I've heard stories of US Soul Calibur copies missing VGA support. Odd considering mine has it. How common is the inferior version, is there any way to tell them apart?
I dunno. My copy supports VGA. In fact, all of my games support VGA, except for Plasma Sword - which I just got the other day. I still need to try that game with a SCART cable to see what it's like. On a related note: is there any kind of homebrew that will allow a game to boot in VGA mode if the original didn't support it?
Makes me curious if PAL copies were affected too. An old purported PAL VGA patch is still floating around online.
There's only three versions of Soul Calibur: NTSC-J, NTSC-U, and PAL. In none of the regions were multiple versions ever released.
Well I can't think of many other explanations, one can't really be mistaken about something like this. Dreamcast VGA is automatic when available.
I'm not sure what to tell you. The Dreamcast BIOS checks a string in the bootsector (IP.BIN) of the filesystem of the disc and if the second to last character in the string is a 0, then it will not allow the game to boot if pins 6 and 7 of the AV port are connected to ground (VGA mode selected). Here are the peripheral strings from all known versions of Soul Calibur: Japanese demo disc: 0019A10 Japanese: 07BBA10 European: 07BBA10 American: 07BBA10 So all of them should support the VGA box. I am confident that there are no other GD-ROMs of Soul Calibur in existence besides these. The mastering date in the bootsector for the Japanese version is 7/14/1999, the USA version 7/30/1999, the European version 10/27/1999, meaning that they are not rereleases. I own both Japanese and USA copies and just booted them to verify that they do boot fine with VGA mode selected. Possible explanations for this: 1. Along with F1 World Grand Prix, Dead or Alive 2, and Tokyo Xtreme Racer 2, Soul Calibur was one of the original four games to be released by the pirate group Utopia with the use of their Utopia boot CD. The Utopia boot CD itself did not support VGA mode, so there may be some confusion regarding that. 2. The pirate group "CNN" repacked Utopia's rip and re-released it as a selfboot. It's quite possible they didn't set the VGA-enable bit in the bootsector. I don't have a copy of it to verify. 3. The pirate group "dCiSo" released a USA version of Soul Calibur, and in their NFO file they wrote (paraphrasing) "CNN's repacked version was the PAL version, so we are releasing the USA version. I have also made sure that this USA release has full support of the VGA BOX." This may or may not be referring to a possible error in the CNN version, I don't know.
