New patches this week add 3D analog controller functionality to a pair of Saturn racing games, V.R. Virtua Racing and High Velocity: Mountain Racing Challenge, as well as keyboard and mouse support to Saturn first-person shooter PowerSlave, aka Exhumed.
All three patches are at SegaXtreme — the High Velocity patch is here, the Virtua Racing patch is here and the PowerSlave one is here. The High Velocity patch should be applied to the Japanese version of the game, called Touge King the Spirits. The patches for Virtua Racing and PowerSlave should be applied to the North American versions.
The High Velocity patch uses the Sega Saturn Patcher, a copy of which is included in the ZIP file with it. The Virtua Racing and PowerSlave patches use the XDelta patcher.
Both Virtua Racing and High Velocity released the year before the 3D controller’s July 1996 debut, so the only analog input they accounted for was from the Arcade Racer wheel. PowerSlave, meanwhile, came out a few months after the keyboard and mouse launched. But keyboard and mouse weren’t widely used yet to control first-person shooters on PC let alone the Saturn.
The patches come courtesy of SegaRPGFan, aka Joe, who’s well known in the Saturn community for working on the NetLink Tunnel application to enable online play on a modern Internet infrastructure. After seeing the success Farkus had with adding online play to homebrew games using Claude AI, Joe took a swing at using AI himself.
“I used Codex (chatGPT). It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a while,” Joe said in the SHIRO! Discord server.
The first game he looked at was High Velocity, a 1995 racing game developed by Cave and published by Atlus.
“I knew the 3D pad was kind of broken in the game but didn’t know why,” he said. “Once I noticed the wheel [controller] gives analog and digital [signals] I tried steering with both the d-pad and analog on the pad and what do you know, it worked. So AI helped with automating disassembly and crafting the mechanics of the patch code while I did a lot of manual poking around in Mednafen’s debugger.”
He elaborated a little more on the SegaXtreme resources page for the patch:
“After spending some time digging into it I found the game uses a combination of digital and analog input to steer when you’re using the wheel. The wheel provides both. With the 3D pad, analog steering is incredibly weak to the point of being almost unnoticeable because it doesn’t provide a digital left/right along with its analog. It seems it uses digital for absolute direction and analog to modify the steering angle. This patch adds digital input once analog is beyond a certain threshold, mimicking what the wheel does. This also makes it so L and R can be used to shift in manual transmission, Otherwise you’d have to awkwardly hit up/down on the d-pad.”
—SegaRPGFan
The patch for Time Warner’s 1995 Saturn version of Virtua Racing functions similarly: The L and R triggers in analog mode register as up/down to enable shifting in manual transmission when using the 3D controller. And it includes a little something extra — the replay music playback fix that Privateye made last year.
An issue originally in Virtua Racing still rears its head, though. Toon K. Leandro reported in the SHIRO! Discord server that pressing L and R at the same time results in an instant game over. That shortcut is present in the original game, as the manual points out: pressing “left fore and right fore” simultaneously quits the race. It just becomes a more pronounced problem with this patch when using L and R to shift gears.
That may change with an update soon, though. Privateye said he found a way to disable that problem and offered to help Joe add it to his patch.
Still, both Virtua Racing and High Velocity have 3D controller support thanks to these patches. “Now anyone who hasn’t given the game a proper go because of a lack of wheel, you have one less excuse,” Joe said.
The PowerSlave patch
After tackling the racing games, Joe took on the 1996 Lobotomy Software-developed PowerSlave next to give it the feel of a modern FPS’s controls using a keyboard and mouse.
“This is a fairly complex patch and still needs thorough testing, so consider it beta,” he said on the patch’s resources page. He asked anyone trying it to report bugs.
The patch essentially adds two forms of keyboard support. The first is a keyboard-only option that uses Sega’s standard keyboard to digital controller mapping — arrow keys to d-pad, ZXC keys to ABC, ASD keys to XYZ, QE to LR, and ESC to Start.
The second activates when a mouse is plugged into the Saturn’s second controller port and the caps lock key is pressed. This mode maps keyboard and mouse input to a virtual 3D controller, which the game normally supports.
The resources page provides a helpful table to parse these controls:
| Powerslave control mapping | ||||
| Action | 3D Controller | Normal KB (caps lock off) | New KB (caps lock on) | New Mouse (caps lock on) |
| digital up | D-pad up | Arrow up | Arrow up | |
| digital down | D-pad down | Arrow down | Arrow down | |
| digital left | D-pad left | Arrow left | Arrow left | |
| digital right | D-pad right | Arrow right | Arrow right | |
| Move forward/swim down (analog) | Analog Y+ | W | Q + Mouse Y+ (mouse look) | |
| Move backwards/swim up (analog) | Analog Y- | S | Q + Mouse Y- (mouse look) | |
| Turn left (analog) | Analog X- | Mouse X- | ||
| Turn right (analog) | Analog X+ | Mouse X+ | ||
| Attack/fire | A | Z | Right ctrl | Mouse left |
| Jump/swim | B | X | Space | Mouse middle |
| Open doors/activate switches | C | C | E | Mouse right |
| Look (hold) re-center (press once) | X | A | Q | |
| weapon toggle left | Y | S | 1 key | |
| weapon toggle right | Z | D | 2 key | |
| strafe left | L | Q | A | |
| strafe right | R | E | D | |
| Pause/pull up sub-screen | Start | Esc | Esc | Mouse start |
| Walk | Left shift | |||
| Exit Game from Pause | ABC | ZXC | E+Space+RightCtrl |
Joe does acknowledge some issues and limitations with the PowerSlave patch:
- Maximum turn speed is limited by how fast the 3D pad can turn, so it might feel a little slow
- When booting from Satiator, the keyboard is not always recognized. Unplug and re-plug to get it recognized. Hint: press Z to skip the intro
- The latest BlueRetro firmware has a number of Saturn keyboard bugs that prevent it from working correctly. If you want to use BlueRetro use a fixed firmware version from here: Releases · eaudunord/BlueRetro
“Now I’m down the rabbit hold of fixing BlueRetro’s saturn keyboard and mouse emulation…” Joe said.
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