Biggest Sega Saturn Homebrew Release
Rockin-B posted this great news on his site:
<blockquote>The Rockin'-B All Stars
for SEGA Saturn
"One to play them all", you burn a single Saturn CD image and get a complete, up to date and all new collection of all Saturn homebrew applications ever created by The Rockin'-B.
Using Atlas (multi game boot disc application for SEGA Saturn), each of the 14 Saturn apps is presented with: a screenshot thumbnail, a short textual description, a full screen image showing controls and an audio file.
Just like the old SEGA Flash demo CD's, you don't need to reboot the Saturn to play another game. Once booted, you can run games (press START) and return to the main menu (press START+A+B+C) by the push of a button. Especially people using the swap trick will find this very useful.
The Rockin'-B All Stars includes emulators, demos, games, a sound player, a backup file compression and action replay reflashing utility as well as a never before released 3D demo of Rockin'-VR. A lot of applications have been updated(bug fixes, speed-ups, new features) for this CD.
These Saturn apps are on The Rockin'-B All Stars:
- Rockin'-VR demo
- MineSweeper
- Atari Lynx emu
- Neo Geo Pocket Color emu
- Game Boy Color emu
- Wonder Swan Color emu
- Saturn SoundPlayer
- 3D Racing Game Project
- WinterSports Eins
- Saturn Game Tutorial Demo
- Texture Coordinate Demo #1
- Texture Coordinate Demo #2
- Texture Coordinate Demo #3
- Save Game Manager
What's new?
New: Atlas
The long awaited Atlas is a fully customizeable multi game boot disc application for SEGA Saturn. It allows up to 50 Saturn games to be put on one CD, offering a very nice game selection menu along with a variety of additional per-game presentation media like screenshot thunbnail, textual desription, full screen info image and even an audio file.
Atlas is the base for The Rockin'-B All Stars and it will be for the C4 - Saturn Coding Contest CD, too.
A tool called Atlas Creator is currently under development. It will allow to create a multi game or single game Saturn disc from a collection of Atlas Game Packs. Of course, it'll allow homebrew developers to create Atlas Game Packs, too. So in the future, the Saturn scene will have a nice solution to distribute homebrew software, similar to the Dreamcast Self Boot Inducer project. For those who want to make custom Atlas Saturn CD's now, all information is written in ATLAS.TXT (on disc and in folder 'readme').
New: Rockin'-VR demo
Rockin'-VR was my first and very ambitous Saturn project. It's is a viewer for 3D worlds written in VRML97. Well, it has never been completed as the 6 month I spent on this where very hard. Nevertheless, now about 5 years later I do release a non-interactive demo of Rockin'-VR which was made for a single person only those days.
Updated: four emulators speed up
All four (GBC, NGPC, WSC, LYNX) of my emulators for SEGA Saturn have been speed up by at least 10 percent. Most importandly, ROMs can now be read from different CD's by supporting in-game disc swapping. Also, exit to Atlas or multiplayer is possible by pressing START+A+B+C, too. Not to forget the controler handling was improved which now supports the multitap and recognizes pad disconnection.
Updated: Save Game Manager
This one is massively improved with a lot of new features. In addition to the BZip2 compression, a file split and join feature offers new possibilities in save game file transfer. It is now possible to transfer save games from one Saturn console to another via button presses. This is a user requested feature known from the 3DO. Another long awaited file transfer feature is currently disabled: human readable base64 textual encoding. New features are the memory viewer and the memory dump feature. This way you can dump the firmware of your Action Replay cart as a backup for reflashing. The included action replay reflash feature has been expanded and now allows to flash with any available firmware file, even user supplied firmwares or firmware backups. A new firmware has been added, too. To deal with all these features, the Save Game Manager now features a nice menu where you can select any possible action manually.
Updated: WinterSports Eins for SEGA Saturn (C4 entry)
The multi platform game WinterSport Eins, which is a remake of a very popular funny little game, is finally finished, after a small adaption to the scaled sprite drawing has been applied.
Updated: MineSweeper for SEGA Saturn
MineSweeper has been released on 31st august 2003 as an entry to the segaXtreme Saturn Coding Contest 2003 and got the 3rd place. A GFX bug has bin removed, which could cause the game to freeze when displaying huge playfields. Furthermore, MineSweeper now allows to exit (to Atlas or multiplayer) by pressing START+A+B+C and partially supports the multitap.
This and a lot more can be found ONLY on The Rockin'-B All Stars for SEGA Saturn. I'm proud to be able to present you this and I hope you'll enjoy it playing on a real Saturn! Special thanks to vbt! He helped in getting it working, screenshots and hosting, too.</blockquote>
Awesome news for the Sega Saturn homebrew scene :)
Visit the Rockin-B`s site here --> http://www.rockin-b.de/
