Although it was really meant for save game storage and RAM upgrades, it could easily be argued that the most important use of the Sega Saturn’s cartridge slot is facilitating 3rd party enhancement carts. These carts can—in addition to enabling cheat codes and providing additional save storage and RAM expansion functionality—perform the noble task of […]
Two enthusiast developed projects on the GameCube—GC Loader and Swiss—have released important updates over the last month that work together to enable exciting new functionality for fans of the lil’ purple lunchbox. GC Loader—an optical drive emulator developed by Daniel Kraak—is a modification that replaces the GameCube’s built in disc drive with an SD card […]
FM Towns Marty console users have enjoyed the availability of an optical drive emulator in the “Doc Brown” for years. Now Deunan has released the “Grey Tower Wizard” optical drive emulator for the FM Towns PC which makes a larger portion of the FM Towns library accessible from an SD card. How Do You […]
The latest update for the Fenrir ODE was released a few days ago and it brings bug fixes as well as a few new features. Sega Saturn enthusiasts who own one should definitely look into this firmware as it makes the user experience much nicer. Both the 20 pin and 21 pin versions can be […]
The Sega Saturn optical drive emulator (ODE) Fenrir just received a minor price drop. Its initial release was surrounded by a bit of confusion in terms of pricing but it ended being sold at €115 (~$138) for the better part of 2020. Ced, the main developer behind the Fenrir, also released a couple of firmware […]
While it’s only been a couple of weeks since the X-station received its latest firmware update, the project’s main developer ramapcsx2 just released yet another newer update that improves, or rather simplifies compatibility and addresses a few bugs. Introduced by Sony in 1998, Libcrypt is extra code stored on quite a few PAL PS disc/games […]
A new firmware update has just been released for the new and upcoming PlayStation optical drive emulator (ODE), the X-station. While users who pre-ordered their units before late September are expecting to receive them very soon, the project’s main developer ramapcsx2 addressed some bugs, improved compatibility and ameliorated the overall presentation of the X-station, all […]
GCLoader, a GameCube ODE made by Daniel Kraak and Dan Kunz, received a new firmware update today that improves audio streaming performance. Attentive readers may have seen that audio streaming was also addressed in a previous firmware update, v1.1.1, but that update was pulled because it functionally bricked certain revisions of GCLoaders by causing Disc Read […]
With the Satiator finally seeing a “Retail” release (right now it’s only being sold to Patreon patrons, but will be available to everyone in the fairly near term) I was finally able to kick the tires on this long-awaited device. A Crowded Market In the three years that the Satiator has been incubating the Saturn […]
Cybdyn Systems has just released a new firmware for their Playstation optical drive emulator, PSIO. While the update itself fixes numerous important bugs and introduces some welcome improvements, what piques my interest is that Cybdyn has recently come in to possession of original PSX development boards—something that could account for the substantial re-writes included in […]
