I installed my region free chip from Bad_Ad84 (Full Chip Replacement Method) and I am having some dramas. It plays the NTSC dev kit startup animation perfectly without any distortion or problems it then asks me to put in the time and date and loads the normal system menu. When I select "Play" and try to load the USB-GDROM to play a game it just goes to a black screen only. If I remove the USB stick from the USB-GDROM it displays parts of the blue USB-GDROM menu with corrupted text but won't really function or load any type of game. The motherboard was a NTSC-J VA1 which I have noticed looks slightly different in places to the PAL VA1 board. I have tried to trace as many pins as I can and have re-flowed the solder a couple of time to try and make sure I am not missing any connections. Any help would be appreciated.
It's got Japanese cake bios which are incompatible with Usbgdrom. If you still have the original drive put it in re flash with link83 devkit bios with dreamshell. Edit: Japanese cake bios are amazing and I can't wait for the new update, however they don't like to work with optical drive emulators. Bad_Ad84 may not know that even 1.031 has issues with Usbgdrom(can't speak for gdemu). I hope 1.033 addresses these issues.
Ahhhh well I am disappointed that it won't work with the USB-GDROM but at the same time I am relieved I am not going crazy and my soldering is still okay haha. Unfortunately I just purchased the motherboard as a spare for this project and my original drive is now dead. I might just have to buy another Dreamcast with a working laser unit and try to re-flash the bios. Thanks for the reply
Just to be sure that it is Japanese cake bios does it have a version number in the upper right hand corner of the menu? Other wise it may be something else. The chip I bought from him recently did and it caused issues with my Usbgdrom so I just assumed.
I can't remember if it did. I will check tonight when I get home. So the regular dev kit bios is compatible with USB-GDROM?
Use Link83 bios instead, which is fine with usb-gdrom. I have trouble using a stock gdrom drive and gdemu using jc's latest bios, so reverted back to Link83 until Jc looks into fixing some issues with 1.022.
I didn't know 1.031 had compatibility issues, this is the first ive heard of it. Far as I had heard, 31 had been working fine. Anymore reports of these problems? If there's a thread with people confirming, I will change them all to link83 in future.
As far as I recall 1.031 didn't have any compatibility issues with stock GDROM or GDEMU but 1.032 is incompatible with Pier Solar and cheat discs.
32 also has booting issues with some CDI ReviveDc rips and certain other rips that work fine on 31 and Link83 and even retail bios's.
Hi all, I installed Cake's v1.032 bios today in my pal va1 board by direct chip replacement. It boots great and originals from any region are playing fine however when booting backups (any backups) I get weird display issues as in the pic attached. If I drop back to v1.031 or link'a bios the backups boot fine. Anyone have any ideas or should I stick with 31 till 33 is released?
