From patches to change Cyber Speedway’s soundtrack and fix Die Hard Arcade oddities to a new Saturn Tribute game and an update on the Sakura Wars 2 fan translation, there’s a lot going on in the world of Sega Saturn! Here’s a roundup of some of the news stories in the Saturn fandom recently.
Patch swaps Cyber Speedway’s soundtrack
Sega fan hacker Derek “Ateam” Pascarella made a patch Dec. 9 that swaps the U.S. version of 1995 Saturn futuristic racer Cyber Speedway’s soundtrack for its Japanese counterpart.
The patch can be downloaded from Ateam’s Github. It’s a custom batch file — just run it in the same folder as a copy of Cyber Speedway and it’ll do all the work.
Sega of America changed techno-inspired soundtrack of the game, called Gran Chaser in Japan, to a rock-sounding one for the U.S. release. Considering it’s a hovercar racing game, many fans consider the Japanese soundtrack more fitting for the theme.
“It really fits the game much, much better,” Ateam said on the SHIRO! Discord server. “I do appreciate the ’90s grunge ridiculous original NTSC-U soundtrack, and that’s what I grew up hearing, but yeah…”
Sakura Wars 2 translation in polish phase
NoahSteam, the project leader of the Sakura Wars 2 fan translation project, said Dec. 4 that he and the team are now polishing it up.
He showed off on X a minigame that was particularly time-consuming called Trump Wars.
“This is the last of the minigames I worked on & I’d say it’s 99% complete,” NoahSteam said, “The remaining tasks I consider to be polish items. But they’d also be very time consuming to fix.”
The project has been in the works for about three years. It shared a major update on its progress around this time last year.
Patch forces 240p, English in Die Hard Arcade
SegaXtreme community member Privateye created a patch Dec. 8 that addresses some niche problems that people run into with Saturn beat-em-up Die Hard Arcade.
The patch, uploaded to SegaXtreme here, forces the game to output a 240p resolution at all times. Normally, it switches occasionally between 224p and 240p, which causes havoc for many modern upscalers and displays that don’t appreciate sudden resolution changes.
The patch also makes the game show English during quick time events when playing the European and North American versions on a Japanese console, or when playing a modded console set to a Japanese region.
The patch combines Action Replay codes that Fafling made last year to force 240p with a patch made in 2021 by Paul Met to force English.
Privateye’s patch uses the Xdelta format.
New Saturn Tribute game teased
Another game in the Saturn Tribute line is in the works, City Connection said Dec. 7.
The publisher made the announcement during a presentation streamed live on YouTube. It didn’t hint at what the next game might be or when it would release.
The most recent Saturn Tribute entry was a two-game compilation of Wolf Fang and Skull Fang released in October.
Saturn Tribute games are the original Saturn games running on what City Connection calls the Zebra Engine, which dataminers have found appears to be a modified version of the SSF emulator.
This story originally appeared on Sega Saturn SHIRO!