The team behind the most widely used Sega Saturn softmod released a significant update to cap off 2023. Pseudo Saturn Kai V6.541 comes to the Saturn scene after about two years of development and testing, according to lead tester privateye.
The team, lead by developer cafe-alpha, added a new menu with cheat support for users of the Satiator optical drive emulator, along with improvements to its features for the Fenrir and Rhea/Phoebe ODE devices. As always, it enables users to boot Saturn software burned to discs. The long-running mod flashes to a variety of Sega Saturn cartridges. The general Pseudo Saturn Kai changelog can be viewed here and there is also a separate changelog for the new Satiator Menu Kai.
Some highlights include an assortment of additional cheat codes, such as widescreen support for the first Panzer Dragoon. You can play as Tails in the Sonic Jam overworld and force Die Hard Arcade into 240p to stop its constant resolution swapping — known to mess with upscalers. It also comes with pre-loaded save files to unlock everything in an assortment of games.
In the above image, we can see what is perhaps its most notable new ability — making Death Crimson playable.
Its new support for the Satiator device gives users a menu for selecting games on the SD card. This is accessed by putting the “autoboot” disc image on the card and does not require a Pseudo Saturn Kai cartridge.
The update has a wide array of color options and fonts which are now applied to all menus in Pseudo Saturn Kai and Save Data Manager, the latter of which is included with Satiator Menu Kai and allows for the transfer of save files between Satiator and all known backup memory devices à la Save Game Copier.
Satiator users can use this new menu to enable cheat codes for games booted from the SD card. They can perform a soft-reset that goes back to the disc image selection menu. Another nifty addition — enabling it to automatically import and export game save data between the Satiator SD card and the internal memory on Saturn.
Outside of ODE support, this allows the use of three or six-button Mega Drive/Genesis controllers in Pseudo Saturn Kai itself. The new update improves support for some games, including those with save files that take up all of the internal memory, like Prisoner of Ice, Sim City 2000 and Valholian. Compatibility is enhanced for 3D Lemmings, Congo the Movie, Krazy Ivan, and Valora Valley Golf.
Continued support for Pseudo Saturn Kai can be funded on cafe-alpha’s Patreon page.
