There’s a new tool at Saturn fans’ disposal to make development of homebrew games on the console even easier: a software development kit called Saturn Ring Library.
Its lead developer, ReyeMe, unveiled SRL in a SegaXtreme thread Friday night. He said its features promise to “do away with many of the headaches of typical Saturn development.”
SRL can be downloaded from the project’s GitHub page. Detailed documentation about SRL’s namespaces and classes can be found on its documentation website.
“SRL is a wrapper for SGL [Sega Graphics Library] written in C++23, giving the developer easy to use tools to develop games,” ReyeMe said. “SRL gives you the power to use a modern toolchain (GCC14.2), supporting many standard library features, and an integrated custom SaturnMath library (straightforward writing of algebraic and trigonometric functions on Fixed Point numbers at run and compile time).”
The greater ease of using fixed point numbers in calculations and its compatibility with the latest version of the C++ programming language give SRL a leg up over other Saturn development kits like Jo Engine and Yaul.
Other SRL features include:
- Builds BIN/CUE images with embedded CDDA audio tracks.
- Has full support for TGA image format (including run-length encoding compression) for loading textures/sprites.
- Mesh and SmoothMesh simplify the process of handling 3D model draw calls. With the NYA exporter (not included), it’s never been easier to draw a 3D scene on the Saturn.
- Custom memory allocation with support for allocating in LWRAM and with ability to automatically determine size of the available dynamic memory.
- VDP2 wrapper functions make it fast and easy to set up NBG and RGB layers with tilemap and bitmap data. A custom CRAM manager allows for easier management of 16, 64, 128 and 256 color palettes.
- CDDA playback with volume and three-band analyzer.
“Now you have everything you need in one easy to setup environment to make your very own SEGA Saturn game!” ReyeMe said.
This reporter can confirm that SRL is pretty easy to set up. After downloading the SDK’s ZIP file, unzipping it and perusing the readme document, it took just a few minutes to set things up before being able to compile a sample project in Visual Studio Code — a free programming editor — and run it in an emulator:
ReyeMe was assisted in developing SRL by Roberto Duarte, 7shades, willll, nemesis-saturn and jae686. He also gave a special thanks to Emerald Nova.
Emerald Nova had been trying out SRL and giving feedback to the team while developing his own Saturn game called Seniriu.
“I have had the pleasure of utilizing SRL in the Seniriu rebuild for several months now I can honestly say this is the only thing keeping me from dropping the Saturn for big projects,” he said in the SegaXtreme thread.
“I have banged on about a more complete SDK for years. Jo is great but sound is broken and 3D just isn’t there. Yaul is too low level to facilitate a large scale effort. Saturn Orbit is literally just SGL with extra steps. SRL is, in my judgement, the only true way forward.
— Emerald Nova
Emerald Nova praised how easy it is to import art assets, both 2D and 3D, as well as sound effects and music, into a project using SRL.
“I think the next big project for Saturn will certainly be built on SRL,” he said.
This is exciting news!