VBT over at ASSEMblergames has been working on getting Wolfenstein 3D running on the Sega Saturn. More specifically, this is early Saturn support for Wolf4SDL, and it already seems to work in emulators. Naturally, I wanted to see what would happen on the real hardware!

I started with my Sophia development hardware, but couldn’t get much further than the licence screen. Trying an Action Replay Plus didn’t improve matters either, so I decided to give a retail Saturn a go. That got a little further, which was encouraging, but something was still going wrong.

I did wonder whether the modchip in the retail Saturn might be interfering, although I never established that. At least I was getting different results from the two machines, which gave me something else to investigate. Keep up the good work, VBT, and I’ll be playing W3D in no time!

Update: Apparently it should have worked, but it didn’t in my case. Perhaps the strange development hardware I was using had something to do with it, although I never established that. :)

VBT continued developing the Saturn port after this experiment. On 15th December 2023, VBT described this old version as deprecated; on 21st December, he pointed users towards the newer project. The video above remains a snapshot of the port during its early development.

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