Kronos is a fork of YabaSanshiro, which is itself a fork of Yabause. The project was started by François, his main goal was to have an emulator benefitting from YabaSanshiro improvements, while being friendly with x86_64 architecture and desktop computers.

Over time, several new features were added :

Sega ST-V emulation (the arcade version of the Sega Saturn)

Modern OpenGL Core support, it should now have a fair compatibility, even with intel GPUs, the minimum requirement is OpenGL 3.3 Core, and 4.2 if you want to benefit from gpu tesselation

Additional things to know :

It’s using a high performance SH2 cached interpreter, albeit different from the dynarecs used in YabaSanshiro, the CPU frequency requirement is still around 30% lower than an emulator using a classic SH2 interpreter like beetle-saturn

It’s compatible with beetle-saturn savefiles, there is even a core option to load them from the same path

It’s compatible with zipped cue+bin+wav isos, you don’t need to uncompress them or convert them to CHD

There are several core options to improve rendering (tesselation, upscaling, …)

Shining Force 3 on Sega Saturn :



Cotton 2 on Sega ST-V :



Things to do/fix :

Improve compatibility with non windows/linux platforms, in the case of MacOS X we’ll first need a retroarch with OpenGL 3.3 enabled

Improve input lag, we are 1 frame behind beetle-saturn at the moment

Add CHD support

Hook optional YabaSanshiro SH2 interpreters as core options, while they are not cross-platform, they could be interesting to further improve performances on their respective platforms (x86_32,arm,arm64)

Hook alternative input devices (lightgun, mouse, keyboard, …)

Fix the “toggling fullscreen/windowed” issue (it will result in a black screen if you do that while playing)

Fix game specific issues, detailed reports are welcome at https://github.com/FCare/Kronos/issues

There is a compatibility list available here