News Roundup for the Week of Oct. 9

Here’s a look at what’s new this week in the Sega Saturn community.

Saturn core added to main MiSTer build

The Saturn core of the MiSTer FPGA was added Tuesday to the MiSTer’s main branch.

It’s a landmark step for the project that Sergiy Dvodnenko, aka SRG320, has been working on since early last year. It’s also a stamp of approval from Alexey Melnikov, aka Sorgelig, the father of the MiSTer project.

And this does make it easier for MiSTer users to get updates — now they’ll download by running “update” instead of users having to grab each new version of the core separately from the “unstable nightlies” channel on the MiSTer Discord server.

Functionally, the core does include one new feature since the last update Oct. 4: a fix for analog video out. RGB SCART, S-Video and composite are all centered and sharp. Previously, anything but HDMI out didn’t display properly.

Silhouette Mirage patch translates through area six

Rasputin3000 put up the latest version of his team’s Silhouette Mirage patch Wednesday. It translates area 6 into English. It can be downloaded from its resources page on SegaXtreme.

Its previous update Oct. 3 translated area 5. It also fixed a bug introduced in a previous patch that froze the game if the player paused it during area 4’s boss fight.

There’s just one area in the game left to translate. Rasputin said that he hopes to have the game playable in English from start to finish by mid- to late October.

Rasputin, Soniccd123 and Malenko began the project in July and began releasing translation patches in August.

Virtual On NetLink tournament announced

Double Dime announced Wednesday a new NetLink tournament for western hemisphere players signed up on the SHIRO! NetLink roster. The game this time will be Virtual On, and while there are eight participant slots for it, that number could be increased based on interest.

It will be a double-elimination tournament and each match is determined by the winner of the best of three rounds.

The announcement comes on the heels of a tournament in Sega Rally Championship ending, with Double Dime won the finals match against SegaRPGFan.

The group also competed in a DecAthlete tournament last spring. For anyone interested in participating, make sure you have all the needed equipment, then join the SHIRO! Discord server and head over to the “online tournaments” channel to express your interest.

Code from Nights, Burning Rangers found in Sonic 3D Blast

Software engineer Bo Bayles found some fun ways to manipulate the code of Sonic 3D Blast’s special stages and posted about them on X, formerly Twitter, yesterday and today.

He plied his knowledge of Burning Rangers and Nights into Dreams to make Tails and Knuckles somewhat playable, change Sonic’s size and discover a debug camera.

“It turns out that if you know your way around the Burning Rangers or NiGHTS code, it’s easy to hack Sonic 3D Blast,” Bayles said. “The Sonic Team Saturn games have a very similar layout: NiGHTS, Burning Rangers, and Sonic Jam all share lots of ideas (if not actual code). Sonic 3D Blast looks totally different from those during normal gameplay, but the special stages use the Sonic Team style.”

He posted videos and screenshots showing off each of his discoveries:

“Here’s semi-playable Tails! Set 0x060D00D6 to 0x01 after you land in the stage to switch from Sonic’s model to Tails’s,” he said. “Tails only has a couple of animations, and the game crashes if you do anything that causes you to do one of the missing ones.”

“0x060D00FC controls Sonic’s size,” Bayles said. “Sonic is normally 1x size, but you can make him tiny or huge by changing the scaling factor.”

“Here’s a previously-undocumented debug camera mode,” he said. “Hold Z and then use the D-pad to move the view around, A and C control the zoom. The controls conflict with the character controls, so it’s not terribly usable.”