New firmware for the Satiator released Wednesday adds new features to the Saturn optical drive emulator, including support for switching discs during gameplay and booting up discs that have been burned or are from any region.
Firmware version 161 and menu version 68 can be downloaded from the official Satiator website.
Being able to swap discs while a game is running has been one of the lingering problems with the Satiator. Previously, users had to restart their Saturns and choose the next game disc image from the Satiator menu, which was a bit of a hassle.
And while most multi-disc games often leave a small save file on the Saturn so that the software knows that a disc has been swapped, a couple of them — notably, Rampo — does not, leaving them unable to be completed using old Satiator firmware.
But Rampo and any other multi-disc game won’t be a problem anymore for Satiator owners. Just press the tray open button on the console and close the tray again, and the Satiator will queue up the game’s next disc, as long as it’s in the same folder and named the same aside from the disc number.
Burned discs and discs for games that don’t match your console’s region, meanwhile, can now boot up without issue with the Satiator’s new firmware. Previously, putting a disc in the Saturn when turning it on meant that the Satiator did not take over the boot sequence and the console treated the disc however it normally would.
The Satiator’s inventor, Professor Abrasive, detailed the new features in the firmware’s changelog:
- New feature: disc swapping. This allows you to flip between discs in a multidisc title just by opening and closing the CD drive lid. Simply place all the files for that title in the same folder. The CUE or ISO files must have the same name except for the disc number. When you select that folder in the menu, you will be asked which disc to boot. You need to be running menu version 68 or higher to use this feature. This allows you to complete Rampo (JP).
- New feature: real disc booting / modchip mode. You can now boot CD-Rs and out-of-region retail discs using the Satiator. Just insert the disc before powering on the console. For the fastest boot, hold A during power on; otherwise you have to wait for the drive to try and fail to read the security ring, which can take a while. The Saturn will boot to the CD player screen, then contact the Satiator (LED will turn green). The disc will then display as a Saturn game and you can boot it from there. The Saturn will stay in modchip mode across resets until you power cycle it. This feature introduces on-the-fly region patching of disc images. For this to work, the Satiator needs to know the correct region for the console. The menu reads the region from the SMPC on boot and writes it to a file on the SD card. This means you have to have booted menu version 68 or higher before modchip mode will work. If you move your Satiator (or your SD card) to a console of a different region, you need to boot the menu again to update the region on the card.
The changelog also mentioned a couple known issues:
- Multi-disc does not support CUE+ISO images.
- Because both the CUE and ISO files are independently bootable, there’s no way to tell whether it’s supposed to be one image or several.
- In modchip mode, if you don’t hold A, CD-Rs occasionally fail to boot.
- This happens when the drive takes too long hunting for the security ring. The workaround is to hold A on startup (or just try again).
This is the first official update for the Satiator’s firmware and menu in nearly two years. That update fixed problems preventing games like Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter from playing without crashing.
The Satiator is an optical drive emulator that plugs into the VCD slot in the back of the Saturn. It takes over the console’s boot sequence to play games off of an SD card. It originally released in December 2020 and can be bought here.
A beta version of this week’s firmware was released on the Satiator Discord server in August last year. At the time, it was intended only to give multi-disc support and the ability to boot up burned discs.
As users tested the firmware, they had problems booting discs — both retail and burned — with regions different than their console’s. That normally isn’t a problem when playing a game off of the Satiator’s SD card, but it was a different story for real discs.
That led Professor Abrasive to add the ability to run out-of-region discs to the firmware’s new feature list. “It patches disc data on the fly inside the CD block,” he said at the time.
There were other kinks to work out at the time, too, as some testers found that the new firmware failed to load any game, showing just a black screen. That caused Abrasive to do a lot more testing before releasing the final version of the firmware this week.
This story originally appeared on Sega Saturn SHIRO!