Marvel Super Heroes, More Saturn Games Working on MiSTer After Core Update

Quite a few Saturn games are newly playable on the MiSTer FPGA after its Saturn core got an update yesterday.

The new builds for single- and dual-RAM setups are not available in the main MiSTer branch — they must be downloaded from the unstable nightlies channel of the MiSTer’s official Discord server.

The core’s development Github lists the latest round of fixes:

• SCU
  -fix DSP DMA address increment (Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter, X-Men vs. Street Fighter)
  -fix Timer 0 (Shining the Holy Ark)
  -fix access to DMA registers (Phantasy Star IV)
• VDP1
  -fix Scalled sprite pre-clipping (Linkle Liver Story)
• SMPC
  -fix system date (Salamander Deluxe Pack Plus: Salamander2)
  -fix INTBACK command timing (Digital Pinball – Necronomicon)

Video Game Esoterica uploaded a video yesterday showing off some of the games that work now, including Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter, Linkle Liver Story, Shining the Holy Ark and X-Men vs. Street Fighter — although he and others found that game freezes once a match begins.

This is the first update to the core since early October when developer Sergiy Dvodnenko, aka SRG320, added support for PAL games.

It seems Dvodnenko was indisposed for the last three months because he was moving. As a resident of eastern Ukraine, he’s been living under Russian occupation since war broke out there two years ago.

But when asked if he was OK on X, formerly Twitter, he replied Jan. 3 to say that he was fine and he was “out of the occupation.”

He apparently left his equipment behind in the move. “I’ve ordered Mister hardware and I’m waiting for it,” he said in the social media post. “I’ll continue to work on the cores when I receive the hardware.”

Anyone interested in supporting Dvodnenko can do so at his Patreon.

He released to the public a playable build of the Saturn core for the first time in May 2022, with a flurry of updates coming between late September and mid-November that year. A lull in updates after that was broken in mid-April 2023, followed by an update or two each month over the summer.

The MiSTer is a field-programmable gate array, a chip that can be changed by programming it to physically emulate retro video game consoles. It includes an SD card reader from which “cores” and games can be loaded.

The cores are the programming that tells the FPGA chip how to configure itself to reproduce the performance of a console. There are cores for a wide array of consoles, from the Atari 2600 to the PlayStation — and now, at least in an early form, the Saturn.