Kronos 2.8.0 fixes over 100 Saturn games and adds a graphics editor

A new Kronos release repairs more than 100 Sega Saturn games, adds controller and filter support, and brings ST-V arcade emulation in line with MAME.

AI-drafted from 2 sources. This story was written with AI from the outside reporting listed under Sources, and checked by automated tools before it went up. The originals have the full detail.

The Sega Saturn emulator Kronos has had its biggest update in some time. Version 2.8.0 fixes more than 100 games across the board, from freezes and black screens to broken controls, graphical glitches and audio bugs, according to a changelog for the release covered by Tradu-France and discussed on r/emulation.

Kronos began life as a fork of Yabause, one of the older Saturn emulator lineages, and has spent years picking up the accuracy and feature work that Yabause itself never got round to. The changelog says the person now running the project took it over specifically to stop it dying, and describes 2.8.0 as probably the largest update the emulator has had. That is a lot of ground to cover on a system with a reputation for being awkward to emulate: the Saturn's dual SH-2 processors and unusual VDP1/VDP2 graphics setup have tripped up emulator authors for decades.

A hundred-plus fixes, game by game

The changelog lists individual fixes rather than a vague summary, which is unusual and useful. Titles named as newly playable include Another Memories, BattleSport, Bedlam, Corpse Killer, Crime Patrol, Deep Fear, Densetsu no Ogre Battle, Device Reign, Discworld, Fantastep and GunBlaze-S, each previously blocked by a black screen, a freeze after the BIOS, or shooting-gallery games where bullets simply failed to register. Die Hard Trilogy has reportedly been added to the emulator's internal game database with the correct 8 Mbit cartridge setting, which is what makes it run at all. Audio fixes are credited for titles including Independence Day, Spot Goes to Hollywood, Thunderstrike 2 and several of the Sega Ages re-releases.

The update also adds Video CD (VCD) support, restores the built-in BIOS option (with a note that some games still refuse to start on it), and fixes long-standing bugs in Japanese save data strings and in save states. A new, experimental graphics editor lets users inspect and presumably tweak sprite and background data directly, and the debug tools have been reworked with new VDP1 and VDP2 exports and extra command-line options.

Catching up with MAME on ST-V

Perhaps the more technical headline is arcade emulation. The Saturn shared its hardware with Sega's ST-V arcade board, and Kronos says ST-V games now match the emulation level of MAME, the long-running arcade emulator that is usually the reference point for accuracy on these systems. New additions include decryption for Decathlete, making it playable, plus support for the Hopper and Mahjong Panel controllers and drivers for Challenge Golf, Name Club V4, Print Club Sony Creative Ver.5, Tsuribori Taikai and Wanpaku Safari.

On the picture side, 2.8.0 adds a run of interpolation and “embellishment” filters: an adaptive sharpening filter, AMD's FSR 1.0 upscaling, Scale3x and Scale4x, Lanczos 3, a sharp bilinear mode, FXAA, a CRT aperture-grille shader and a cel-shading toon filter. The changelog is upfront that none of this makes emulation cycle-perfect. It says some games still lack precisely emulated cycle timing, and that the project has borrowed some of those timings from Mednafen, another Saturn-capable emulator, describing them as imprecise but functional.

What is still unclear

The changelog claims Kronos now emulates “around 99 percent” of the roughly 1,300 known Saturn titles, but also admits it is impossible to test every one from start to finish, so bugs will remain. No version numbering scheme or formal roadmap is given beyond this release, and there is no independent benchmarking yet to confirm the accuracy claims against MAME or Mednafen. For now the detailed, title-by-title fix list is the strongest evidence on offer, and for a system whose library is still being picked apart for quirks, that level of detail is itself notable.

Sources

Image: Tradu-France