POS, snes9x and SGL replacement

Wednesday, 10 May, 2006 12:00

New Saturn homebrew game in the making

Some weeks ago, Arnold and me started working on a brandnew graphic adventure for SEGA Saturn. We had teamed up for Tic Tac Toe, before. Arnold has got quite cool skills in creating 3D render images, composing music and writing game scripts. So I was easily convinced to contribute by writing the engine sourcecode, as I previously planned to do such a game sometime, myself.

It is gonna be inspired by Snatcher, Shadowrun and the like. I can tell you that the render images already look better than those of D and Mystery Mansion do on SEGA Saturn.

I will try to use some special effects the Saturn has to offer, one of which is extreme high resolution of 704x512 pixel, that you might haven't seen in any Saturn game, before. I even managed to display sprites in this high resolution, although the specs mentioned in the vdp1 manual are below this. The game will be multi language, currently it's developed in german and will be translated into english (and maybe others), after completion.

Things that I'd like add are:

multiple sounds streamed from CD

CD prefetching

video playback

We thought about using the MPEG cart for movie playback, but ran into problems in creating MPEG cart compatible CDs.

SNES emu screenshots and compatibility

VBT made some nice screenshots of commercial ROMs running on snes9x for SEGA Saturn. As I experienced myself, he reported that the fast asm cpu core works with a lot of ROMs and features a better compatibility than expected.

Of the few games I tested, those are working with the asm cpu core:

Actraiser 2, Blackthorne, Bomberman 1, Sonic, California Games 2, Captain Commando, Where in time is Carmen Sandiego, Castlevania 4, Chess Master, Clayfighter, Contra 3, Demon Crest, Desert Strike, Final Fantasy 2, Final Fantasy 5, F-Zero, F-Zero 2, Gradius 3, Illusion of Time, Super Star Wars: Return of the Jedi, Mega Man x2, Mystic Quest, Another World, Rock 'n Roll Racing, Sim City, International Superstar Soccer Deluxe, Super Star Wars, Super Turrican, Super Turrican 2, Pro Tennis Tour, Terminator 2, Top Gear 1, Wing Commander, Zelda

SGL replacement website updated

I added the latest new functions to the list on the SGL replacement website:

slSlaveFunc, slScrWindow0, slScrWindow1, slScrLineWindow0, slScrLineWindow1, slScrWindowMode, slSetTVMode, slSetScrTVMode, slRequestCommand

Besides smaller updates here and there, most interesting for devvers is a commented list of supported compile flags, that I've added, too.