"The main goal of the new approach is to balance accuracy with practical performance on Android"

The Sega Saturn emulator Yaba Sanshiro has taken a big leap forward thanks to a new rendering technique that allows it to overcome one of the console’s biggest quirks.

As you may (or may not) be aware, the Saturn’s VDP1 chip draws sprites and polygons as quads, but modern-day GPUs are designed around drawing triangles.

“When you render a quad on a modern GPU, it is normally split into two triangles,” explains Yaba Sanshiro developer devMiyax. “If you draw a sprite this way, a texture that should look natural across the whole quad can appear distorted across the seam between the two triangles.”