Dr. Abrasive Reflects on Satiator ODE Four Years After Its Release

Humankind has now endured roughly four trips around the sun since the release of the Sega Saturn optical drive emulator, Satiator. It utilizes the Video CD Card slot on the back of the console. Often celebrated for its ease of use, and occasionally eyebrow raising for its higher price tag, this solution is now rich with features and a relatively high compatibility rate. It is among the few ODE devices that does not require disassembling the Saturn disc drive, allowing its users to fully preserve their console hardware.

Over the years, Dr. Abrasive has improved game compatibility while continually adding new features. Within the past few weeks, the Satiator went on sale, temporarily dropping in price from $259.99 to $199.99. In light of this, and its numerous firmware updates, we reached out to Dr. Abrasive to talk about the progress made with Satiator since its 10 years of development. We discussed how previously incompatible games were made functional, the higher prices some buyers face in other countries, what is next for firmware updates, and reaction to alleged cloning of the Satiator chipset.

SHIRO: “The Satiator has come a long way since it was created. How do you feel about the current state of the ODE?”

Dr. Abrasive: “Wow, it’s been a long journey — over a decade now! It sure has been a trip since I first chucked a Saturn in my suitcase in Japan thinking I’d just make some music using the SCSP — which of course I still haven’t gotten around to… I’m really happy with what the Satiator has become. I love that it’s such a nugget with its hefty shell and its cute box art. And most of all I’m happy with the firmware — the distillation of this decade of development.

“I’ve taken a very uncompromising approach to the firmware. When there’s a compatibility bug, it’s always tempting to find a quick tweak to the code that’ll get that game working. But behind that temptation lies disaster: how do you know that tweak won’t break one of the hundreds of other titles for the console? Instead, I always hunt down the root cause. How, exactly, does the Satiator’s behavior differ from the real console? This can be tremendously involved; because of the amount of CD activity in a typical game, it’s like looking for a needle in a haystack — and without access to modern debugging infrastructure on these ancient chips.

“For example, to fix Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter I ended up having to reverse engineer a significant chunk of the game code. And what I eventually found was a place where the game should have been waiting for the Saturn’s CD block to signal completion — but the game just assumed it was done after a certain time and charged ahead. Now, you can absolutely argue that that’s a bug in Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter — but it does work on real consoles! It’s very tempting to fix this by treating it as a bug and patching the game. But getting users to manually patch would suck for the plug ‘n’ play user experience I aim for — and automated patching risks introducing new issues as people use different rips, homebrew, or mods.

“So that leaves me with one acceptable option: putting in the hours to fix it at the root. For Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter, I laboriously honed some of the critical Satiator routines until the CD block was responding as fast as the game needed. That way I knew I wouldn’t break anything else; if anything, it’d improve other titles with similar issues. This process is really painful: it feels like staring into the void sometimes when you’ve put in many hours and not even found the issue yet, and when you finally find the thing you’ve then got to turn around and fix it! But looking back at the emulation quality I absolutely feel this was the right path.”

SHIRO: “The mod chip mode was a welcome addition in the latest firmware update. Any future plans for the device or firmware down the line? Any minor fixes that are still on the to do list?” Note: Mod chip mode uses the Satiator to boot a burned game that is in the Saturn CD drive.

Dr. Abrasive: “The next big item on the Satiator to-do list is a compatibility bug; Dungeons & Dragons: Shadow over Mystara is the last popular title I’m aware of with issues (it likes to crash). I’ve spent a couple of hours on digging and found zero needles in the haystack so far, so I’m girding my loins for a long, deep dive. After that I’ll have a look at my feature list again; there’s a few quality of life things I’d like to do, like adding some basic Japanese font support to the menu.”

SHIRO: “Some Saturn fans expressed concern over the high price tag compared to other ODE devices. What drives the price, and is anything being done to lower it, particularly for buyers who also have to pay import taxes? Also, how were you able to lower the price for the ongoing sale?” Note: The Satiator is manufactured in the United States.

Dr. Abrasive: “Living as I do in the faraway land of Australia, I’m particularly sensitive to how it feels to be lumped with expensive shipping and fees! I’m looking into some alternate solutions, particularly for people in the EU and the UK. That’s going to be a while longer than I’d hoped, though, so one of the main goals of the sale is to offset those expenses for our continental friends.

“While I’d like to keep the Satiator price down, I’m never going to beat something like the SAROO on price. Ultimately this is driven by labor costs, not materials: development, manufacturing, shipping, and support for the Satiator are all done in countries with higher cost of living, and thus wages, than the places we get our awesome cheap stuff from (like China).

“I saw someone on Reddit the other day calling me a “terrible businessman,” and I think they’re right, if for the wrong reasons: because of my strict do-it-right attitude, I continue to put a lot more hours into the Satiator than really makes sense financially. A good businessman would have buttoned it up years ago, declared it complete, and moved on to developing their next product. That would make the most money for the least hours of work. But I care too much about this thing to just drop it and walk away. I want it to be the best, the easiest, the smoothest, the most compatible. And that’s taken a lot of hours so far, with quite a few yet to come.”

SHIRO: “How do you feel the Satiator currently compares to the other devices? (Rhea/Phoebe, MODE, Fenrir, SAROO.)”

Dr. Abrasive: “In terms of comparison, well — compared to the internally installed devices, Satiator is of course easier to set up and to move between consoles — and as something of a preservationist myself, I like that it avoids the unscrewing of anyone’s precious treasures. Their approach of emulating just the CD drive is of course ideal for compatibility, it’s the simplest possible layer to do it.

“The SAROO is more of an interesting one: I think the approach of turning off the real CD block and presenting a fake one via the cart slot is very clever! I had a pretty good dig into the SAROO approach back when the code and designs first surfaced around 2015, but I decided the Satiator type approach was going to result in much better compatibility. There are things where they will absolutely have to resort to patching games… (example: some games turn the real CD block back on!), and because they’re writing their own simulation of the CD block rather than using the real one, there are an enormous number of subtle interactions that have to come out just right as well; I don’t envy them the amount of debugging it would take to get these things working without playing whack-a-mole as one fix breaks another title. I’ll be interested to see how that compatibility plays out in the long term; it looks like they’re putting a lot of work into it!

“I think the Satiator sits in between and gets the best of both worlds — using a drive-based emulation with the real CD block gives you a great compatibility base, while its little brain-tap through the Video CD port gives you plug-and-play operation as well.”

SHIRO: “Concerning recent clones on AliExpress, are you able share your thoughts on those? I understand a lot of work went towards preventing this from being easy to clone.”

Dr. Abrasive: “My first reaction to the cloning situation was hurt. Seeing someone taking this decade-long labor of love, and blatantly copying it, artwork and all, was really painful. (The artwork is particularly personal; the designer is my sister!) On reflection, it’s interesting that it’s taken so long.

“There was a funny incident a couple of months ago where a super pushy Chinese bloke popped up in the Satiator Discord. He was insistent that his Satiator had broken during a firmware update and that I should send him new chips for him to replace them himself… He eventually deigned to send his unit to me and it was a fascinating find: none of the parts on the circuit board had come from my assembly line! And, hilariously, it had some little dot stickers on it — old mate had put it through a 3D scanning process and missed removing some of the helper dots. So it was evident that people were actively trying to clone it this year.

“I suspect the delay between then and now was while they were figuring out how to disable the firmware update feature so people wouldn’t brick their clones trying to update them! I’ll be curious to see how they turn out too — I suspect they will be buggy as hell. But ultimately I think the worst effect here is on legitimate Satiator users, because it’s going to make providing support more difficult.”

SHIRO: “Any closing thoughts?”

Dr. Abrasive: “In closing, I’d like to share my gratitude toward the Satiator community on Discord. I’m grateful for the many thoughtful and generous people who have tested games, reported bugs, suggested features, provided feedback, and generally been lovely to me and to each other. Thanks you legends! <3”

We posted a video review of the Satiator shortly after its 2021 release. You can watch it here. Please keep in mind, a very large amount of the issues pointed out in this video have since been resolved: