The Sega Fish Life is being worked on!

weird. this error shown if game can not read/write/erase data in "game settings" flash sector (0x10000 - 0x17fff).
it is pretty much expected to happen on emulators, almost all of them does not correctly emulate "sector erase" flashrom command (i.e. different sizes of different sectors of this flash chip).
but not on real Dreamcast... are you sure flash roms in your dreamcasts is fully good/alive ?

in general, this game require first 2 bytes of flash "factory" area (@0x1A000) was 0x30 0xff
in the rest it seems pretty fine with VA0 or VA1 flashes

 

Well I've tried it on a va0 JP Dreamcast, va1 US Dreamcast, and another va1 US Dreamcast with GDEMU/DCHDMI, all the same problem. So I don't think it's that.
And it works on lxdream with JP flash but not with US flash. Clearly something else is going on

 

I see. strange then.
not sure if software or hardware problem... can you provide flash dump from one of yours Dreamcasts ? I'll try to find out what is going on there.

 

I don't have a Japanese DC, but I do have US DC with a region-free modchip. I'm not sure what revision the motherboard is. How do region settings work with CDIs? Is it possible to make it NTSC-J region? The modchip will only change the BIOS obviously, everything else is just a standard US model, so I don't know how useful that would be.

 

Nah that doesn't change anything, the DC console BIOS just checks that the region in the flashrom is marked as enabled in the disc's header. The region free BIOS bypasses that check, but that check is not the problem (I have a region free BIOS and it's a region free header in the disc image I made). The problem is that the software itself, not BIOS, is checking for something in the flash

 

I'm not sure how my chip works. I've noticed that it will only load imports if they're inserted when the system is booted. I think it'll work even if the tray is open. But once you load a game, if you open the tray and/or put in a different disc, it'll only load US discs. I guess maybe what's happening is that it only disables the check once, at system boot. After that, if you load a different game, the system checks again, and the chip doesn't disable it; so it's locked to US, as it normally would be. I wonder how it actually disables/bypasses the check though, because there are situations where I don't understand how it does this. Does it disable the flashrom check, or the disc header check, or both? At what point does that state revert back to normal?