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Menu User Guide

This page explains the features of the menu, as of version 64.

You can find all releases of the menu, and a CHANGELOG, here.

Disc image browser

When you start up your console, the Satiator menu will start in the disc image browser. This shows all of the folders and recognised images in your SD card.

Press A or C to launch a game or enter a folder. If you enter a folder with only one disc image in it, it will be automatically launched.

Power cycle the Saturn to return to the menu from the game. (Or, if you're using a patched Action Replay firmware, you can use A+B+C+Start a couple of times.)

The menu performs a region-free boot of the disc, so you can launch out-of-region discs this way. This boot method (the jhloader I originally wrote for Pseudo Saturn) only works from the menu - you can't launch out-of-region emulated discs from the Saturn CD player at the moment.

Press B to move back to the parent folder. Use the left and right D-pad to jump a full screen at a time.

You can nest folders if you like to organise things that way.

The following disc image formats are supported:

  • ISO files
  • CUE files, with any combination of BIN, IMG, ISO and WAV data files

CUE files can have an arbitrary number of track files - there's no need to merge them. MP3 is not supported.

Pressing B from the top menu will take you to the Satiator tools menu. (This will change to Start in a future release.)

Tools Menu

The tools menu currently gives you access to:

  • Action Replay tools, for backing up and flashing AR-type cartridges
  • Diagnostics for your system
  • Formatting your SD card

If you'd like to transfer games between your Saturn's save memory and your SD card, I currently recommend slinga's Save Game Copier.

Action Replay tools

The AR tools are intended to help you work with Action Replay style Flash cartridges, including those used for Pseudo Saturn / Pseudo Saturn Kai (PSK).

This is intended to support Action Replay patching, because the original AR firmware doesn't play particularly well with the Satiator.

Selecting Backup AR will dump the contents of your cartridge to a file on the SD card.

Selecting Erase AR will completely blank the cartridge. This allows you to use an AR cartridge as a pure RAM cart. For AR versions which store save games in Flash, this will also wipe any save data on the cartridge. “3in1” or “4in1” carts with a switch should not be affected. A successful erase will not show a confirmation message.

Selecting Flash AR will let you choose a new file to flash to the AR's Flash. The file name must end with .bin to be shown in the chooser.

If your cartridge is not making good contact, you may get a Flash ID error. Simply wiggle the cartridge to reseat it and try again - you don't need to reboot.

Diagnostics

As of menu 64, the only diagnostic available is the SD card latency test.

SD Latency Test

This does a set of 1-sector random reads on your card, and measures the time it takes to complete each operation. Long latencies, or errors in this test, indicate that your card may not work well with the Satiator.

For reference, the cheap SanDisk cards I use for testing have a mean latency of around 1500µs, and a maximum latency of around 3000µs.

The Errors count should be zero. If you get errors, your card probably needs to be replaced.

For ease of comparison, you can hotswap SD cards for latency testing - running the test again will reinitialise the card, although you may need to run it twice to get a stable result. If you hotswap the card, I recommend that you power cycle the console before proceeding to play games, etc. to avoid problems loading other titles.

Format SD Card

This option will wipe the SD card using either FAT32 or exFAT. This is intended to allow you to get a consistently formatted card for comparison with other users.

The cluster size used for FAT32 is 32KiB; for exFAT, 256KiB.

menu.1613380188.txt.gz · Last modified: 2021/02/15 09:09 by abrasive

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