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30 years of the Sega Saturn: How to play Saturn games in 2025
You have options, and you should know what they are. If only so you no longer have an excuse to not play Sega Saturn games.
Marc Normandin
May 30, 2025
On May 11, 2025, the Sega Saturn will turn 30 years old in North America. Throughout the month of May, I’ll be covering the console and its history, its games, and what made it the most successful Sega console in Japan but a disappointment outside of it. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.
If you’ve been following along for the month of May, then you’ve read about a bunch of Sega Saturn games that you should play. For the first time, again, whichever: play ‘em, they rule, etc. Glad we’re in agreement. Now, how do you go about playing them?
“Easy,” you say. I’ll simply go out and buy a Sega Saturn. I have good news and bad news for you on that front, so let’s start with the former. As of this writing, a “loose” Sega Saturn console — meaning, not in a box — is selling for $159 secondhand on average. Maybe sometimes a little more, maybe sometimes less because it’s for parts and not working, but on average, not all that bad. Here’s the bad news. There aren’t that many Sega Saturns in the world in the first place, and, 30 years after the system released in North America, there are even fewer of them.
It’s not like you’re looking for a working Atari Jaguar or anything like that, though. There are millions of Saturns, at least hypothetically, that you could acquire, and you only need the one for yourself. So if you really want one, you can probably find a working one even if plenty have already been trashed, broken, lost, or simply aren’t available because people who already have one aren’t going to sell you theirs. There is a much more significant issue surrounding buying a Saturn in 2025, though, and it can be distilled to one word. Or price, as it were: $1,079. That’s how much Panzer Dragoon Saga costs, as of this writing, if you want the discs to come in a box. Magic Knight Rayearth is $920. Burning Rangers? $526. Saturn Bomberman will run you $420. Not everything is quite that expensive, and the Japanese versions of games can run cheaper than their North American counterparts, but you see the problem here.
You might not be able to get your hands on a lovely Japanese Sega Saturn, but there are other ways to play the games. Image credit: Wikimedia
Rarity is the name of the game with the Saturn, and that rarity will reflect itself in the price of far too many games for most people. Which is where alternative options come in. Three major ones, all worth exploring, but your preferences could drive you to one over the other. Hey, Sega’s been out of the console business for decades, Saturn games aren’t being re-released en masse in the present, you know the score here.
One note: this is not meant to be 100 percent comprehensive as far as specific options go, but should be more than enough for anyone Saturn-curious to get moving on their new hobby. Also, this is uhhhh for playing backups or something.
First is the ability to soft-mod your console. Meaning, you use software to modify your Saturn, rather than a hardware mod. For this, you’re talking about using the Saturn’s cartridge slot to house a program that lifts some of the limiters on the system. Pseudo Saturn (and its fork program, Pseudo Saturn Kai) are both hacks that can be loaded up into an Action Replay cartridge and left in your Saturn for when you want to bypass the region-lock of the Saturn, or to play a blank CD-R that a Saturn game has been burned onto. This is the kind of thing you can add onto an Action Replay cartridge yourself if you are so inclined, which will involve looking up exactly how to do that sort of thing and following directions. Or, you can find someone on ebay who has already located the appropriate cartridge for you and will sell it at a reasonable price ($20-30?) with Kai already loaded onto it. Hypothetically speaking this would probably work for you and eventually turn you into the kind of person who could spend an entire month writing about Sega Saturn games.
There are downsides to this, however. You need a disc drive that can burn CDs, and you also need CD-Rs, which are not as easy of an acquisition as they used to be. (Thank you, PC from 15 years ago that I will keep plugged in until it stops working.) Though you could buy hundreds and hundreds of blank CD-Rs and still save money on Panzer Dragoon Saga, so there’s that. The more significant problem is that the Action Replay is being used for Pseudo Saturn purposes rather than as additional storage memory as it was intended for (or in place of the 4MB Extended RAM cartridge that’s required for certain games) and the Saturn does not have much internal storage memory. There are workarounds — and also enhanced versions of these cartridges that do still work as additional memory — but just be aware that it’s not as simple as grabbing the first search result you see and adding it to your cart.
Having additional storage is practically a must, as the Saturn’s battery needs to be replaced — don’t ask how often, the answer is “it depends,” and the result of guessing wrong about when to replace it is always that your saves on the Saturn itself get wiped when it runs out. I’ve had to play Radiant Silvergun from the start a few times now, and not necessarily by choice.
If all of this sounds annoying — burning discs, having to store them on a shelf, worrying about the cartridge slot being used for the wrong thing when you just want a place to save your games — you might want to think about investing in an Optical Drive Emulator instead. This acts as a replacement for your disc drive, which is also probably not a bad idea because you aren’t going to get much use out of your Saturn hardware if, say, the laser decides it’s lived a good life and it’s time to die.
Basically, an ODE bypasses the disc drive and allows for games to be read from storage media — a solid state drive, an SD card, a flash cart — rather than optically. Sometimes, you need to actually open up your Saturn to install an ODE, and sometimes, that also means removing the existing CD drive. You need to crack open your Saturn for Terraonion’s MODE, for instance, and remove the drive that’s in there to make room for your new ODE. The Fenrir ODE isn’t quite as large as the MODE, and promises easy installation, as well as continual support and updates — updates like the one from earlier this spring that said that streaming Saturn games over wi-fi to the ODE was in the works.
Then there are the flash cart-style options that won’t require opening up your Saturn at all. There’s the Satiator, which prides itself as “the world’s most advanced drive emulator for the Sega Saturn.” This one plugs into the Video CD card port on the back of the Saturn, which is also where the battery lives. Then there’s the SAROO, which uses the same cartridge slot that you would for an Action Replay loaded up with Pseudo Saturn Kai, and is also significantly cheaper than either MODE or Satiator. There are some compatibility issues that have arisen, but SAROO is using open-source software that is constantly being tinkered with. It also has its own storage options to overcome the Saturn’s limitations, cuts out the CD-loading times, and works as a replacement RAM Extension cart. Pretty good for the price.
Personally, I’m still debating on which to get, but given the limitations of the Pseudo Saturn/Action Replay method — despite how much mileage has been squeezed from that to this point — it’s something I’m very interested in solving. Whether to pay for an ODE that cost more than my Saturn did, or just roll with a SAROO and see what happens, is something I’m still mulling over. If you’re sketched out by opening up your Saturn yourself, you could always see what someone like Sound Retro Co. would charge to take care of these kinds of upgrades for you, provided you’re sending over the appropriate ODE with your console.
Maybe you don’t want to buy a Saturn, or burn discs, or install an ODE, or gamble on getting a SAROO at the right price from the right retailer or wait for community updates to the software so the game you want to play is compatible. All fair reasons to not want to do it! For you, there’s always emulation. And for Saturn emulation, I’ve asked Sega Saturn Shiro’s Dan Myers, aka Danthrax, for an assist. You see, Saturn emulation was notoriously tricky for a long while — when GameTap was briefly making Saturn games available as downloadable rentals, for instance, Panzer Dragoon Saga wasn’t included in part due to limited demand combined with it being such a pain to get the emulation working properly. Part of my buying an actual Saturn in the first place wasn’t just my fascination with original hardware in an attempt to mimic the original conditions and contexts that games released within, but because emulation was, at the time, such an annoyance to muddle through.
So, here’s Dan to give you all context on a bit of the past problems with Saturn emulation, as well as the standout emulators you could utilize today, if you’re most interested in experiencing Saturn games this way.
Emulating the Saturn
The biggest hurdle to developing an emulator for the Saturn is the console's sheer number of processors — eight of them in total.
Two main CPUs, which work in tandem (if a game is programmed to do so — some games just ignored one of them) to do the majority of a game's code-crunching.
The Saturn Control Unit, which manages traffic on the console's data lanes and includes a digital signal processor, or DSP, that can calculate 3D math quickly but can't access the system's memory directly.
A processor for controlling the CD-ROM drive as well as the optional MPEG video card if one is present.
Two processors for handling audio — a Yamaha chip that generates sound and a Motorola chip that governs the audio subsystem and talks to the main CPUs.
Two graphics processors, called video display processors or VDPs, which work together to render a game's visuals.
That's in addition to six different banks of memory, or RAM, for the various processors to use. It's a lot for an emulator developer to chew on.
The way the Saturn renders its graphics is unique, too, making it difficult to approximate with any other hardware. It famously renders polygons using quadrilaterals, but the gaming industry ended up standardizing the use of triangles to build polygonal objects instead. While a Saturn emulator can simply have modern video cards render two triangles to form one quadrilateral, that means the computer running the emulator is doing twice as much work to show the same polygon. Not only that, but how do you show a texture on two triangles that was originally mapped to a quadrilateral? That requires some complicated trickery to pull off well.
And that's just the Saturn's first graphics chip, VDP1. Its other one, VDP2, is unique, too. It somewhat resembles a 16-bit console by having multiple layers of two-dimensional graphics that games often use for on-screen text or other user interface elements. But one of those layers is special: It can display a plane that stretches infinitely into the distance in an effect that is often described as resembling the Super Nintendo's Mode 7 plane, as seen in games like F-Zero. The VDP2 can even sacrifice most of its other layers to render a second, separate infinite plane at the same time. Modern graphics cards don't really render things in this way, so emulator developers have to work out how to replicate the effect. Some games used VDP2's infinite planes in more complicated ways, too, such as the water and uneven ground in Grandia, the cliff in the first chapter of Panzer Dragoon II Zwei, and innumerable background effects throughout Radiant Silvergun — those prove to be some of the most difficult effects to emulate in software.
Saturn Emulator Options
There are three established Saturn software emulators that are often used these days, with forks of each of them as well. They are SSF, Medanfen, and Yabause.
SSF is the oldest — its first release dates all the way back to December 1999 — but its developer, Shima, still updates it to this day. SSF is a PC-only emulator and is probably the least CPU-intensive option. While it doesn't require a Saturn BIOS file — which must be ripped from an actual Saturn or "obtained" from certain corners of the Internet — some games do run better when users have added one. Opening games is as easy as File > Open with its basic graphical user interface, although a lot of options are hidden inside tabs with unhelpful labels like Program1, Program2, etc., and its readme file is entirely in Japanese. It includes a variety of debugging options, useful for hackers looking to modify or translate a game, including the ability to search a game’s memory while it’s running. SSF does a fine job emulating most games, but it's still not perfect despite its long development time.
No emulator is perfect, really, but Mednafen probably comes the closest. It's a multiplatform emulator that added a Saturn core nearly a decade ago. The Mednafen team's Saturn core matches a real Saturn's graphics and audio very closely, although it does run slightly faster than original hardware. It has been known as a more processor-heavy option, although at this point, any CPU from the last several years should have no trouble with it. It does require BIOS files for whatever region of Saturn game you want to run. (A region-free BIOS is floating around the Internet, for those who don't want to worry about having an appropriate region's BIOS.) It includes some debugging options but they're a bit more limited than other emulators. By default, to play a game, users must drag and drop a Saturn's CUE file onto Mednafen's EXE file or use a DOS-style command line — it has no initial graphical user interface without using a third-party GUI like Mednaffe or MedGui, and when running a game, its GUI is very barebones.
There are a couple of forks of Mednafen, including Bizhawk, which includes plug-and-play support for Xbox controllers, and perhaps the most popular one, Beetle, which is included in the multiplatform emulation platform RetroArch. Each has small differences but they function similarly to basic Mednafen. Thanks to being part of RetroArch, its version of Mednafen, Beetle, is available on Android and iPhone devices as well as the PlayStation 4 — unofficially, of course. Regular Mednafen and Bizhawk are PC only.
Yabause, which dates back to 2003 by a French developer named Guillaume, is perhaps the most user-friendly emulator. Like SSF, Yabause can use a Saturn BIOS file but doesn't need one to operate. It comes with a fairly intuitive user interface — opening a game is as easy as File > Open — and it's not particularly CPU-intensive. It runs on PCs via Windows, Mac and Linux, and one of its forks, Yaba Sanshiro, focuses on compatibility with mobile phones and portable PCs. It has a number of useful debugging options that are easy to use thanks to the aforementioned intuitive user interface. It also has the ability to upscale game assets, making 3D assets look crisper than original hardware.
But it's also the least stable, as I've found it crashes far more often than other emulators I've used. Its audio bugs out a lot, too, sometimes resulting in an awful buzzing sound that persists even after closing Yabause on PC — users must go into Task Manager to manually kill the process to end the aural pain.
Yabause stopped active development nearly a decade ago, although there are two forks of it: Kronos, which may have ended development with its most recent update earlier this year, and the aforementioned Yaba Sanshiro, which continues to be worked on by Shinya “DevMiyax” Miyamoto, who maintains not only Android and iPhone versions but Windows as well.
There are a couple other software emulators, too: Ymir, which just released a preliminary version in the last month that I haven't tested yet, and Nova, which is still very much a work in progress with 3D graphics but does pretty well with 2D and features some nice scanline filters.
One more emulation option is worth mentioning — hardware emulation via the MiSTer FPGA (field-programmable gate array). The MiSTer's Saturn core has been in the works by Ukranian developer Sergiy “SRG320” Dvodnenko for more than three years. At this point, the Saturn core very closely emulates real hardware performance, even imitating slowdown that occurs on original Saturns — the software emulators above usually do not emulate such slowdown. The MiSTer is a chip that can be changed by programming it to physically emulate retro video game consoles and its "cores" are code that tells the FPGA chip how to configure itself to reproduce the performance of a console. MiSTers are pretty expensive, though, costing about $200 with a somewhat user-unfriendly initial setup for the SD card that games and cores are run off of.
Here are links to my most recent coverage on some of these emulators:
—Dan “Danthrax” Myers
And there you have it. Why bother going through all of this explanation, when it’s not something that’s been given attention for other consoles who have had their anniversaries celebrated in this space? Well, the Saturn never had the audience that the Nintendo 64 did, which is also why, when the Playstation gets a month in the spotlight for its own 30th later this year, it won’t look anything like the Saturn’s celebration. The opportunities to play Saturn games just haven’t been there in the same way that they were for the N64 or the Playstation, either contemporaneously or in the years since: the N64 has been a pain to emulate, too, but Nintendo still put a bunch of games on Virtual Console, you know? Sony may screw up the whole idea of properly remembering their past, but they’ve still made it available on quite a few occasions. Sega is out of that particular game in more ways than one, at least so far as their history before or after the Genesis is concerned, so here we are.
Oh, and you don’t need to rip open your N64 to plug an Everdrive into it, if you wanted to ever play [your backup of] the Blockbuster-exclusive, Stunt Racer. Can’t discount that part of things — the SAROO is a far more recent innovation in the Saturn space, comparatively.
So! The Saturn is deserving of special attention, because it is a special platform, but also because it requires additional effort that some other consoles do not in order to experience what it had to offer. What it has to offer, to be more accurate, and it’s that present-tense that made it clear that the only way to put an exclamation point on to a month full of Saturn-specific features was to convince you that you, too, can go play Saturn games. You don’t even need to do it to celebrate a birthday, but simply because you can, now that you know how.
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