v6.483 : The long awaited one
Written by cafealpha
16 comments
Classified in : PPCenter, Saturn, Programming
This is with the pride of a job finally being done to announce the public release of Pseudo Saturn Kai v6.483 ! As usual, it can be found in the download section of Pseudo Saturn Kai page.
This release was heavily tested by privateye and in fact it couldn't be released without his extensive help. Thank you very much !! 
Rare footage of privateye and me uniting forces during
Pseudo Saturn Kai development and testing
There are many changes not only concerning ODE support so that every Saturn worshiper may appreciate this release.
Game and Saturn hardware compatibility improved
So far JHL loader wasn't supporting some Japanese grey Saturns but this is now fixed so that it's finally possible to play Panzer Dragoon Saga with Pseudo Saturn Kai on all known Saturn hardware revisions
This fix doesn't removes the need disc image before burning it. This concerns few games indicated as requiring usage of Pseudo Saturn patcher utility in Pseudo Saturn Kai compatibility page.
Additionally to hardware compatibility improvement, graphical issues are also fixed in some games. This concerns Croc, Slam 'n Jam '96, MechWarrior 2, Need for Speed and Space Hulk so if you were waiting for an update of Pseudo Saturn Kai to play these games, it's (finally !) the right moment to update your cartridge 
Save Data Manager for Satiator ODE
As indicated in the title, Save Data Manager now supports Satiator ODE.
Supports include the export and import of save data to/from SD card, the access to all known backup devices (including Saturn floppy disk drive), so if you have important saves from your favorite games and don't want them to become lost or corrupted or want to share them with Saturn friends, you don't have any excuse to do it right now
Save Data Manager and Satiator access emulated in Yabause
Additionally to Satiator ODE support, many small details were fixed or improved, for example file browsing now uses a better font, comments written in Japanese are now correctly written in save data dump report file etc.
All these fixes and improvements were made in the hope everyone (and not only ODE users) will take benefit from Save Data Manager : if you want to import a pre-recorded save for a given game then SDM may be useful for you, if you want to copy saves recorded on a floppy disk then SDM may be useful for you, and so on
Support for latest (2021/07/02) Fenrir firmware
In regard of the stream of the "why Pseudo Saturn Kai doesn't works with Fenrir ?", or "when will Pseudo Saturn Kai will support latest firmware of Fenrir ?" or all the similar questions asked here and there on the internet, that's probably a super awaited feature ! And finally it is here
So, latest firmware (2021/07/02) is supported, and consequently nested folders feature too.
However, display of game cover/screenshot is not supported, so even if it is enabled nothing will be displayed on Pseudo Saturn Kai. This shall be added in a future release, but as other features may take over the priority, ETA regarding this feature is not decided yet.
Fenrir nested folder example under Yabause
As I like to improve things whenever it is possible, I caught the occasion of the development of nested folder feature to do cosmetic enhancements to disc image selection menu.Majority of these enhancements won't be noticed : for example slight changes regarding width of some letters, or making menu title not flickering during initial display.
On the other side, Rhea/Phoebe and Fenrir users now may appreciate the addition of font selection on disc image selection menu ! I like default one but as it may not be the taste of everybody, it's now possible to select an alternate font
Font selection in disc image selection menu
Development and testing of this version was quite exhausting because of unexpected troubles here and there. For example, Satiator didn't always wanted to provide access to the CD-ROM it is emulating when SD file access is enabled, which was fixed simply by ... directly reading disc image file contents instead of data sectors from emulated CD-ROM 
On Fenrir side, reading of save data files whose size is not a multiple of 2 KB isn't working correctly, so the simple workaround for this problem is to add a padding at the end of save data files to make their size being a multiple of 2 KB 
Remaining problem with this workaround is that save data exported with older version of Fenrir firmware may not be readable now and unfortunately it's impossible to fix that only with Pseudo Saturn Kai.
Remaining problem with this workaround is that save data exported with older version of Fenrir firmware may not be readable now and unfortunately it's impossible to fix that only with Pseudo Saturn Kai.All of that to say we may take a well deserved rest for a small while. I don't know how situation is exactly on privateye side but personally I would like to recover back sleep time lost during the last four weeks 
Please wait for 30 minutes (a dozen of episodes) for
privateye and me to return back to full power 
Next goal for Pseudo Saturn Kai is to support disc image selection for Satiator ODE. Development pace until this milestone as well as additional support for Fenrir ODE depends on everyone supporting Pseudo Saturn Kai on patreon, so don't hesitate to contribute there if you're interested 