News Roundup for the Week of April 29

From new homebrew efforts and cheat code discoveries to FPGA clones and a little Sega history you may not have known about, there were quite a few headlines Saturn fans were talking about this week. Let’s take a look at some of the stories from around the scene.

Bo Bayles finds hidden level select cheat codes in Gex

Hot on the heels of recent finds like the four-player mode in High Velocity, Saturn hacker Bo Bayles discovered three cheat codes hiding in the Saturn version of 1995 2D platformer Gex.

He posted about them on social media Thursday and wrote more in depth about them on his blog.

Two of them are level select codes. The first allows players to select all of the game’s normal levels — on an overworld screen, hold R and press Left, Right L, Start, Left, A, Y, A, Up, Y. The second code shows a selection of Planet X bonus levels — again on an overworld screen, hold R and press Down, Right, C, Right, Right, L, Start, Left, A, Up, Right, L.

The third code displays the full credits sequence that normally only plays when all of the Planet X bonus stages are beaten. At the mode select screen, hold R and press C, Left, Up, Right, Left, Right, Down, Down.

As if that weren’t enough, Bayles found a debug mode in Gex, too. You can read more about it and get the Action Replay codes to enable it at Bayles’ blog.

Pigsy remaking Revenge of Shinobi on Saturn

A homebrewer named Pigsy who’s known for his ongoing recreation of Castlevania: Symphony of the Night on the Genesis/Mega Drive as well as his SGDK development tutorials on YouTube and Patreon has dipped his toes into Saturn development. He posted on Friday about a remake of Genesis platformer Revenge of Shinobi that he’s coding with Jo Engine.

“Since the Saturn also uses C programming language, I should be able to simply copy and paste my Mega Drive GG Shinobi game logic/AI code over,” Pigsy said on X, referring to another of his projects in which he’s recreating the first Game Gear Shinobi game on the Mega Drive. “I just have to get competent at utilising the Saturn-specific hardware functions. A fun little diversion from my MD work!”

He said his remake, which is not yet publicly available let alone finished, will feature more background layers, more colors, extra animation frames, CD-quality music and more open level design relative to the original game.

“The experience of learning to develop for a new system (especially one as complex as the Saturn) is always a mixture of excitement and frustration,” he said. “I’ll no doubt be glad to retreat back into the familiarity of SGDK once this month is out! For now though, I’m having fun.”

Footage uploaded of first iteration of Columns — before Sega owned the IP

A game collector named Trevgauntlet Neu posted to X Thursday what he claims is the first screenshot of Columns — not for a Sega platform but for the HP-UX, Hewlitt Packard’s 1984 Unix operating system.

Columns may be seen as a ubiquitous puzzle title for Sega, appearing in arcades, on the Game Gear, the Genesis/Mega Drive and even the Saturn. But the company didn’t originally design it. That credit goes to Jay Geertsen, a programmer at Hewlitt Packard in 1989.

Geertsen spoke to Retro Gamer magazine in 2019 and said that after his little HP-UX game was ported to Macintosh and DOS, it caught the attention of Sega by way of a lawyer who offered to buy the rights to the intellectual property. By 1990, Sega rolled out an arcade iteration of Columns and launched the Game Gear with a port of it, using the now-familiar jewels, Egyptian iconography and catchy music instead of Geertsen’s plain colored squares with no sound whatsoever.

“I took that screenshot as soon as I got the game to run,” Trevgauntlet said on X. “I had to contain myself from being too excited.”

Trevgauntlet also uploaded six minutes of footage to YouTube of Geertsen’s Columns being played.

Thanks to Gosokkyu for writing about Trevgauntlet’s discovery on Cohost where it caught SHIRO!’s attention.

MiSTer clone costing $99 in the works

A hobbyist named Taki Udon uploaded a video Thursday demonstrating a clone of the MiSTer FPGA that he plans to sell for $99 — about half the price of the current DE10 Nano board that the MiSTer uses.

He also showed off an optional RAM chip that costs an additional $15, although it’s not so optional for anyone looking to play the Saturn core on this clone MiSTer.

Some of the hardware changes include swapping the DE10’s micro USB and mini USB ports for a USB type-C port, and the JTAG port has changed from a USB port to a header. The board seems to run like a DE10 just fine, though, as the video shows gameplay of the Genesis and Nintendo 64 MiSTer cores performing on the clone MiSTer without issue.

After just a couple months of work on the board, Taki Udon unveiled it on April 29. The project seems to have the blessing of MiSTer’s creator, Sorgelig, as Taki said in his video this week that Sorgelig reached out to him after the unveiling to give suggestions on how to make the clone board even better.