Back during the Saturn’s heyday, SEGA fans were able to take their console online, letting you access your e-mail, browser and online multiplayer gameplay. In North America, only a handful of games could play online, while the Japanese audience had a much bigger library to choose from.
According to a report from SEGA SATURN, SHIRO! , Joe (SEGARPGFAN) “brought back online peer-to-peer NET PLAY for Japanese X-BAND games!” In the video above, David Lee (SaturnDave) explains how Joe got this to work. A couple of years back they created an exploit allowed for online play on the Saturn. New changes are coming “imminently” that will render the old exploitation obsolete, and give players a much smoother experience.
Using the same NetLink over VoIP setup as a basis and adding a simple additional instruction to the dialing plan, Saturn gamers are able to enjoy these Japanese X-Band games, previously lost to time and closed servers. While this won’t work with retail copies, Joe has patched several game images to bypass the server check and simply default to peer-to-peer direct dial.
Great news is that this totally works with US NetLink modems, which have no problem syncing up just fine with the Japanese modems, which are capped to a lower 14.4Kbps versus the NetLink’s 28.8Kbps. (mind you, the Japanese X-Band games were designed to play fine at 14.4Kbps)
Other currently patched games include Shadows of the Tusk, Decathlete and VF Remix, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg… Joe plans to patch out the entire Japanese X-Band library if possible.
These fine gentlemen have a podcast that gets into the nitty gritty of it all, and you can check out one of the videos above. Puyo Puyo Sun never looked better.
They help run the DreamPipe website, and a Saturn version is coming soon!
