Much of the northern hemisphere may be in a deep freeze, but the Saturn scene’s always hot. Here’s a look at some of the recent stories fans are talking about.
Tokyo Xtreme Racer Hits Steam Early Access
The latest entry in Genki’s long-running street racing series Tokyo Xtreme Racer released yesterday on Steam in early access for US$30.
It’s been received well, rocketing up the sales rankings on Steam to second place on its release day with a 96% positive rating from buyers.
Fellow SHIRO! from The SEGAGuys Dan the MegaDriver checked the game out in a video today, calling it “fun, engrossing and thrilling,” and said it’s in line with previous games in the series.
Announced last August, it’s the first entry in the franchise in nearly 20 years. Some of its earliest entries were on the Saturn, including Shutokou Battle ’97, Wangan Dead Heat — a.k.a. Highway 2000 in North America — and Wangan Dead Heat: Real Arrange.
Knight0fDragon demonstrates online play in Shining Force III
The lead developer of the long-running English fan translation patches for Shining Force III uploaded a video Tuesday demonstrating online functionality in the normally single-player game.
Knight0fDragon has been working to find a way to add online play to any Saturn game. While Shining Force III seems like a strange choice on the surface, Knight said in the SegaXtreme Discord server that he focused on it because it’s the game he knows best.
“Small video showing SF3 being modified to use the XBand library for online play,” Knight wrote in the YouTube video description. “Game is now patched to transfer controller data over.”
XBand is the online library used by Japanese Saturn games. To put it simply, XBand and the U.S. equivalent NetLink send controller inputs over the Internet and the other console accepts them as if they’re from a controller connected to the console.
In Knight’s video, it appears that both consoles are able to control the same character. He insinuated on Discord that he isn’t using consoles here, but rather emulators. “I gotta dig up my Linksys VOIP adapter to test this on consoles (tunnel method requires additional patching),” he said, referring to the NetBand Tunnel program used to play Saturn games online today.
New website converts Saturn save file formats
A SegaXtreme user named Euan created a website for converting Saturn save files to different formats, posting a thread about it Tuesday.
Euan made three options:
- A page for converting to and from Mednafen’s BKR format.
- A page for converting to and from SAROO’s BIN format.
- A page for converting to and from the MiSTer FPGA Saturn core’s format.
Euan said the SAROO converter can merge new saves into an existing SAROO file so that you don’t lose your other saves when adding a new one.
“So far I’ve only added support for Mednafen (which writes out standard Saturn files),” he said in the thread. “I know there are many other Saturn emulators out there, and I’m curious if there are others in mainstream usage which have different save files.”
The site is open source, which can be found at its GitHub.
The Shining force 3 online feature is amazing. I am a huge fan of shining force and this is so exciting !
KnightofDragon you are a genius !!