The mobile version of Yaba Sanshiro for Android phones was updated Saturday.
The developer, Miyax, overhauled his Saturn emulator to Version 1.10.1, switching the way it renders graphics from OpenGL to Vulkan.
The free version can be downloaded here and the paid version, which adds some extra features for US$5.60, can be downloaded here.
Miyax uploaded a video to YouTube showing off the difference the switch to Vulkan makes.
In a blog post, Miyax explained his reasoning behind the change in drivers.
“I was impressed that the Retroid Pocket 3+ runs Yaba Sanshiro at full speed. But I also noticed some features like tessellation do not work, so I tried to implement them for this device. But these issues happened inside of the OpenGL ES driver and seemed hard to fix by me. So I try them on my Vulkan code. Then it’s easily fixed. I found that I am in a new era. OpenGL ES is sunsetting. GPU maker will not support OpenGL ES drivers anymore. VDP (Sega Saturn video processer) emulation with Vulkan is mandatory to adapt to this era.”
—Miyax
He admits that this implementation is a work in progress and glitches are likely to happen, but he’s going to work to improve it as feedback comes in.
If you’d like to give some feedback, you can join the Yaba Sanshiro Discord server here.
There’s no word yet whether the Windows version of Yaba Sanshiro, which hasn’t been updated since August last year, will be updated to use Vulkan drivers.
Yaba Sanshiro began development eight years ago as a fork of Yabause, an emulator that is no longer actively worked on, to bring it to Android devices. A PC version was released about a year later, seeing regular updates alongside the Android version.
Its name was changed to Yaba Sanshiro 2 in April 2021 after Google blacklisted the original app for including Action Replay cheats.
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