How to get Skies Of Arcadia (echelon) working properly!!!!

[diablo2121]

I don't know if this matters with the sound issues in SoA or not, but I was looking through the sound files of two games, Grandia 2 and SoA. Well Grandia 2 uses .afs and .adx sound formats and the sound is flawless, and all I saw in the echelon rip of SoA were .mlt and .pq4 files. Do you guys think this is somehow related to the sound quality issues?

 

[zodiac]

anyone able to help me? at all? suggestions? >_>;;

 

[Dark Mits]

Great news, even though I'm certain at least someone else has beaten me. I FINISHED Skies Of Arcadia (didn't find all secrets though) using Chankast. Took me about a month or so. However I faced many stability problems and I'm writing this now so as to help you overcome them (minor spoilers).

=> Save after every battle on deck or airship battle (unless not possible). These types of battles tend to crash the emulator more frequently than any other occassion.
=> Make sure the framerate is below 30fps all the time! This is pretty much important. If the framerate is faster than 30fps then it is likely that the emulator will crash soon. First you'll experience the music silencing (if there's such expression) or many sound effects and voices not being played by the emulator or being cut-off in the middle of playing and after a while the emulator will crash on a black screen. My experiments proved to me that if the framerate is below 25fps then it is possible to play up to unlimited time. I played 7 hours straight (no kidding!) and then turned of my computer to go to sleep. To lowewr your framerate increase CPU percentage (consult the help on how to do this, but I guess that if you're reading this post you already know how).
=> When on airship battles the music will probably go out completely (usually when a shot is fired or a torpedo hits) but that's no problem, because on the next hit the music will start playing again (not all the time though).
=> Now for the strange part: Sometimes the emulator would crash on a certain point whatever you would do (or wouldn't do). Specifically, I experienced this when I got to fight near the icy stone reef between Yafutoma and Ixataka. When the battle was loading and the character models where loaded then the emulator would crash on a black screen but the music would still play normally! The VMU screen would freeze also. A second time I experienced that was when the boss in Glacia would use "Death Laser". When the camera would zoom on it (the boss) then the same effect would occur. (SPOILER) Third time when Galcian would summon the rain on Valua (SPOILER END). I overcame all these problems by repatching the original (Echelon) ISOs. Also, in these occasions I noticed that the emulator would freeze on such points if the patched ISO was fragmented. I don't know if it has any relation, but I thought mentioning it would maybe help. When I finished the game my patched ISO was contiguous.

Major thanks to: <-> the authors of Chankast and those who contributed
<-> aika-san and co. for creating SOAPatcher
<-> the forums and all who posted valuable info
<-> my sister (!) for insisting not to use a guide and so
the game surprised me at times (especially from the
middle of the second disk and onwards)

I also noticed that if you enable the Capcom hack nothing would be different except for the in-game clock going really fast (1 minute in-game <=> 5-8 seconds of real time). Also, I went through the final 2 hours of the game without the emulator crashing at all my first time. Haven't retried a second time.

Sorry for the long post. I had to write this 3 times because my first two times weren't posted for unknown reason (page expired!). Yor turn to help: Do you know where to find the original soundtrack? SOAWorld's soundtrack is not complete and the mp3s there seem to miss many sounds.

 

[diablo2121]

It's truly an awesome game

 

[Kiljaden]

Hmmm... when ever i try to patch my CDI files, the program starts fine and detects the mounted images, but always hangs after that. It goes no farther than the first bar. I tried the solution posted eariler about replacing some MS-DOS files but nothing seems to work. Anyone know anything about this? Please reply if you need more info or anything.

 

[aika-san]

Sorry for the long post. I had to write this 3 times because my first two times weren't posted for unknown reason (page expired!). Yor turn to help: Do you know where to find the original soundtrack? SOAWorld's soundtrack is not complete and the mp3s there seem to miss many sounds.

Thankyou for your help and feedback Dark Mits. I haven't been keeping an eye on this lately as I've been working on another PC game hack. Good to see that you have gained enjoyment out of the patch and that it is completeable.

When I play a game I stick to the following rules while playing through the first time:

1) never cheat unless your stuck.
2) only cheat to get past what your stuck with and then turn off cheats again (or stop reading the walkthrough).

The enjoyment certainly comes from playing the game, not completing it. I ruined a few good games for myself by hacking them and running through in a matter of hours. It leaves me feeling empty, unsatisfied and definately not proud of 'beating' the game. I then find that I never have the desire to play the game through again. How to blow $60 in a few hours? Just cheat. Hmmmm?? If you really want to enjoy an RPG, then the best way is to play it is in the manner the developer's originally intended.

 

[Delson]

Hmm I have encounter a error after the loadinig screen of dreamcast logo. It says something about signature error. If anyone know this problem, may you please help me?

 

[Kiljaden]

Well i've waited for about 2 days with the patcher running and its gotten halfway done as of a few minutes ago, but what could make it go so slow? I have left the computer alone while it was running so im at a loss lol.

My computer is a 2.0 GHZ pentium with 256 megs of ram and a 64 meg video card. I've followed the instructions on the windows help page posted earlier and still nothing changed so any help would be appreciated.

Thanks

 

[rfunches]

What is your computer's specs? Can you run anything else with Chankast?

For whatever reason, my laptop (P-4m 1.6 GHz, 512 MB RAM, ATI Mobility Radeon 7500) couldn't handle it, but my desktop (P4EE 2.8 GHz, 512 MB RAM, ATI AIW Radeon 9600) can.

It took me this long to get through to this site...my router croaked on a few sites including this one, and then it was down for a while, but I actually got this problem resolved about two days after posting.

 

[Kiljaden]

Just to keep this bumped cause its a really good topic.....Bump.

 

[FoxStarwind]

Hello,

I was wondering, how long should this patch take? I once tried patching both cds, and the blue progress bar went 1/4 of the way one time, then it seemed to stop. After waiting a long time, I ended the task, deleted the files in the temporary folder that were created, and retried the patching. Again, it stopped, but this time the progress bar had gotten halfway. I waited at least 15 minutes, but from the instructions it seemes like the patching should only take five minutes? Any help is appreciated. Thanks!

When it stopped, I did a CTRL+ALT+DEL on windows xp, checked the processes, and tried to see how much CPU the patching program and other programs started by the patching program were taking up. When I could tell progress was moving along, I could hear my computer "thinking" (don't know what the term is when the computer makes sounds and the orange light is blinking) and the CPU processes were being used by at least 20%. However, when it stopped, the orange light didn't blink anymore, the computer didn't make any sounds, and the Windows Task Manager showed that those processes were using 00 CPU.

Oh, I also should add that I still have not patched either of the cds yet, so both still do not work on chankast for me.

 

[Merrick]

I have a problem. I repacked the game manually and hacked again to 11700 (using the delta2bin patches for 1ST_READ.BIN).

Disc 1 worked fine.

Disc 2 however I have a problem. The patch made the 1ST_READ.BIN 2 megs or so bigger (made an identical 1ST_READ.BIN to Disc 1) and this 2 megs is more than I can fit on an 80 minute CD-R. I cannot overburn if I am burning one session at a time (CDRWin method).

Any ideas (other than to use bin2boot, which I don't like)?

 

[Vyse]

How ??

Hi, I from Russia. I don't speak english very well, but can translate something.
How you can path it???????
SoaPatcher doesn't see my imafes on deamon tools!!!
I have Windows Xp sp1
f:\soatp - is it normal?
I tried patch this manualy, but i can't do 1st_read.bin !!!!
Which program use to patch it ????

Help me pleaseee!!!!



Skies of Arcadia - Power))

 

[Vyse]

I have a problem. I repacked the game manually and hacked again to 11700 (using the delta2bin patches for 1ST_READ.BIN).

Disc 1 worked fine.

How you do that??
tell me

 

[Federelli]

Don't know why (might be conflicting with Alcohol 120%), but after following the instructions i'm stuck on Step 3 of the Manual.txt guide.

The patcher won't recognise my .cdi images mounted with DT 3.29.

The ehelon .cdi images are exactly:
CD1 (E-skies1.cdi): 782.154.138 bytes
CD2 (e-soa2rp.cdi): 813.047.730 bytes

 

[Federelli]

Besides, i get lots of BAD_POOL_HEADER from this damned Daemon Tools

 

[Vyse]

Soatp no recognize my images too. ((

 

[Federelli]

My PC if it helps: MSI 865P NEO-L | P4 2.8GHz 800MHz bus + HT @ 3.2GHz | 1GB Dual-Channel DDR-400 | HD Seagate 60+160GB 7200RPM | ATI Radeon 9600 Pro 128MB 8xAGP | ViewSonic E70 17" | SoundBlaster Audigy 2 | Jazz Speakers JS300 2.1 | Pioneer A05S DVD-R 16x | LG GSA-4120B DVD-RW/+RW/RAM 12x | Windows XP CORP+SP2 | DirectX 9.0c | Fibertel 1Mb down/128Kb up

 

[aika-san]

Probably due to your BAD POOL errors. I've never seen this error before. Try doing the patching on another PC. Patching also works with the latest version of Alcohol 120%. The patcher does work, but not on all PC's (i'm not sure why). Sorry I can't help further but I'm working 80 hour weeks at the moment. Will possibly have more time for doing this in february.

Hope this helps.

 

[Federelli]

It doesn't work with alcohol either, that's the first thing i tried.

I get the pool errors whenever i load an image, and instantly try to acces it. It seems like there's a buffer overflow somewhere in this stupid daemon tools.