All DC games can do it!

After spending hours or even days disassembling and reading the Dreamcast BIOS, I could point out some entry points and modify small parts of it. First of all, special thanks to those guys that made the emulation possible. Without them, my work would have been nearly impossible! Anyway, my only hard drive that had a copy of my work died so I’ll get back to that, for sure, but later this year… Well I know I should have put it online or whatever. Sometimes you are in the rush and you can’t handle everything. That is what happened to me those past weeks and I delegated the survival of my data to a Toshiba hard drive. How stupid I was! It’s over now and I’m going to invest into SSD drives.

I had to move to a new place recently and there is no TV. That is a good thing because I save my brain from being roasted by those stupid commercials and I’ve also started working on the VGA compatibility for some games like Skies of Arcadia. I remember that I played a lot that game and today I wanted to play few minutes. I got frustuated because back in the day I was using the PAL version and as you all know, the VGA output is not supported.

Why not? I decided to have a quick look (2 hours not more) and I saw something interesting: the video mode is hard coded!!! No matter what cable you plug, you get a PAL NI signal. From that observation, I started to modify the binary and it worked. I need to do a test on a TV to check how the game behaves because I’m pretty sure the game will only be playable with a VGA box though.

So maybe later I will work on the other naughty PAL games that refuse to be compliant with VGA standard. Bad boys…

There is no internet connection where I am so please don’t ask me where you can get that patch. I know what needs to be done πŸ˜‰

UPDATE: I also have Resident Evil: Code Veronica working perfectly through the VGA output. Now I’m trying to enable/fix VGA support for Bangai-o PAL. The 50/60Hz screen is skipped so you can see the game menus, start a game but there are some gfx glitches…

UPDATE 2: Got Snow Surfer working as well. No progress on Bangai-o. I’m starting to think that those 240p games cannot be patched to work correctly with a VGA box even if the video ouput is forced to VGA. The game does not fit the screen and stays in the up right corner.

UPDATE 3: MTV Skateboarding featuring Andy something is playable on VGA. One new thing: the game is locked to run only for a specific region. At least it was! The game is shitty though, I guess the MTV license cost too much πŸ™‚

23 replies on “All DC games can do it!”

Bangai -o is 320 x240 type of game, should also do not support, similar and Bakumatsu Roman Daini Maku – Gekka no Kenshi – Final Edition (JP)

Actually, I am able to enable the upscaler of the PVR engine so the game appears in full screen now. Just need to fix a couple of other little things… I will try with the second game you mention to see whether my patch can be used for all the other 240p only games.

Awesome Work πŸ˜€

I posted this comment already, but it didn’t actually post.
Would you be willing to see if WWF Attitude is patchable? i love that game but i only have a HDMI modded Dreamcast (via VGA) and that game is TV only πŸ™

Yeah sure. It is part of my plans. I am so bored that few games refuse to output VGA! I’m going to patch all euro/pal games that need to be then check the other us or jap specific games. Btw do you know where I can get a tosec torrent that contains all pal gdi dumps? Thanks in advance

Thats awesome, I cant wait to see how thing go πŸ™‚
As for the tosec dumps, I have a tosec set up on my server, but i’m not sure tosec includes ALL versions of PAL games, For instance, in the other post’s comment section, a dude was asking about resident evil code veronica Spanish version, but I cant see it in the tosec dumps… so either tosec isn’t language version complete, or there isn’t a dedicated Spanish version of the game.

I think you’re right. If I recall correctly, back in the day, I played resident evil code veronica, the french version and there were subtitles during the cut scenes. I’m gonna dump my disc and check whether my patch for the english version can be used as is. I really hope so! And maybe it is time for me to contribute to tosec and send them hash of my french version!

How do you dump your games? bba? Im just hooking up a sd card to my other dc so im going to scan through my games and see if there is anything different.

If you want access to the tosec dumps on my server, let me know and ill send you a link.

Thanks, that’s nice of you! For the moment I think I’m good. I’m still looking for Half Life Gold version and Propeller Arena GDI dumps. I know some guys have them but I don’t know who they are though πŸ™‚ Maybe you know where I can get them?

It looks like the dude who released both of those titles previously, atreyu187, is no longer a part of the Dreamcast scene.
You can find him over on theisozone.com and assemblergames.com, but he hasn’t been on since the latter part of 2014 unfortunately,
There are CDI versions released by him, but I’m not sure how complete they are…

By the looks of it, this is the most complete Propeller Arena image out there
Link removed due to being auto marked as spam,

hello and thanks for the patchs for resident evil and skies of arcadia ^^
but i need help please…
i have the gdi files,i know how to extract the files to replace the “1st read.bin”…but after i don’t know how rebuild the original file to put on my gdemu…
please help me ^^ tell me how i can patch the games ^^
thank you!

Sure, I think I should have write a post about that, it is not really hard, you just need to know the steps. Basically what I do is:
– convert the track03.bin to track03.iso:
1/download my script and copy it next to the track03.iso: http://www.mediafire.com/view/vggcax7vo5a53wa/raw2iso.py
2/make sure you have python installed and working in your command line (typing “python” in the command line should bring you the python prompt)
3/with the command line go to the track03.bin folder and type: python raw2iso.py track03.bin track03.iso
– delete track03.bin (since you have it in iso format)
– edit the disc.gdi file so that the third track points to track03.iso and change the sector “2352” to “2048” for that track.
– open the 1ST_READ_PATCHED.BIN and the track03.iso in an hex editor (like Hex WorkShop)
– select the first 32 bytes of the 1ST_READ_PATCHED.BIN then find them in the iso file (if you have more than one occurrence, make sure you select the right one by checking the next bytes)
– Now you should have the offset in the track03.iso where the 1ST_READ.BIN is.
From that point I do the following in hex WorkShop:
– select all the bytes of the 1ST_READ_PATCHED.BIN file then copy
– go to the tab where track03.iso is open, go to the offset where the 1ST_READ.BIN file starts then go to the menu Edit/select block, type the size on the 1ST_READ_PATCHED.BIN. All the 1ST_READ.BIN bytes are selected. Finally right click, paste. It should warn you that the “Undo buffer” is too small. You don’t care, you click on OK. Now the image is patched.

Good luck πŸ˜‰

Airforce Delta / Deadly Skies

Hi, do you think you could patch Airforce Delta respectively Deadly Skies for VGA support? I’ve enabled the VGA bit on the image and I’m also using a VGA cable with a 15/30 kHz switch. This results in 480i output which one of my LCDs actually accepts over VGA. It doesn’t work with my larger LCD that’s usually connected to my Dreamcast. Also the 480i picture doesn’t look as good as games with 480p output. If you’d find a way to patch the game for 480p, that would be absolutely awesome.

Patch method

Hello,
Thanks for this amazing job!!!
I have cracked many consoles and patched many games but honestly I have never see anything so complicated. Could you please just put a link with the 3 games already patched? It would change my life! After three hours of trying is so difficult for me…

Lelautre

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