• Welcome Back Guest,
    There's currently a few rebranding bugs, one being emails aren't working, we're aware of this and will work on this as we have time. If you need a password reset, please contact us on Discord links in the navbar.

Saturn Saturn Satiator Progress Thread

megavolt85 said:
to be honest, I'm surprised at the greed of commercial developers on the retro scene :)
Click to expand...

Retrogaming in general is becoming less feasible thanks to these greedy people.

$250 is an obscene price, even terraonion mode feels cheap in comparison...

Come on Satiator should be priced $100, even $150 would be already a stretch.
All the wait for nothing, thank goodness prof Abrasive said it would not be a premium priced item.

I wish Krikzz would start working soon on Saturn on a similar card...
 
I was guessing 180-200 USD range, once he went with molding tooling and USA-based soldering/assembly.
 
Well, Is not for me in Brazil. I had high hopes this would cost less than fenrir or mode, but just one of these costs 150% of my monthly paid salary.

Still will play on crappy emulators. Not this time for me.
 
I am disappointed by the Satiator's price as well. Guess I will buy Terraonion's device in the future, with that I can at least tell myself that I can also put it in my Dreamcast if my USB GD-ROM for that system fails someday.
 
Well, I'm very disappointed. Especially since I'm fairly certain that he said that it wouldn't be too expensive. I could understand 150$, but 250$+ is just hard to justify from a buyer's perspective for such an old cheap console.

Guess I'll get a Phoebe, or plain old CD-Rs in the end.
 
I am disappointed in the price, but if a very nice menu comes to it then I would be more inclined. If the menu looks like dos, then a fenrir is a nice choice.
 
I, too, was shocked by the price. And I do recall those claims about it not being premium priced / as cheap as possible. Granted those claims were way before the decision to manufacture and assemble PCBs in the US. That alone may easily have added $100 to the price (but I’m just throwing that number out of my ass).

After letting it all sink in for a while, I don’t think it’s that ridiculously priced anymore. US production, injection molded case (most ODEs come with a crappy 3D printed mount, at best), awesome product box / art. Even has some cool bonus features like a USB port that may potentially be used for Saturn development and debugging in the future.

I do understand everyone’s dissatisfaction and frustration though, he didn’t deliver on the price-point that was “promised” (everyone’s expectations were for a lower priced product).

That said, I’m 95% sure I’m getting one. I’m 8XX in queue though, so I won’t make the first batch, perhaps some early reviews could sway me otherwise. For me the biggest selling-point is the open source menu system. It really bugs me when these are kept closed source, and one is left at the mercy of the maker.
 
At this point, I'm seriously considering resurrecting my "never quite finished" Saturn ODE project, getting it to a workable state and open-sourcing it. When I shelved it, it was at the point where it could generate a transport stream and status to play simulated audio CDs and the Saturn side could read simulated data CDs, but it didn't boot.

It was also slow - largely because it was accessing the SD card in SPI mode since the CPU I was using (STM32F103C6T8?) only had a regular SPI interface and couldn't handle the cards in 4-wire mode.

All of this was potentially fixable - but that "hijack the CD block" approach that the Satiator used was clearly better and since it was apparently going to be a low-cost product I couldn't see any point in carrying on. Have to find all the design files...
 
Trimesh said:
At this point, I'm seriously considering resurrecting my "never quite finished" Saturn ODE project, getting it to a workable state and open-sourcing it. When I shelved it, it was at the point where it could generate a transport stream and status to play simulated audio CDs and the Saturn side could read simulated data CDs, but it didn't boot.

It was also slow - largely because it was accessing the SD card in SPI mode since the CPU I was using (STM32F103C6T8?) only had a regular SPI interface and couldn't handle the cards in 4-wire mode.

All of this was potentially fixable - but that "hijack the CD block" approach that the Satiator used was clearly better and since it was apparently going to be a low-cost product I couldn't see any point in carrying on. Have to find all the design files...
Click to expand...
I'd buy that. Hell, even if you don't feel like working on it yourself, you could open source it as-is. The guys from Black Dog Tech probably could finish development and market it at a fair price.
 
Trimesh said:
It was also slow - largely because it was accessing the SD card in SPI mode since the CPU I was using (STM32F103C6T8?) only had a regular SPI interface and couldn't handle the cards in 4-wire mode.
Click to expand...

how you transfer data? STM32F103C8T6 don't have hardware I2S
 
megavolt85 said:
how you transfer data? STM32F103C8T6 don't have hardware I2S
Click to expand...

Using the USART in synchronous mode to produce the data stream and BCLK - LRCLK was generated using one of the timers in counter mode driven from the BCLK signal. The chip was honestly a horrible choice for the application, but it was to hand.

I'm thinking of taking the code skeleton I have and porting it to the ESP32 - that has decent I2S support and can alos support SD cards in 4-wire mode. It's also way faster and has 2 cores...
 
megavolt85 said:
may be look to CH376S? USB with low price, SPI or 8 bit parrallel interface
Click to expand...

I did have a look at it a while ago - it seems like a nice chip, my only issue with it is that it doesn't support exFAT, which can cause problems is you are using > 32GB SD cards through an adapter.
 
Trimesh said:
At this point, I'm seriously considering resurrecting my "never quite finished" Saturn ODE project, getting it to a workable state and open-sourcing it. When I shelved it, it was at the point where it could generate a transport stream and status to play simulated audio CDs and the Saturn side could read simulated data CDs, but it didn't boot.

It was also slow - largely because it was accessing the SD card in SPI mode since the CPU I was using (STM32F103C6T8?) only had a regular SPI interface and couldn't handle the cards in 4-wire mode.

All of this was potentially fixable - but that "hijack the CD block" approach that the Satiator used was clearly better and since it was apparently going to be a low-cost product I couldn't see any point in carrying on. Have to find all the design files...
Click to expand...

it would be cool to have more solutions, especially if they can be reliable and low cost at the same time (something that is not easy at all).
Also your project could be adapted for a similar approach of Satiator = using the mpeg card slot and leave the cd drive in place?
 
https://www.patreon.com/posts/faq-40787196

Long form FAQ posted yesterday.

  • supports images in BIN/CUE format (single- and multi-BIN), and ISO files. It supports on-the-fly region patching of games, so you don't need to modify your games to play them out of region.
  • acts as a "system disc", allowing you to boot CD-Rs, if for some reason you really want to do that.
  • compatible with both RAM carts and the backup save cartridge.
  • unaffected by 50/60 Hz switches, and by modchips.

Coming features.

  • Saturns with BIOS 1.00, booting into the Satiator menu requires opening and closing the CD drive lid. I already have a fix for this and it just needs a little bit of integration work.
  • will be a save manager integrated to the menu, so that you can transfer game saves from the Saturn's memory to the SD card and vice versa. This will also work for the backup cartridge, if you have one.
  • Multi-disc games will be supported. Opening and closing the Saturn's real drive lid will be used to indicate to the Satiator that you want to switch discs.
  • AR not supported AS IS, but AR also stores its firmware on Flash chips - it can be reprogrammed at will. So my plan here is to develop an alternative firmware for the AR to embrace the Satiator. This is actually an opportunity disguised as a problem: there are a number of cool features which can be implemented once you have a little bit of storage in the cart slot. This will be open source, however it eventuates. In the mean time, it's possible to use an AR as a RAM cartridge by flashing it with an empty firmware - which is what I run on my development system.

Compatibility spreadsheet.

 
Virtua Hunter said:
it would be cool to have more solutions, especially if they can be reliable and low cost at the same time (something that is not easy at all).
Also your project could be adapted for a similar approach of Satiator = using the mpeg card slot and leave the cd drive in place?
Click to expand...
The short answer is no - it's one of those things that's theoretically possible, but would require a huge amount of work including lots of reverse engineering of the existing CD block. The amount of time it's taken to get the Satiator out is a good indication of this. This just connects to the CD drive flex cable.
 
Trimesh said:
The short answer is no - it's one of those things that's theoretically possible, but would require a huge amount of work including lots of reverse engineering of the existing CD block. The amount of time it's taken to get the Satiator out is a good indication of this. This just connects to the CD drive flex cable.
Click to expand...

I see, after all it took years to develop satiator.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom