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Fans Port Tomb Raider Expansion Unfinished Business to SaturnAfter more than a year of work, fans have finished a Saturn port of the 1998 PC expansion to Tomb Raider, Unfinished Business. RetroRaiderJohn, the port’s lead developer, uploaded a launch trailer for the project today. You can download the release by checking the video’s description for a Mega.nz link. There, you’ll find Japanese, PAL and North American region versions as separate downloads as well as “expert” versions of the game for North America and PAL. The video’s description says the expert edition has “Atlantis levels first and inventory reset for Egypt levels, based on how it was originally intended by the developer.” The link also has a folder for Fenrir-compatible versions — players found that the Fenrir optical drive emulator doesn’t play nicely with the BIN and CUE files that Unfinished Business is being distributed in, but Derek Pascarella found that refactoring the game as CCD, IMG and SUB files worked, so RetroRaiderJohn added those to the Mega link. Unfinished Business, also known as Tomb Raider Gold in North America, was a PC-only expanded edition of the original Tomb Raider. It added four bonus levels across two chapters. The first sends Lara Croft back to Egypt several months after the events of the base game, while the second takes place in Atlantis mere moments after the end of the base game. The bonus levels were never officially released for consoles, but fans did it unofficially for the PlayStation in both 2014 and 2021. Today marks the first time it’s appeared on the Saturn. 
The port is technically a heavily modified version of the original Tomb Raider that released on the Saturn in 1996. RetroRaiderJohn wrote tools to convert PC data into something the Saturn could use, essentially transferring level assets from the PC port into the Saturn base game. His work began in early 2022, and things soon turned sticky. “Data conversion went pretty smoothly at first, until it was time to import level textures: memory limitations caused all levels to crash, except one,” RetroRaiderJohn said in the trailer description. “These limits were expected, given that the PS1 ports suffered the same during development. However, it turned out that memory was a much bigger problem on the Saturn, due to different memory management.” “In order to prevent the memory from breaching, data had to be seriously optimized. Various tricks and techniques were invented and implemented over a long period of time, and proved to be quite successful. Unused meshes and animations were deleted, while duplicate meshes and animations were reused. Required pathfinding data that’s used for climbing enemies was forcefully removed, since none of the enemies in Unfinished Business can climb anyway. Two huge alternate rooms in one level were removed, with the difference being replicated in a much more efficient way. And then there were many, many more tricks applied. Eventually, I managed to make every level work without any noticeable compromises.” — RetroRaiderJohnRetroRaiderJohn also credited Retro Dad, RoS, Spyros, Troye, Cyblitzer and Dominik with helping on the project. He also said that he used Paul Met and Esppiral’s full-screen patch for the Saturn version of Tomb Raider as well as bug fixes from the PC version made by SuiKaze and Arsunt. The launch trailer’s description lists the port’s key features, which include quite a few fixes and additions:
There are several issues that RetroRaiderJohn warned players about, though:
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