Seta GX brings experimental Sega Saturn emulation to the Wii, beta v0.3.1 is out
Seta GX, an experimental Sega Saturn emulator for the Wii, reaches beta v0.3.1 with Wii and Classic Controller support. Here's what runs and how to try it.
Seta GX, an experimental Sega Saturn emulator for the Nintendo Wii, is now at beta v0.3.1. The release thread on GBAtemp has passed 169 replies, and most of the testing reports live there. If you have a Wii, an SD card or USB stick, and your own Saturn dumps, this is worth a look.
Seta GX is a port of Yabause, the old open-source Saturn emulator. Coder Evoca / fadedled says the original Yabause Wii port was heavily modified and simplified. Some improvements, CHD support and SCU emulation, come from devmiyax’s Yaba Sanshiro. The speed gain comes from hardware-accelerated rendering that borrows tricks from the Wii’s Hollywood GPU. The code is GPL v2.
The feature list is short. It loads CUE and CHD images, and bin+cue and bin+img both work. CHD runs about 5% slower. Saves work. v0.3.1 added Wii and Classic Controller support on top of GameCube pads. Storage is SD or USB, FAT32 only.
Testers on the forum report mixed results. Clockwork Knight 1 and 2 reportedly run well. Saturn Bomberman is slow but playable. Die Hard is unplayable, and Destruction Derby stops after the first load. Resident Evil runs gameplay only, no videos. One Quake report sits around 60% FPS.
To try it:
- Grab the build from the releases page.
- Copy the apps/SetaGX folder into the apps folder on the root of your USB or SD card.
- Create vgames/Saturn and saves/Saturn folders.
- Put your own Saturn BIOS in apps/SetaGX/ as bios.bin. The BIOS isn’t included.
- Drop your disc images into vgames/Saturn.
The author is blunt that this is experimental and full of crashes and softlocks. Transparency effects in VDP2 don’t work yet. The notes also say it runs poorly in Dolphin, though that part is murky.
My take: Saturn has always been a pain to emulate, and the Wii is an odd box to run it on. Yabause did the hard groundwork years ago, and Seta GX builds on that with some clever GPU work. It’s a niche toy, not a finished product. Still, I like seeing people port old emulators to weird hardware instead of waiting for someone else to do it.
