Discussing it from the past, i remember people here playing this game, or people generally infatuated with Sega Saturn in general. And besides, there are many emulator fans around here, of this i am VERY certain! So i want to discuss about it, a bit...

There are many secrets to this game, from giving a certain name to your new game profile after beating the game once, to doing certain things in-game to unlock secret areas (like the Alucart, not Alucard, items)... So many, that it truly pales in comparison against any other game, for the sheer number of hidden stuff, among other things.

One of them is about Richter. I have never played the game with anyone else other than Alucard, so now that i managed to get the game + emulator run well on my Win7 64x, i am going to give it a proper Richter and Maria thrashing, too! But Richter has two secrets on him. In the cheat-webpages, one of them is to press "L, R, Up and A" to select him and it says it unlocks his full moveset and secret outfit (long-sleeved), while the other is to press "Up and C" to select him and it says it unlocks his second outfit (again), but nothing else. As far as i saw all three versions of him, other than costume, have no real difference, moves seem to be exactly the same among them, too... Anyone knows more and can share some insight into this one?

Also, what is Maria's moveset and how does she use the animal summons?

Not many people played a Sega Saturn. And you expect answers from a mostly PC gamer community.

One word. Emulators. But you are right. One of the persons here that are deep in them too, even stopped replying to me since a long time ago. Like the previous time several months ago, that i was inquiring about a good emulator for my system, but then that person helped me find one. Never mind. Who knows, someone might know. This game is constantly inside the 5/10 best games ever made and there are PC people who know it, while console people don't.

Oh you have no idea how much I want to get a PS1 ans Sega Saturn Emulator working on my PC because I really want to play these 2D sprite games be it JRPGs or Shumps I have list:

PS1:

Arc the Lad games
Battle Hunter
Beyond the Beyond
Breath of Fire 3 and 4
Brigandine
Castlvania Chronicles (Remake)
Final Fantasy Tactics
Kartia The World of Fate
Legend of Mana
Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete (Remake)
Megaman 8 and Megaman X4-5-6
Gunbird (Mobile Light Force)
Persona 1 and 2
Philosoma
Rayman 1
Loaded (Blood Facotry) and Re-Loaded
Romance of the Three Kingdom games for Playstation 1
Saga Frontier 1 and 2
Saiyuki: Journey West
Sol Divide: Sword of Darkness (Pre Rendered 3D like DOnkey Kong)
Suikoden 1 and 2
Strider 2
Strikers 1945
Thunder Force V
Tales of Destiny and Tales of Eternia
Torneko: The Last Hope
Valkyrie Profile 1
Vandal Hearts 1 and 2
Wild Arms 1
Azure Dreams (Looks like Ogre Battle 64)
Dragon Quest VII
Eternal Eyes
Grandia 1
Star Ocean - The Second Story
Thousand Arms
R-Type Delta
Castlevania Symphony of the Night
Silhouette Mirage

Sega Saturn:
Dragon Force
Albert Odyssey
Guardian Heroes
Guardian Force
Bug Too!
Herc's Adventures
Three Dirty Dwarves
Thunder Force V
Legend of Oasis
Darius Gaiden
Shining Wisdom
Dark Savior
The Horde (video game)
Astra Superstars
Magic Knight Rayearth
Real Bout Special
Layer Section/Galactic Attack
Samurai Shodown 4
DoDonPachi
Battle Garegga
Batsugun
Shining the Holy Ark
Hyper Duel
Soukyugurentai
Saturn Bomberman
Radiant Silvergun
Shining Force III

What hold you back? PS1 emulators are plenty and many works good enough to play most of games.
As for saturn, I never played one. Never even try to emulate it but I know there is at least one emulator that works decently. And some of Saturn best games got ported to PS1 and I played them there, to name a few : Lunar silver star story complete and eternal blue, grandia, and this topic of thread Castlevania SOTN

Because a certain PS1 emulator required the use of a registry that had to download and downloading it gave me a Virus.

Got any other PS1 emulators that are safer and require no registries?

You mean the PS1 bios? A lot of PSX emulators support and include the free HLE bios now, such as ePSXe. Not every Playstation game works with it, but most of the ones I tried didn't seem to have any major issues (MediEvil had some audio glitches and Crash Team Racing was the only one that straight up refused to work).
That said, there are certain sites where you can download the proprietary PSX bios without catching viruses, but I highly recommend trying the HLE variant.

PM this to me please.

I'm curious, which one would that be? The ones I'm aware of are basically useless.

I usually look here for my emulation need
www.emulator-zone.com

For saturn, there aren't many that works. I only tried yabause. But even it doesn't look so good.

For Sega Saturn, Yabause did the trick for me, works like a charm. For 64 bit version. For PS1, i don't know, last time i played was in XP environment.

www.emulator-zone.com/doc.php/psx/

I've tried both ePSXe and psx with good result. EPSXe is rather hard to configure, but you can make the game run prettier that it originally look by using the right plugin. Usually something started with Pete or peops. You also need bios file. It's named scph1001.bin or similar and must be downloaded.

Why the Saturn version specifically? Is it different from the Playstation version, which was probably about 1000x more popular?

I still have the Playstation version, bought it back when I bought my Playstation, as one of those PS games everyone seemed to consider as a must-have (along with Gran Turismo, Silent Hill, Vagrant Story, Final Fantasy Tactics etc...).

I played it somewhat but somehow just lost interest and stopped playing quite soon. I didn't quite get it why it was supposed to be so great, meh. I figured maybe it is because I didn't have a SNES or NES before my Playstation, so I didn't have any emotional strings to the Castlevania series, or 2D platform jumping games in general.

The Saturn version of SotN had a few new areas, and Maria as an unlockable playable character. That said, it's generally considered a terrible port, and the new features are nowhere near as good as they should be.

If you want to try it anyway, then SSF is by far the best Saturn emulator, although it doesn't have built-in ISO loading, meaning you'll need a virtual drive. And unfortunately, as far as I'm aware none of the good free ones (ie- not laden with adware and trojans) are compatible with it.

Really? Last time I checked, it barely worked at best. Perhaps I'll try again sometime. BTW, the official Yabause wiki says this about SotN: "Almost playable, lot of glitches." It's perhaps telling that not a single game works "perfectly".