So alright, just a bit of background on this project, it's being worked on by a veteran of the industry, so when he gives estimates as to how long this will take to finally reach people, understand that it's an expert giving you those time frames.
The problem with the release in possession is that it's a series of zip file backups from 1996 along with a clone image of a person's entire development PC. What's going on now is that we're piecing together the environment exactly as the people working on Sonic Xtreme had theirs so that we can build their code. If you're unfamiliar with what a development environment is or how one works, you might want to
take a look at my Dreamcast game thread. I have neglected it (sorry, but I haven't forgotten!) so all that is there right now is a tutorial for building a development environment from scratch to build dreamcast games with.
This guy is trying to piece together a Nvidia NV1 development environment the same way, only with infinitely less resources available to him. Even worse, he's jumping into someone's source code that is non-commented and undocumented and only half complete. Parts of the source, for example, expect files to be in exact locations on the computer - which is fine, but it takes time to set up his computer to build like that.
He already has a skeleton build working, by commenting out basically everything he can build an executable that calls the NV1 library and does absolutely nothing. It's going to take a few weeks before we can build a fully functional executable, but the exciting thing is that we have everything possible to do so.
The guy has an NV1 in the mail going to him, along with some saturn development equipment. This is a hobby for us, not a job, so keep in mind that getting this stuff to a state where anybody can play it will take time, but the most important thing is
we have this in our possession. It will never be lost again.
Now, onto the specifics of what I got to see - namely the source code. I can confirm with my own two eyes that this is indeed the real deal source and it's crazy. We have 5 builds of this from various states of Ofer's work. Early on, we have a partially completed build where Ofer was in the middle of transferring his work over from a software renderer he built to the actual NV1 hardware, which is where we think we can get the software renderer working again. Everything actually builds from the same source - saturn, PC, and mac - but it's the absolute thinnest abstraction layer you could possibly imagine. Functions like "draw polygon" overloaded with the brunt of the work being done in these sorts of calls, lol.
So, midway through these builds, you can see the source transform into something more dependent on the NV1, and the build options whittle to PC and Saturn, ditching mac, and eventually to PC only. You can evidently get this running on a saturn no problem using a cartdev kit (the dsk images don't contain the actual binary, only the peripheral files to be loaded through the serial port on the saturn) but it runs at like 3 fps. Eventually, the build options whittled down further to just PC.
Now, the craziest part - 4 months after the final build we have from Ofer, we have another build from POV of a never before seen Sonic title for the saturn. We don't think this title has ever been shown off or mentioned before. We don't even know what it looks like yet because we can't build it until the environment is complete. But there is likely at least one more major surprise in this find.
I saw the code for the level editor, it's built right into the engine. The assets folder even includes icons for the level editor we never noticed before, but now suddenly make sense. They do things like map surfaces onto the cubes.
This guy basically wants a buffer between the starving crowd of people and himself, mainly because he does this out of pure love for coding and preserving games. Jollyroger himself is a great guy, sounds passionate in the same ways I am passionate about games and development. He is weary of people getting upset that this release is taking too long and, you know, doing dick 4-chan stuff like finding out his email address and messing with him. So, going forward, Andrew75 and I will be the between guys for him and the community. All releases will go through us and if you have comments or questions, direct them our way. We will be the ones who eventually package and release these files, but not today. This will take a few weeks to get in people's hands, but we definitely want to share.
I have some pictures but I can't share them at the moment because they're mainly of the source code itself. However, if my credibility has ever meant anything, trust me when I say that this is absolutely, 100% real. We
finally have Sonic Xtreme, now we just have to prep it for release.
That reminds me a bit of that Nintendo video where they kidnap a Sony guy and a Sega guy and show them how great Star Fox 64 and the rumble pack are... 
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