Hi, I've been trying to convert some Sega CD games to (E), though generally I've just downloaded (E) to begin with to save the hassle. Problems: 1. Heart of the Alien I've tried with every converter I can find (even SCDConv2.5 which lists this game as being converted succesfully from the author's site) but I can't ever get it any further than the Sega logo then black freeze. 2. Lunar - The Silver Star I get a title screen then black freeze. Has anyone had success with either of these two? Ecco 2 worked fine. Sonic CD, the audio in the movie sequences becomes jumpy (I assume this is due to something regarding PAL/NTSC?) So.. my "US soundtrack" version is instead composed of the PAL-iso + US audio. Which.. is pretty close to being US audio with exception to some movie scenes I think.
Lunar is freezing because of your disc being burnt wrong. It does require pregaps to be properly burnt or else the CD-Drive will stall causing the hang up. Perhaps Heart of Alien is having the same problem ? Remember that the MEGA-CD uses a Audio CD Drive as a CD-ROM drive, which causes a few "issues". Edit: Pregaps are two seconds of blank data (gaps) placed before an CD-DA track. The first audio track after the data track has an OBLIGATORY 2 seconds pregap. The other tracks may or may not have pregaps on them. I think it depends on how the title is programmed.
Thanks for the info, I'll look into it. I used the Sega CD Cue Maker program for all my discs - I'll have a look to see if there's any differences in gap placement or length. Thanks again. In the mean time, in order to save me producing several more coasters, does anyone have a successful (E) conversion of either of these 2 games?
I know that for sure Lunar has no region protections of any kind. I can't say anything of heart of the Alien. I can tell you, though that a good number of Japanese games do have calls to routines that only exist on the JPN BIOS or actually go out of their way to check if the BIOS it's running with is of Export type. :shrug: My experiences with the MEGA-CD region lock mechanism make me believe that the best conversion method (less hacky) is use the BIOS with the smaller boot sector (JPN) and actually paste the proper boot data (JPN LOGO) at the boot sector then pad the difference with NOP instructions. That was before RAQ figured out how to hack the sub CPU BIOS and I started to mod the bios then. :shrug: Now I just suggest that people use an region free hacked bios instead. Of course the JPN BIOSes are the best compatibility out there.
Thanks. I think I just had a bad ROM for Heart of the Alien, I just tried the unmodified US disc (with my Everdrive MD loading up the MultiBIOS) and I got the same freeze. I'll try the same with Lunar later on.
Considering you have a PAL unit and want to play US games you can simply slap the PAL SEGA licence code on the address 0x0200 of the iso (start of the SEGA logo code) and then pad the difference with NOPs. The JPN logo is 342 bytes long, the PAL logo is 1390 bytes long and the USA logo is 1412 bytes long. So you paste the PAL logo from my zip file at offset 0x0200 of your ISO file, then proceed to pad (fill) the size difference with NOP instructions (4E71) 11 (eleven) times. That should be enough to make American discs play on your PAL system. With all respect due, SDCONV sucks ... :shrug:
Thanks l_oliveira - I'll try this out later. I see, so with the USA logo being the largest this should mean that the conversion from US to PAL or Japan is very simple (no re-addressing required) and the same for PAL to Japan, but anything else would become more complicated? I assume you just use a Hex editor for all this?
