A former Bethesda employee by the name of Michael Matthews once caught the attention of a Sega Saturn Facebook group. He posted pictures of the development Saturn console they used at the company. “They were looking at porting Daggerfall to the Saturn,” Matthews said, adding that the project barely went anywhere since the console “didn’t have the strength to do what they needed.” They allegedly built a boxy maze demo that you could move through while shooting fireballs, then shelved the port.

Looking at screenshots of that Facebook thread in the SegaXtreme Discord server, Saturn homebrew developer Dr. Emerald Nova wrote, “Bruh, two and a half programmers managed to get the Seniriu terrain test working. (Bethesda) just didn’t believe hard enough. Give me three more years and we’ll have a Daggerfall equivalent.”

Let me get real with you for a paragraph. Emerald Nova is not porting an Elder Scrolls game to the Sega Saturn. He is creating an original game for the Saturn called Seniriu. It has been in the meat grinder for a long time. We have been loosely covering this project since a demo was submitted to the 2020 SegaXtreme Saturn Homebrew Contest.

As you can see, it was a fairly simple tech demo. The player assumes the role of a spacefaring person with a sword in one hand and what looks like the fusion cutter from Star Wars: Battlefront in the other. Models of 3D enemies appear but cannot be affected in this demo build.

Sometime after the 2020 homebrew contest season, Emerald Nova scrapped the code and started over.

Reforging the Rings

All throughout, the core concept of Seniriu stayed the same.

“Think of The Elder Scrolls if it adapted the old Bioware hub world design,” Emerald Nova said. “When you get to a planet, there is a hub area, a sort of safe zone. You talk to people, get your motivations to do a thing somewhere. Then you travel on foot from the hub to a dungeon or what have you. Then we get into the TES-inspired elaborate dungeon delve in first person. You do/get the thing, go back to the person of interest to discuss. Talk to the princess about what to do next. Then carry on.”

As for how he wanted to get this to show up on Saturn, that changed a few times. Emerald Nova started with a game engine that would be 2D viewed from above with a 3D perspective from inside the game. Pre-rendered sprites would be put on a flat plane with some walls and other features, “not unlike TES Arena… I don’t know if Virtual Hydlide is a good example…”

“The sprites came out fine drawn in Saturn, but I didn’t like the feel,” he said.

Now he is experimenting with fully 3D polygonal models. Using the NYA exporter built by Reye, they created a combat test. It did not make it into the build submitted to the SegaXtreme 30th Anniversary Saturn Homebrew Contest.

With lots of help from 7shades, they are working on creating 3D dungeons gently wrapped in collision polygons and terrain. EmeraldNova said 7shades built the codebase for the terrain. The demo used to create terrain was also submitted to the homebrew contest. Touch ups to the code are still in the works.

The collaborative effort does not stop there. RinkRat is composing original songs for the game. Some of the tracks are in the Seniriu contest build, providing atmospheric waves of tunes to the work-in-progress game.

Dr. Emerald Nova is taking care of the Seniriu lore and development of its world. He is working on a novelization of the game, which can be found online.

Perhaps one of the most significant aspects of its production is how Seniriu is being developed. The team is using Saturn Ring Library. It is a development environment still being forged by prominent homebrew developers, coders and others within the SegaXtreme coaching tree. It is designed to further streamline the process of creating a homebrew Sega Saturn game, allowing coders to use the latest version of C++. We previously spoke with Reye, one of the minds behind the tool kit.

“SRL is a wrapper for SGL [Sega Graphics Library] written in C++23, giving the developer easy-to-use tools to develop games,” Reye said. “SRL gives you the power to use a modern toolchain (GCC14.2), supporting many standard library features, and an integrated custom SaturnMath library (straightforward writing of algebraic and trigonometric functions on fixed point numbers at run and compile time).”

Seniriu is being made in tandem with the creation of Saturn Ring Library. It almost parallels Sega’s development of the Virtua Cop Sega Saturn port and Sega Graphics Library in 1995. We asked Dr. Emerald Nova to explain this in terms that coders would understand, and in terms that a child could understand.

“We have access to basically any C++23 feature — with a slightly trimmed down but still useful standard library,” he said. “Fixed point math has been simplified with operator overrides. Actual object orientation means we aren’t using cargo cult objects via structs in C. You can start abstracting things via templates and virtual functions, which becomes useful when you start thinking about different game objects and characters acting similarly but not quite the same.”

“I can bug the SRL team with things that I break,” Nova added. “That happens a lot when you try to mash multiple samples together to make an actual game.”

His vision for the final game could have anywhere between 40 and 60 maps. By 2025 Saturn homebrew standards, that makes for a hefty game. Nova said he cannot do this by himself unless he quits Saturn and develops this on PC instead. (Where’s the fun in that?) He can generate a map in under two weeks. “If we can load one, we can load several,” he explained.

“We gotta shove the combat demo back into it so that NPCs can exist,” Nova added. “Whether the Saturn has the processing power to let them walk on the map is a separate consideration.”

The map seen above is used in the latest demo build, seen running on a real Sega Saturn in the footage below.

Paving a New Path for Saturn Homebrew

For many years, JoEngine was considered to be the gold standard “starting point” for aspiring Saturn homebrew developers. It is what 7shades, the creator of CubeCat, recommended to newcomers in a past interview. SaturnRingLibrary appears to be poised to surpass JoEngine in many ways. Regardless, Dr. Emerald Nova still recommends new homebrewers begin their journey with Jo.

“Starting with Jo for now I think is still correct. C is simpler than C++, and a lot of baby devs come in knowing basically no programming,” he explained. “Also, SRL isn’t battle tested yet, though Seniriu is making progress on discovering issues. The only reason I made it on that credits list is because of weekly complaints to the SRL group chat about stuff not working.”

On a more advanced level, Nova said he believes the only things JoEngine has over Saturn Ring Library is its use of voxels and better support for its map file.

“For the voxels — it is so intensive and limited that I think no one would really use it for a game,” he said. “The map file: we currently can use the old SEGA tools to generate a VDP2 map.”

With it being about five years in the making, and having started over since the beginning, Seniriu may need more time to bake before it takes its final form. With some of the great minds of Saturn homebrew and tool development behind this project, its outlook seems promising. As of this writing, we are in for a Saturn adventure inspired by old-world BioWare and Tamriel — carving the way for a potential expansion of the already robust homebrew scene.