This Sega Saturn emulator just got a big speed bump and dozens of fixes

The Sega Saturn was far from the most profitable console for the company, especially since it arrived at the same time as the first-ever PlayStation, which, by comparison, was a success. Despite that, there has been a reasonable demand for suitable emulators, likely due to their limited sales outside Japan. Unlike more popular consoles, there’s a dearth of emulators for the Sega Saturn, with few viable options, such as Yaba Sanshiro 2 or workarounds using RetroArch or OpenEmu. More recently, a third option has cropped up: Ymir, which lets you run Sega Saturn titles on Windows, Mac, and Linux, and it is now getting a major update.

After releasing v0.3 in April and v0.3.1 in May, the developer StrikerX3 of Ymir has rolled out two subsequent updates. Of the two, v0.3.2 gets most of the improvements, with a major focus on fixing bugs that previously caused the emulator to crash. The developer has specifically reworked the part that replicates how the console interacts with game discs, which now ensures more stable operations, and makes icons such as Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter finally playable.

The developers also reworked the audio pipeline, freeing up compute. This, in turn, improves performance by around 25%. The release also improves how the emulator handles CPU-related tasks, and these “microoptimizations” add an additional boost of roughly 10–15% for CPU-heavy games.

Additionally, the update enables changing clock frequencies of the virtual CPUs. Ymir now supports overclocking up to 500% to reduce lag in poorly optimized titles, and underclocking to 25% for light games to reduce overhead. Besides these, the build brings a long list of big fixes that previously prevented specific games from launching or running properly, and these have been mentioned in the changelog on GitHub.

Besides these changes, v0.3.3 brings subtle changes, including improvements in how certain games render colors. Despite these features, the developer insists Ymir is still a work in progress, and some games may still not work, though they claim that a good chunk of the popular ones now do