Hello, I have this disc here I'm looking for a bit more information on. This is the disc itself - I was able to open the MAIN.EXE file in a hex editor, which contained some strings of character names that I was then able to google and I found that the game is "Slap Happy Rhythm Busters", which was only released in Japan. It appears that this disc is a beta of the game - My disc is on the bottom and the released disc is on the top. I'm having a problem though because the disc is damaged, it has a few small pits or dot-type things on it. I've attempted to image it with CloneCD but due to the damage it simply errors out. I've tried running it from ePSXe but it just fails on a black screen. Right now I'm using ddrescue to image the disc and attempt to get as much information as possible off of it, but it's pretty slow and I've got 48 MB so far, out of a total of 273 MB. The main question I have is if anyone knows what THQ was doing with this? Why a beta of a Japanese game that (as far as I can google) THQ had nothing to do with is on a THQ disc?
It might be the USA BETA of the game, I have read somewhere that the games was suppose to be released in the USA but then got cancelled. Great find
What final? I had a copy of this but I think I sold it? I guess there is a chance I still have it as I can't recall who I sold it to or how much I sold it for. I was pretty sure someone dumped this long ago. Is the ROM out there?
Well I've had ddrescue running since 8 PM last night (it's currently noon) and it's not looking good. The disc is just too badly damaged. It's read about 145 MB so far, with 80 MB being "rescued" (good data) and about 66 megs that are all errors. It's showing 3490 errors (!), and currently it's been 45 minutes since the last successful read. I was hoping ddrescue would produce an image that maybe could at least boot up or something but it's not looking that way. As it is the disc is completely unplayable in anything I tried it on (PSX, PS2, emulator). I'm going to let it run and complete but I don't have much hope for anything useful. Interesting though that it looks like THQ was translating it for US release before it was canceled. At least now I have an idea of what this disc is. I can't find a ROM out there but maybe someone who actually knows where to look (I'm just googling here) could find it.
You'll just be damaging the drive at this point, the laser LED will burn itself out. Even if there's an obvious physical reason for the read failures (scratches), try as many different drives as you can get your hands on, because one of them might just soldier through. I had this recently with a PS2 disc that wouldn't dump on anything other than my external LG.
most dvd drives are piss poor at reading cds. Get an old school cdr drive like a plextor or yamaha. Get a drive that can read at 1x and set it up. Also compare it to the Japanese file structure on the final.
Good idea, i haven't thought of trying different drives. I canceled ddrescue since it wasn't reading anything anymore and I'm now trying a different drive. I'll let this go for about 30 minutes or so and if it doesn't seem any better I'll cancel it. A family member has an old Windows 98 computer so maybe I'll try the CD drive in that and see if it does any better.
The game was pretty much in english in Japan, so it's easy for them. Real fun game, not very deep. I have a Japanese copy I can do a file list of. Do me a favor go to run->cmd and type the drive letter. d:\dir /on /s >list.txt
I'm on a Mac so I had to do it differently, but here's the listings - I'm not sure what the two "total (number)" things are, but they aren't the total sizes. Ignore them, I guess.
