Written by cafealpha no comments
Summer here means an occasion to go to the beach, but because of 'rona restrictions I virtually went to the beach by reading an old blog article.
And instead of beach I went to nearby temple, so that I prepared my bin of 5 yen coins and use it to wish for many things from world peace to success in ongoing Saturn projects.
After getting bored in tossing my coins I took pictures of cats. It was a quiet day with more cats than pilgrims
A cat
Another cat
A gang of cats
Do not feed cats ... but they seem to live well anyway.
(Are they using my 5 yen coins to buy cat food ?!)
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
