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This page is about ietx, a port of Yeti 3D engine to Saturn.
ietx2 is a port of the Yeti 3D engine for the Sega Saturn.
Rather than a "stupid port" that would only be a recompiled version of the engine without any modification, I am proud to say that it uses Saturn hardware in order to speed up the drawing process !
I started the development of ietx2 at the beginning of year 2007 (I wanted to participate in C4 2007 contest with it ...), however, as I was stucked in debugging the application and needed to burn CD-ROM each time I wanted to test it on real hardware, I gave up the developpement on Summer 2007.
At the beginning of January 2010, I re-discovered the application's sources on my dev hard disk, so that I wanted to test it real hardware ... and it was the re-beginning of the ietx2 development adventure 
As development would require a lot of tests (if possible, on real hardware), I first wanted to easily upload code to my Saturn, by using a simple command-line based upload tool, or so.
Hence, I tried the soft that came with my USB Data Link ... no really user-friendly for repetitive use ... no source code, but ... Oh ! protocol is detailled ! Let's write a transfer soft for it After several tests, I realize that the my USB Data Link device itself seems not to work correctly ...
Hmmm, let's start from zero and build a freewing communication device ! Hardware cost me $15 and around 10 days of free time during lunch time at work in order to build it.
Available software for Freewing was a 10 years old .exe file without source, so let's re-write it
3 monthes later, transfer software is ready on both Saturn and PC sides, and freewing can be used to download/upload data from/to Saturn, featuring some extra features, such as error-recovery and stream compression (typical transfer speed is 15~20 KB/s with compression enabled 
).
Great I don't need to burn CD-ROM for testing anymore !! 
What should I do now ? As I was fed up to read debug message directly from Saturn's TV screen, lets make a debugger !! 2 monthes later, SatLink application was born. Thanks to it, I could easily see Saturn's memory contents, read/write files through my freewing, and send debug messages from Saturn to PC.
So, ietx2 developpement itself can restart ! I finally could fix the problem that made me gave up in summer 2007 (vertex projection function needed to be modified in the case the coordinates were negative), add some speedup stuff, add double buffering stuff in order to remove some glitches, load map data from CD, etc, etc.
ietx2 is only a technical demo, but I am thinking about adding some replay value to it (As I don't like FPS games, it would be something different), but before this, I plan to improve the drawing engine itself, especially adding Shading by using Saturn's Gouraud Shading or so.
 ietx snapshot #1 (2007/06/20) |
 ietx snapshot #2 (2007/06/20) |
 ietx2 snapshot #1 (2010/12/03) |
 ietx2 snapshot #2 (2010/12/03) |
ietx2 snapshot #3 (2010/12/03) (Click for video on youtube) (video available here in avi format too) |
ietx2 snapshot #4 (2010/12/03) (Click for video on youtube) (video available here in avi format too) |
ietx3 snapshot #1 (2012/06/09) (Click for video on youtube) |
ietx3 snapshot #2 (2012/06/09) (Click for video on youtube) |
You can extract files from archives by using 7zip software.
Note: At present time, levels and textures included in ietx2 are existing stuff grabbed from the internet.
As I plan to make several changes in the yeti ROM data in the future, it is not time to make new stuff now, so that I am using theses maps for testing.
Also, as yeti ROM data would change in the future, yeti level editor software isn't provided now.
 SatCom_release_20110426.7z |
ietx2 latest sources and binaries. |
| 20070620_CA_IETI.7z | Old (June 2007) version very close
to original Yeti 3D GPL version. (Quad rendering is not working correctly) |
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