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Frogbull Recreates Minecraft on SaturnA barebones recreation of Minecraft is running on Saturn thanks to homebrew developer Frogbull, and he’s already made it available for some players to try out. Frogbull revealed the project Wednesday during a livestream on his Twitch channel. The next day, he posted a download for his supporters on Patreon . He said he plans on releasing it to the wider public eventually, once he’s worked out some bugs and added more features. Frogbull told SHIRO! that he had to wrap his head around the original game’s structure and how to make Minecraft work on a Saturn. ”For example, [the] camera is the same as the player; no player position, only camera position,” he said. “To avoid useless matrix computation work, [it’s] all in SGL axis (with -Y as up axis).” SGL is the Sega Graphics Library. It’s a set of low-level commands to perform common operations and make programmers’ lives a little easier. Frogbull is using that in combination with the Z-Treme Engine from fellow homebrew developer XL2. In a separate Patreon post explaining how he made this prototype, Frogbull said he’s using a three-tier level of detail system for each block’s textures:
The nine blocks in the Saturn Minecraft prototype and their three levels of detail.
Frogbull’s Minecraft build is essentially in “creative mode.” There’s no collision yet — the player can move freely around the world, including floating up and down with the shoulder buttons. Players can place and delete blocks from a selection of nine types — grassy ground, cobblestone, sand and other basics. The play area is an infinite ocean and an animated infinite sky. Classic Minecraft music and sound effects are in place, too. 
So there’s no actual mining or crafting yet in Saturn Minecraft. Nor are there survival mechanics, animals, enemies, an inventory or many other elements found in the full game. Frogbull is going to keep working on it, though. He’s already talked about how to increase the world size, which is limited by what can be stored in the Saturn’s RAM at runtime. It’s only 64 blocks wide by 64 blocks long by 32 blocks tall right now, but Frogbull theorizes that he could use the 4MB expanded RAM cartridge to support a world that’s 320 by 320 by 64. 
He said he can easily support 15 different block types, too. He stores each block’s data as a 4-bit chunk, so there are 16 different combinations of numbers that can be stored in each one to act as block IDs — the 16th being open air. He just needs time to implement blocks for the other six slots he hasn’t filled yet. ”Using 4 bits per block helped also to double the size of the map,” Frogbull told SHIRO!. “But maybe [a] better solution exists to save even more (for example Minecraft saves chunks, not blocks, and the game has variable size chunks to avoid wasting memory for a chunk full of air).” 
The expanded RAM cartridge might be used to increase the number of block types, too — he could expand the block ID system to 8 bits to support 127 different blocks at the cost of expanding the world size. ”But that [is] for future updates,” he said. He won’t be going it alone, either. Many of the homebrew developers on the SegaXtreme Discord server are excitedly brainstorming on how to fit more of the classic game onto the Saturn and improve performance. “Now I just want this to get pushed as far as possible, so that we have classic Minecraft on Saturn,” said one developer, ReyeMe. Frogbull is well known for recreating PlayStation games on the Saturn, such as Metal Gear Solid , Crash Bandicoot and Final Fantasy VII , over the last few years. Last year, he made a Shenmue tribute game on Saturn that included recreations of the Dreamcast title’s 3D forklift racing and arcade segments, and it was his first project that he made publicly playable. Minecraft is one of the highest selling video games of all time. It uses voxels to display its massive procedurally generated world where everything is composed of cubes with low-resolution textures. Since its first public alpha in May 2009 on PC, it’s been released on more than a dozen platforms — everything from cell phones and Raspberri Pi to handheld systems like the Vita and the modern consoles of today. While its version isn’t official, you can add the Saturn to that list, now, too.  The obligatory, uh, obelisk with conspicuously darker tip. I’m sorry.
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