A new video uploaded today shows impressive progress on a fan effort to recreate Tomb Raider 2 on the Sega Saturn, with most of the game’s levels said to be in a playable state.
RetroRaiderJohn has been working on the recreation for about three years, and since his last update in December, he’s added features exclusive to Tomb Raider 2 that weren’t in the first game, like dynamic lighting, a controllable vehicle in the boat, and new moves such as wading and climbing.
His work isn’t playable to the public yet, but putting out a demo is the plan eventually.
“It’s important for me to achieve the highest quality user experience I can provide on the Saturn,” John said in the YouTube video’s description. “There are a few things that currently aren’t up to my standards, such as the save feature and some other inventory related stuff. Polishing these smaller features is quite frankly not always exciting to work on and will take time.”
Rather than making the game from scratch, John is inserting levels, models and gameplay elements from the PC version of Tomb Raider 2 into the officially released Saturn version of Tomb Raider 1’s code. He did something similar to recreate the 1998 PC expansion to Tomb Raider, Unfinished Business, two years ago.
As the YouTube video description says, the fan project “takes the original Tomb Raider 1 Saturn engine as a base and uses code injection to implement any relevant Tomb Raider 2 functionality, basically forming a hybrid engine.”
Adding new features
While the first Tomb Raider was released on Saturn in 1996, even arriving there before other platforms, the sequel famously became a PlayStation exclusive the following year. Both the PS1 and PC versions of Tomb Raider 2 feature dynamic lighting, so getting that feature running on the Saturn is an important milestone to show that a port would have been possible.
John told SHIRO! that the dynamic lighting affects performance slightly, especially in larger, more detailed areas, but overall it’s working well.
“I studied how it works in the original engine and came up with a decent way to get similar results,” John said. “I used some pre-calculated values to speed up the process (which is an optimization and not a compromise).”
The new moves introduced in Tomb Raider 2 such as wading and climbing required some tricky hacking to implement in the Saturn version of Tomb Raider 1. For wading, John said he had to implement a whole new state routine for wading, plus water height and depth detection.
“I had to extend her state slots because I had none left,” he said. “I also added another one for special animations, such as the detonator explosion. So now I have a lot more freedom to add any missing states or special animations.”
The state slots are basically a bunch of memory addresses to all the state and collision code in the game. “I had to move those to a big empty location in the binary to extend it,” John said.
In addition to the aforementioned animation of Lara Croft detonating a bomb, another special animation John added is one of Lara being bitten by a shark while underwater. John provided videos to SHIRO! showing off those newly implemented animations:
Remaining hurdles
Most of Tomb Raider 2’s levels are fully playable in John’s recreation within the Tomb Raider 1 engine, but a few of them remain sticking points. The YouTube video description gives a rundown of every level in Tomb Raider 2 and how playable they are:
- Great Wall: fully playable
- Venice: fully playable
- Bartoli’s Hideout: fully playable
- Opera House: partially playable (with gameplay in WIP)
- Offshore Rig: fully playable
- Diving Area: fully playable
- 40 Fathoms: fully playable
- Wreck of the Maria Doria: fully playable
- Living Quarters: fully playable
- The Deck: fully playable
- Tibetan Foothills: not attempted yet (with good prognosis)
- Barkhang Monastery: not attempted yet (with bad prognosis due to massive scale)
- Catacombs of the Talion: fully playable
- Ice Palace: fully playable
- Temple of Xian: unplayable (due to massive scale)
- Floating Islands: mostly playable (with bad performance in open areas)
- The Dragon’s Lair: not attempted yet (with good prognosis)
Croft Manor: mostly playable (with missing assault course timer)
Home Sweet Home: not attempted yet (with good prognosis)
Two of the levels, Barkhang Monastery and Temple of Xian, still pose problems because of their size and complexity — but John has some ideas to make them work.
“I was thinking of maybe packing room vertices the way TR2 on PSX does it,” John told SHIRO!. “That would save a good amount of data, but I’m unsure if it would be enough.”
John’s already implemented a frame data packing technique that Tomb Raider 2 introduced to improve performance in other large levels.
“Another slightly problematic level, Floating Islands, suffers from horrible performance in the huge open section in the beginning,” he said in the video description. “Reducing the draw distance has made a significant improvement, but it’s still not up to fully playable standards. I will have to think of a way to either utilize more of Saturn’s power (possibly even VDP2) or, more realistically, optimize the drawing code and level geometry.”
Other future plans include implementing the sequel’s new weapons and continuing to implement sound effects — something that’s proving to be difficult.
“SFX are actually very problematic, since TR2 levels have like twice the amount that TR1 levels do,” John told SHIRO!. “And since the SFX driver uses uncompressed WAVE data, it’s kind of hard to work with this.”
He said he might have to speed up the sound effects to save data and then let the engine play them at a lower speed. It’ll be something he tinkers with in the future.
Despite the remaining hurdles, it’s just a matter of time before Tomb Raider 2 is entirely playable on Saturn, thanks to John’s passion for the series. He’s already feeling good about his progress so far.
“It’s coming together really nicely,” he said.
This is exciting!
So cool, loved TR1 on the Saturn and played both TR2 and TR3 on the PS1 and later on PC. As a kid, I was so disappointed that Croc, Pandemonium, Gex, Tomb Raider, Resident Evil and other cross platform games were only being released on other systems. Projects like these somewhat fill a gap and realize dreams!
I wish an Edit button was available, so, to correct what I meant above. I was so disappointed that SEQUELS TO Croc, Pandemonium, Gex, Tomb Raider, Resident Evil and other cross platform games were only being released on other systems