A promising Sega Saturn emulator brings major improvements in a beefy update

The Sega Saturn is one of the more complicated retro video game consoles to emulate, but we’ve seen several solid emulators over the years. Most recently, a developer released the nifty Ymir emulator for computers, and it’s just received a major update.

Ymir is a Sega Saturn emulator for Windows, Linux, and MacOS that was released earlier this year. Developer StrikerX3 has just released version 0.1.7, which includes various additions and tweaks.

For starters, several under-the-hood adjustments have led to general performance improvements. These improvements vary by title, but the developer says some games have seen a 10% performance boost.

What else is new with the Ymir emulator?

Furthermore, the emulator has also seen significant compatibility improvements. While only ~10% of all Saturn games have been tested via Ymir, almost 80% of these titles are now listed as compatible. That doesn’t seem like much in isolation, but popular titles that are now playable include Command and Conquer, Daytona USA, Nights into Dreams, Sega Touring Car Championship, Sonic Jam, and Wipeout 2097.

The emulator also lets you take screenshots (in PNG format), which can be scaled up to 4x quality. Finally, the app now supports Sega Saturn’s Arcade Racer and Mission Stick peripherals, in case you want a more authentic experience.

In any event, we’re glad to see improvements and additions coming to this latest Sega Saturn emulator. Ymir promises a user-friendly experience that doesn’t require a relatively beefy PC, which is at odds with some rival emulators. In fact, the developer previously claimed that Ymir runs fine on a 2013-era Intel Core i7 4470 CPU, “even with rewind buffer enabled and 3 cores pegged by a heavy background processing job.”