What's new

A little help here please?

ranguvar

New member
First of all, please don't refer me to nullDC. It keeps freezing and crashing everytime I enter (DC Bios dumps and all), and I don't feel like spending another entire day tweaking to get yet another emulator to work for me. :doh: That said, here is my problem:

I have Chankast (which works beautifully by the way), at least on the OS screen. I have not been able to play any games (ie. Skies of Arcadia), so I don't know how Chankast is graphics-wise, sound-wise and all that other great stuff. Chankast keeps reading my .cdi image as a music disc with two tracks. Um, I saw Testaccount's question too, btw, but the question wasn't really answered and all I got was to try nullDC. :( I tried burning the image onto a physical CD-ROM, as a data CD, but alas, the image is 37 MB, too large. So, case in point, is there another virtual drive program thingy that I can use that will work, or is there anything else I can do to start playing Skies? If you absolutely must recommend nullDC, please can anyone give me a manual or something to read on it. It's rather vexing how it crashes all the time...

Thanks!:bunny:

You should also know that I am rather new to this emulation stuff. :unsure: I am picking up rather quickly, but please don't be too exasperated if I have no clue what you are talking about. Thank you again.
 

Agozer

16-bit Corpse | Moderator
Not being able to detect the CD image correctly is rarely the virtual drive software's problem. Have you tried booting the game with a bootdisc?

How does nullDC crash btw?
 

Agozer

16-bit Corpse | Moderator
You need to find it. Utopia Bootdisc, to be exact. There might be other bootdiscs as well, but I don't know about those.
 

Agozer

16-bit Corpse | Moderator
the guide tells you how to create the Utopia bootdisc (you know, burning it), not how to run it.

You run the bootdisc like you would run any other DC games on emulators. Mount it, run it. When prompted, unmount it and mount the game image.
 
OP
R

ranguvar

New member
OK... I am oficially going insane. :w00t: Yeah, not a good thing, when you've been staring at your comupter screen for two days straight wondering where your social life has gone...

Anyway, I did that too (found another FAQ), Still doesn't work.
I was rereading the Chankast FAQ for the 100th time now perusing for something I've missed and... could this be it?

I can't unstuff my bioses. Could that be the problem, I just assumed they were fine the way they were: (see attachment). Is this my problem? Well, if it is, I might as well give up because they're not coming unstuffed, and I can't find a pure bios anywhere, let alone the bios itself so...

What do I do now? @_@
 

Agozer

16-bit Corpse | Moderator
They are fine the way they are. For some reason your StuffIt program seems to have associated itself with BIN files (which shouldn't even matter since the BIOS works when you boot up Chankast without a mounted CD image).

So, to reiterate: If the BIOS works, your Dc_bios.bin and Dc_flash.bin are fine. Chankast refusing to boot games is a different matter.
 
Last edited:
OP
R

ranguvar

New member
OK! So the BIOS files aren't my problem. Thanks so much for clearing that up for me! :satisfied But now, Chankast not recognising my .cdi images... Anything that you know of that I'm missing? Time to raid Chankast's extensive FAQ again...:ninja:
 
OP
R

ranguvar

New member
Daemon Tools v3.29, the recommended version.

I also tried using boot disc again, like you said. Mount image into drive, open Chankast, wait 'til Utopia screen pops up and mount game into same drive. Did that, waited for a while and when nothing happened, clicked reset, Chankast turned white and stopped responding. Am I doing something wrong?
 

Agozer

16-bit Corpse | Moderator
Did you press Start or any other buttons after you replaced the bootdisc with the game disc? Utopia waits for user input, if I'm not mistaken.

All things considered, not even Utopia is a surefire way to get non-selfboot games working. Which CD-ROM plugin are you using?
 
OP
R

ranguvar

New member
I pressed Start (both from the menu and from the controls), Reset, A button and any other button I could think of pressing. Nothing. When I press reset, Chankast goes white and stops responding.

I'm using the xxx CD plugin, when I use the other one, I get the TOC error. I have Windows XP, by the way. I thouht that you couldn't use the xxx plugin if you had a 2K, so I used it.

Something interesting: The game I'm trying to get to work is Skies of Arcadia. Chankast thinks the fixed Skies (the unecheloned version patched with SOAPatcher) is a music CD, but I found by tweaking with the options, Echelon-version Skies is recognised when I change the cable from VGA to NTSC. I tried the same with the fixed version, and it still won't recognise. @_@
 

Agozer

16-bit Corpse | Moderator
Always keep the Cable Type as NTSC. There are only few rare cases where VGA is needed. IIRC, most games will not work properly without CT being set to NTSC.

SOAPatcher does not work correctly for everyone, it could be that the patching failed, which then resulted in an unusable CD image.
 
Last edited:
OP
R

ranguvar

New member
Yaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay!!!

I changed the cable type to NTSC... and it worked!!!!!!
Thank you soooooooo much!!!!:party:

But noe the graphics suck like no other and the sound keeps cutting out... I am cursed with computer problems. Can you help me with this one too, if it's no trouble. Thanks!
 

Agozer

16-bit Corpse | Moderator
Define "graphics suck".

Which brings me to my next question (I hope I'm not making you repeat something): What kind of a graphics card do you have? What about sound hardware?

FYI, SOA works better in nullDC, but the game froze after a part of the game was cleared (very early on).
 

Top