DCEmu Homebrew Emulation & Theme Park News
RockinB
by Published on December 21st, 2008 15:50
SEGA Saturn Coding Contest
Porting Party winter '08/'09
It is time again for another episode of the annual SEGA Saturn Coding Contest. A few small changes compared to previous contests mean significant improvements for all contestants:
Your effort is directly rewarded with a prize. No more "I don't have a chance to compete with contestant x", because your prize does not depend on your rank. Instead the amount depends solely on your effort.
The goal to port games over to saturn lowers the amount of annoying debugging work, so you get more result out with less work and you can concentrate on the funny things of homebrew coding.
Objective:
As Porting Party suggests, the objective is to take an existing game of your choice and port it over to SEGA Saturn! This implies that the source code of that game is available and written in C or C++. It's totally up to you which game you choose! Choose your game carefully, try playing it yourself before starting to port it. You'll be best off picking up a game that's finished, very enjoyable to play and that doesn't exceed the hardware capabilities of the SEGA Saturn console.
Time:
The contest is running during winter 2008/2009. Meteorologically, this is the time from december 21st 2008 to march 20th 2009. So march 20th 2009 is the deadline for submitting your entries. To submit your entry: upload the Zip-compressed ISO CD image to a file hosting service like megaupload.com and submit the link via email to [email protected].
Prizes:
All entries are rewarded, no matter which rank. The better your entry is, the more money you win. The more entries you submit, the more money you win.
- Money: Every entry wins as much money, as it got points from the judges. So having achieved the maximum results in: 90 point = 90 euro. Even more if you collected extra points by using special saturn hardware features. Multiple entries means multiple times money! Money is transfered via paypal, contestants in the EU can alternatively use bank transfer.
- USB Data Link v2: This device connects your Saturn with your PC and transfers game saves, bios and uploads homebrew games for testing. Version 2 is brand new and exclusive to contestants, it transfers data much faster than version 1, you can't get it anywhere else. All contestants who haven't got a one last year, will get one for free. Those who won such a device last year, can have it upgraded to v2 for free!
Judging:
The entries are judged in the three categories: graphics, sound and gameplay. The judging is done by 5 to 6 judges in parallel. Every judge rates each entry in each category by giving a rating between 1 and 5 points. This means each entry can get up to 75/90 points regularly.
Additionally, extra points can be achieved by using special hardware features of the Saturn console.
So happy coding everyone. Porting is perfectly suited to submit multiple entries, because each single entry is being rewarded!
The Rockin'-B ...by Published on July 1st, 2008 18:10
Finally, writing SEGA Saturn games in Lua becomes reality!
Lua is a powerful, fast, light-weight, embeddable scripting language. The Saturn Lua Player is a powerful runtime environment for homebrew Saturn games written in Lua. It provides access to hundreds of functions of popular Saturn programming libraries.
It's simple, it's fast, it's powerful and it makes fun! Making Saturn games is now as easy as opening up a text editor and writing:
slPrint("Hello World", 5, 5) while true do slSynch() end
The Saturn Lua Player has proved it's usefulness by running Police Officer Smith and various complex 3d demos. It successfully handles multiple 2D scrolls, rotational scrolls, complex 3D scenery, realtime gouraud shading, textures, save files, CD reading, PCM playback and a lot more!
Download the all-in-one Saturn Lua Player package as Zip (15 MB) or 7-Zip (8 MB) archive.
It includes 12 demos with prebuild ISOs, docs, tools and complete source code of the SLP runtime and all demos.
...by Published on April 3rd, 2008 16:35
Finally, the ranking of the entries of the C4-2007 SEGA Saturn Coding Contest has been determined!
It's been a very close run in the end, with Gaganoid (by VBT) and Police Officer Smith (Arnold and Rockin'-B) being draw with 57 points each!!!!! The battle had to be decided via extra points. This time at the beginning of the contest, a list of extra points was written down. Other people's suggestions were also integrated into the list. If an entry implements a feature from this list, it gets rewarded with an extra point.
Personally, I expected Gaganoid to win this year. After summing up the points from our 5 judges, I was very surprised to see the same number of points for both entries. But due to the massive use of high resolution images throughout the whole game, Police Officer Smith C4 wins over his strong competitor Gaganoid by getting 5 extra points in total.
One the other places follow the Dezaemon 2 Save Game Manager (Madroms), Destiny's Kingdom (Amon), Yaul Demo (Piratero) and SEGA Blur (VBT).
Big thanks go out to all contestants and to the judges as well. Now it's time to play these new Saturn homebrew games on your very own SEGA Saturn console!
Downloads, videos, judge ratings and comments can be viewed here:
http://www.rockin-b.de/c4/2007/results.html ...by Published on October 4th, 2007 19:49
The annual SEGA Saturn Coding Contest starts now!
The C4 - 2007 is a place for hobbyist programmers interested in graphics or classic consoles, as well as SEGA fans with programming skills.
The deadline to submit a homebrew SEGA Saturn game or demo is 20th december 2007. Downloads are scheduled to be available at christmas 2007.
Prizes sum up this year to a unbelievable value of 850,- Euro in total. They consist of money prizes for the three best entries, as well as a SEGA Saturn USB DataLink device for everyone!!!! The new rating system allows contestants to get extra points. With 3 extra points you get a USB DataLink no matter which place you entry is.
I've bought 10 of these very useful devices. They plug directly between the Action Replay cartridge in your Saturn and the USB port of your laptop. With it, you can exchange save games and execute homebrew binaries on your Saturn.
So, I hope you devvers like these new prizes, you are all invited to give it a try!
http://www.rockin-b.de/c4/2007/index.html ...by Published on February 12th, 2007 11:45
Here are some videos of the entries of the
SEGA Saturn Coding Contest (C4-2006)
captured from real SEGA Saturn. Have a look, they are great!
Atlas booting the C4 2006 CD
Well, the YouTube videos don't look as good as the original videos that I uploaded. Furthermore, I can't verify if the sound is still there.
Recording method was:
1. recorded with DVD-recorder
2. cutting and re-coding with VirtualDub
3. upload to YouTube (re-coded there, again) ...by Published on February 3rd, 2007 17:15
Finally, here are the final rankings and downloads of the
SEGA Saturn Coding Contest (C4 - 2006)
The winners are:
- Bounty Getters (proof of concept) by Zaksund
- Super Mario Clone ported by VBT
- Charette A Bestiaux (multiplayer tank battle game) by Vreuzon
Other entries are:
- 3d landscape flying demo by Rockin'-B
- 3d car demo written in Game Basic by VBT
- 2d graphic demo by Charles MacDonalds
To cite a judge(Tassian):
"Let me say this first: it was a real treat to see how good all the entries were and how well the really important aspects of videogames were covered: a fun gameplay, flashy 3D graphics, cool 2D graphics, nice sound and long term fun."
Download the SEGA Saturn CD images,
view detailed ranking and
read complete judge comments here:
http://www.rockin-b.de/c4/2006/results.html
Don't miss playing the entries yourself, either on a real SEGA Saturn (swap-trick or modchip) or on an emulator like SSF, yabause and the like. ...by Published on December 11th, 2006 15:29
People who had a look into homebrew games available for SEGA Saturn may have wondered why only very few of them use 3d graphics. And almost all of these feature only very simple 3d models.
One main reason for that is the difficult toolflow needed to convert 3d data to Saturn format. The conversion is error prone, covers multiple tools (some of them windows-only), with every tool having it's own bugs and limitations.
Once you started assigning Saturn specific polygon attributes, you can't just go back the toolchain and change the geometry without having to redo all the work on polygon attributes.
But that was then.
For Blender, a free cross-platform and open-source 3D modeling program, capable to import a lot of common 3D file formats through plugins using it's python API,
there is now a new plugin available, which allows a 3D scene, including textures and gouraud shading tables, to be exported to SEGA Saturn format!
This is already the 3rd release of the plugin and though further updates will follow, this one can already be considered to be way better than the "traditional" methods. This script was created for my entry to the SEGA Saturn Coding Contest (C4 - 2006) and it is released in the hope, that it will enable other participants to easily use 3d graphics, too.
Have a look at the original topic for detailed info!
Download and view Screenshots via Comments ...by Published on October 27th, 2006 16:20
The SEGA Saturn Coding Contest (C4 - 2006) is almost over, only 1 month left to submit an entry.
For those experienced programmers who haven't been sure if to enter, it's still enough time to make an entry which focuses on visuals.
Same for me, I've just decided to enter myself this year, again. How about you?
Get all the details on the C4-2006 website. ...by Published on October 21st, 2006 14:57
The SEGA Saturn port of SMS Plus emu by VBT is known to be the fastest emu out there, as it uses native Saturn GFX hardware for graphics rendering.
Currently, VBT is working on sound support. For those who hate waiting for a next release, I created a ready-to-burn ISO image which includes the newest version of VBT's emu (the one he released the other week, with updated CPU core) plus all homebrew SMS roms that I could find on the smspower website.
Download and give feedback via Comments! ...by Published on October 21st, 2006 11:02
The Sega Saturn Multiplayer Taskforce has released a new multiplayer game. As the author Vreuzon is from france, the game got the french title "Charette a bestiaux".
It's a top-down viewed real-time tank battle game for up to 6 players. Like in his previous releases ("Stéphano karaté maitre", "Floupix Ping Pong"), you can choose the number of opponents and whether they are controled by humans or CPU AI. The terrain graphics are generated by an algorithm.
Playing the game for the first time, you'll notice that Vreuzon once again has managed to make this Saturn homebrew game better than all his previous releases. It even features transparencies, backup save states and really good sound effects. Significant improvements where ever you look!
Resources:
- GPL'ed source code
- official home page
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Catherine: Full Body’s English translation for the Vita