There were a string of Windows-only closed-source emulators, including SSF, Giri Giri, Satourne, etc. It was expensive, hard to program for, and its graphical abilities were best suited to 2D. Before the days of multi-core processors, parallelism meant having multiple chips. The SEGA Saturn was long said to be impossible to emulate, because of its unusual (ridiculous) architecture that incorporated eight processors (two Hitachi SuperH SH-2 processors, one Hitachi SH-1 processor just for streaming and decompressing from the disc in realtime, two “video display processors” from SEGA, a Motorola 68EC000 for sound, another custom SEGA DSP chip for sound built by Yamaha, and finally something called the System Control Unit). Then rip the disc and convert its TOC to a CUE with these two commands: $ cdrdao read-cd -datafile image.bin -driver generic-mmc:0x20000 -read-raw image.toc Observe which drive is the disc drive with the first command, and use that path in the second command: $ diskutil list

If you have MacPorts, the command is as follows: $ sudo port install cdrdaoīacking up a PS1 disc in cuesheet format, using cdrdaoįind and unmount the disc filesystem. Note that your binary image file has to be named consistently with what is in each CUE file.įirst, you need to install the “cdrdao” package from either MacPorts (recommended), Fink, or from source. It would fail with weird errors unless I provided the game in cuesheet format.Īlmost any cuesheet file can be found at . In fact, you can just download every cuesheet for a given system all at once, which is nice. Maybe it will preclude you from having to create your own, if you ripped your games as ISO. I realized the need for cuesheet format when I tried to use the Mednafen emulator to play a Playstation 1 game I backed up in ISO format. Most 16-bit era CD games were this kind of disc, and sometimes it was used in the early games of the PS1/Saturn generation. You can rip all of their data, but without metadata to indicate the track boundaries, it seems that multi-track disc images can’t be properly handled (?). I mentioned in my first post in this series that many old games use “mixed-mode discs” (audio and data as separate tracks). Well there’s actually a case where cdrdao is needed, and that is when your emulator wants game images in the “ cuesheet” format (a pair of files with the file extensions. In a previous post, I mentioned that two command-line utilities for making optical disc images on Mac OS X were dd and cdrdao, but I recommended dd because it was simpler to use. Preserving CD and DVD-based Console Games (Pt. 2) Preserving CD and DVD-based Console Games

Sega saturn emulator mac os x