The SEGA Saturn (1994) was SEGA's 32-bit console, and the home of many great 2D games, shoot 'em ups and fighting games. It sold well in Japan and poorly elsewhere, so most of its library never left Japan.
We have about 1,000 SEGA Saturn games on My Abandonware. They are disc images: one file of about 400 MB per disc, and some games have several discs.
SEGA Saturn emulators
The Saturn was hard to emulate for years, and it got much better recently. Ymir is the easiest to start with, Mednafen the most accurate. All of them need the Saturn BIOS.
- Ymir (Windows, Mac, Linux): a new emulator, fast and easy to set up, with very low input lag. It reads every common disc format. A good first choice.
- Mednafen (Windows, Linux): the accuracy reference for years, also available as the Beetle Saturn core in RetroArch. It has no menus of its own.
- Kronos (Windows, Linux): a fast emulator with its own window and menus, also a RetroArch core.
- SSF (Windows): the old Japanese emulator that ran Saturn games first, and still runs a lot of them.
- Yaba Sanshiro (Android): the choice on a phone or a tablet.
The Saturn BIOS
Every Saturn emulator needs the BIOS of the console, a file of 512 KB, often named saturn_bios.bin or mpr-17933.bin. It's copyrighted, so no emulator includes it.
See our page about BIOS files to get one. The Saturn came in three regions, Japan, America and Europe, each with its own BIOS. Ymir looks in a roms/ipl folder next to its program, and picks the BIOS that matches the disc you load.
Running Saturn games
Unzip the game, then open the disc image in the emulator: the .cue file, or the .chd file when our archive holds one. The console boots from the disc and the game starts.
Our archives hold one of these disc formats:
- .cue with .bin: the most common. Always open the
.cuefile, not the.bin: it holds the track list, and Saturn games keep their music as audio tracks on the disc. - .chd: one compressed file that holds the whole disc, music included. Smaller, and easier to keep.
- .iso, .ccd with .img, .mds with .mdf: other disc formats, read by Ymir and most emulators.
Some games have several discs, named "Disc 1", "Disc 2" and so on: download them all, then change the disc in the emulator when the game asks. Some of our files say "1G1R release", which means one version was picked for the game, usually the best or the most complete.
Many Saturn games are Japanese. The real console refused a disc from another region, so a Japanese game usually wants the Japanese BIOS. Most emulators can also pick the region by themselves, or let you set it.
The RAM cartridge
Several late games, mostly fighting games, came with a memory cartridge that the Saturn needed to run them. Turn it on in the emulator, or the game stops at a message.
Games like X-Men vs. Street Fighter and Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter asked for a 1 MB or 4 MB RAM cartridge. In Ymir, Mednafen or Kronos, pick the cartridge in the settings, then start the game again. If a game complains about memory, or the picture is broken, this is usually why.
I need help!
We do not provide support for running abandonware games. Saturn emulation has a small, knowledgeable community.
Ask on SegaXtreme, the main Saturn forum in English, where the people who write these emulators also answer.
Checked in October 2026 against each emulator's own documentation and, where it exists, its source code. Game counts and file sizes come from our own catalogue. These guides were drafted with the help of an AI assistant and checked by hand before publishing. If something here is out of date, tell us.