Save Game Manager

Most useful utility for gamers on SEGA Saturn!

page 1 screenshots

virtual drives

A virtual drive is a temporary storage device located in work RAM. It is thus not physical persistent and will be lost after reset, power off or exit of the SGM application.

Virtual drives are faster and (almost) not limited in size and number. Apart from that, there is no difference to other storage devices for you. Their use is to make file organization and compression flexible and efficient.

You always have a spare empty virtual drive. If there is more than one empty virtual drive, then these are deleted automatically.

So you never explicitly need to create or destroy a virtual drive. When decompressing archives, all files included will be placed in a new virtual drive.

compression

You can compress a whole storage device into a single compressed file with the powerfull BZip2 compression by pressing Z button. A storage device can be any of the supported devices:

CD drive

system backup memory

external backup memory

external serial device

virtual drive

The filename starts with "SGM" and the rest is either generated automatically from the date and it's size or given by the user. With an external 4MB RAM cart, you can increase the compression quality up to 4 (default: 1) on the 2nd help screen with A and B buttons.

Compression ratio depends on the data itself, it's uncompressed size and the compression level (default: 1, up to 4 with 4MB RAM cart only). This means, when a save game changes, it's compressed size might change, too.

decompression

Decompress the selected file to a new virtual drive by pressing Y button. The SGM checks if it's a valid compressed archive. You can speed-up decompression on the 2nd help screen with C button, but it will take more RAM which means in some cases you can't perform fast decompression (has never happend to me).

Action Replay firmware flashing

You can select a certain AR firmware file on CD and in the menu (press START) just select flash Action Replay.

The arflash program from ExCyber is started, which will perform the flashing on request.

Once in arflash, you can't return to SGM, except you reset or restart the Saturn. This means all unsaved virtual drives are lost.

I take no warranty for any damage!