sonic the fighters for sega saturn does anyone think that it will be found

i was wondering if anyone thinks that the sega saturn version of sonic the fighters will ever appear ? i realize that it would be easier for someone with coding knowledge to take a rom of the arcade version of sonic the fighters then port it to the sega saturn than waiting for a game beta that may be nothing more than a test engine . personally i would love to see someone port sonic fighters to the saturn ,i can't as i have no knowledge of coding for the saturn and i might need the saturn source code.

 

Dunno, but this reminded me of a scan I did a couple of years ago:

 

I doubt even AM2 would have been able to simply port over Sonic The Fighters from the Model 2 board to Saturn, though to my knowledge their conversion was completed and supposedly cancelled in either late 1996 (prior to the release of Fighters Megamix) or as late as May '98 depending on different sources. As with so many of this division's unreleased projects from that era, it's unlikely Saturn STF will ever see the light of day... if it even still exists in the first place.

P.S. Do you honestly believe the source code for such a game would be so readily available? I can only dream of that being the case, along with the last-known builds of Saturn Virtua Fighter 3 and the Shenmue prototype escaping out into the wild.

 

x

 

AM2 ported STF to Sonic Gems Collection in 2005. They still had the source code then.

He's the one who endorsed the game, and was in good terms with them. Good enough to have featured SA1 director Takashi Iizuka as a playable test character in the game's debug menu.

Oh... I see, now.

 

x

 

We can tell from the port included as part of the Gems Collection that AM2 definitely still had the Model 2 source code for Sonic The Fighters as late as 2005, though I was under the impression that takeshi385 was originally asking about the cancelled Saturn version rather than assets from the arcade original:

Also, it's been claimed in the past that while Yuji Naka initially approved of STF, following what he perceived as the misuse of his creation at the hands of Sega Technical Institute during the whole Sonic Xtreme fiasco he was indeed against the idea of Sonic Team characters featuring in Fighters Megamix, hence their substitution for Bark and Bean.

I realise it's a subject that's been done to death in the past (no thanks to myself!), but Saturn STF remains an enigma as we know more about other ill-fated titles of the time such as the 32-bit prototype build of Shenmue and even Saturn Virtua Fighter 3 compared with this similarly doomed stablemate...

Although this is pure speculation on my part, it's likely that STF on the Saturn would have run on a variant of the same engine that powered Fighting Vipers, FM and perhaps VF3 as well. On the other hand, it may very well have been built around a modified version of the VF2 or VF Kids technologies.

Whatever the case, one thing that remains is STF was quite similar to VF3 in so much as that is was discussed quite frequently back in the day and never shown. Actually, we've had more insiders talking about their recollections of witnessing at least tech demos for the VF3 conversion project than anyone ever coming forward to confirm they'd ever seen STF.

For all we know, despite rumours of the contrary it's a possibility this game may have never even gone into production on the Saturn. Does anyone have absolutely any leads on this one, as all I can remember is a brief mention years ago on Sega of Japan's website release table for a tentative date of May 5th 1998?

 

From what I recall, Sonic Fighters SS was never started on and was just thrown on the release schedule by marketing without AM2 ever approving development.