this post was submitted on 17 Sep 2024
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Exactly. The ONLY point of these consoles is to play physical copies of games you still own. Otherwise just buy a mini PC and USB controllers that match the originals and call it a day. Going halfway like this makes it useless to both niches.
It takes one benefit of using an emulator (digital storage medium) and combines it with the worst aspects of original hardware (physical hardware prone to damage, video output that isn't compatible with many modern displays) and also loses out on the other benefits an emulator has (shader support, save states, emulated hardware overclocking to guarantee max and stable framerates, etc).
To me, this is almost worse because it also permanently alters a console that is no longer manufactured.
Yeah, I was interested in the idea cause I have a saturn which is a bit beaten up, but if I can't play the disc's I have why would I bother.
You can do a perfect ROM compression of the games you own on disk (or find one someone else did), and then play them on this sega saturn console and achieve 100% compatibility with the original game. This is not something an emulator can do. It can get close, but it will not reach 100% without the original hardware/chipset (usually).
That's a lot of fancy words to say "so you can emulate your games". Which is our point: if you can't play your OG games and are gonna be emulating those anyways, no one gives a shit if it has an OG chip anymore. We're gonna have to emulate anyways, any might as well do it with better shaders, graphics, control, etc than on this custom built, one use only, emulator.
Look, I don't know what to tell you here. You're downvoting me (or someone is) because you're not understanding the point of what they're doing. That's ok, but it's not ok to claim victory here because you don't understand the point of what they're doing, or you're not knowledgeable about the intricacies of the retro gaming/emulation world.
It's not to make an emulator for the general public. It's to take an original board, and put it into a SFF (Small Form Factor) and have a perfect, 1:1 system that can play any Saturn game. Any game. No chipset issues. And it looks like an original Saturn, just smaller.
This appeals to a very specific set of people who care about compatibility and functionality of the games they're playing.
It's not a general emulator or general device. If you want one of those, you can already build one.
It's a thing that does exactly what it says it does. And it appeals to a very specific type of crowd. Which is, apparently, not you. That's ok. But don't trash it just because you don't understand it.
Please see my reply explaining the differences