Happy Camper

I love video games. I like old video games. I have emulators for every console I have ever owned, and the games I used to play. One of my favorite consoles was the Saturn. Died fairly quickly in the US, but had a fairly long life in Japan. I loved the Clockwork Knight games, the Panzer Dragoon games, and there were scads of RPGs on it (Working Designs did 4 or so games for it, plus the Shining Force games, Shining in the Darkness and others). My favorite game for the system, and my favorite shooter of all time is Radiant Silvergun.

I bought this game imported when it was out, and it had a limited release IIRC, and I got one of the last one available for import.* Well I love this game. I enjoy shooters but I am not good at them. This one has a difference from the rest of the genre - instead of power-ups you pick up and you play (and then loose when you die), your weapons (and you have 6 of them) gain powerlevel as you kill things with that weapon. So if I shoot down lots of stuff with the "a" button my "a" weapon gets better.
When the game ends you can save your game - it doesn't save your progress, but it saves your weapon levels. So in a couple of days, when you play some more your weapons are as powerful as they were at the end of the last game. So you blow through early levels much faster. For someone who isn't all that great with shooters, this is a great blessing.
Then our Saturn died. The internal battery went kaput - it wouldn't keep saves. And trying to find a working Saturn in the area or a replacement batter was difficult and/or expensive.

So I kept trying emulators. The primary one I looked at was Satourne. Nifty little game, and on my old machine before I had a 3-d card it ran at about 15 frames a second (60 is standard for the console). So I gave up.
Then I got a 3-d card and it ran at about 25-30 fps. So I gave up.
Then I got the Phoenix, and it ran at 40-45 fps. I tried for a while, but a 25% speed drop was still too much, so I gave up.

There is another Saturn emulator, SSF, but it had some beefy reqs - a 64 bit athalon or a dual core. I had completely drove it out of memory. But in searching for a Jaguar emulator (Just so I could play Aliens vs Predator again dang it) I ran across SSF. And I thought, wait, I have a 64 bit processor, a beefy 3-d card and lots of memory.

It worked.

So I've been playing Radiant Silvergun, and am ripping a bunch of my old Saturn games to isos to mount on my virtual drive to game with (As a lot of them are irreplaceable I don't want to use the actual games in play.)

I be a happy camper.


* I never knew that the original was as popular as it was. Years later I was surfing a message board and someone who had a pirate of the game wanted an original. A reply commented about having deep pockets. So I checked ebay - it was going for $400 to $500! I had a genuine rarity on my hands. O keep good care of that baby.
I just checked ebay again - someone has a new, unopened copy listing at $1,000. Wow.