Satiator (Saturn Drive Emulator) Review
Introduction
After a multi-year wait, despite half of Australia (where it's creator lives) burning down and a global panic over COVID-19 dragging everything to a crawl the Satiator has finally made it to a retail release. For the unfamiliar, the Satiator is an Optical Drive Emulator (ODE) for the Sega Saturn game console. In a nutshell it lets you play Saturn games from solid-state storage (an SD card) rather than the Saturn's CD drive.
The Competition
When the Satiator was first announced there was only (technically) one competing product on the market; Deunan's Rhea/Phoebe ODE products. During its 3-year long incubation, two other contenders have made it to market. The first is the Fenrir by CED which is very similar in design to the Rhea/Phoebe and easily the least expensive option. The second is the MODE by TerraOnion which costs considerably more than the other two but provides better options and presentation. I don't own the other devices so I won't attempt to compare them based on anything other than their published functionality and pricing.
The Satiator's Advantage
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| The Satiator's one step installation - plug it in and you're basically done. |
The one thing that sets the Satiator apart from its competition is that it doesn't require removal of the original CD drive. In fact installation is as simple as plugging it into the MPEG card slot in the back of the Saturn. This affords several considerable advantages:
- You don't even need a screwdriver to install it
- You don't need to pay anyone to install it even if you have no technical skills
- You don't need to buy/make mounting brackets for it or its media
- It's compatible with every Saturn model with an MPEG card slot - including the NaviSaturn - ribbon type is a non-factor.
- If a game isn't currently compatible with the Satiator, you can still play it off of a disc. (You can't do this with the other devices because there is no longer a disc drive).
While most people would probably find the notion of removing the cartridge slot from Sega Genesis (meaning you could no longer plug in any game cartridges) in order to be able to use an Everdrive a ridiculous non-starter, many seem more than prepared to discard the optical drive from their console even though in principle they'd be doing the same thing as sacrificing a console's cartridge slot. A very popular belief in retro gaming circles is that the CD drives in all of these 90's era consoles are dead or dying and this is often used as a way to dismiss the Satiator's biggest advantage. I'd like to take a moment to break down and rebut that argument.
While it's true that _any_ device with moving parts will eventually succumb to wear and fail, the laser apparatus in the Saturn and many other consoles of its era are not as fragile as many people seem to believe.
A few factors seem largely responsible this perception:
- The horrifically flawed design of the original PS1 laser which caused almost universal failure seems to have given all CD lasers a bad reputation.
- Years of using cheap CD-Rs on chipped systems caused accelerated wear because the lasers were not calibrated for CD-R media and couldn't properly focus causing them to continuously re-read.
- People "tweaking the pots" in an effort to improve performance as a pickup begins to have trouble reading discs.
- Complete lack of maintenance.
Satiator Packaging
The Satiator ships in a box that's about the right size and shape for a deck of playing cards. From the "kawaii" little panda-like cartoon mascot to having just enough Japanese writing and awkward-ish English to evoke nostalgia for the unofficial import hardware from the 90's.
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| The Satiator product box next to a CD case for size comparison |
The Device
The Satiator, itself is much smaller than I had pictured it - likely owing to the fact that I've never seen a Saturn MPEG card in person. If I hadn't been following this device since it's initial announcement I might not have paid so much attention to the quality plastic molding it's housed within. It's very similar to the translucent gray of the official Sega 4MB RAM cart. The addition of glitter does do something to increase the cuteness, it must be said.
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| The Satiator itself next to a Gameboy cartridge for size comparison |
On the back is a micro-USB port, a full-sized SD card slot and a convenient retractable tab for ease of removal.
Preparing Your SD Card
The official Satiator website (satiator.net) has a "Getting Started" section that has links and explains the basics of where to place the menu executable, and the firmware update file.
Like a lot of devices in this space, it requires that you force larger SD cards to be formatted as FAT32, though this is the first place I've heard that the limitation is because of licensing (evidently Microsoft charges for ExFAT) rather than some technology limitation.
There's no monkey business with firmware being locked behind serial numbers or a login wall, and according to Prof. Abrasive (the creator of the device) it's virtually brick-proof. If something goes wrong with firmware, you just try again.
The website tells you a little bit about how to organize games on the SD card file system by explaining that you may nest items, but doesn't really go into compatibility concerns.
Image Compatibility
There is very little in the way of documentation about supported image formats. In general any BIN/CUE seems to work - including multi-bin titles, and BIN/CUE that use alternative extensions like ".img" or ".iso". Also simply ISO files will work as well.
Menu / Game Directory Layout
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| The Satiator Menu - This is just a directory listing of the root of the SD card. |
The Satiator menu is very bare-bones. As of right now there don't appear to be any options at all - just navigate and launch. The bottom of the screen has a single strip that tells you what firmware and menu version you're running. I would much rather have a quick lightweight menu than something that's fancy but slow, but I would like just a teensy bit more.
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| Right now the Satiator menu is limited to a display width of 32 characters with no option to scroll. Anything longer than that will be truncated when displayed. |
File and directory names are fixed at 32 characters wide and there is no horizontal scrolling so for long directory or file names where they only differ after the first 32 characters you'll either have to shorten the names or guess which is which.
The menu supports nested directories.
Only directory names and files with a ".cue" or a ".iso" extension will be listed in the menu. If a directory only includes a single ".cue" file, when you highlight and activate that directory instead of descending the directory, it will automatically launch the game within. If there are multiple such files in the directory either because you've placed all of the discs in a multi-disc set together, or because the file is in ISO/CUE format, the menu will descend the directory and present you with a list to choose from.
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| The "Save-Game-Copier" directory contains an ISO/CUE image. Aside: the Save-Game-Copier is a lightweight tool that supports copying savegame files to multiple devices including the Satiator - it's available here. |
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| Since the Satiator recognzies both ".cue" and ".iso" as launch-able files, instead of just launching the ".cue" it descends the directory to let you choose which one to launch (in this case it doesn't matter because the .cue is just pointing to the .iso) |
Game Compatibility
The Satiator is still fairly new and doesn't boast 100% compatibility. There is a list being tracked of incompatible games here. Many initial incompatibilities have already been fixed and it seems like the stragglers all suffer from similar problems - either booting to a black screen or kicking back to the BIOS. I take this to mean that we're only a couple of fixes away from most of the remaining games working as they should. If you caught it in the images above, I'm on the latest firmware for the Satiator as of this writing and it's still marked "Beta" despite already having a very high compatibility rate. This is a pretty strong indication of Prof. Abrasive's commitment to fixing the last holdouts for pretty much complete compatibility.
The only games that can't and won't be fixed are the ones requiring the Saturn MPEG cart. According to Prof. Abrasive it would technically have been possible to design the hardware to perform the acrobatics of swapping itself out of memory and "becoming" an MPEG cart but it would have increased the cost of the device disproportionately to implement for the 15 or so games that require it (of which Lunar is the only one I personally have any interest in at all) - and again given the fact that anyone with a working disc drive can simply swap out the Satiator for an MPEG card and play the game off of a disc, this seems a fair decision.
Compatibility with Saturn Cartridges
The Satiator is fully compatible with Backup Memory and RAM expansion cartridges, however Action Replay and PseudoSaturn Kai carts are another matter. It seems that the AR/PS carts interrupt the boot process before the Satiator has an opportunity to hook it (possibly because of the need to check for a disc in the drive before booting the menu). Prof. Abrasive mentioned that he plans to create firmware for AR/PS carts that will make them compatible with the Satiator and perhaps allow for extended functionality (like in-game-reset, or auto-backup savegames to SD) at the same time.
Playing Games
As it ought to be, once you get past the menu and launch a game, the experience is basically the same as playing a game from disc. The obvious exceptions being that you no longer hear the disc drive spinning and loading is completely smooth. In order to maintain compatibility, the Satiator limits transfer speeds to match the original Saturn drive speed, however since there's no longer any re-reads or seek time like you would have with a real CD drive, the process is marginally faster than loading from a CD. Prof. Abrasive did mention possibly adding an experimental feature to turn off the speed limit, however that is not currently an option.
In the few hours I've had with games, I've not experienced any issues. FMV seems to work smoothly, audio seems to be correct (correct volume, no weird issues like what the PS-IO experienced), gameplay is pretty much identical, and if I'm ever in doubt as to whether the Satiator is doing something wrong testing is as simple as popping the disc in to the Saturn and trying it that way.
One thing I've really enjoyed is the ability to play in-progress translations and hacks without needing to burn discs. The Grandia English translation and Nocturne in the Moonlight (Symphony of the Night) 4MB hacks have been my favorites so far. (Now I just wish Ms. Tea would release the beta for Magic School Lunar!)
Development
The menu system is all open source and available on Github so anyone with the programming chops who wants to take a crack at it can improve or re-write the menu system.
Likewise Prof. Abrasive has created a fork of the Yabuse Saturn emulator which includes an emulated version of the Satiator to allow anyone to develop against the hardware without even needing to own one. This has already borne fruit in the fact that Slinga was able to successfully integrate the Satiator into its Save-Game-Copier utility for the Saturn (so you can copy your saves from the Saturn to the SD card inserted into the Satiator and vice-versa.)
Talk about embracing the community and lowering the bar for contribution to the project!
Conclusion
It's my personal opinion that the Satiator is the best and ultimate ODE for the Saturn owing to it's nigh universal console compatibility, simple non-technical installation, high game compatibility, ability to operate in harmony with the CD drive and overall performance. About the only thing that should give anyone pause over the Satiator is its $259 (before shipping) price tag. At that price it's the most expensive of the Saturn's ODE options. However when you factor in that it's a self-contained solution - you don't need to pay anyone to install it for you (though the other ODEs do have very simple installs, some people still don't feel comfortable opening up their consoles and prefer to have experts do it for them) and the fact that it doesn't disturb your Saturn's CD drive (so you don't have to keep a second console around to play games that won't work with the ODE) the price difference becomes less of an issue.
