Some consoles are harder to emulate than others. The Nintendo 64 is one of them, as is the Sega Saturn, well known for its complex architecture.

Many of you on our Discord have told us about performance problems on these two machines, whether on a Raspberry Pi, Mini PC or other device. Rest assured, these problems are not caused by your hardware or Recalbox.

And with good reason: emulation of the Nintendo 64 and Saturn has always been tricky. Due to a history of emulators cobbled together over the years, the results vary greatly from one game to the next. Some run very well, others much less so, as we explained in this article.

As far as Recalbox is concerned, the Saturn can be emulated via four different emulators: Mednafen, Yabause**, YabaSanshiro** and Kronos**. All of which means you can run iconic titles such as Nights into Dreams, Sega Rally Championship, Daytona USA, or the Panzer Dragoon and Virtua Fighter series in the best possible conditions.

Gamekult today introduces us to a newcomer to the world of Saturn emulation: Ymir, which aims to simplify console emulation while improving performance.

For the time being, only the BIN+CUE, IMG+CCD, MDF+MDS and ISO game formats are supported. The CHD format is not yet supported at the time of writing, but the developer has confirmed on Reddit that it will be included sooner or later. Progressive rendering** is also under development.

Initial feedback from users on this same thread has been particularly encouraging, suggesting a bright future for this new project. For the moment, we haven't yet tested Ymir on Recalbox, but we'll be sure to keep you informed if it's implemented.