definitely needs to be corrected maybe there's just something wrong with my installation of mu deck because I can't imagine they would do this but one of the Saturn's face buttons is mapped to the right bumper button on my controller I don't know why it is so if you're having issues with the button layout you can either change the buttons within retroarch or you can go to the steam overlay menu and change around your buttons there as well because once I got it going correctly playing Virtual Fighter 2 is a lot easier but I was so confused I was missing a button and I went and found it on the right bumper it was a very strange configuration if it's like that out of the box I do hope they change it but talking about lag and latency in Saturn that's always a conversation with emulation is how much lag is there and is it going to affect your gameplay this is a big conversation because some of the Saturn ports that have recently come to switch have up to six frames of lag and that is definitely unacceptable but remember there's two different types of lag there's mathematical lag lag that exists as a number and there's perceivable lag lag that you can actually tell is occurring and if there is any lag in Beetle on the steam deck I cannot feel it playing radiant silver gun I'm able to get through the same bullet patterns the exact same way I normally would and if there was too much controller lag the difference between pushing a button something happening on the screen I would have felt it there it's an unscientific test but it is my test and there's so much other fun to be had playing the extended enhanced version of Nocturne in the Moonlight on the Sega Saturn is just an absolute ton of fun it's so much fun to be able to play this on Steam deck because this is a great game to play on the go as well but as far as the memory card setup is concerned it should be on by default and I showed you those menus there if I go ahead and Save in the beginning of the game and I back out to the main menu and go to data select you're gonna see that our save is there but music is important if this doesn't sound right it's worthless so go ahead and listen for 30 seconds and I will be right back [Music] foreign [Music] quality is spectacular and that's the last component here everything looks and sounds and plays exactly like I'd expect Sega Saturn to play and a game like burning Rangers one of the probably the most graphically impressive games on the Saturn runs exactly like it should run which is to say that at a very high frame rate and it can be choppy but beetle is pulling off what you would expect on a regular Sega Saturn something like Guardian Heroes here just looks great I am so impressed with what the steam deck's pulling off here because emulating on Saturn is high test because the architecture of the Saturn with vdp-1 and vdp2 in the sh class processors is not an easy thing to pull off and honestly if it plays Saturn Bomberman like I would expect then I'm going to give it a 10 out of 10. but that is how you get the Sega Saturn working on your steam deck if you follow all the steps in the tutorial you will be able to play Saturn on your steam deck as well just make sure you get your bios files and you put your games in the right folders but it's so impressive of that the deck can do this I can't wait just to sit on my couch and Play Sega Saturn in my hand if you want to see other tutorials leave me a comment down below and tell me what you're interested in seeing I'm happy to make it for you guys and if I haven't covered a platform yet it's possible I've already made the video and I just haven't put it out yet short of that Center on Steam deck it is great I'll see you guys next time bye bye

Channel: Video Game Esoterica

Views: 18,420

Keywords: Steam Deck, Valve, Valve Deck, Emudeck, Emu Deck, EmuDeck 2, Emu Deck 2, RetroArch, Duckstation, Steam Deck Review, Steam Deck Tutorial, Steam Deck emulators, Steam Deck Emulation, PC Gamer, PS1, PSX, retro gaming emulation, retrogaming, retro gaming, retrogamer, retro gamer, retrogames, retro games, Steam Deck How to, Steam Deck rom, Steam Deck Emustation, Emustation, Game Emulation, Emulation How to, How to Emulate Games, Gaming Tutorial, MAME, Sega Saturn Emulation, Beetle Saturn

Id: EIiK5GNFQGc

Length: 10min 25sec (625 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 25 2023