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MAME work and other stuff
October 2, 2013 Haze Categories: General News. 8 Comments on Sega Ultradrive

Team Europe dumped the Ultraman cartridge (purchased and donated by SSJ) for the Sega Saturn. The is one of two games that used a data cartridge alongside the CD, the other one being King of Fighters ’95.

With the cartridge present it boots straight up in MESS / UME, although performance leaves a lot to be desired (the Saturn driver has been rather slow with a lot of games for a while now and could really do with some optimization) The banding on the title screen is (I think) a graphical effect *edit* indeed it is, confirmed via the video on Segagaga Domain.


Ultraman Saturn Ultraman Saturn
Ultraman Saturn Ultraman Saturn
Ultraman Saturn Ultraman Saturn
Ultraman Saturn Ultraman Saturn

The game is generally considered to be terrible like most Ultraman games, but good to see it running in MESS rather than just displaying the ‘Cartridge is Missing’ screen.

Due to the game being a Japanese only release, and the use of the cartridge this one is notoriously difficult to run on real hardware unless you own a Japanese system because the cartridges to bypass the region locks can’t be plugged in at the same time as the game cartridge the game needs.

Also note that while the game boots up in MESS it seems to hang frequently so you’re probably better off with something like Yabause for Saturn emulation (it lets you use the cart dump)

8 Comments

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Have you compared Japanese and European KoF ’95 carts? Is it 100% known they are identical? The fact both versions can be emulated with the same cart dump doesn’t really mean the carts are identical.

I have no idea of the status of that, the people who dumped it aren’t people in contact with the dev teams afaik.

I think the only reason we assume they are the same is because of Haze’s (or Kale’s?) comment on top of the xml stating the header suggests it’s compatible with both regions

I have no idea where the dump came from, I think Kale had it

so, unless Kale has more insights, I think there has been no confirmation

There’s very little reason to believe they should be different (it’s simply a game data ROM) but I can’t even tell you what type of cart the one we have comes from.

The header in KOF95 cart shows JUET, meaning that it does work with Japanese, American, European and East Asia (Taiwan) consoles. I don’t rule it out that it could be hacked, however.

I can confirm that the JPN and EUR KOF’95 ROM cartridges are 100% identical.
And the recent Ultraman ROM dump is correct and is identical to my private own dump I made some years ago.
That’s great to see people interested in Saturn preservation. Keep up the good work.

I feel like Saturn was working better not too long ago, but nonetheless, given how stupidly sophisticated the hardware is, I’m impressed that it runs as well as it does. It could be like 32x or 32x_scd…

Hopefully, there will be a day that it runs well enough to emulate VF2 at 100% on something less than an elite CPU.

In some areas it definitely did used to work better there are slowdowns and hangs where there didn’t used to be. However overall ability to boot / run random and obscure Saturn titles is MUCH better than it used to be.

It’s a complex system with a lot of CPUs, and as you observe even for a really simple setup like 32X the exact balance of things can cause a real headache.

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