Saturn Coding Contest: Porting Party Winter '08/'09

[RockinB]

SEGA Saturn Coding Contest
Porting Party winter '08/'09

I think this might be of interest for the people at this board, too. So here is the official announcement of the new Saturn coding contest:


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

[RockinB]

Here are some images of GemDropX (by Bill Kendrick) running on SEGA Saturn. The port is basically done, all graphics, sounds and music works fine. It's much fun playing it! Maybe the timing can be improved.

This is going to be one of my entries that I'll do for this contest. Of course, as I'm holding the contest, I won't get any price, only a rank will be given by the judges.

Titel screen:


Title screen#2:


Gameplay in SSF Saturn Emulator:


Gameplay in SSF Saturn Emulator #2:

[RockinB]

Here are some images of Vectoroids (by Bill Kendrick) running on SEGA Saturn. This SDL game performs direct access to the frame buffer pixels. Although it claims to use fast geometric calculations, the rasterizer is poor in terms of speed (performs per-pixel access to framebuffer).

The game also uses some sort of "gouraud shading"-like color interpolation.

My initial attempt of porting it had some problems. It's been way to slow, it flickered and the color effects had to be disabled. All because I used the software rendering of the original game. But now I've switched to using the VDP1 for drawing the vectors. But I've had some trouble with gouraud shading, because it behaves differently than in the vdp1 docs.

The vector drawing is now done with gouraud shaded lines drawn by the vdp1. The background is 640x480 8bit paletted (hires+double interlace), the vectors are 320x480 RGB double interlace. The game now runs fast, it's finally playable.

Thes images are of the finale VDP1 accelerated version of Vectoroids:










Here you can compare the above images to the previous software rendering version. The flickering made it unplayable:

[RyaNtheSlayA]

i doubt anybody is awesome enough to do it but id love to see Quake 3 scaled down and running on a Saturn w/ 3D pad support. Its possible but I havent met anybody who has the 3D workings of the Saturn completely down in the homebrew community.

[corn619]

I wonder if someone could port some NES or SNES classics to saturn with updated graphics. I don't know much about coding but it would be cool if it could be done.

[RyaNtheSlayA]

I wonder if someone could port some NES or SNES classics to saturn with updated graphics. I don't know much about coding but it would be cool if it could be done.

Yes but you have to have the source code I guess (or you could try your best to make a replica)

[RockinB]

I wonder if someone could port some NES or SNES classics to saturn with updated graphics. I don't know much about coding but it would be cool if it could be done.

Luckily, there already exist SNES and NES emulators for SEGA Saturn. As for porting in general, the source code needs to be available. Making a clone/replica/reimplementation is not the objective of this years contest, since it doesn't offer the same benefits that porting of finished games has.