(Editor’s note: This story has been updated on Jan. 6 to add clarifications from Benjamin Siskoo about the emulator’s new 6xBrz filter, RAM extension cartridge and change in OpenGL rendering.)
The developer team of Benjamin Siskoo and FCare gave Saturn fans a present on Christmas last week when they released a new version of their emulator, Kronos.
Benjamin Siskoo made a thread on SegaXtreme to announce Kronos version 2.6 — and then 2.6.1 a few days later — and provide links to download its 64-bit version and its 32-bit version. Or you can compile it yourself by checking out the Kronos Github.
The thread on SegaXtreme lists dozens of new features and fixes for specific games. Some of the improvements are to the VDP2 debug windows and VDP1 timings as well as the addition of 6xBrz — an upscaling filter that smooths the final render, which Benjamin told SHIRO! was widely requested by the community.
The new version also adds an “extension cartridge for homebrew developers.” When asked about that, Benjamin said it’s a tool for people who need more RAM to develop their homebrew games and debug them.
“It has a dedicated address where you can write so that the characters wrote here are directly printed on the log console of Kronos,” Benjamin said. “That way, it allows [you] to put traces in your homebrew and to get more RAM for easier debug. We choose to implement it as a cartridge since it does not impact lambda user experience.”
The small update to Kronos called version 2.6.1 uploaded Dec. 28 made fixes to taking screenshots, autostarting via command line and an overflow error.
The team uploaded a video to YouTube to show off their latest work:
Some of the newly playable games shown in the video include DragonHeart: Fire & Steel, Shining Wisdom, Resident Evil and X-Men: Children of the Atom. You can check the emulator’s compatibility list here.
Benjamin Siskoo did make two important notes in the SegaXtreme thread: One, that save states from previous versions are not compatible with Kronos 2.6; and two, that OpenGL support has been dropped, so players need a video card that supports at least OpenGL 4.3 (CS core).
Benjamin explained the OpenGL change further to SHIRO!, saying that the rasterization process used by the OpenGL core does not align to the way the Saturn’s VDP1 rasterizes graphics. So they switched to a compute shader core, or CS core, which leaves it up to the developers — in this case, Benjamin and FCare when making the Kronos emulator — to define their own rasterization. Its flexibility allows Kronos to emulate Saturn graphics more accurately than with normal OpenGL, in other words.
But a graphics card still needs OpenGL 4.3 support to support the CS core, hence Benjamin’s note about it.
For those who want to follow the project, it has a Discord server as well as an English-speaking forum at Tradu-France.com.
Kronos is a fork of the Yabause emulator that has been in development since at least early 2018. It had been more than 10 months since Kronos’ last update, version 2.5, which added a variety of input methods, implemented SH2/SCU concurrent access on the CPU bus and improved the emulation of dozens of games.
Danthrax is a contributor to the Shiro Media Group, writing stories for the website when Saturn news breaks. While he was a Sega Genesis kid in the ’90s, he didn’t get a Saturn until 2018. It didn’t take him long to fall in love with the console’s library as well as the fan translation and homebrew scene. He contributed heavily to the Bulk Slash and Stellar Assault SS fan localizations, and has helped as an editor on several other Saturn and Dreamcast fan projects such as Cotton 2, Rainbow Cotton and Sakura Wars Columns 2.
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