Snow Surfers EURO – 60Hz/VGA Patch

Hi,
As I said in my previous post, I don’t have much time to work on game patches or the next version of my custom bios. That though does not necessarily mean I can’t quickly talk about what I worked on few weeks ago! I have a couple of game patches ready or almost ready and today I’m releasing an easy one. As usual, it is a 60Hz/VGA patch that you need to apply to the boot file (1ST_READ.BIN). Snow Surfers is one of those games that which have a specific name for each region: Snow Surfers in Europe, Rippin’ Riders Snowboarding in the US and Cool Boarders Burrrn! in Japan. Not particularly helpful but funny though. It was one of the Dreamcast launch titles, at least in Europe. It is a pretty good game and playable up to 4 players.

Download: jc-snows-60hz-vga.zip

Next and last point: custom bios. In addition to small patches that ease the Dreamcast’s use, the next version of my custom bios will also embed two new features. One can easily be guessed from the pic below. For the other one, I let you imagine or wait, depending on your mood. I know that it looks a bit shitty but I need really more time to understand how I can re-use the internal graphics. (Time that of course I don’t have…)

11 replies on “Snow Surfers EURO – 60Hz/VGA Patch”

Is it possible to set the default time to 01.01.2015? Instead of 1998.

Also is it possible to force th colour of the intro without changing the region?

That is a “fix” I would definitely include. Though, I don’t know yet whether it will be part of the next release.

Forcing the intro anim color w/o changing the region? Yes, it is possible but it requires more work on my side (need to store that settings either in the flash or a VMU). I’m exploring ways to have new bios-settings but it is not ready yet.

I think a found… well not a bug, but an unwanted side effect from one of your changes.

I’ve tested your 1.030 bios with devbox boot animation on va0 Japanese unit, everething seems fine except for hacked bleemcast! emulators. They are heavily protected and as a result don’t work on any available ODE at the moment. However, they work perfectly with original GD-ROM and official bios or link83’s bios, but hang at white screen after SEGA logo with your bios. My guess is that this behaviour is related to bootfile extent check trickery.

So, hey, maybe you shoul consider making a version without this hack, because your other hacks are quite useful for a DC without ODE.

Thanks for reporting that issue. I don’t see why it would be related to the bootfile extent check since this check is performed in a routine that is not executed when you boot a mil-cd. Anyway, I need to test that soon.

there will never be a widescreen support. The best you can get is VGA or 60Hz support then your screen performs the upscaling. See the pictures in my next (newer) post, I do have a widescreen and the image is correctly displayed 😉

Ok so now I understand what wide-screen support means 🙂 So I think it’s pretty easy to have the bios menu displayed correctly on wide-screens but I cannot make any promises regarding patching games. I have some ideas to do it in a transparent way for players but it will required several patches per game. Once the list of supported games gets longer enough I will work on this feature.

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