After more than a year of work, fans have finished a Saturn port of the 1998 PC expansion to Tomb Raider, Unfinished Business.
RetroRaiderJohn, the port’s lead developer, uploaded a launch trailer for the project today.
You can download the release by checking the video’s description for a Mega.nz link. There, you’ll find Japanese, PAL and North American region versions as separate downloads as well as “expert” versions of the game for North America and PAL.
The video’s description says the expert edition has “Atlantis levels first and inventory reset for Egypt levels, based on how it was originally intended by the developer.”
The link also has a folder for Fenrir-compatible versions — players found that the Fenrir optical drive emulator doesn’t play nicely with the BIN and CUE files that Unfinished Business is being distributed in, but Derek Pascarella found that refactoring the game as CCD, IMG and SUB files worked, so RetroRaiderJohn added those to the Mega link.
Unfinished Business, also known as Tomb Raider Gold in North America, was a PC-only expanded edition of the original Tomb Raider. It added four bonus levels across two chapters. The first sends Lara Croft back to Egypt several months after the events of the base game, while the second takes place in Atlantis mere moments after the end of the base game.
The bonus levels were never officially released for consoles, but fans did it unofficially for the PlayStation in both 2014 and 2021. Today marks the first time it’s appeared on the Saturn.
The port is technically a heavily modified version of the original Tomb Raider that released on the Saturn in 1996. RetroRaiderJohn wrote tools to convert PC data into something the Saturn could use, essentially transferring level assets from the PC port into the Saturn base game.
His work began in early 2022, and things soon turned sticky.
“Data conversion went pretty smoothly at first, until it was time to import level textures: memory limitations caused all levels to crash, except one,” RetroRaiderJohn said in the trailer description. “These limits were expected, given that the PS1 ports suffered the same during development. However, it turned out that memory was a much bigger problem on the Saturn, due to different memory management.”
“In order to prevent the memory from breaching, data had to be seriously optimized. Various tricks and techniques were invented and implemented over a long period of time, and proved to be quite successful. Unused meshes and animations were deleted, while duplicate meshes and animations were reused. Required pathfinding data that’s used for climbing enemies was forcefully removed, since none of the enemies in Unfinished Business can climb anyway. Two huge alternate rooms in one level were removed, with the difference being replicated in a much more efficient way. And then there were many, many more tricks applied. Eventually, I managed to make every level work without any noticeable compromises.”
— RetroRaiderJohn
RetroRaiderJohn also credited Retro Dad, RoS, Spyros, Troye, Cyblitzer and Dominik with helping on the project. He also said that he used Paul Met and Esppiral’s full-screen patch for the Saturn version of Tomb Raider as well as bug fixes from the PC version made by SuiKaze and Arsunt.
The launch trailer’s description lists the port’s key features, which include quite a few fixes and additions:
- Three different regions: American (NTSC-U), European (PAL-E) and Japanese (NTSC-J)
- Expert edition (no NTSC-J for now): Atlantis levels first and inventory reset for Egypt levels, based on how it was originally intended by the developer
- Improved texture and SFX quality compared to the OG Saturn releases
- Restored and corrected SFX and sprites
- Correctly rotated/mirrored object textures
- Subdivided meshes (to reduce warping)
- Ability to perform the handstand
- Ambience (wind/heartbeat) tracks playing almost continuously
- New loading screens
- New statistics screen
- Extended credits (ported from the NTSC-J version and modified)
- Gym loading screen in the PAL version (ported from the NTSC-U version)
- Fixed crocodile distance damage bug
- Improved rendering for certain texture surfaces
There are several issues that RetroRaiderJohn warned players about, though:
- [PAL] Fatal rendering issue at certain angles near walls. This issue has the potential to affect the following areas in particular (spoilers):
- “Return to Egypt”: getting hit by the boulder right before the third secret;
- Atlantis levels: getting too close to the winged mutants.
- [ALL] Temporary corrupted textures after a static camera view is interrupted. To avoid this, don’t press any buttons until the camera has refocused on Lara again. This issue affects the following areas in particular (spoilers):
- “Return to Egypt”: after pulling the lever that opens the two doors in the boulder room;
- “Temple of the Cat”: after pulling the two levers that open the underwater doors leading to the large room with the animated cat textures.
- [ALL] The ambience track in the Atlantis levels might pause when a mutant explodes near you. Open and close the inventory to resume the audio.
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