Prolific Saturn hacker KoolFiller has released one of his most ambitious projects to date over on SegaXtreme, a hacked version of Athena‘s 1997 Saturn shmup maker Dezaemon 2 that not only has English menus, but also impressively holds every single user game from the latest version of the Dezaemon 2 Save Game Manager. This fits all 267 games onto a single disc, which eliminates the process of copying only a few games at a time from the game manager to your memory card or floppy disk!
The patch download includes a PDF of the Dezaemon 2 80-page manual in English, which is an invaluable reference when creating your own shmups. This has been updated to reflect any changes made to the Special Edition, as well as higher quality thumbnails.
KoolFiller also made a Self-Booting Games Library kit that will convert any game into a self-booting disc image.
The mouse cursor in the menus is controlled using the dpad or a Saturn Shuttle Mouse (helpful for editing). To navigate through the games you just need to place the cursor over the user (“U”) slot and click “L” or “R” to move up and down the games library. This also loads the game you select into the active user slot, which means it’ll be ready for editing. The original three sample games have been swapped out with the hidden games — you just need to hold L+R when the cursor is placed over (“S1”), (“S2”), or (“S3”) to select them.
“The Dezaemon 2 interface has been carefully translated, yes with AI assistance,” KoolFiller said. “None of the included sample games have been translated at all. If I ever find a legit human translator to review the interface text I will happily update the patch. I’ve been working on this for some time, didn’t just pop it out over a weekend. So use your own discretion, and stay far away from my releases if you’re someone who thinks think that all AI projects are digital asbestos or slop. I have been imagining this hack since like 2001. I am thrilled to see it finally become a reality.”
Finally, KoolFiller said he “would like to thank all the Dezaemoners out there (too many to mention I’m sure, but you know who you are.) Especially to the folks that put the Save Game Managers out there, and of course to everyone who made a game over the years which is included. Thanks so much to you all!”
You can find the patch on KoolFiller’s post here, as well as additional information including the cheat code system. KoolFiller said, “if anyone uses this to create new games I will gladly add them to the disc in a future update (no troll games),” so hopefully we’ll see some new user-made shmups added in the near future!
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