Updated: News roundup

Sunday, 26 February, 2006 19:30

Dear Saturn fans, much has happend in the Saturn homebrew sector recently. Enjoy the 6 following news:

My favourites added!

See my personal favourite game, book, music and movie.

RB_SaturnDXF source released!

On special request, I released the source code of RB_SaturnDXF. If anyone makes additions or improvements, please share them with me.

Tic Tac Toe ported to Saturn!

People always help each other and as I've received much help, I'm trying to help others, too. This goes especially for Saturndev newcomers. A member of the german nexgam forum, Arnold, is trying to learn how to port simple games to Saturn. As part of this I've ported TTT - Tic Tac Toe to Saturn.

It's been so much fun, I can't remember the last time that I had so much fun in Saturndev. Similar to the SGL replacement, I just wrote some wrappers for the few SDL functions used by the game and implemented their functionality on Saturn with the bitmap library of the SGL, which behaves very similar to drawing with SDL. The result is that the only change in the original source code is uncommenting unused code.

The port of the original game is already done and downloads are up(source+binary+ISO), however it's not finished as Arnold will apply some improvements. Here's as WIP screenshot:

SGL replacement in the works!

In the past I was convinced that we will never have an all homebrew Saturn library, because there would be noone doing this work and it would be a lot of work for sure.

But I've also always been fascinated by the Saturn demos of Charles MacDonald, which don't use any SEGA libs at all. And others like Piratero and Mic are up to increase the amount of homebrew Saturn source code, too.

Now a couple of my projects like the Emulators on Saturn or the Voxel demo could benefit a lot from geting rid of SEGA libraries. They only use a small portion of the library, but suffer a lot from it's increased binary size, wasted variable storage, wasted CPU time and limited slave CPU control.

So instead of fucking around with every single project, I decided to try to implement those few SGL functions that I use in these projects to create a partial SGL library replacement.

Some very simple homebrew Saturn demos already work, like 12 player pong by slinga, bm15bpp demo by Cyber Warrior X or satdemo by Charled Doty.

SNES emu on Saturn is reality!

If you would have asked me if there will ever be an SNES emu on Saturn, I'd said never, without a doubt. But then there came z-roc requesting a SNES emu on Saturn in return for a nice donation. Okay, I was up for it and the more progress I had, the more excited I got and I thought: this guy really made a good thing, without him this would have never been.

Okay, that's certainly true, but what's true, too, is that his offer was not a serious one. I stopped my work immediately and after being tricked that way, I don't have plans to bring this project further.

features:

requires 4MB RAM cart

max. ROM size: something between 2-3 MByte

CD browser

frameskip setting

unfinshed = gfx glitches

compatibility: unknown

speed: faster than I expected, not yet optimized in any way

If you like me to continue this project, let me know.

Donation received!

Recently I've really been in need for a Saturn console, since they keep dying from testing so much of my homebrew software.

Thanks to dhau, I now got a working modchipped Saturn which will really help me out. I've put the guts into a new case and applied the region mod as well as the 50/60 Hz mod. This will help me to optimize Saturn homebrew software for PAL and NTSC systems. Thanks for your support, dhau!

Everyone willing to support my homebrew can make a donation. Though you can download all things for free here, it makes sense to donate if you like me to continue creating new stuff.