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roka (roka@pl.smuglo.li)'s status on Sunday, 20-Sep-2020 07:26:10 JST roka lol either sorting or VDP1/VDP2 drawing issuescreenshot.jpg -
georgia (georgia@freespeechextremist.com)'s status on Sunday, 20-Sep-2020 07:30:25 JST georgia @roka what game is that -
roka (roka@pl.smuglo.li)'s status on Sunday, 20-Sep-2020 07:30:25 JST roka @georgia Shining the Holy Ark, it's a dungeon crawling, party-based first person perspective RPG (aka blobber). Pic related is from a cutscene with a shitty furry ninja.mk-81306-0011.png -
georgia (georgia@freespeechextremist.com)'s status on Sunday, 20-Sep-2020 07:41:06 JST georgia @roka is it a peecee game? -
roka (roka@pl.smuglo.li)'s status on Sunday, 20-Sep-2020 07:41:06 JST roka @georgia it's :sega: Saturn exclusive, I'm currently playing it in an emulator though (because I'll have to completely check caps on my hardware – one didn't look too bad when I was fixing the solder on the modchip power tap so some rot might be happening ehhh) And here's the game throwing a reference at me that immediately made me REEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE the first time I played it. StHA is part of the Shining series which are normally tactical RPGs, however it is also reusing the style and systems of the first game that started the series – Shining in the Darkness, which was a proper dungeon crawler. In it, the first floor boss you encountered as a scripted event was a kaiser crab and you had high chances of being completely pulverised by it since the game didn't allow you party members at this point and the section of♂the♂dungeon you are allowed to roam in is heavily segmented with powerful enemies should you make a step a bit too far. Later on, the game throws them at you as random encounters – significantly depowered but they're still likely to give you a heart attack the first time those fuckers pop up. Shining the Holy Ark game also did this and they are even more of a pain to fight against since the pincers count as separate enemies and when you remove them, the GIANT ENEMY CRAB gains a powerful attack against the whole party in a turn. Fuckers knew you possibly played SitD in the past and wanted you to cry.
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roka (roka@pl.smuglo.li)'s status on Sunday, 20-Sep-2020 07:41:33 JST roka @georgia here, screenshot didn't attach ;;mk-81306-0019.png -
roka (roka@pl.smuglo.li)'s status on Sunday, 20-Sep-2020 07:48:04 JST roka @georgia unlike Soyny GayStation, Saturn's modchip requires very little invasive work to install – they are ribbon cable passthroughs and the only thing you need to solder is a wire leading to any +5VDC source. I just tapped it to the base of one of the gigantic power prongs coming from the motherboard (on the bottom of the frankly very thicc unit) that „pierce” the power supply daughterboard (located on topmost layer, on the level of the CD-ROM block) – the current flowing through there would be the highest so it shouldn't affect anything. I believe any +5VDC pad would do, though. -
georgia (georgia@freespeechextremist.com)'s status on Sunday, 20-Sep-2020 07:48:05 JST georgia @roka wow that sounds horrible. I love that you soldered your Saturn. -
roka (roka@pl.smuglo.li)'s status on Sunday, 20-Sep-2020 08:03:50 JST roka @georgia you know what's cooler? The copy protection on Saturn was broken within its lifespan but only because of a design flaw in the security protocol – the CD block operates semi-independently using a SuperH-1 microcontroller with self-contained code (both of Saturn's main CPUs were SuperH as well, just a generation above). All the modchip does is listen on the data bus and hijack the result of CD check from the CD block to the main CPU since it's the latter who makes a decision whether to unlock the drive or not (when it detects presence of a game disc signature, it locks down access to only few sectors). The exact nature of what the system would check to verify disc's authenticity was not known for certain until a few years back when some guy actually managed to dump the code from the CD block's CPU. It's what made emulation of the Saturn improve rapidly within months tbh, the block did a lot more than just handle the CD-ROM. -
georgia (georgia@freespeechextremist.com)'s status on Sunday, 20-Sep-2020 08:03:51 JST georgia @roka I still think its really cool :)
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