Whoo boy, I have gotten some flat-out stupid emails and messages (and death threats, seriously) over this stuff (mainly from other boards) so I'd like to take a moment to dispel some notions:
we are not hording the source code. First of all, the source code is neigh useless to the vast, vast, vast majority of people. Why is it not useless in our hands? Because JR has professional experience developing for the Sega Saturn, and as a result has sega saturn development hardware. We understand the need to preserve old games - we, all 3 of us, are active in various video game preservation societies, from arcade board preservation to stuff like this. We have taken steps to ensure the source code isn't going to die on some person's hardware, we have preserved the source. But we will not distribute it. Why? Because the author of the source specifically asked us not to. Now, I get some people are thinking, "if you're already going behind backs to release this stuff in the first place, what's the harm of going against Ofer's wishes?" That is a bad sign of trust to do that. This stuff doesn't operate in a vacuum. Aside from burning bridges with Ofer Alon, who isn't really a bad person to know in general, we would be demonstrating to other people that we are not operating in good faith among developers. This could impact our potential to gain access to future prototypes. So the situation we're faced with - either release a largely useless source code to satiate a bunch of people online who really don't know the situation to begin with at the expense of our future ability to uncover prototypes... or not. The choice is obvious.
We are not interested in "owning" a rare version of Sonic Xtreme. We don't really get any joy out of holding onto something like this. I think especially Andrew75 and I are mostly excited to be the people who are bringing this stuff out to the community, not part of some super secret club or whatever. Which is to say, what we care about most is releasing Sonic Xtreme, not gaining exclusive access to it.
The NV1 SDK, which is being used in this project, would be of no help towards a theoretical sega saturn emulator development. This in particular is weird, I keep getting hit up from people demanding we release the NV1 SDK so that "a real sega saturn emulator can be developed." This is just a gross misunderstanding of the way this tech works. Firstly, the NV1 and Sega Saturn are entirely different beasts. JR joked with me that the most these machines share in common is that they run on electricity. Obviously, they both use quadratic primatives, but that wasn't uncommon in 1996. My Creative 3DO blaster, for example, does the same thing.Quads weren't a unique quirk of the saturn's hardware. Beyond the use of quads as a primitive, the NV1 is radically different from the Saturn. Case in point - the NV1 is a single GPU by itself. When you code for the NV1, you create an NV1 object (nvschedule or whatever) and that handles all communication to the card. It works as a single entity. The Saturn uses dual VDPs to render its graphics, with a pipeline running between them. you are, for all intent and purposes, coding for 2 graphics chips when working with the saturn. The hardware between the NV1 and Saturn is so radically different.
Further, the NV1 SDK we have wasn't part of this leak. This SDK is freely floating around on the internet. Anybody can grab it, it's not something we're holding on to. It's been out there, in the wild, since 1996. And it's useless to Sega Saturn emulation development. And, most importantly, Sega saturn emulators already exist.
Long short of this is, we're 3 people with day jobs, who have spent quite a bit of personal money on this without accepting donations (nor do we wish to), who hold day jobs and have personal lives. Girlfriends, wives, kids, pets, that sort of thing. Additionally, being passionate professionals, we all also have other projects and hobbies that take up our time. Without getting into JR's personal life, Andrew75 alone is working on Project AXSX (of which he's spent several grand of his own money) and I am doing stuff for Half Life 2 VR. So the work we do for this release is being done out of passion and a desire to distribute this to the greater whole because we realize this is worth doing. We're gonna lose money on this endeavor, but it's worth it to us. While accusations of greed honestly doesn't surprise me, given the nature of the internet, please realize that you likely don't have a good grasp of the situation and how much we're personally contributing to get something into everybody's hands for free.