PPCenter :: devblog

Additional testing of my test cartridge showed that Shining Force scenario 3 was "working" well when using memory expander hack

By "working", I mean that game was working fine (no freeze, black screen whatever) while looking for save data on SD card.
I didn't verified if save data was consistent or not, this can be verified and eventually fixed later

Logs show that game is looking for SFORCE31 save data, which is normal, but after that it is looking for SFORCE39 save data ?!?
I suppose this is some debug stuff that was left as-is, or maybe something for game beta testers ? Please let me know if you have more informations about this


It "works", but there's still a lot of code to write/cleanup/etc before release !
At first, I should add some "log to SD card" feature, this may be useful when we will enter beta testing stage

BTW, I'm looking for a name for my "SD card-based memory cart for Saturn" project.
The only requirement is that the name needs to be easy to remember. Suggestions are welcome


Edit (2016/02/12) : nearly 5 months after, everything works more or less so that I took a couple of videos of Pseudo Saturn Kai in action

Instead of coding, I used my brand new rasp (file) on a Saturn memory cartridge shell :

Yeah, I know, it's "homemade"

Request : I only have a limited stock of cartridge shell, so is there somebody with a 3D printer/whatever ready to produce shells ? If you have the skillz, hardware, time and motivation to produce Saturn cartridge shells, please contact me via my homepage's contact form .
I can offer one cartridge (without shell) if you fulfill my needs

Edit : I forgot to put a picture of the cartridge itself :

Unfortunately, I lost against Dural during last (bonus) stage, but at least I was stronger than Saturn BIOS Backup Library

(Nearly) 2 years-old comment in VHDL source code oO
I forgot I started to study VHDL so long ago

This fixes a nearly 3 years old bug
At that time, I connected a SD card to my second pad port on my Saturn and could read files successfully. However, file write sometimes failed ... I thought about many possible causes of failures (not enough 3.3V power supply ? Bad luck ? etc etc), but it was a software bug : writing sectors to SD card actually takes longer than reading sectors, and I didn't waited enough for my SD card to finish write.
Changing poll timeout count from 500 clocks to 50000 clocks seems to fix the problem. (Q&D fix, but if it works fine, I won't change it )

So now, as SD card read/write access works on both yabause and real hardware, it is time to to use it in order to develop new features for my Saturn