Emerald Nova Games
Emerald Nova Games
Developer of Yaul. Sega Xtreme page.
Emerald Nova: What names are you known by in the Sega Xtreme and Sega Homebrew community?
mrkotfw: mrkotfw, and in my earlier days, nescphp.
Emerald Nova: When did you come into the Sega Xtreme and Sega Homebrew community?
mrkotfw: I joined the SegaXtreme forums on Dec 30, 2002. I believe I was on and off up until possibly 2008 when I started focusing more on Sega Saturn development.
Emerald Nova: How did you find the community?
mrkotfw: I may have found it through Eidolon's Inn.
Emerald Nova: What projects you have contributed to in some form? Who did you work with on these projects?
mrkotfw: Yaul. Since it's inception, I've worked on it privately for the first few years. When I finally joined GitHub in 2010, I decided to move away from SourceForge. Over the years, I've had people make large and small contributions.
Emerald Nova: Is there anyone you think is in danger of being forgotten or lost to time that made contributions to the community?
mrkotfw: Possibly CyberWarriorX and Rockin'-B.
Emerald Nova: Is there anything else you could think of that should make it into the Saturn Homebrew history pages?
mrkotfw: The SegaXtreme forums pre-2015..
Emerald Nova: Do you have any previous history in game development or the game industry?
mrkotfw: Prior to the Saturn, nothing other than tinkering with the GBA in the early 2000s.
Emerald Nova: Thank you for your time!
Emerald Nova: You submitted Heroic-Vania for the 2020 Competition. This was basedon code written by ndiddy, correct?
mrkotfw: Yes, it's in the license. Heroic-Vania was forked from ndiddy's project, which was initially ported from SBL over to Yaul. Yaul itself has had many contributors.
Emerald Nova: That helps. What about AJBats, hitomi2500, and misscelan?
mrkotfw: There's some bad blood? Last I heard, vbt scared Charles back in the IRC days. All three are users.
Emerald Nova: Users?
mrkotfw: Users of Yaul.
Emerald Nova: Lets focus on your stuff. You do Yaul and recently, adapted some of ndiddy's and Ponut's code to create Heroic-Vania in Yaul.
mrkotfw: Man, I'm not so good at remembering things, sorry about that. But yes. My real work, to me, is Yaul. I don't have any other Saturn projects. They're all contained with Yaul. With Yaul, there's libsega3d, which is the 3D library with SGL 3D model compatibility.
Emerald Nova: Is there any official library left in Yaul?
mrkotfw: There never ever was anything official in Yaul, it was written completely from scratch. The ONLY "official" things are the BLOBs that are required to generate an IP.BIN.
Emerald Nova: Basically an non-optional sequence you need to get anything running.
mrkotfw: You don't need it if you're testing via tools like: SatLink and ssload. That is, you just need to upload your binary to memory and execute. But if you want your game to boot from a CD, then yes.
Emerald Nova: What about an ODE?
mrkotfw: With an ODE, you need the IP.BIN. But not if you are booting from a development cartridge: uploading and executing your binary using an USB development cartridge or the USB DataLink. Or even the ISA PC COMMS card. This is what I used back in the early 2000s
Emerald Nova: Thats the COMMS card?
mrkotfw: Yeah.
Emerald Nova: And there is a cartridge associated with that?
mrkotfw: The 4M/1M Action Replay cartridge.
Emerald Nova: With a serial to USB cable?
mrkotfw: No, not at all. Parallel port. This is the same one that's used for Pseudo Saturn.
Emerald Nova: Most do not have a parallel port.
mrkotfw: Now they don't, but back then it was very common as far as I know.
Emerald Nova: Thank you.