The “Sega Saturn Slim” is becoming one of the most awaited retro gaming devices for 2024. This planned update to the classic Sega Saturn console aims to slim down its design by removing the CD-ROM drive.
What’s the point? If you’re gonna alter the OG equipment to such an extreme extent like removing the CD drive, then you’re not going to play original copies on it anyways. Might as well just run an emulator.
The point is to attempt it and do it with the original hardware without “trimming” the board.
It’s an exercise in space management, not emulation.
Emulation is what it sounds like. Emulating the original thing.
This is the original thing. Just smaller.
And missing the normal way to play games. You’d have to use ROMs on this, and at that point there really isnt much of a difference between this and just emulating, you are already more than half the way there.
Not exactly. Emulating the board and chipset is where a lot of emulation issues show up. ROMs are generally pretty easy to serialize/copy around. It’s the chipset/boards that are tricky and generally requires the boards being destroyed when reverse engineering them to figure out how to emulate the chipset features.
This would be a “perfect” emulation of any Saturn ROM/Game/whatever.
That can only be done with original hardware. Emulators get close, but all they can ever get is “close”. New versions of the emulator chipsets come out to address and fix bugs or API issues that are discovered later as additional games are played on the emulator.
It’s why not all games run on all emulators. There’s a lot of subsets based on chip compatibility and specifically, how close it is to the original thing that will only work on some subset of games; and you might need a different emulator to run the other games for a platform because of compatibility issues.
So, again, this is not an emulator.
This is the real deal. Just smaller.
Running a ROM on it is not emulating. It’s running a game file on the original hardware, and the compatibility will be 100%, instead of some smaller % that an emulated board/chipset would have.
Exactly. The ONLY point of these consoles is to play physical copies of games you still own. Otherwise just buy a mini PC and USB controllers that match the originals and call it a day. Going halfway like this makes it useless to both niches.
But it’s not the original thing. It’s missing a core feature. So it is emulation.
there’s the charm of playing in original hardware without having to deal with the original storage medium.
There are better alternatives to CDs, might as well use them. It is no different than using a flashcart.
given the popularity of everdrives, i don’t think most people play on original hardware for the sake of using original copies. using original hardware gets around potential inaccuracies and/or performance issues with emulation. the Saturn is particularly prone to these issues because of it’s complex architecture- despite being more powerful, Dreamcast emulators tend to run much better than Saturn emulators just because there are way less moving parts
Okay, but you can do that with a softmod or a flash cart on the Saturn, too. You don’t need to rip out its guts to transplant them to a different case. Even if you had a Saturn with a faulty drive you can add a ODE solution without having to sacrifice the original form factor.
Plus, yeah, Saturn emulation is harder and less accurate than other systems, but we’re pretty much there these days for most of the stuff you want to play. You can do all sorts of cool cases and consolized devices to play old games these days, why break apart an original Saturn for that?
i agree with a lot of what you’re saying- i kept the original shell and disc drive on my Saturn personally and just use a pseudosaturn for playing imports and backups. i was just answering fishos’ question of why bother with original hardware if you’re not using original discs
