Update 2021 Nov. 30th : I received more orders than expected ^^; Please wait until current orders are processed so that I can re-open this article.
Good news for everyone looking for a Gamer's Cartridge : 4 of them are available for sale
As in previous flash sale, these cartridges use 3D printed shell whose shape and color may vary.
So in order to order a cartridge, please post a comment with the ID of the cartridge you want to purchase. And please don't forget to indicate your email in the appropriate field when writing the comment so that I can contact you back to continue the ordering of the cartridge.
Rule to be selected for the ordering of a cartridge is "first-come first-served" so if someone wrote a comment with the ID of your favorite cartridge, please select another cartridge or wait for another flash sale ... if any.
Cartridges support in-game backup memory to SD card, Pseudo Saturn exploit (play CD-R backups), cheat codes and smooth support of Rhea/Phoebe and Fenrir ODEs.
On the other hand 1MB/4MB expansion RAM, CD-ROM emulation or any other advanced features are not supported.
Pricing is the same as before : USD 77 for the cartridge itself and shipping price is described in EMS homepage in "Up to 500g" row.
So for example of an order to USA, the total is USD 77 + JPY 2000 (around USD 17) = USD 94.
If you live in a country not (yet ?) covered by EMS, the only alternative is surface mail, which takes an eternity to deliver (well, I exaggerate, but three months is quite long for a small package to arrive) and not super well tracked too.
Payment method is Paypal only : sorry but I don't accept any electronic currency as well as barter economy as well as anything else than Paypal.
(Lower half of this article in same as above but in Japanese.
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.
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
Update 2021 Nov. 29th : As promised, Gamer's Cartridges are now internationally available Please refer in the article here if you're interested in ordering one.
Update 2021 Nov. 15 : Unless there is a last-time cancel, the two cartridges listed in this article will be sold soon. I plan to resume sales with other cartridges soon, and next time it shall be international sales
Sorry non-Japanese players, but this sale is restricted to Japan customers only. Main reason is that it's a long time I went to the post office and consequently want to restart things gradually.
A bit more (but not a lot of) cartridges are planned to sell in similar flash sales, so please stay tuned
Written by cafealpha 7 comments
After a long wait there is finally an update of Pseudo Saturn Kai ! ... and, there's not a lot of new things from previous version : only the minimum stuff to work correctly with latest (20210207) firmware for Fenrir ODE .
But wait, there's more ! As the weird title of this article suggests, this release is a bit special because it was made directly from previous release (v6.408) of Pseudo Saturn Kai and this is why both release numbers are quite close : there are other changes pending but not available in v6.411a and instead available in a "parallel future".
So you may ask why everything new is not available in v6.411a, and the answer is simple : all pending changes together don't work ! Additionally to small changes and improvements, this was an attempt to get write access working on Fenrir SD card, but as the previous times it didn't worked and in fact was terrible enough to break other base features such as SD card refresh
So rather than trying to fix everything in the same time, I simply focused on what's most important : fixing compatibility with Fenrir firmware 20210207, and the strategy paid because if I continued in trying to fix everything together, Pseudo Saturn Kai would certainly be still stuck at the same "nothing works" dead spot !
The plans for near future is to return back to main codebase indicated as "v6.419" in the picture above, merge back the fixes around firmware 20210207 from v6.411a and then terminate the remaining pending changes ! Now that base features are finally working correctly I hope that the remaining won't take a lot of time until being ready to release.
After finishing base and extra features, I shall finally be ready to attack the "Fenrir save data export & import" final boss. In order to (finally) go on next development goal, I really would like to terminate that this time, so please wish me good luck
Last but not least, I would like to express warm thanks to privateye, who helped a lot in the preparations of this release !!!
TL/DR: a new version of Pseudo Saturn Kai is available, but as it only contains tweaks to work with Fenrir, please wait for next release in the case you're not using this ODE
Today is some kind of special day for me : among many other things, this is the anniversary of Jean-Luc Le Ténia, the best French singer in the world ! Jean-Luc would had be 45 years old today but unfortunately is no longer here to celebrate today with us.
Today is also the 4th anniversary of Gamer's Cartridge initial public release. For more than three years, this project was the occasion to meet many people, to loose hair on many bug and -I hope- to have contributed in a better Saturn community
Jean-Luc Le Ténia is no longer here, Gamer's Cartridge production was frozen (not to say discontinued) last year because of enough free time lacking to assemble new cartridges. And Saturn gamers are now either using Action Replay (reliable expansion RAM but no backup memory) or "all-in-one" cartridge (backup memory but sometimes buggy expansion RAM) to play their favorite games.
To makes things a little brighter, the best I can do is to develop a new Pseudo Saturn Kai fitting more nowadays needs and situation :
Built-in support with latest ODEs
In-game save data access for Satiator ODE
Save data storage on cartridge flash ROM
As a consequence of my free time being limited from this year, I thought in stopping non-priority projects to focus on other (not necessarily Saturn) ones. But on the other side, if I don't improve Pseudo Saturn Kai, I'm not sure that somebody else would do it for me !
So if the Saturn community shows enough interest, I would like to contribute to a newer Pseudo Saturn Kai
And to measure if the community is interested or not, I'm making Pseudo Saturn Kai development crowdfunding-based.
Principle is simple : the more interest (support) from the community, the more free time I allocate on Pseudo Saturn Kai. And the less interest from community, the more free time I spend on other projects.
I don't plan to make a living in developing Pseudo Saturn Kai, and for this reason all the development made so far was done on a altruist basis.
All the development made so far (cheat codes, Rhea/Phoebe support etc) was cool but honestly a lot of work. So with your help I would like to find enough energy to give it birth again
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.
