A Bunch of Saturn Dev Software

Hey,

So I recently met someone that had a bunch of disks and cd's with source code and development tools from Sega. He said he got them at a IRS liquidation sale of a company in the Bay Area after the web bubble burst. Anyways I finally met up with him and took a look at the files.

There was a ton of stuff but a lot of it was Sega Saturn stuff so I'm posting here.

There was a ton of 1.44mb floppy discs with source code of various Sega games. Also a lot of developer tools. I will get to those in a bit. There were 4 cd's and they all have some interesting stuff.

• Sega Developer Tools November 1995 (32X and Saturn) (README - http://pastebin.com/WeZLzA7J )
• Sega Dev Machine Archive (Top level directories are BRIEF FOO PUB STRIKE VECEDIT VISTA)
  
• Sega Channel (Top level directories SIERRA and P__)

The floppies had Spiderman source code. They are all archived using CP Backup though I haven't been able to extract them yet I tried using Dosbox and an old version of PC Tools but I said screw it and I'm installing Windows with bootcamp right now (I'm on OSX).

You may have noticed I said there were 4 cd's and I only listed 3. The 4th was an unreleased PSX game called Razor Wing. Unfortunately I couldn't copy the files. The CD was in great condition but for some reason hung at 21mb every time.

Other interesting things

• Sega CD Sound Drivers
• MacDDT_Sega
• 3D0 Animator
• Source Code for some game called Gray Convert
• Junk Mini Game source code. Note sure what it is. It's PSX related though.
• Game called Spidey -- It was just labeled with a post-it ( I can't run it I need erx68k )
• A bunch of id software stuff. Original art files it looks like from doom. It's all .map files.

It would be awesome to actually figure out what all this stuff is. Also what company it may have come from.

Also one last thing. The guy swears that when he opened up the files on a PC many years ago he saw a ton of Panzer Dragoon Saga art files and what looked like code. I couldn't find anything. He said that he could only see them when browsing on a PC. I could see that happening back in the day but OSX should be able to read any Windows file formats right? Either way like I said I'm installing Windows now and I'm going to go check the discs out again later in the week. That would be amazing if there was anything related to Panzer Dragoon Saga on the discs.

Any software suggestions or even hardware for reading the floppies? I bought a Sebrant external Floppy Drive but it started to crap out on me towards the end. I was just copying the files off the disks, should I have been making images of the disks probably? I've been reading around the site and this place is amazing! If anyone has any pro-tips that would be cool.

 

No idea on Saturn stuff but yes you should image the disks using any software of choice, I personally use IMGBurn.

I know you can image floppies as well but no idea on the details for that one and remember to always back up everything in triplicate in as many locations as you can when it comes to these types of things.

 

Thanks for posting here! Sure does look like an interesting bunch of everything!
Let me just page the good doctor "Paging Dr. @Druid II, is @Druid II in the house?"

 

Great find :thumbsup:

Regarding floppy imaging - try WinImage on Windows or 'dd' on Linux/Mac. The top tier solution would be a KryoFlux device, maybe you can find somebody that owns one and can dump the disks for you?

 

Cool find. You should definitely try to image the entire disks, there might be some hidden/deleted files. It's much better to try to recover stuff from the images than directly from the floppies themselves, as you risk overwriting stuff.

Also, if you do use dd on a Mac, like rso suggested, be careful, as the wrong dd invocation can easily blank the entire disk.

 

Thanks everyone for all the responses! I'm tempted to get the KryoFlux. I'm just not sure about dishing out 120.00 for it + 80.00 more or so for the drive... That said I've made more extravagant accidental drunk Amazon purchases before, so lets get some beers in me

So I'm going to follow up this weekend with the owner of the disks and see if he can meet up again. I wish Kryo Flux had rush delivery...

If anyone lives in the Bay Area and has a KryoFlux feel free to message me! If anyone has anymore insights or wants more details about the files I have also let me know. Thanks again!

 

a kf is great for copy protected or damaged disks, or if you're a perfectionist. most of the time a normal drive should be sufficient, unless you run into read errors.

drx makes a good point about accidental overwriting though - thankfully floppies have that write protect switch thingy.

 

Why has nobody noticed the real find here?!?


Sega coded the red ring of doom!

A floppy drive! ;-)

No, seriously... use a floppy drive. Not that USB crap, a REAL floppy drive. And I wouldn't bother with a Mac (would the whole big endian / little endian thing matter?) - just use an old PC with a working floppy drive. Personally, I keep good floppy drives for just that occasion. Except for that one that says Mac on it.. and I'd use an old Mac myself. In fact, the art disks are probably all Mac format.

By the way, most of those disks are not Saturn. And it's fairly obvious they're from ID Software - Doom and Commander Keen. It's even written on the disks!

P. Brennan is Peggy A. Brennan, a former production artist. I've reached out to her to see if she'd mind sharing some memories (so that she doesn't get bombarded by hordes of gamers!) - hopefully, she will!

Nice stuff!

 

Nice find!
May I add a suggestion for the problematic CD, try with some other CD/DVDdrives.

 

@retro Ha fair point on it not all being Sega Saturn stuff. The burned CD's were all Sega Saturn though and I'm really curious as to what they are. I'm going back to check out things again today. I've got Windows installed on my laptop now so that should make some things easier.

I will look into getting my hands on an old PC with a floppy drive. I'll get some more pictures and more details today. I will update.

 

x

 

Hey so I've figured out more! I'm pretty positive I've figured out where all these CD's and disks came from.

One of the disks I have has a bunch of references to Strike. It also had files for jungle levels, desert levels, urban levels. So I started searching those things with a couple other keywords and then I came across this forum post from 2008.
http://www.sega-16.com/forum/showthread.php?2918-Super-Strike-Trilogy-does-it-exist

It looks promising so I scroll on then I see this post

Super Strike Trilogy is real, but unreleased. I asked David R. Foley some questions via e-mail. He and his company Foley Hi-Tech Systems (which also worked on B.O.B., Spider-Man CD, and Urban Strike) were working on it. It's listed on his resume, and he also mentioned it in his response to me. He didn't elaborate on it, nor did I ask him to.
​

Suddenly it all clicks. All the Spiderman game source code (There's a bunch of versions Miles 1 - 4 then one just labeled Spidey). Also some of the disks explicitly said Foley Hi-Tech on them. Also I found a txt file with a time sheet of theirs. They were based in San Francisco and David Foley the founder still lives out here. So I think there's a high likelihood they came from Foley Hi-Tech.

My guess would be that one of the things I have here is the unreleased version of Strike that they are talking about in that old forum post.

In other news... on the Sega Channel cd there's a bunch of bins of games that run in KEGA as well as a ton of a different menus that you can run of the actual Sega Channel.

@Druid II I'll send you a message with some details on the files. I should have all the mac ones. I don't want to go posting everything up just yet the guy who owns all the disks asked if I could hold off.

He didn't have the disks with him at his shop today but is going to bring them tomorrow. So I'll have more info then.

​

 

Yes they were. The Mac stuff is out there. You can still copy Mac files on a PC. There was an ISO, too.

Could be Urban Strike.

Also note that Foley is a word for sound effects recordings. I think you're right in this case, though. Ring of Doom is an unreleased game by them.

David Foley did work on Spider-Man and also The Amazing Spider-Man vs. The King-Pin, but the company don't have their name credited in the game. Not to say they weren't involved, though.

 

x

 

There was an ISO, and you're wrong. The file 32X-DDK.7z is most definitely what's on the CD. The folders are empty on the CD.

 

x

 

10 years ago - long gone. Pretty sure it was the same disk.

Whilst the files are indeed present on a Mac (and would have been if whoever copied them did it right), they're just the files on Antime's site.

 

Since there's at least some MegaCD dev related stuff in this collection (saw the MegaCD SNASM install disk in the images), please keep an eye out for the C-Trac software to drive the CD emulation hardware in the Cross Products MegaCD devkit. This software may take the form of a "SEGA.EXE" file, or possibly an "EMULATE.EXE" file along with a "SEGAEMU.HEX" file. This software is currently lost to time, and without it it's impossible to use the CD emulation capabilities of this devkit. The company that made the emulation hardware no longer exists, but I tracked down the guys who designed the hardware and wrote the software. They sent me a bunch of stuff like design schematics, but unfortunately the guy who wrote the software told me he didn't save any backups of it, so the only source we can hope to find that software on ever again is random drives and disks like these ones, from former developers.

 

@Nemesis I might actually have what you're talking about. There was a disk called Sega Dev Machine and it was for Sega CD. Here are pics of the files. Let me know if this is what you're looking for.

 

Holy crap, that's it! I've been actively searching for that software for a decade. Any chance of a copy of that disk? There are a total of two people in the world trying to use that system for actual dev work, myself and Headcrab, and that software is the only "missing piece" of the devkit right now. I can see there's also the official include files for the MegaCD security programs there, and other official content from Sega which hasn't previously surfaced online.

If you're still after software recommendations, I'd suggest just installing the 30-day trial of WinImage and creating a disk image. A USB or internal FDD doesn't matter, either one will do the job fine.