Tools for the Sega Saturn SAROO
This repository contains two tools to help you create custom backgrounds for your SAROO Optical Drive Emulator for SEGA Saturn. With these scripts, you can create your own animated GIF visuals and looping background music to personalize your SAROO experience.
Easily convert any collection of still images into a compatible animated GIF that displays correctly on SAROO without colour corruption or playback issues. Click here for the detailed readme
Convert audio or video files into raw 16-bit PCM suitable for SAROO background music, complete with optional looping. Click here for the detailed readme
Although SAROO has supported animated GIFs and background music since firmware v0.5, there's still very little community-made content out there a year later. The creation process was poorly documented and often frustrating, with tools like ezgif producing unreliable results.
These scripts were created to make it easy and consistent for anyone to generate SAROO-compatible files.
Let’s help build a library of awesome backgrounds and bring the Saturn’s startup screen to life.
- FFmpeg must be installed and accessible from your system path.
Playback on the Saturn is slower than they appear on website.
Example of an animated GIF created, that includes a 10-second pause.
Example of a looping animated GIF, that includes no pause.
Some more "Invincible" examples, a bit too busy for background imagery for my taste, but good proofs of concept:
If you create your own background GIFs and music, I recommend sending them to WilliamDSW's repo for inclusion in their collection.
The official Saroo Github repository is at https://github.com/tpunix/SAROO
This utility is provided as-is, free to use and distribute. Please do not modify before distribution. Attribution appreciated.
Please consider subscribing to my YouTube channel and supporting me on ko-fi.
I also wrote a blog post for my website about the creation of this tool, check it out at https://www.therealwidge.co.uk/2025/06/making-saroo-backgrounds-easily.html
And there's now a YouTube video about it too : Click the image to watch it...
