Hello, I'm helping out with the Shining Force III translation project and I have a few questions and was hoping someone here with more knowledge would be able to assist.
1. How stable the Saturn core of Bizhawk compared to SSF or Yabause v0.9.14.
2. Does bizhawk allow for save file transfers e.g. if I beat shining force III scenario 1, can I load that file into scenario 2 similar to how an actual Sega Saturn works?
3. I see the standard version of Yabause allows me to dump sprites and textures, but I don't see that function listed in bizhawk's menu, was it removed or am I just overlooking it?
I appreciate any help provided. Thank you!
Yes the home page indicates it uses yabause as a base but I think it uses a previous version. I didn't know if biz hawk added any performance improvements over ghe stand alone version though since it added a few other features.
If youre reverse engineering and hacking a game, you're going to be pushing saturn waaaaaay harder than bizhawk can handle. And I can't believe bizhawk has added any features to the saturn core.. except I guess for the standard hex editor and stuff. If there's not saturn emulator with even that debugging capability, then we're in a pretty poor condition. Anyway excepting that, Bizhawk is not your best choice here except maybe for casual testing, which closely approximates a casual playthrough.
1) It uses an old Yabause core. It's best if you just use the latest standalone yabause version.
2) Yes, just rename the files to match the sequel. The save files have the .SaveRAM extension, but they are the same as a regular 64kb bkram.bin other emulators use. So you can even transfer between emulators. Bizhawk doesn't support the external backup cart though.
3) Bizhawk doesn't have that function, sadly.