July 9, 2004
Wow, who could have known when I was asked to start work on this project,
that it would have such an impact?
Appearntly everyone but me :D
In the first week of its unpublished release,
my WinXP version of GiriGiri went global!
Litteraly tens of thousands of copies were downloaded!
It was so furious in fact that I nearly lost my ISP due to bandwidth use.
Well, having learned from that, having done more work, and having made
some preperations this time around, I am proud to announce, a new release.
Whats new:
01. This project is now called "Cassini".
02. Decrypted ALL of the coding.
03. Decompiled and added the source codes to the package.
04. More translation.
05. Replaced Jap BIOS with Euro BIOS.
06. Thanks to work by MiC, updated the FrontEnd.
07. More performance improvements.
08. Updated the games.dat compatability list.
09. Updated the "Complete" games list.
10. Added HELP support.
11. Set up download sites.
The newly formed "Team Cassini" consists of:
Barnito - Advertising, Hosting, Distribution
Lockshaw13 - lists and compatability
Slacker - lists and compatability
Iceman50 - resource acquisitions
SigmaX6, DWBrett - Beta testing
Snail - Coding
July 1, 2004
This installer is 8,417 K in size.
If you get a Disk 2 not found error,
test the size as this is usually an indication of a partial file.
Snail's Sega Saturn emulator: First Release.
GiriGiri is one of the best Saturn emulators out there.
It shows quite impressive screens of commercial games,
even though speed isn't always at 100%.
Originally created for the Japanese version of Windows 98,
this emu didn't work on US systems.
It started out as a free developers tool,
but in its final release, went commercial.
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The project is now discontinued, in a way.
Sega hired the GiriGiri team to further develop the emu for their saturn games service at http://cyberdisc.zaq.ne.jp/
a site now long gone.
Shortly after the commercial release,
Gavionne released a hack that made it so you no longer had to register GiriGiri. This hack spread very fast over the internet, and this enraged Sega.
Further development of the emulator has been very problemmatic.
1. The documentation of the source has been destroyed.
2. It has been coded for the Jap Win OS
3. Sega encrypted the program
4. Gavionne encrypted the program
5. Almost no hardware schematics/docs exist on the Saturn
About a year after "Gav" cracked the emu, Cyberdisc released a patch to get the emu to run under WinXP US.
Roughly, one more year later, MiC, Chris, Den, Max, Dai and Fehmi
created a US frontend and loader that included several tools.
Later updates and testing by Lockshaw13 and Barnito would provide gamelist compatability and further distribution of the emulator.
That brings us to my dabbling with the emu.
While I've made several emus and have vastly improved on many,
for the reasons listed above, this emu has been a bear to get any improvements working.
What has changed?
Partial decryption and decompiling.
I have included what dissassembly code I could manage.
Further XP patching and optimisation.
Font patch.
Corrupt disk track 1 handling.
Loading time improved.
Overall resources improved.
Code updates.
Library updates.
Added tools.
Updated documentation.
Removed 4.28 Mb of old/useless files.
Updated the configuration tool.
Updated the Audio Conversion Library (It is not for sound output, but rather reading in the sounds... I do not know if this will actually help sound output quality but it will make loading an image faster.)
More Jap to US translation has been done to make the need of foreign fonts less of a must.
What has not changed...
Gamelist database compatablity.
Testing shows that this updated package still works under Win2K.
Performance under Win2K showed little to no improvement.
Performance under WinXP showed better rates and resource usage.
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