Skies of Arcadia problem

[AlphaWhelp]

I am having some serious problems trying to run Skies of Arcadia. since chankast doesn't support original cds and the original cds are all I have. trying to make an ISO out of this cd winds up with some kind of 4 meg crap file. Any ideas, here? Some special program I should use?

edit: I've tried copying the CD, making ISOs of various different formats, all sorts of crap, but nothing actually works except... my dreamcast. I can't get it to play.

edit2: ugh, after some more internet-digging, I see that the DC does not use the standard laser width for CDs, so they're impossible to rip normally. Anyone know how I can hook up my DC to my PC and rip these games?

 

[Chilly0123]

its MUCH easyer to just download the iso. belive me, i spent hours looking through different sites with guides with pages and pages of instuctions to teach you what to do and what equipment u need and its not worth all the trouble when u can just download almost any game anyway.

 

[Mouser X]

I'm going to have to agree with the cold guy (Chilly) on this one. In fact, as I'm typing this, I'm downloading 3 copies of SoA, all from different sites. And that doesn't include the copy I already have on my PC... Which of course raises the question of "Why would you want 4 copies of the same game?" Well, "recently" (being within the last 6 months to a year, or so), corrupt copies of SoA have started being distributed. As of yet, I haven't found any copies that weren't messed up somehow. Based on what I've seen, these copies will run on a regular Dreamcast just fine, which is why they keep getting distributed. However, when patched (so that they'll run on Chankast), CD2 has a corrupt file (the original image, before the patch, contained the corrupt file), and won't get past the "Sega" screen. So, I'm downloading 4 copies of CD2 to see if any of them do not contain the bad file. 2 of those so far have had the same corrupt file. Of those 2, I was able to successfully repair 1 of them using CDmage, as was suggested in the SoA thread (see here). The other image wouldn't load into CDmage, so I couldn't repair it. So, if you do go looking for the CD images, be warned that you'll most likely need to figure out a way of fixing the disc errors contained in the CD image.

FYI, I just posted this to let you know that, if you look, it's not to hard to find SoA. Also, if you do decide to rip your own image, then you should be warned that the game will be very likely to crash on the black screen (apparently it's called the inventory bug, because that's where it usually happens). This has been mostly fixed in the patch that I linked to. Good luck getting it running. It's a great game, and looks gorgeous on the PC screen (there are still graphical emulation glitches, but most of them can be worked around, if you're patient enough). Unfortunatly, it sounds terrible 50% of the time. 40% of the time it will crash because of bad sound files/poor sound emulation. The other 10%, it actually sounds decent. If you're deaf, then don't worry about the sound. Good luck getting this going, with whatever you choose. Either way, I do recommend you check out the SoA patch thread. Mouser X over and out.