Written by cafealpha 5 comments
Out of stock ":]". I'm glad to have finished this batch I don't plan to sell Gamer's Cartridge for a while, because stock of parts to build theses cartridges (electronics components, PCBs, labels, etc) is currently very low here. I'm even lacking of bubble paper used when shipping cartridges
So, what's next ? Of course, Saturn stuff I plan to use this "break" in cartridges manufacturing and sales in order to continue Pseudo Saturn Kai development. Main feature to add is cheat codes, which is a bit "heavy" one to implement, because processing in order to make cheat codes working isn't documented in details. But that will be done ! Also, there are some side quests here and there regarding Pseudo Saturn Kai features. I plan to implement as far I can, so it will be limited only by my free time, my motivation, and flash ROM remaining on cartridge
Gerber preview before ordering PCB on Seeed Studio, very classy and realistic
Edit (2017/05/11) : finally back in stock I catched the occasion to make some minor improvements to my homepage, such as adding anchor link to some sections, adding some directions for Japanese users, etc ... and I'm already full up with writing HTML
Edit (2017/05/12) : half of the stock already reserved oO
Cartridges are assembled by hand, hence stock is small, but I'm impressed anyway
Written by cafealpha no comments
Finally available :]
Last June, I initially wanted to release Saturn Gamer's Cartridge with custom label, but some unexpected problems regarding label quality (not resistant to water) delayed its release, consequently, Gamer's Cartridges manufactured until now had only shell, but no label.
"Stronger" label retained for use by Gamer's Cartridge is designed for car tuning purpose, so waterproof, and even alcohol proof ! I suppose this will satisfy the requirements of typical Gamer's Cartridge user (※) Just a (common sense) note : while labels are waterproof, cartridges themselves aren't So no, you still can't play Saturn while taking a bath
Cartridges with their labels. Bottom-right one (without LEDs) is USB dev cart.
Custom labels were the last main milestone regarding Gamer's Cartridge design : I won't design custom boxes for my cartridges. Why ? Because I want Gamer's Cartridge users to ... use their cartridges, not collect (shelf) them
You are Saturn Gamer ? Want to share your Saturn saves with your emulator or friends ? Want to enjoy Dezaemon 2 game but don't want to purchase a modchip + memory cartridge ? Then Saturn Gamer's Cartridge is for you
Special thanks to my friend Darius who selected paper, printed labels sheet, and cut each labels Darius provided pictures he took when cutting labels, so please enjoy the labels making-of
Label sheet scanned just after print-out. Red/blue lines are used as help when cutting labels.
Tools used : ruler and cutter. And also Darius' God Hand and eyes (not pictured)
In order to optimize time , labels are first cut row per row.
Written by cafealpha no comments
Just a quick article about a Sega Master System demo made by a good friend : Be No Sqr
Be No Sqr description page screenshot Cut in two halves, because ... my laptop screen is wide type (10 years old laptops had larger and taller screens ... what a pity)
I didn't participated in this project ... in fact, I don't know anything about Z80 assembly, but that's cool to see my own nick listed in the credits page
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One month from last update, but not significant updates The reason is that children fought with nearly all typical winter diseases during the last three weeks : mumps, influenza (x2), gastro enteritis, and finally otitis ... x2 too
Internet husband ... I hesitated to put other pictures like "x2 combo !" and "body temperature over 40 ? High score !"
Children were relatively safe from winter diseases until last month, but last spurt until summer was relatively heavy for them
So, no significant updates, but various minor updates :]
Among theses updates, main menu display has been improved when lite version of the firmware is used : - "Extra" features moved to main menu - System status now displays Saturn related informations (BIOS version and PAL/NTSC frequency information) rather than nothing when USB and SD card aren't detected. Theses changes concerns USB dev cart and Action Relay users, hence the majority of Pseudo Saturn Kai future users, so theses changes couldn't be avoided before initial release
Here are pictures taken before and after the changes. Many thanks to Zone66x for testing and taking theses pictures
Pseudo Saturn Kai v5.820 : status display was a little "empty" And USB port was incorrectly detected when running from Action Replay ...
Pseudo Saturn Kai v5.875 : some saturn informations are now displayed. There's no simple way to detect if cartridge is Action Replay or not, so generic "Boot Cart" string is displayed when cartridge type is unknown.
And main menu is a little simpler : no longer need to go to sub menu in order to access extra features.
Also, Zone66x verified that Action Replay communication port (parallel-like port) was usable with Pseudo Saturn Kai. Thank you for testing
Another new feature I'm proud enough to introduce it on my blog is the soft reset "à la carte" Soft reset is used in Pseudo Saturn Kai when loading game from CD-ROM, and also when executing program received from USB port. Basically, it wipes all memory, and puts VDPs memory and registers in initial state, which is good when loading game from CD-ROM, but causes problem when Saturn developer wants to do something else than "just" executing program on main RAM. The "à la carte" advantage comes here : it is possible to select which module to soft-reset, and which one to let as-is before executing program.
Here is an example :
Pseudo Saturn Kai (lite version installed on USB dev cart) main screen. Test program will be executed from this screen.
Let's try to let VDP registers and VDP1 RAM as-is when uploading test program :
Soft reset "à la carte" settings and execution result : Starfield (VDP1) remains in memory and is displayed on test program.
One more try, but with VDP1 RAM clear before execution :
Soft reset "à la carte" settings and execution result : As VDP1 RAM is cleared, starfield is no longer displayed.
Possibilities for this features are relatively wide : it's for example possible to upload graphics on VRAM, then level data on sub RAM, then execute test program on RAM. I hope this will help to improve Saturn homebrew development scene :)
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The quick lazy brown dog jumps over the foxes ? The brown fox quick lazy jump jumps over the ? The ... well, I forgot what it was, but just to say that I spent a some time in messing with fonts in my Save Data Manager application In fact, it would be more accurate to speak about code pages (*), because I finally added support for Japanese text display :]
(*) For those who forgot what code pages was : Once upon a time, before Unicode unified every characters, (and also made strlen function not working correctly on UTF-8 text), there was a custom for all countries in the developed world to define up to 128 extra characters that would be used in second half of ASCII character table. Of course, Japan wanted to do the same, so it added poor looking "1 byte kana" characters on this extra 128 character page, and also added the remaining characters (including kanjis) after that, which gave birth to Shift-JIS encoding.
Since Saturn was developed, during this prehistoric "codepage" era, it is normal to find can find some code page remnants in Saturn software
One of these "code page remnants" is the comment string stored in each Saturn saves : didn't you noticed that sometimes BIOS displays Japanese characters in its save management screen ?
So, Save Data Manager must display Japanese characters instead of garbage characters when showing comment in save data selection menu !
What save comment looked like before adding Japanese characters display ... (It's a 6 months old screenshot)
How to do this ? First, I need to verify that BIOS was defining characters according to Shift-JIS charset, and the best way to do this was to modify some save states and see what BIOS is displaying on screen.
And if possible, displaying as much as possible characters at once would improve the job's efficiency, so I choose to modify Keio Flying Squadron saves since they take only 32 bytes each.
So here comes the reason I choose a such weird title for this article : I wanted to display all font characters at once on screen In the facts, I didn't used such a complex "lazy brown dog jump blah blah blah" sentence. I just displayed all the character in ascending order, and here is what it looked like in BIOS screen :
Repeat after me : －ｱｲｳｴｵｶｷｸｹｺｻｼｽｾｿ...
Looks good That's definitely 1 byte kana characters in typical order.
Saturn BIOS also has ability to display European (accented) character, and switching from a codepage to another is just the matter of changing a byte per save data, so let's try and see what it looks likes :
Same text as above, I just changed the language value
Oh, it looks like the good old ISO 8859-1 (latin1) charset
The picture above was displayed by setting French (my native language) language code in save, and setting to another language code (I tried with Spanish) gave unsurprisingly the same results.
So in the Saturn world, one byte equals one character, and there are two codepages to handle in order to display save comment string. I first feared I had to deal with multi-byte characters (that is a real pain to handle when coding software), but that's not the case, and in fact it's relatively easy to do.
(2 hours later)
Katakana and European fonts
Hmm, theses characters are looking cute :) It's seems that it is time to feed my image conversion tool ^^
(5 minutes later) Okay, latin.bin and katakana.bin files are ready, I should add some codepage stuff in my text display code now !
(1 hour later)
Finally some exotic language displayed ! I lost 30 minutes in wondering why application wasn't initially showing Japanese characters ... and it appears that I was "cleaning up" the comment string by replacing exotic character into space character "It wasn't a bug, it was a feature " It made sense when Japanese character wasn't displayed correctly, but it was time to remove this string cleanup code.
Job complete ? Well, there are still some details to fix, and this is what take the most of time when developing software, but at least the boring part of the job is done :]
As a reward for me, I can now set save comment to a cool one when importing save data and that comment isn't defined. I initially used a dummy "ImportData" string, but the holy "ｾｶﾞｻﾀｰﾝ,ｼﾛ" string defined in hitomi2500's ss-save-parser project is definitely better.
ｾｶﾞｻﾀｰﾝ,ｼﾛ !
Last but not least : finishing this main quest opens doors to firmware translation side quest ! Well, Japanese translation would be ugly, because kanji characters are not available (just old-looking katakana characters : this article title would look like ｻﾞﾚｰｼﾞﾌｫｯｸｽｼﾞｬﾝﾌﾟｵｰﾊﾞｰｻﾞﾌﾞﾗｳﾝﾄﾞｯｸﾞ on firmware :D), and on software side, handling multi byte characters is a real mess, so I don't want to do make a Japanese version of Pseudo Saturn Kai and Save Game Manager.
However, translation for European languages is now technically possible Well, "possible" doesn't means I will do this right now This is a low priority job, so I will do it when I will have enough time and motivation for it.
BTW, in order to test if exotic character display was OK on Pseudo Saturn, I tried to print "beta" glyph (defined in European codepage) on the title bar :
Pseudo Saturn Kai main menu
Without any surprises (text display routines are common between Pseudo Saturn Kai and Save Data Manager), it works ! I can finally indicate that this is a beta version ^^
Edit : oops, the feature to inform me when a comment is posted seems (once again) not to work, and consequently I didn't noticed new comments :/
Here are the comments I replied so far. Since I'm late, they deserve to be re-posted here :
I am really happy to hear that you don't have cancer anymore!! Congratulations! I wish you a really long and happy life! :) Anon
@Anon : It doesn't guarantee I'm cancer free ! CT scans indicate that there is no evidence of cancer relapse, but CT scan has limits (it doesn't shows millimeter-order tumors), so I continue regular cancer screening and taking care in everyday life
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Hey @Spawn, could you upload those Saturn saves you have on your PC? I have been looking for an archive of Saturn game saves for months now and I haven't found any. Maybe with the save states I have, and your saves I can upload them somewhere and start an archive? I'll give you credit for it of course. ReyVGM
@ReyVGM : Thank you for sharing your saves on segaxtreme ! They will be available for everybody on Save Data Manager, so that it will be easy to import on Saturn or emulator.
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best wishes for 2016 !!! vbt
@vbt : Thank you ! Best wishes for 2016 too !!! Well, we are already in February, sorry ^^;
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It's great to see your active development, cause my saturn projects are almost in hibernation today (i'm a bit in a time trouble). And i'm glad my code is of some use. Good luck! hitomi2500
@hitomi2500 : Hehe, I got some free time until end of March ... I don't know what it will be after that, but what's sure is that I will continue to have fun with my Saturn Please keep continuing the good work too :]
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stunned and confused
last night I went on a sega saturn nostalgia trip.
I had to catch up with 8+ years @ segaxtreme. I found antime's usbcart, hitomi2500's fork, hitomi2500's new "wasca" and your stuff here.
sounds great ... I need to dig up my saturn and finally start something. I have a usb-cart from 2006 from pinchy (he seems inactive since 2007). seal1
@seal1 : Hey, I remember seeing your nick in segaxtreme thread about yano/Freewing transfer device (I built a Freewing device at that time). It was a long time before I made my first USB dev cart ... nostalgia. Many members forgot about Saturn and left segaxtreme, but luckily vbt and antime are still active. You're always welcome on segaxtreme, even if it just to say "hi"
So no, you still can't play Saturn while taking a bath 
