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

[aika-san]

i also appreciate your efforts aika-san i can tell you've put a lot of work into making this game playable, and its been very successful. welll done! i shall be beta testing it to see how much is playable (hoping other game saves will get round the probmatic areas)

Thankyou dreamer. Just to let you know, I wasn't referring to anyone listed in the credits. When I first uploaded v2.0, within 1 hour over 30 people had downloaded it. Four hours after this around 50 people had downloaded it and not one of those people had replied with any results even when I requested. It takes 5 minutes to run the program, and 1 minute to post either 'yep, works, thanks' or 'no, doesn't, here's why'. You gave me information regarding the fact that the patch was not working for you, and that's what I needed. It's just a pity the 50 odd other people couldn't spare the time to use same approach. I could have fixed the bugs quicker then.

I wonder whether tweaking chankast settings can get past the problem areas. I haven't been able to play the game much (no time) but I will need to sooner or later. There might be some other type of hack that may get around the problem areas. I'll have more of an idea on possible workarounds when I get to those points in the game and see what happens first hand. Either that or like you say, game saves just after the crashes. I'm not sure.

I understand what you're saying, but how does one change the name of the save file it's not a simple case of 're-naming it as the file name is neither S.ARCADIA001 or ARCADIA_E001. i have enclosed a picture to show what i mean. maybe you can help me work out how to rename the files..)

If you upload your save (is that allowed on the forum??) then I can most likely change the name using a hex editor and upload the modified version for you. Don't know whether that will fix the problem though. If it does, I could write another program that could change SOA saves between NTSC/PAL. It's worth a try anyway.

 

[dreamer]

Thankyou dreamer. Just to let you know, I wasn't referring to anyone listed in the credits. When I first uploaded v2.0, within 1 hour over 30 people had downloaded it. Four hours after this around 50 people had downloaded it and not one of those people had replied with any results even when I requested. It takes 5 minutes to run the program, and 1 minute to post either 'yep, works, thanks' or 'no, doesn't, here's why'. You gave me information regarding the fact that the patch was not working for you, and that's what I needed. It's just a pity the 50 odd other people couldn't spare the time to use same approach. I could have fixed the bugs quicker then.

I wonder whether tweaking chankast settings can get past the problem areas. I haven't been able to play the game much (no time) but I will need to sooner or later. There might be some other type of hack that may get around the problem areas. I'll have more of an idea on possible workarounds when I get to those points in the game and see what happens first hand. Either that or like you say, game saves just after the crashes. I'm not sure.

With the renaming of your save, if you upload your save I can probably change the name using a hex editor and upload the modified version for you. Don't know whether that will fix the problem though. Worth a try.

yeah, if you don't have the time to play it i can always send a save just before it crashes to test it.
i may as well write details here about the compatibility of the game seeing as i know the original too well.

this probably should go in the compatibility thread but oh well:

minor graphics glitches making some layers transparent or hard to see, including menu's, and some special moves.

random crashes (quite rare) about 3 or 4 crashes in battles in 5 hours play.

servere sound issues, mainly in the music, sometimes cutting out completely or missing most sounds. but speech comes out perfect.

most annoying graphical issues so far - ship battle grid almost impossible to see during the battle against the red gigas (guesswork from me got me through it).

permanent crash while about to take part in the deloco ship battle, when he sets the forest alight with his flame cannon. (see picture)

otherwise most graphics look nice, and it runs at a decent speed.

 

[dreamer]

Thankyou dreamer. Just to let you know, I wasn't referring to anyone listed in the credits. When I first uploaded v2.0, within 1 hour over 30 people had downloaded it. Four hours after this around 50 people had downloaded it and not one of those people had replied with any results even when I requested. It takes 5 minutes to run the program, and 1 minute to post either 'yep, works, thanks' or 'no, doesn't, here's why'. You gave me information regarding the fact that the patch was not working for you, and that's what I needed. It's just a pity the 50 odd other people couldn't spare the time to use same approach. I could have fixed the bugs quicker then.

I wonder whether tweaking chankast settings can get past the problem areas. I haven't been able to play the game much (no time) but I will need to sooner or later. There might be some other type of hack that may get around the problem areas. I'll have more of an idea on possible workarounds when I get to those points in the game and see what happens first hand. Either that or like you say, game saves just after the crashes. I'm not sure.



If you upload your save (is that allowed on the forum??) then I can most likely change the name using a hex editor and upload the modified version for you. Don't know whether that will fix the problem though. If it does, I could write another program that could change SOA saves between NTSC/PAL. It's worth a try anyway.

another edit, lol. okay i'll give it a go. hmm, i had to change the file extention so it was valid....it's not really an .exe, just change to .dci
and its somewhere on disk 2, it's the USA version. okay, thanks for the help with this!

 

[Siro_21]

Nice to see u dreamer helping Aika San out with the whole game and its gr8 to see other people getting involved in making this game run even better than what it is doing at the present moment.I am highly gratified for what Aika San has done and yeah i will be busy over the weekend doing some work from my job so probably i wont be able to test the game as itself but surely after monday i'll get into the thick of things for sure.Do remember me for the latter parts not for now 3 days loads of work to do and dreamer continue ur work in helping this game run even better!Cheers Aika San & Dreamer.
And forgot to tell that there are surely glitches in the game surely during the battles and i strangely encountered collision detection problems within the game otherwise it was giving decent framerates.Well increasing the resolutions surprisingly doesnt really inhibit the framerates and they remain smooth for quite some time but suddenly drops which is obviously understandable as chankast is still in alpha stage and still a lot of work needs to be done to make this game more stable for playing for long hrs.The sound really does chip of a lot as dreamer has already mentioned that and also during the battles quite a lot of things arent visible on the ship and stuff so next time i report the bugs they will be more precise...See u all later Aika San & Dreamer...

Siro

 

[dreamer]

Nice to see u dreamer helping Aika San out with the whole game and its gr8 to see other people getting involved in making this game run even better than what it is doing at the present moment.I am highly gratified for what Aika San has done and yeah i will be busy over the weekend doing some work from my job so probably i wont be able to test the game as itself but surely after monday i'll get into the thick of things for sure.Do remember me for the latter parts not for now 3 days loads of work to do and dreamer continue ur work in helping this game run even better!Cheers Aika San & Dreamer....

Siro

whoa, thanks Siro_21, but really i dont deserve much credit, aika san has put in loads more work into making the patch.
i like to help with this game as it's the only reason i wanted a dreamcast emulator (SOA = fav game) so its no problem for me to play through the whole game to check for flaws, i will keep anyone updated once i get past the crash area. good luck in testing the game yourself when you have the time, it runs well untill the point which i mentioned.

EDIT: as mentioned in the above post, increasing resolution doesnt have any slowdown even on my computer (so boost the res to max!), a few others notes to add is that running around (in normal game) will glitch up if one direction is pressed, so use diagonals (in the case of the keyboard, two keys). if the speech becomes garbled (it did on the USA version too, assume its a chankast glitch) just save at the nearest point and restart the emu. it's mostly working though.

 

[Siro_21]

Well surely i have the same values as u regarding DC emulation and Skies of Arcadia as i also grew up hearing a lot abt this game in days when Ps1 was ruling surely does make a reading of how gr8 this game is.I wish i had a dreamcast to fully play this game without any bugs anyways our luck is being rided by the Chankast Emu which has obviously done a wonderful job in making a dream come true atleast which seemed impossible until a few months back.I have been testing some other games lately specifcally mk gold and it does have strange issues too does tend to slow down a lot while uppercutting the opponent and random crashes as its CCD image or something so the music like in guilty gear cant be heard but surely it does run with decent framerates and is fully playable.Although not that playable though sucked in my opinion..... and time stalkers has finally started running with okay framerates i'll be reporting more games in the near future........

Siro

 

[aika-san]

another edit, lol. okay i'll give it a go. hmm, i had to change the file extention so it was valid....it's not really an .exe, just change to .dci
and its somewhere on disk 2, it's the USA version. okay, thanks for the help with this!

Apologies. Was sleeping.

I imported your NTSC save onto my VMS card but Skies would not even look at it. So I used the hex editor and changed the naming format to PAL and put this modified version back onto the VMS card. It's probably wise to remove the NTSC save from your VMS card, so that the new PAL one is the only save on your VMS 'cause the NTSC one may stop you from reading the PAL one. I can now select continue on the main menu of cd1 and it says it's the DangralAirDuct save, but if I attempt to load it then asks for cd2 which I don't have yet, so it looks like this mod works!!! Yay!! Now you can get past the crash.

It's a pity we don't have a save that is directly after the crash so you can play the rest of CD1, but at least this is a temporary workaround. Is it possible that someone can upload a save just before the crash, so I can see what's going on without having to play to the point. I might be able to work out a way where you can get past the crash and keep your original save. At the moment I haven't got the time to play it. I wish I did though. I'd love to play it. It looks so good. Reminds me of Grandia 2, very anime and cinematic.

Anyway, all I did was change the name from S.ARCADIA001 to ARCADIA_E001. I could write a quick program that does this for you. This would be much easier to do than SOAPatcher. I could then integrate this feature into SOAPatcher v3.

I packed the modified dci into a rar archive, so make sure you unpack first.

Let me know if it works for you. You'll probably have to boot from CD2 though.

My real DC has been dead for years. Still have it and my games though. I'm a sucker for old games/hardware. Still have atari 2600, sinclair zx spectrum, c64, amiga 1200. All are working except the DC and the spectrum. Can't see the point in fixing/using any of them when the emulators are doing a great job. It's all so much clearer on a nice PC monitor/gamepad.

It's great to see Siro, dreamer and Fina getting in on the act of solving this next problem. Your testing is invaluable. I barely have the time to do the SOAPatcher/mods, let alone test for other crashes in the game. Together we will make it so the game is playable to the end.

I used to have lots of time on the computer, but unfortunately now I don't. It pee's me off because I've got a top-end P4 that gets used maybe 1-2 hours a day. Such a waste of nice hardware. I will keep doing this though, 'cause maybe one day things will quieten down a bit and I will have more time. Have a guess which game I'll be playing then?

EDIT - I am getting all the saves from GameFAQ, and hacking them to PAL. I will upload a pack of compatible saves shortly.

 

[aika-san]

5 saves including the 1 you uploaded all hacked to pal. working fine with soa cd1 now. packed using winrar so make sure you unpack first. just replace your vmu.bin with this one. yay!!! no more crashes

have fun. :happy:

 

[dreamer]

Apologies. Was sleeping.

I imported your NTSC save onto my VMS card but Skies would not even look at it. So I used the hex editor and changed the naming format to PAL and put this modified version back onto the VMS card. It's probably wise to remove the NTSC save from your VMS card, so that the new PAL one is the only save on your VMS 'cause the NTSC one may stop you from reading the PAL one. I can now select continue on the main menu of cd1 and it says it's the DangralAirDuct save, but if I attempt to load it then asks for cd2 which I don't have yet, so it looks like this mod works!!! Yay!! Now you can get past the crash.

It's a pity we don't have a save that is directly after the crash so you can play the rest of CD1, but at least this is a temporary workaround. Is it possible that someone can upload a save just before the crash, so I can see what's going on without having to play to the point. I might be able to work out a way where you can get past the crash and keep your original save. At the moment I haven't got the time to play it. I wish I did though. I'd love to play it. It looks so good. Reminds me of Grandia 2, very anime and cinematic.

Anyway, all I did was change the name from S.ARCADIA001 to ARCADIA_E001. I could write a quick program that does this for you. This would be much easier to do than SOAPatcher. I could then integrate this feature into SOAPatcher v3.

I packed the modified dci into a rar archive, so make sure you unpack first.

Let me know if it works for you. You'll probably have to boot from CD2 though.

My real DC has been dead for years. Still have it and my games though. I'm a sucker for old games/hardware. Still have atari 2600, sinclair zx spectrum, c64, amiga 1200. All are working except the DC and the spectrum. Can't see the point in fixing/using any of them when the emulators are doing a great job. It's all so much clearer on a nice PC monitor/gamepad.

It's great to see Siro, dreamer and Fina getting in on the act of solving this next problem. Your testing is invaluable. I barely have the time to do the SOAPatcher/mods, let alone test for other crashes in the game. Together we will make it so the game is playable to the end.

I used to have lots of time on the computer, but unfortunately now I don't. It pee's me off because I've got a top-end P4 that gets used maybe 1-2 hours a day. Such a waste of nice hardware. I will keep doing this though, 'cause maybe one day things will quieten down a bit and I will have more time. Have a guess which game I'll be playing then?

EDIT - I am getting all the saves from GameFAQ, and hacking them to PAL. I will upload a pack of compatible saves shortly.

'Is it possible that someone can upload a save just before the crash, so I can see what's going on without having to play to the point. ' - of course (see attachment) it's a second vmu that i had on there.

'I'd love to play it. It looks so good. Reminds me of Grandia 2, very anime and cinematic.' - i have the original Grandia 2 it's great, i love anime too, maybe thats why skies is my favorite game.

game saves work ^^, shame i can't continue with my file but i know you will be working on the crash, yep. i have disk 2 if u need it, or is it just a matter of time before you get it anyway? i found myself playing the final boss, but closed the emu cos i wana complete my own file, not finish off someone elses

good luck with getting more of the game to work when you're free. on the saves i sent you (has two, one backup, choose most recent) just move forwards in the ship to the small hut between two islands, and a cut scene should start, soon will crash.

 

[Siro_21]

Nice to see you people working it out as i am still working on my project i have to submit for work later on monday so i'll be getting into action sooner or later maybe i give a try today after i sleep for sometime.Continue the good work guys its required to make the game run better and make it more stable.Good Luck

Siro

 

[aika-san]

Thankyou for the saves. I was able to replicate your problem sucessfully on my pc and have found a workaround for the crash where the ship flies forever. I found it will lock all the time on this scene if you are pushing extra keys on the keyboard/gamepad just before and during this scene. It hasn't locked on me yet on the scene if I only do the single keypresses required to advance the dialogue to the problem scene and then leave the keyboard/gamepad alone while this scene plays.

BTW. There's an old computer term referring to this. PLOKTA. It stands for "Press Lots Of Keys To Activate". If you don't PLOKTA, it works fine. :happy:

Let me know if this works for you.

EDIT - Have tried the above around 10 times now. If you PLOKTA it don't work, ever. If you dont PLOKTA, it passes the scene properly every time.

Now you can play the rest of CD1 properly (hopefully) and I don't need to write a .dci patcher program.

Here's 2 pics. One on the crash point and another one of the scene directly after the crash point. Ignore my crappy gfx settings. The reason you crash is PLOKTA.

arty:

 

[Fina]

I had a really hard time getting through the final bosses without the emulator hanging. Took me like four attempts before I finally found a work-around. If you set the Chankast CPU setting down to 50, the game will go unusually fast. Almost the entire game will be in fast-forward, which makes it easier to get past parts without the emu hanging.

BTW, if anyone wants to see an archive of SoA pics running on Chankast, I've got them going here : http://dynamic3.gamespy.com/~soaworld/gallery/index.php
And if anyone else needs any other Skies-related info, be sure to check out Skies of Arcadia World.

 

[aika-san]

I had a really hard time getting through the final bosses without the emulator hanging. Took me like four attempts before I finally found a work-around. If you set the Chankast CPU setting down to 50, the game will go unusually fast. Almost the entire game will be in fast-forward, which makes it easier to get past parts without the emu hanging.

BTW, if anyone wants to see an archive of SoA pics running on Chankast, I've got them going here : http://dynamic3.gamespy.com/~soaworld/gallery/index.php
And if anyone else needs any other Skies-related info, be sure to check out Skies of Arcadia World.

Thankyou Fina,

I'm compiling all of these bugs/workarounds and they will be included in the SOAPatcher v3 documentation.

 

[dreamer]

great work Fina and Aika San:
'EDIT - Have tried the above around 10 times now. If you PLOKTA it don't work, ever. If you dont PLOKTA, it passes the scene properly every time.'

LOL, thats me i am a true PLOKTA :blush: constant button bashing when somethings slow and annoying me, i get irritated easily with slow scenes and ...well...press many keys.

anyway, thats very cool u worked it out. and Fina, are you the Sam person who made skies of arcadia world? i used to visit that site ages ago ^_^

hmm, anyway, i shall be continuing my save thanks to Aika san's help. its good to see lots more people are helping with this thread.

i posted i pic here - only cos it's really cool ^_^ (and my desktop background!)

 

[dreamer]

I had a really hard time getting through the final bosses without the emulator hanging. Took me like four attempts before I finally found a work-around. If you set the Chankast CPU setting down to 50, the game will go unusually fast. Almost the entire game will be in fast-forward, which makes it easier to get past parts without the emu hanging.

BTW, if anyone wants to see an archive of SoA pics running on Chankast, I've got them going here : http://dynamic3.gamespy.com/~soaworld/gallery/index.php
And if anyone else needs any other Skies-related info, be sure to check out Skies of Arcadia World.

which part of the final boss was the emulator hanging on Fina? i got mostly through the actual Zelos battle with no problems (the second part of the three way boss) was it the last one that causes emulator problems?

 

[aika-san]

great work Fina and Aika San:
'EDIT - Have tried the above around 10 times now. If you PLOKTA it don't work, ever. If you dont PLOKTA, it passes the scene properly every time.'

LOL, thats me i am a true PLOKTA :blush: constant button bashing when somethings slow and annoying me, i get irritated easily with slow scenes and ...well...press many keys.

anyway, thats very cool u worked it out. and Fina, are you the Sam person who made skies of arcadia world? i used to visit that site ages ago ^_^

hmm, anyway, i shall be continuing my save thanks to Aika san's help. its good to see lots more people are helping with this thread.

i posted i pic here - only cos it's really cool ^_^ (and my desktop background!)

Don't panic. I think everyone PLOKTA's on occasion. It's lucky I picked up on it. Worked out that it was to do with PLOKTA pretty soon after replicating your bug. This method may also get past other problem areas, or reduce the possibility of other hangs.

Anyway, have just uploaded a new v2.01 containing the latest fixes and workarounds in the documentation plus included the game saves and info on how to change saves between NTSC and PAL. Didn't change the version number, because the changes were only the made to the documentation and the game save additions.

Now all we need to do is check that the rest of cd1 and all of cd2 is completable under chankast. I can't really see why they shouldn't be, but it will pay to check just in case there are more problem areas. As bug reports come in, I will update the SOAPatcher package. At the moment, I'm only really interested in major bugs. The ones which stop you completing the game.

Waiting for the next challenge....

aika-san

 

[dreamer]

Good work Aika San, i will be playing the game later, i will try and speed through the rest of disk one and disk 2 (unless of course i run into problems).

i once completed both disks of the original version in little over 20 hours (which in generally quick) so it should be done soon depending on how much i play. i shall inform you of any other major glitches or problems in the near future.

Dreamer

 

[aika-san]

thx heaps dreamer. only play through if u have the time though. there is no rush. i realise it's a huge game so don't burn yourself out.

once you have confirmed complete playability i will release v2.1 which will include all the bugs/fixes you have found. v2.1 will be the final until i have cd2. then I will begin work on soapatcher v3.0

once v3 is released then I might have a look at another game that i think should be running. :icecream:

 

[Elorien]

Bugs

Dunno how to do much about the black screen bugs. They've hit me a few times and its really frustrating >_< Right at the end of long sections without save points Yay for losing an hour of play!

The text thing is rediculously easy to fix though, in my experience.

After a battle, sometimes you'll get a garbled screen for like half a second, and then after that a lot of text is garbled. Either just a letter here or there off, or sometimes everything looks like bad outputs from a kana translator Q_Q;

Anyways, for that kind of garbled text, just go full-screen (or out of full-screen) and then back again. That always fixes it for me. No need to save/reset or anything.

 

[Fina]

Sam I am, Dreamer.

The problem I had withe the last boss (3/3) was where the emulator would either black-screen when loading something new (Boss S-Move) or hang on a victory pose.

I've noticed though, when the game starts acting up and the music stops playing correctly, it's going to crash.

Whenever I fight a battle, and the music and sound stop playing, I will ALWAYS get the bug where the victory pose will play, but it will not continue to the victory stat screen.