SEGA Saturn 28th Anniversary Game Competition

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Hello everyone,
For those who don't know me, I am Sansigolo (@G_Sansigolo) .

I'm here to submit my homebrew entry for the contest: The Case of the City Botucaiba

The Case of the City Botucaiba

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Synopsis

The Case of the City Botucaiba is a mystery visual novel for the Sega Saturn about Renne Bras, a detective who travels to Botucaíba to investigate the mysteries surrounding the city. Submitted in 2022's Cidades Habitáveis game jam from @museudoamanha. The theme of the jam was "Healthy city".

You are Renne Bras, an ordinary "detective. You entered the business seven years ago, just after the end of your longest relationship. You became famous for solving the case of kidnappings in the capital. Months have passed since the case of the Lighthouse of São Bento do Oeste. Since then you have become an active detective in the South Minas region. Everything changed when days ago you received a e-mail from Julia.

Hi Rene, How long <3

It's me, Julia, sending this email to invite you on a trip. It's been months since months since we last saw each other and so I wanted to invite you to spend the vacations together. In case you don't know, I have now become an editor at Sergipe Magazine, a famous political magazine in the country. And during the school vacations at the end of the year, I decided thatI wanted to travel to the city of Botucaíba, in the interior of São Paulo.

You may be wondering why a teacher from São Bento do Oeste would want to spend her vacation in a city in the interior of São Paulo. I want to spend her vacation in a town in the countryside of São Paulo. To know the answer come to me personally hahaha.

I hope this e-mail finds you well!

Yours truly, - Julia

Screenshots



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About the Game

This game was made for Sega Saturn, Sega's 32-bit video game console. To play it is necessary to download an emulator or burn the ISO to a CD. To play on a computer, we recommend the emulators: SSF, Yabause or Mednafen or multi-core emulators such as BizHawk or RetroArch.

Disclaimer

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Credits

This game uses photos made available by the city of Botucatu and Murmansk. With assets created by @_m0U0m_. Music from drackfreeee and Wee Free Music. This game was made using Jo Engine and Neptune Engine.
 
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Here's my Submission for the Tools and Utilities category:

Sega Saturn FILM Muxer



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This is a tool I've made to try and make dealing with FMVs in translation projects a little less painful. The key thing it does is take the Audio from one Cinepak file, and combine it with the Video Stream from another Cinepak file. This can be useful if you want to say replace the audio in a Japanese FMV with dub audio without degrading the video quality of the original Japanese video. The other key thing it can do is work with ADX Audio Cinepak files. So if your game uses ADX Audio Cinepak files and you want to subtitle them, this tool can take the ADX Audio from the original Japanese file, and combine it with the subtitled Video Stream of your new subtitled video.

I have currently only tested it with ADX audio files, but it should work with uncompressed PCM files as well.

The key requirements for it to work are the following:
  • Both files video streams must have the exact same amount of frames and match in resolution and frame rate.
  • Both files audio streams must have the same length and specifications (8-bit/16-bit, Mono/Stereo, Sample Rate, etc.). Audio Compression however does not matter.
  • Being written in Java, a Java Runtime Environment is required to run it. It should work with Java 8 or higher.
So what it's basically doing is taking the Audio data from one file, and the video data from another file, and combining them and reconstructing the STAB chunk data correctly.

The one obvious caveat here is that you need to be able to encode your videos by following the stickied Cinepak Encoding guide. For ADX audio the key caveat is you need a source file that already has ADX audio. This can work if you want to preserve an original FMV's ADX audio, but unfortunately there isn't a way to add new ADX audio yet. I'd like to add this in the future, but I just haven't had the time to look into how this kind of audio was originally broken up into it's STAB chunks.

How to use it
  1. Encode your new video as you normally would following the Sega Saturn Cinepak Encoding process making sure to adhear to the requirements listed above.
    • If you want to preserve the original video but replace the audio, encode a copy of the source video with your new audio swapped in.
    • If you want to preserve the original audio, encode your modified video with uncompressed PCM audio that matches the specifications of the original source video.
  2. Run the tool and select the source FILM file for your audio, the source FILM file for your video, and the output directory.
  3. Click the "Mux Audio and Video" button.

Your new file will be in the specified output directory with the naming convention "NEW_<Name_of_Source_Audio_File>".

Why not use FFMPEG?

While FFMPEG does technically support Sega FILM files, it does not generate the STAB chunk correctly. While some games may be lenient and still play these files, they may present issues (Video glitches, Cracks and Pops in audio, other errors, etc.). Other games may instead just flat out refuse to play these files or crash completely. A good example of this is Sakura Wars 2. When doing research on various different ADX Cinepak files, this was a game I found that flat out would not play any file I threw at it that used ADX audio that FFMPEG created.

This tool will instead generate a correct file with a compliant STAB chunk that any game should be able to play. To show that it works, here is a test I did taking the Disc 2 intro for Sakura Wars 2, and adding subtitles that I did for the first game and patching it into Disc 1:





Eventually I'd like to expand this tool to be a complete replacement for MovieToSaturn and eliminate the need for a classic MacOS environment, but I haven't had the time to really dive into that rabbit hole yet.

EDIT:

Now supports using an ADX file as your source audio. This only works if your destination file also uses ADX Audio.
 

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Releasing the current WIP for Lunar 2 for the contest, v0.18

This is an updated preview release of an English Translation hack of Lunar 2 EB for Sega Saturn.

Here's a summary:

- Straight WD PSX script inserted (for now), a translation cleanup effort is underway.
- VWF inserted (Game Arts got rid of the one from Lunar 1)
- Items/Spells/UI text mostly there now; should be glitch-free maybe minor spacing issues.
- Save/load slots translated now.
- Battle stuff now translated.
- Subtitle format decoded, first subtitle replaced as proof of concept. The tile looks a little glitchy, but thats what i drew because i was lazy. Still need to figure out adding subtitles to videos that did not previously have them.
- Still jp audio so this is more like an undub with the WD psx text. There are a few TBDs in the dialog text for text that exists only in the original Saturn release and does not map to the psx re-release.

I have played up to Dalton on mednafen without any major issues.

There are some graphical glitches that occur when the WD timed dialog text does not line up perfectly with the JP action script. This gets cleared up after entering and exiting the next battle. The solution here is to fix all the scripts, so thats all TBD along with the translation. The first time you'll probably encounter this is after meeting Lucia for the first time. Not sure what happens on real HW.

Lots of work still left to do on this, enjoy.


-Mr Conan

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Here is my entry : Irréel (?)

I didn't test it for that long, it might crash or have bugs left, please tell me if you encounter any!
 
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I forgot I did this patch 9 months ago, but here's the mk ninjas , sonic and CRAIG STADLER in NBA Jam:
 
GalaXmas

Temporary Download Link: GalaXmas

Resource Link: GalaXmas

Holiday special turned around in 24 hours with help from Malenko and Xenos Interactive.

The ghosts of naughty children past are haunting the woods of northern Canada as Santa makes his way to deliver presents to all the good children of appropriate religious and socioeconomic background. Dead trees are coming alive as Kinder rushing through the forest to attack. Giant Elk stampede without regard for who is in their way. Hats are possessed as Twisted Santa Hats, seeking to attack Santa as a personal vendetta. Snow Bears see the red sleigh and charge. The very naughtiest ghosts posses snowmen as wisps to throw fire as Fiery Snowmen. Santa must fight back these naughty ghosts the only way he knows how, by handing out coal. Can you survive level 6?
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Game by Emerald Nova

Art by Emerald Nova, Malenko, and Xenos Interactive

Wintery Loop - Wintery loop

Music: God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen, Deck the Halls, Silent Night (Unholy Night), We Wish You a Merry Christmas, Twelve Days of Christmas, Jingle Bells, Carol of the Bells by Alexander Nakarada (www.serpentsoundstudios.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons BY Attribution 4.0 License
 
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Hi everyone,

I wanted to submit a homebrew game that I have been developing in the early mid of this year.

Briget Bisop

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About the game

The game takes places in the house of Bridget Bishop, a small and lovely witch. Bridget loves to experiment with magic and watch to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. But one day... she turns her cat accidentally into a frog. Her mission is to turn back his beloved cat into its original form.
The game is some mix of RE (3D character over prerendered backgrounds) with classic graphic adventures mechanics. It still could be some bugs, but the game it's finished and quite polish.

The game was created using Jo_engine and Ponut sound.


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Attachments​

The binaries are zipped among a Medanfen emulator, to make it easier to run in the PC.

Bridget Bishop v1.29.0 - Pal version
Bridget Bishop v1.29.0 - NTSC version
 
GalaXmas



Resource Link: GalaXmas

Holiday special turned around in 24 hours with help from Malenko and Xenos Interactive.

The ghosts of naughty children past are haunting the woods of northern Canada as Santa makes his way to deliver presents to all the good children of appropriate religious and socioeconomic background. Dead trees are coming alive as Kinder rushing through the forest to attack. Giant Elk stampede without regard for who is in their way. Hats are possessed as Twisted Santa Hats, seeking to attack Santa as a personal vendetta. Snow Bears see the red sleigh and charge. The very naughtiest ghosts posses snowmen as wisps to throw fire as Fiery Snowmen. Santa must fight back these naughty ghosts the only way he knows how, by handing out coal. Can you survive level 6?
View attachment 7978View attachment 7979

Game by Emerald Nova

Art by Emerald Nova, Malenko, and Xenos Interactive

Wintery Loop - Wintery loop

Music: God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen, Deck the Halls, Silent Night (Unholy Night), We Wish You a Merry Christmas, Twelve Days of Christmas, Jingle Bells, Carol of the Bells by Alexander Nakarada (www.serpentsoundstudios.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons BY Attribution 4.0 License
 

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I would like to submit my Sega Saturn utility: NetBand (v4.3)

Also known as the “The Tunnel”

What is it:

This is a python based utility to facilitate net play between Saturn systems using the modem peripheral. As originally designed, Saturn “online” games ultimately used direct-dial modem to modem communication whereby one Saturn would call another directly over a telephone line. This utility eliminates the need for a real telephone line by tunneling the modem data over the internet. When used with specially patched versions of the modem capable games, a multiplayer gaming experience very similar to the original implementation over landline can be had.

NetBand is available as a standalone Windows PC distribution or as a modified "Dreampi" image for Raspberry Pi.

Notable Features:
  • Automatically updates script files to latest version
  • Dreampi version maintains full Dreamcast online capabilities
  • Automatic modem detection
Setup Requirements:
  • Windows PC or Raspberry Pi
  • Saturn console capable of playing modified games – Cartridge based solutions such as Pseudo Saturn are not supported
  • US Netlink or Japanese modem cartridge
  • USB modem using the Conexant RD02-D400 chipset
  • A way to supply telephone line voltage (Dreamcast line voltage inducer or similar)
  • Unique public IP address with the ability to forward the following ports to the PC or Raspberry Pi running the NetBand utility: 65432 TCP, 20001-20002 UDP.
Games Supported:
  • Daytona USA Circuit Edition (JP)
  • Daytona USA Championship Circuit Edition – Netlink Edition (US)
  • Decathlete for SegaNet (JP)
  • Duke Nukem 3D (US)
  • Puyo Puyo Sun for SegaNet (JP)
  • Puzzle Bobble 3 for SegaNet (JP)
  • Saturn Bomberman for SegaNet (JP)
  • Saturn Bomberman (US)
  • Sega Rally Championship Plus (JP)
  • Sega Rally Championship Plus Netlink Edition (US)
  • Sega World Wide Soccer 98 (JP)
  • Shadows of the Tusk (JP)
  • Virtua Fighter Remix for SegaNet (JP)
  • Virtual-On for SegaNet (JP)
  • Virtual-On Netlink Edition (US)
Game Patches:

(attached)

Please use the included version of Sega Saturn Patcher to patch your game images. Patched games are REQUIRED. Stock games will not work. You’ll notice that a few of the games have a Japanese and US version. Depending on network conditions, one may perform better than the other. If you experience poor performance with one version, try the alternate region release.


Utility Download:

PC

https://github.com/eaudunord/Netlin....3-beta/Netlink_Tunnel_v4.3-beta-portable.zip

Raspberry Pi




Project Page:

GitHub - eaudunord/Netlink

For technical support please visit the Sega Saturn Shiro! Discord server.

Note to judges:

I have spare modems that I can loan out for evaluation purposes

Gameplay:

I recognize that not everyone judging this utility will have the ability to test it first-hand. I want to provide three gameplay samples using the same game to highlight the similarity between NetBand and the original Landline implementation as well as show the large gains in speed and responsiveness over the older VoIP method of getting Saturn games online.

Virtual-On with NetBand 4.3 (Note slowdown past 6:00 was a capture card issue):





Archived footage of Virtual-On played on landline:





Previous tunneling method using VoIP:

 

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Sonic X-Treme (homebrew version)

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Sonic and SEGA Saturn fans alike, rejoice! In this latest installment of the many Sonic X-Treme fan recreation projects comes a new and certainly unique entry into the foray - packed with 4 colorful prototype levels, as seen in the original famous pieces of footage, and a brand new re-imagining of the Nack/Fang boss level as seen in the renowned promo/magazine screenshots - all beutifully re-created and re-designed for the very system the original game was doomed to be released for: the SEGA Saturn!

Refer to the download page for a detailed run-down on additional features, FAQ's and setup. Enjoy!

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Download:
 
Hello,

My submission this year is a CHIP-8 emulator for the Saturn. For those who never heard of it, the CHIP-8 is an interpreted low-level programming language from the late-1970s, in essence programs are run on a virtual machine of sorts which interprets each instruction. It was initially designed and developed by Joseph Weisbecker in 1977 with the goal of making video game development easier for the COSMAC VIP kit computer. To this day there is still plenty of CHIP-8 games and programs being made.

Included in the disc image there are more than 50 public domain/open source CHIP-8 games.

If you want to add more, simply put them inside the 'ROMS' folder and rebuild the disc image, there is also an optionally 'ROMS.INI' file where you can fill in the game description as well as a pre-configure the keymap and some other emulation options.

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A surprise translation project has been submitted. Tune into this week's Shiro stream to see what it is. A full announcement will be made after the reveal.

EDIT:

Team NoahSteam is proud to present

Sakura Wars 2 - Special Edition Demo Translation
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This demo is our reveal that we are officially working on translating Sakura Wars 2 ~Thou Shalt Not Die~. The project has been in the works for over a year and a half now and we are finally at a point where we are comfortable revealing it to the public. While the script translation is mostly done at this point, there's still a bit of technical work left to get the translation actually into the game. So the release date is still very much TBD.

But in the mean time we decided to translate the original Demo Disc that Sega made back in early 1998 to give the same kind of teaser to English fans that Japanese fans had back then. This demo includes a short trailer as well as a short visual novel portion of the game that introduces new characters and dialogue mechanics. While this is from the entire team a lot of the work was done by the following:

==DEMO PROJECT LEAD==
TrekkiesUnite118

==PROGRAMMING==
NoahSteam
TrekkiesUnite118

==TRANSLATION==
MattoBii

==GRAPHICS MODIFICATION==
Joqu
Mattobii
NoahSteam
TheOpponent
TrekkiesUnite118

==FMV SUBTITLES==
Programing: TrekkiesUnite118
Translation: MattoBii

==PROOFREADER==
Bowl of Lentils


Some of the more difficult work involved getting the lip sync data just right so that the text could all be properly displayed, without desyncing the lip animations. In the final game all the text will draw on it's own when characters finish speaking. But in this demo the text completely stops drawing when the characters finish speaking, requiring the player to press a button to see the rest. To fix this we had to do a lot of tedious work to add more text draw commands, without disrupting the lip animations as they're stored in the same data.

So while this syncs a bit better than the first game's patch, there are still some spots where there was no hope in getting it to sync properly without ruining the lip animations. So those lines had additional draw commands slapped at the end of the animation sequences all at once. However I must point out that in the final game this will most likely be more like how we handled it in the first game simply due to the extremely tedious nature of trying to fix this without the original dev tools and source code Sega had back in the 90s.

The other challenge was getting Joqu's beautiful new logo to work in the game's title screen. The title screen in the 2nd game is mostly done on VDP1 through hand drawn animations. So that required us to recreate that which Mattobii gladly did for us. It was then a task of cutting up the logo and animation frames to fit into the original VRAM space, and then modifying all the VDP1 draw commands to properly draw the new graphics on screen in their correct spots.

Finally, the last challenge we had was recreating the trailer at the beginning. The original trailer had Japanese text overtop of it, and showed off scenes with in game dialogue, as well as the battle hud. We wanted to have that footage show off those same scenes from the early patch builds. So Mattobii painstakingly played through the demo builds trying to capture like for like shots from the original trailer, while I captured some shots with the English battle HUD and went through the PC version's FMVs for the pre-rendered footage. While the final trailer is not 100% 1:1 in shots, I think it's a very good approximation.

The demo patch itself is available here in the resources section: Sakura Wars 2 - Special Demo English Patch
 
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My entry this year is update for SkyBlaster.

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New stuff includes:​

  • demo of a story
  • fmv (thx TrekkiesUnite118 for help with cinepak)
  • coop mode
  • new enemy with homing projectile
  • tweeked controls
  • new music (by random stuff)
  • Fixed some bugs and introduced new ones :)
I was planning more, but time was not on my side, this year was really busy. Maybe next time or over the year I'll have some time to finish this completely.

Download link: Builds - Google Drive

Edit: As a small bonus here is a HD version of the intro with all previous revisions of it skyblaster_intro_fmv.zip
 
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