If you’re a retro Sega fan, you know that Saturn has been one console where emulation has been spotty at best. The Sega Saturn is one of the better-built consoles of the 1990s, but all hardware fails eventually. Fortunately, the upcoming Polymega emulation console has possibly the best Saturn emulation we’ve seen yet. The team behind it has released video of some notoriously tricky to emulate titles running on the Polymega.
I spent some time with the Polymega at E3 and was blown away by its polish and multitude of options. Despite the enormous amount of clone consoles that have popped up over the years, no one has really attempted to offer a high-end, multi-system experience.
The base model of the Polymega will emulate PlayStation, Saturn, Sega CD, Turbografx CD/PC Engine CD-ROM2, and Neo Geo CD. No other emulation system has tried to tackle CD-based games, and it’ll be an excellent product for people who want to preserve the aging CD drives in their consoles.
The console won’t just emulate games, though, it’ll offer enhancements. As you can see from the video above, Panzer Dragoon Saga looks a bit sharper and clearer at higher-res than you would get from playing on the Saturn alone. I can get about the same results with my setup, but that’s with a Framemeister X-RGB Mini, an upscaler that costs more than the base model of the Polymega.
I love playing games on original hardware, but given the multi-system support and expandability, I can see myself relying on the Polymega when I just want to play a game without any fuss.
The Polymega will also support Genesis, 32X, Turbografx 16/PC Engine, NES, and SNES via expansion modules which will be sold separately and as part of a deluxe bundle. The console should be available sometime in Q4 2019.
