The Sega Saturn NetLink League

really really really want to play final fantasy vii on sega saturn.. dont ask why, just something in my brain just wants me to be able to play ff7 on saturn.. make some killer box art ect ect.. make it fun. so is it even possible with hacking? jc.. im a total newb, i know but yeh curiousity led me to this site, so in other words its my way of appreciating you guys =D asking a totally insane question.. well thanks

kenny
deedeedaadaadoo@yahoo.com

You'd need an entire (experienced) development team to rebuild the game from scratch for the Saturn's architecture. This wouldn't be like any modern port.

Short answer: Not gonna happen. You'd have to find some (read: count the number of people who worked on the PS1 version and insert that number here) insanely (and I mean INSANELY) dedicated people to work on the project for at least several years. Sorry. :/

On the other hand, feel free to make some "killer box art." It would be hilarious if someone believed that FF7 for the Saturn actually existed.

No. Play Grandia.
It even got better reviews than this overhyped ff game...

lol ahhh yeh thought so, well it was worth asking i thought. maybe ill make some killer box art haha and i still wanna play grandia.. its just ff7 ment alot to me in my youth. id rather see some dedicated team members make sonic xtream anywaYS. thanks dudes!

how did people like sega away team and stuff make theyre games on saturn? couldnt we get the hardware? or atleast build a 2D saturn game with some of it?

The original development hardware is really rare (and expensive) and not particularly useful anymore because it won't interface with modern computer systems. You're much better off finding some Saturn development software (although there's not a ton of great and modern Saturn dev software out there due to the complexity of the system and the difficulty programming for the Saturn - plus the need to write in either assembly or C to optimize your code... where there's not enough interest, there aren't many available tools) and building and testing it on an emulator. Once you have it working on an emulator, then you can worry about burning it to a disc and attempting to run it on a modded system.

As I understand it, Sega Away Team was a hardware development group, not a software development group.

It's definitely possible to make a game for the Saturn. It's just really difficult. Far more difficult than for almost any other game system. It takes highly skilled, highly interested, highly dedicated people to accomplish anything worthwhile on it.

Yeah, you'll spend "a lot" of time trying to acomplish something.
You'll surely feel great, I suppose.

If you're interested in programming but knows nothing, try making something for Master System, Game Boy or Mega Drive first. Windows could be easier/have more available tools, though.

If you're interested in programming, try programming in C or C++ (or even Java - it's not a huge jump from there back to C++ and C) on a computer. Once you understand the basics there, then you can worry about writing the kinds of highly efficient and optimized code you'll need to write for an older game system. I'd agree with Rogue's suggestions of first game systems to try to program for. For all of those, you'll probably want to learn to code in assembly as well. The Game Boy and the Master System used the Z80 processor (or in the GB's case, a variant of the Z80), so you'd need to learn Z80 assembly for that. The Mega Drive/Genesis used a Motorola 68000 for its primary processor with the Z80 as a support/backwards-compatibility chip. You'll want to learn 68k assembly for that.

It's a far cry easier to learn to write programs on a general-purpose computer with the nice development environments that exist today and see if you have any skill at it before tackling the much more difficult and technical problems that exist with writing programs (and games!) for specialized systems. Game development carries its own set of challenges that exist beyond the writing of a simple program.

programming is not a job for me XD. I'm filled up to my neck eith homework all the time XD.maybe one day though

For me, programming is my homework, at least in my computer science classes. Also reading the textbooks and studying for quizzes.

Also, I started teaching myself to write programs back in middle school. At this point, I can't remember when exactly I was writing them (whether it was during summer break or the school year), but I know at least some of them were during the school year. I specifically remember one of my teachers loaning me a book so I could go further than I already had. I was either 12 or 13 at that time.