Saturn emulator Yaba Sanshiro was updated Sunday for the first time in more than a year, bringing graphical improvements that came to the Android version last week.
Version 1.20.10 can be downloaded here. The emulator’s developer, Shinya “DevMiyax” Miyamoto, confirmed on X that Yaba Sanshiro on Windows now includes the rewrite of the VDP1 core to use compute shaders that he added to Android on Friday.
He said it also includes a new cheat code browser. It uses Action Replay-formatted cheat codes and also allows for writing values to specific memory addresses.
Miyamoto wrote a blog post earlier this month explaining why the previous rendering method, GPU tessellation, didn’t work as well as the new compute shader method. It began with him investigating gaps that appeared in Sega Rally Championship’s graphics with the old rendering method. For more information on the Yaba Sanshiro’s use of compute shaders, read SHIRO!’s story last week.
The Windows version hadn’t been updated since February 2025. Android is the emulator’s lead platform and gets updates regularly every couple months. Some of the Android version’s updates over the last year included leaderboards and RetroAchievements, but those weren’t added to this week’s Windows update because it would be difficult to implement them, the developer said.
“Implementing leaderboards and game cards with the old C++/Qt codebase would be tedious and, honestly, not very fun,” Miyamoto told SHIRO!.
He also confirmed that artificial intelligence was used to develop the emulator starting with this update.
“Of course, yes,” he said. “I built a harness to help improve the emulator with AI. I like to think of myself as a pretty good cowboy.”
Miymoto wrote in a social media post in March that he’d begun using AI for emulator development. “At first it kept breaking things,” he said at the time. “But once I documented my debugging process and problem-solving methods, it started fixing issues faster and more reliably than I can.”
Miyamoto used Claude AI to overhaul the Android version’s user interface in February.
Yaba Sanshiro began development in 2014 as a fork of Yabause, an emulator that is no longer actively worked on, to bring it to Android devices. Its name was changed to Yaba Sanshiro 2 in April 2021 after Google blacklisted the original app for including Action Replay cheats.
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