The Sega Fish Life is being worked on!

Our goal is to document and share everything we can about the Fish Life. We are still working on it haven't haven't yet discussed in what way that will be done. I would definitely want to see it properly exposed in the museum but that is not my decision to make. This is one of many ongoing projects and will take some time before it's complete.

In any case, I'll post updates on here when we are ready to share more information

 

Most interesting thing popped up on AG in months! Good work!

 

Big update!

It took us some time to get the Fish Life running properly. We could see it turning on and the disc was spinning but it was impossible to get a picture and the sound was garbled. We inspected everything but couldn't see any issue. We were very worried.

Spoiler: Repairs

Hopefully a member of the museum found the issue, that we had completely missed! Small repairs were done and lo and behold, it works!

Video can be seen here:
https://twitter.com/twitter/statuses/986492134730686466

We were able to find a touch screen more or less compatible with the unit and played with it for a while.

A menu can be accessed using buttons behind the unit.

Spoiler: Menu

The Fish Life is also capable of running regular Dreamcast games by disconnecting a cable on the motherboard, but we have yet to try the controller ports that are inside the unit, as there are no external ones.

I also made a scan of the disc itself, so that you can finally see what it looks like. It is the Amazon version, one of the 5 games released.

Spoiler: Fish Life scan

There is still more information to be shared, so be sure to follow this thread!

 

Awesome news, excited to see more of it!

 

Sega fish life:

A lot has happenend in the last few months. First of all, we were able to dump the game, flash et BIOS. Thanks to @Laurent for providing the tools necessary to dump the game.

The BIOS and the flash were dumped directly from the Fish Life unit using NetBSD and the serial port. The BIOS is a regular 1.01d version, only the flash makes the device special (on top of the touch and voice recognition capabilities). Credit for this go to the staff at the museum.

We then contacted some members of the community to help us make the game work on emulators, do some reverse engineering and help us make the best out of this opportunity. As you can see, they were extremely helpful

https://mobile.twitter.com/museebol...o/iframe/twitter.min.html#1016253708701765632

On top of that, an English translation of the game has been made!

Big thanks to @SiZiOUS @japanese_cake and @-=FamilyGuy=- for the time spent on this project.

This is not over and there are yet more surprises to come

 

is it possible to get maple device replies ? similar to these
http://dcemulation.org/phpBB/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=97047

 

Do you mind telling us a bit more about the flash image?

 

We give you all informations we found and all dump during his release

 

This is an interesting request as the Fish Life device has a touch screen, and maybe we'll find the fact that touch screen is maybe a special Maple controller...

Maybe someone at the Musée Bolo can run the MapleTest binary provided above?
But this request ask to create a bootable disk and see if the Fish Life can run them. I can create a selfbootable disk but not test myself as I'm in France and the Musée Bolo is in the Switzerland

 

I'd say there is 2 probable ways - Maple FT9 "pointing function" device Tablet subtype, or some ELO-compatible touch screen connected via serial (SH4 SCIF port).

I'm personally interested to implement support for this "game" in emulator (Demul).

 

Hello. It would be stellar if you could get the touch screen to be emulated. We do not have the original touchscreen of the Fish Life but we have tested with a uncalibrated 3M touchscreen and the software was reacting positively (eventhough it was far from perfect).

 

Sorry I was wrong, it's not necessary to create a selfboot disk for the MapleTest executable, as the output of the program is sent back to the PC client through the serial/ethernet connection. So if the program is run without an attached client, a simple blank screen will appear...

You need to download the MapleTest binary here then execute it on the Fish Life through the serial port with dc-tool. But if the touch screen already uses the serial port, this can be a problem. I don't think there is a G2 bus on the Fish Life for connecting a BBA...

 

its a shame this went dark. maybe the touch screen inputs can be found by the maple bus after all, big homebrew potential if true

 

A release!

https://segafish.museebolo.ch/en/
Includes one of several fish life GD-ROMs in GDI format, a BIOS/flash dump.

 

That's amazing. So did you try to boot it in a ordinary Dreamcast after changing the right value in the flash?

It's wonderful that SEGA allowed you to do this research too.

 

FishLife "as is" will not boot on regular Dreamcast, it require a bit special flash.
but I've heard it was already hacked to boot on regular DC.

technically, Fish Life box is: DC VA1 motherboard with standard 1.01d BIOS but special flash,
and a special 837-14046 PCB where is 315-6211 gamepad/controller chip, DC microphone chip, and a bunch of connectors. at function level it is the same if you plug into Dreamcast port A regular controller and plug in it Microphone device (not sure which one, Seaman or DreamEeye),
there is also touch screen device connected to SH4's SCIF serial port, touch screen model/type is unknown, and I'm not aware of similar ones.
the protocol seems to be:

Code:

release event: 40 (xx?)
touch event: 41 Xl Xh Yl Yh 0x xx
40/41 - header, might be other value, code check only 7th and 1st bits
Xl/Xh Yl/Yh - X/Y values, where Xl = X&0x3f; Xh = (X>>6)&0x3f,
X/Y ranges is about 0 - 640*5 / 0 - 480*5
0x - unused, probably 4bit Zvalue
xx - unused, probably checksum

touch device sends data by itself, game code doesn't send any requests, an in general game doesn't send anything to serial port, but only receive.

here is short vid demonstrating touchscreen emulation

 

@MetalliC How did you get SCIF working under DEMUL? I can't find any option to configure a port for it in DEMUL or its ini files. Does it just default to the first COM port it finds or is there a plugin for it? Which version of DEMUL is that? So far, I've only been able to get Fish Life to work in the latest release of NullDC. Everything else errors out.

 

@Dreamcast I'm one of Demul developers, I've RE'd this game and coded emulation of this touch device.
sorry, you can't get it working until next version/revision will be released.

you can get in running on Demul, but with no touch screen emulated, if:
- grab fish_flash.bin from FishLife releasers site
- put it into Demul's /nvram/ folder and rename to dc.flash
- set Config -> Dreamcast ->
Time Hack - uncheck
Region -> use Flash settings
Broadcast -> use Flash settings
- select this game image and run it

 

Yes, it was hacked to run on a retail Dreamcast last summer when all of this was originally being worked on.
These hacked files were shared with me in private today, but unfortunately they don't seem to work for me.

The unhacked image works just fine on an emulator with the fish_flash.bin flash image.
The hacked disc works just fine on an emulator with the Japanese retail flash image, whether using BIOS 1.004 or v1.01d.
It does not, however, work on an emulator with US retail flash image or EU retail flash image.

I made my own CDI version from scratch from the patched GDI version, it gives the same error message on my va1 US Dreamcast and my va0 JP Dreamcast. Maybe it'll work on a real va1 JP Dreamcast? I don't have one.

When I say it "doesn't work," I mean it boots to an error message that says "ufInitSystem miss" which as I understand it is related to the flashROM.

 

Just wait a little, something will come soonish.