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
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
Webou (which host PPcenter) was kindly providing HTTPS for already a long while but my homemade CMS was messing up the display of my homepage : for obscure reason (I honestly don't remember why) it was trying to load the page's CSS from an absolute URL, including the "http", and as HTTPS doesn't really likes to load something from an unsecured location, the CSS was discarded so that the page display was ... minimalistic
Saturn cartridges page before fixing HTTPS support
This is now fixed, and additionally trying to use plain HTTP should also magically redirect to HTTPS.
That's quite helpful, because all the labels for Gamer's Cartridge are referring my homepage as "HTTP" (*) and I really didn't wanted to have to re-design theses labels
Just a small article to inform that NinPen Manmaru translation patch was updated recently : I was reported that the game freezes after beating the final boss and that this could be fixed by using original (Japanese) script file instead of the translated one during that moment.
So this update of the translation patch is just a lazy implementation of what's described above : before overwriting script files with translated ones, the file used after beating final boss is renamed so that Japanese one is kept
At some moment I wanted to do something better regarding this translation project, such as translating in-game images :
Me trying to convert images to
standard format : the cut scene
In-game image correctly converted on second try
But that concerns so few screens (typically, regarding memory cartridge setup) that the game is playable as-is.
And also, I'm not that motivated to do translation work to then see physical copies for sale on some kind of stores for retro-gaming; so far I did my best to make my projects available for a large majority of players (Pseudo Saturn Kai itself doesn't costs a dime and can be installed on cheap Action Replay-ish cartridges, there are no kind of advertisement nor crowdfunding requests on my homepage, etc), so on the other side it's quite frustrating to see other retro gaming teams making cash on other people's work ...
To end on a positive note, I would like to add from the fact it could be verified that -except the small problem above- the game could work fine until last boss, it's fairly sure that the two "NINMES.DA" and "NINOMAKE.DA" are not necessary to play the game.
Consequently the "Press Enter to continue patching at your own risks" message caused by theses two files can be safely ignored during the patching process
That's a bit late for Easter, but did someone noticed the one hidden in Pseudo Saturn Kai v6.314 ?
Easter Egg in Pseudo Saturn Kai v6.314
This can be triggered by a key combo from Pseudo Saturn Kai main menu and ODE image selection menu. It's available in both lite and full versions of the firmware and can also be triggered from RmenuKai too.
Keys sequence was changed after taking the video above, so don't try to guess it from there ! Unsurprisingly, keys sequence is more complex in Pseudo Saturn Kai v6.314
Why such kind of technical demo in Pseudo Saturn Kai ? Simply because it was fun to implement
Additionally, this is also a small wink to the good old times I was daily using a TI-89 calculator : this Easter egg was ported from Voxel2Space demo by Kai Kostack.
I still keep using my TI-89, but way less more than when I was a student. It's actually quite handy to do quick math or binary to (hexa)decimal conversions at work : the more Windows evolves, the more horrible its builtin calculator becomes (seriously, my eyes are about to bleed each time I see the Windows 10 calculator ), so it's good to have a physical calculator at reach of hands
Let's play a game with this Easter egg : the first one to find the correct keys combo will be rewarded by a Gamer's Cartridge from my own collection !
- Post the correct keys combo in the comments of this article.
- This is limited to one Gamer's Cartridge, for one lucky Pseudo Saturn Kai user.
- Don't forget to indicate an email address where you can be contacted !
This is necessary for offering the reward.
- Choice of the Gamer's Cartridge shell color etc is at my own discretion.
- Application will end in December 31st, 2019 : if nobody find the key combo until that time, I shall re-use this Gamer's Cartridge for similar kind of games with my Saturn projects.
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.
), so it's good to have a physical calculator at reach of hands 
