Emerald Nova Games
Emerald Nova Games
A dude loving his Saturn more than reasonable, and who would like to spend less time chilling at work and doing daily chores at home.
Emerald Nova: What names are you known by in the Sega Xtreme and Sega Homebrew community?
cafe-alpha: cafe-alpha. I'm also known as pastek on French forums.
Emerald Nova: When did you come into the Sega Xtreme and Sega Homebrew community?
cafe-alpha: At the end of 2005 for participating (and winning !) C4-2005 programming contest. Before that, I was in touch by email with Rockin'-B, who encouraged me to register on SegaXtreme.
Emerald Nova: How did you find the community?
cafe-alpha: I think it was thanks to Rockin'-B, as explained above. Before that, Saturn was (and is still) my favorite console. In 2005 I learned how to write a hello world program in C. I decided to make a game for Saturn. So that I naturally arrived on SegaXtreme forums and the Rockin'-B homepage as both were by far the best references at that time.
Emerald Nova: What projects you have contributed to in some form? Who did you work with on these projects?
cafe-alpha: Main contributions are Planet de Pon (Tetris Attack clone), ietx (3D game demo), Gamer's Cartridge (memory cartridge featuring in-game access to SD card) and the "Kai" in Pseudo Saturn Kai. Majority of these projects are derived from the work of other people, such as Rockin'-B (Saturn Game Tutorial) and CyberWarriorX (Pseudo Saturn). I also would like to thank antime and vbt (and other friend I may have forgotten) for their indirect help in my projects. Also, I have to thank the people who helped in testing Pseudo Saturn Kai, especially Stac and privateye. Without them I would certainly had not continued development and maintenance of Pseudo Saturn Kai so far.
Emerald Nova: Is there anyone you think is in danger of being forgotten or lost to time that made contributions to the community?
cafe-alpha: Certainly the first generation of homebrew developers on Saturn, for example TyRaNiD, Charles MacDonald or ExCyber because they started from nearly nothing and in my opinion built the technical basis of the Saturn homebrew scene we know today. Also, FREE WING and Yano contributed a lot by developing alternate solution to PC Comms card : before USB dev cart was a thing, I was an enthusiast user of both devices, which helped a lot in testing ietx at that time.
Emerald Nova: Is there anything else you could think of that should make it into the Saturn Homebrew history pages?
cafe-alpha: Even if it's not "bare metal" development, Dezaemon community (user-designed shmups for use with Dezaemon 2) is definitely worth mentioning.
Emerald Nova: Do you have any previous history in game development or the game industry?
cafe-alpha: No. I work in "industry" of software development close to custom hardware, but that's not related to games and it's better like that, because after all making things for Saturn is more an hobby as a job.
Emerald Nova: Thank you for your time!