More Cassini Insights

posted in Emulator News by narvick on Jul 18th, 2004

Runik, the author of Saturnin, was kind enough to write in with this:
    Hi ! I'm Runik, author of Saturnin (a saturn emu as you may have guessed :p). As the confirmation mail to access to your boards is a bit long to show up, I would like to write my concerns about Cassini. I read the thread about emufanatics on your forums, and there are a few things I would like to clarify. First, I have nothing against The Scribe, he stated his position about the legality of the emulator, and i've nothing to say about that. To be honest, I don't care much about the legality of Cassini, as it's none of my concern. This is a matter between them and Sega. But that's not the point. The thing that really bothers me is that Cassini is just a hack of an existing (and now defunct) commercial emulator named Girigiri. The Cassini team is trying by all means to do people believe that Cassini is a new open source sega saturn emulator, which is totally false. They base their claim on the fact that the coder (Snail) changed 40% of the original code of the emulator, added 3 major feature to it, and provided the sourcecode within the package. I'll try to explain each point on a developper point of vue, as I know quite a few things about the saturn hardware : 1. the 40% source change and the 3 major improvements : When you read the Cassini website, it's stated that there's almost no documentation available about the saturn. Isn't it a bit paradoxal to change 40% of an emulator without any documentation ? We (other coders interested in this issue and me) asked Snail to provide a detailed list of what he changed on the emulator. We posted our requests on different boards (including the official one) and we never got any answer. People who tested Cassini after testing Girigiri didn't found any big differences between the two. So I sincerely doubt about the amount of work spent on Cassini, and to me it's just a hack of another emulator, which was already really good ... 2. Sourcecode bundled with the emulator : The sourcecode files are just big assembly files generated by an automatic binary disassembler like IDA, which is far of being something usable by any developper. Some skilled assembly developpers (not me :p) tried to compile the files anyway with no success, and the questions regarding this matter were still never answered. I personnaly highly doubt that any improvement besides the frontend and some minor fixes can be done using this material ... The original author of Girigiri (Megadeath) and Sega did a tremendous job with this emulator, to me it's an example to follow, and I really don't like to see people claiming hard work made by others their own ... It's a question of morality and respect. Anyway I strongly encourage you to read the whole thread at emufanatics, as there are some issues with the Cassini team which I don't talk about here (like the game.dat file problem). The thread is located here : EmuFanatics Thread Thanks for reading me :) Best regards, Runik
Okay, here's the deal. ZD will not be posting any more Cassini news unless there is further legal development or a new release. We'd rather not be caught in the middle of this controversy. ZD neither supports nor condemns Cassini, we just try to bring you, the reader, news.

If and when the emulator has been deemed illegal, we will remove the download. For the time being, you can still download Cassini at the Saturn Emulators page