EU Rush 2049 depends on DC internal flash/region?

I wasted many a disc on PBA bowling a few years ago, after eventually seeing it running I could have kicked myself

 

Its because the hacker was an idiot and didnt make the game region free. Belokk did some stupid crap in his days. I have repacked it, made region free instead of NTSC-U only, sorted the files properly and added a dummy file to decrease the load times. An image of it is in the file download thread I made with all the betas and unreleased stuff I could find PROPERLY repacked & sorted with dummy files.

Also South Park Rally does the same as Rush and will not boot on a USA deck even with my modchip.

 

I seen that in your thread, its awesome that guys like you can repack and do all the dummy file stuff, I tried ripping the DreamOn demo discs with my bba but got nowhere

 

So your repack definitely works on an untouched PAL system?
(not trying to interrogate you or question your ability, just want to make sure to save myself from burning a fifth copy of the game without being absolutely certain )
Because the old one looked like it was going to work right up until you press start on the title screen, I think that's where it all went to hell anyway, Its been at least a year since i last tried it.

 

I have had three PAL users confirm it works. Most if the folks that were left in the DC scene after it died had no clue what they were doing l.

 

Ok great thanks I will have to give it a whirl when I am next near a dreamcast

 

Yea it was of no fault of your own just someone that had no idea what he was doing (same guy that couldn't selfboot Border Down in 2004 so he released a non-selfboot variant when it was only one simple hexedit to make it work that was used on only about 95% of all DC games), not sure why but it seems a lot of folks that had unreleased games botched the releases. Flintstones, Half Life, Propeller Arena, PBA Bowling, Hell Gate and the list goes on with horrid rips. The DC scene never had an quality control. It just had to boot and be compressed in 20mb rar files to avoid being nuked. There was rampant downsampling for no reason at all other then to be the first to the top sites. So many rips are utter trash and why I don't play anything made by the "scene" as I can do a better job myself and I taught myself by simply reading and learning how data was accessed and the layout of GD-ROM disc.

 

Wow. That's a really nice PSO ver2 disk design. The NTSC version is just another dragon pic.

 

I suppose dialup played a part. In the modern era I would've expected 1:1 dumps of the GD-ROM to be primary, for preservation reasons.
With selfboot, region free, hex edits, and similar, relegated to patches.

 

That would make for patches the size of the GD-ROM's for the most part. Selfbooting a DC game is pretty tricky as LBA's vary, header data must be swapped out, file must be relinked (something that can't be done in Windows properly as CDRecord will ignore links done in Windows). The only game I know of released as a patch was 550mb for a translation as the video's had to be recoded and text was hard coded.


And dial up may have been part of it for sure but I know in 2000 when the DC was hacked I ditched dial up long before that. There are games like Columns 2 which untouched was under 200mb but the scene rip was still downsampled to a measly 65mb all done in CBR and all audio was taken from 44k stereo to 22k mono when it would fit on a 74min disc untouched. Just wish there were some rules to it but so few understood how it worked so they couldn't really enforce rules on something they knew d*ck about.

 

Oh. It's been a while since I've ran a burned game. Hearing things like that about how it works, I'm less sure I'd recommend the idea to users.

 

Surely thats the point of the region free bios? games shouldnt need to be hacked....

 

Maybe be but the region free BIOS only works for GD-ROM's and not Mil-CD's and this includes official ones from Sega don't work with a region free BIOS or modchip so it wouldn't work anyhow even if you had one. And it isnt so much hacking them but setting the region flags. Even some GD-ROM disc were region free by doing the same thing setting flags for all regions.

 

I've never before this topic heard of region locked Mil-CD's, or region free GD-ROM's.

 

Are you 100% sure about that? As thats what the bios is supposed to skip - the region flag check.

 

Hmm... Would it affect me differently, having a modchip instead?

 

No, the modchip does the same thing - patches the bios as the DC is loading it

 

That's normal: Rush 2049 has another region protection based on a checksum of the gdrom drive kernel. In 2000, echelon wrote few lines about it in the e-sf2049.nfo file that came with the game archives:

I know someone has made a tool which dumps some information out of the gdrom drive (saying "Kabuto version is blablabla"). Maybe you should have a look at it, I think its name is something like GD info...

 

Thats more like it.

Good info, thanks

 

100% sure as my Space Channel Five Mil-CD will not boot on any of my systems except my Japanese system. I have tried one with a modchip as well as BIOS replacement.