DCEmulation

I would like to add that I did this modification just to set my Pal system to Ntsc colour system along with the 60hz boost. All was well until yesterday. When I finished a marathon of house of the dead. Upon rebooting the swirl became black and a new swirl appeared in the top left corner and I am repeatedly asked for the time and date. Considering I never changed the actual region I am baffled to how I an default it or restore as it will not boot any Cd's or GD's. Anyone found a method to get rid of this black swirl of death?

If you can't run any apps, your kinda in big trouble ...

What did you use region changer for ??

Is your console a japanese one ?

-=FamilyGuy=-

Sorry for double post, but here's some good news

Puch666 is agree to release the bios so here it is :

http://d.turboupload.com/d/1800243/hack.zip.html

Thanks to him for it !

and here's info on the bios's region :



I also doubt the hkt-0120 bios wouldn't works with rflash, so you might dot a region changer backup of flash on vmu using chankast, then put int on a cd, use this cd to load in onto the vmu, then load it with region changer (then your DC would be unusable) then you could put the hkt-0120 bios instead of the real one. Risky but might worth trying on a spare mobo.


-=FamilyGuy=-

It is European Pal, I used it JUST for changing the Scan rate and colour system not the region. And this happened several days after the actual day I changed it.

As I said, if you change the 0x1A000 bit to 0xFF then the RFLASH will work with both RBIOS and HBIOS. (tested successfully in Chankast)

Well, that's cool :p
You still need region changer and the vmu cd to put this slightly modified flash to your dreamcast. But wich region will your dreamcast be then, using the RBIOS ?

Now you've got everything to do a dremcast with a cool intro

[edit] If all that you want is the bios intro, would it be possible to simply take the intro movie and put it in a RBIOS ?

-=FamilyGuy=-

[edit]

About what you said before (that you didn't saw any region free setting in the Hbios[wich is true that there ain't none).

SegaOnline sold some dreamcast unit in 2000 that were region free (the hello kitty dreamcast is too I think. It could be possible to keep the region free on theses bios but to add the mil-cd exploit. (I beleive what theses bios do is to simply ignore the JUE bytes).

But the problem is to dump this bios/flash ... since it can't boot mil-cd games.
But using a SystemDisc2, a gd-r with ip-tool serial burned on it and a dc>pc serial cable, it'd be possible to dump it...

Now the problem is to :

1)Find one of these dreamcast
2)Find a gd-burner
3)Find a blank gd-r
4)Find a system disc
5)find a codercable

I think Mark30001 could do it if he had a region free dreamcast.



Thank you

-=FamilyGuy=-

In case anyone else is interested...

http://dchelp.dcemulation.org/?Region_Changer

Haha !

Good work !

*waiting for SWAT to add this into region changer ....*


-=FamilyGuy=-

Is there any hard way of resetting the bios region or defaulting like a small current or something? As this is the Dreamcast that I overclocked successfully and really don't fancy doing it again so soon. I downloaded eeprom eraser and the latest flashing disk but nothing I put in will boot.

@miggi03 : you're kinda F***ed

@everyone else : Swat released region changer 1.7, wich lack (unworking) region free, but add a black swirl option.

http://dc-swat.net.ru/news/#nid0


Here's also a EU HKT-0120 bios in case you'd want it, we still need to find a value for the 294th bytes to set the bios to USA (01=EU ; Anything else seems to be Japan).

http://www.megaupload.com/fr/?d=2GOHNNYQ



Thank you !


-=FamilyGuy=-

Awesome.

If you get ahold of the Dreamcast mod chip, it will probably work.

That's interesting. But the thing is upon selecting start game or loading of a disc it will ask for the time and date again. The controller board is perfect so it's not a battery issue. So maybe I am as Familyguy put it F**cked. But knowing me I wont give up till it explodes or I injure myself so if I do find a soloution i'll post here.

You might find a way to amke a game to boot on your console, using a custom region byte thyat woulb (miraculously) fit the corrupted on you got in your flash (if it's really your problem) ...

Otherwise, you can change your mobo or if you're good at soldering/desoldering, I can give you a dead mobo(you pay shipping) and then you'd be able to take the flashrom from this one. Would be a pain *where you know* though ...


-=FamilyGuy=-

Yeah I got a spare motherboard and am good at de soldering I would rather change the bios chip than do the OC mod again to be honest. Thanks for the kind offer though and your help. Will report back as to whether this is successful as I notice I am not alone with this black swirl of death. Cheers.

DON'T DESOLDER THE BIOS !!!

Region changer don't change anything in the bios, it change things in the flash, wich I dunno wich chip it is, bnut definetely not the bios ! Don't screw your mobo desoldering the bios !


-=FamilyGuy=-

S**t , good thing I checked this. I got my DC in bits in front of me. Ahh well the transplant of the crystal begins. Thanks again Familyguy.

Ok I did some tests using the hacked hkt0120 bios and the regions:

Bad news here, setting the region value to 00 does indeed change the swirl colour to blue and the region itself HOWEVER the region is NOT PAL, it is an unknown/unset region, thus no cd-r (JUE) will run with the region setting as 00. (it is probably a corrupted value) EVERY other settings appear to be japan. How so ? because the value at 0x126 is very likely not to be the only value to modify, to sum up, this value probably only correspond to ONE of the dip switches of the devkits. As you know there are several of those and some probably need to be set or unset at the same time as some others in order to change a region properly. Thus we need to find the other dip switch values to change. Yet the bios would still not be region free, so the best way is to hack it to bypass the region check in IP.bin

Finally the biggest problem will be to find a way to flash it into a retail dreamcast.

Also I noticed that the bios to be flashed in HKT-0120 units features a specific header and that this very header features a hash check, which would explain why it didn't work to flash it on the actual units. Do anyone know what errors were encountered when the owner of the devkit tried to flash the hacked bios ?

The development unit refused to boot (there wasn't a bios intro at all).

The thing is that the HKT-0120 bios was dumped when the devbox had its region switch set to NTSC-J, so I'll try getting around dumping proper NTSC-U & PAL versions.

Thanks Mark, can you also send me a legit bios meant to be flashed on the hkt-0120 unit ? (in fact several versions would be better) as I don't want to install the katana sdk on my comp. That way I may manage to figure how to generate a complying hash for the header of the hacked bios.