Sega Netlink and Saga

Panzer Dragoon
1

Someone told me Saga has a debug Mode and level select that can be accessed with a keyboard and the floppy drive that come with the Saturn Netlink.

Anyone knows something about this?

2

I noticed in the past that there was text for debug options stored on the discs, but at the time I just assumed they’d been totally disabled in the finished game. The stored text for the title screen has five options that can’t be accessed normally:

NEW GAME
CONTINUE
TUTORIAL 1
TUTORIAL 2
TOWN
FIELD
BATTLE
SOUND
MOVIE

…which look like a level select (Town, Field and Battle are the names used in the PDS code for on-foot areas, flight areas and battles), a sound test and a movie test. Ancient Weapon posted a while ago that the sound test appears to be fully intact on the discs, but inaccessible; he said it was in the file “SNDTEST.PRG”, I think, so it wouldn’t surprise me if the other debug options are there too. (Oh, and PDS does specifically support and recognise the floppy disc drive; if one’s connected, the third icon on the save-game menu lights up and allows you to save to it.)

But yeah, I’d be very interested to know how these options would be unlocked and what they’d be like…

3

Okay, that’s interesting. How would you hook a floppy drive up to your Saturn anyway?

4

As odd as it may seem, Sega released an actual Saturn floppy disc drive in Japan. I was thinking of adding this to the PDS “weird stuff” page on the site, as I imagine it would seem quite odd to most Western fans; having a blank third icon on the save-game menu I mean, when we never had the Saturn FDD over here (and most people understandably don’t know that it existed). Here’s a scan I took from the Japanese manual showing the floppy icon:

http://www.geocities.com/lance_way/floppy_02.jpg

5

I guess the floppy drive would have been connected to the port on the back of the Saturn, right?

In addition, I remember seeing a file named SNDTEST.PRG on one of my Saga discs, which I thought might be a sound test. Yes, I know, my powers of deduction are amazing!

I thought that it would have been interesting to get that working, but I don’t know how we could and even if it would do much anyway.

6

After almost 7 years I finally know the truth!

7

Sorry, Lance - I had not seen that before I posted my earlier reply! :anjou_embarassed:

8

I had the US netlink (just threw it out about a month ago) but it didn’t have a floppy drive …

9

That’s coz it was only released in Japan. The floppy disc drive, that is.