Booting Sports Jam (jap) on PAL DC

[brmanuk]

Hi are there any homebrew bootdisks that will boot a ilgitimate gdrom of Sports Jam that I bought from Lik-sang? I've tried Utopia v1.1 and that just freezes. Does Utopia v2.1 work with this game or do any other bootdisks (dc hacker etc) work with gdrom imports? Thanks

[emptythought]

This is news for me also, but I've heard that DC Hakker works with booting imports. I assume you load up DC Hakker, switch the discs with your import, rescan the CD, then load the 1st_read.bin, or whatever the name of the main program file is.

[brmanuk]

really? well I checked it out at http://homebrew.dcemulation.org/ and it says 'Dc Hakker will not work with WinCE emulators and apps (GypPlay, Sintendo etc..) or commercial games'. Can someone confirm that it does or doesn?t boot imports? Thanks again.

[Sweater Fish]

I believe that means pirated commercial games since those indeed won't work, but Dream Hakker boots up legit commercial games just fine. Or well, sort of fine...it actually has all the same issues that the Utopia disc has, which means that there's a lot of games that won't boot up at all with it or that when they do boot up will have copy-protection mechanisms in place that limit how much you can do in the game. I suspect that maybe Dream Hakker actually uses the same mechanism for booting Katana games that the Utopia disc does and that's why it was originally shunned around these parts despite what a great application it is.

So, anyway, if Sports Jam doesn't work with Utopia, it won't work with Dream Hakker. It will however work with the PAR demo disk which can be downloaded from BOOB!'s user tools page:

http://www.boob.co.uk/usertools.html

It's the second from the last thing on that page, labeled "CDX demo." That's just the plain files, so you'll have to get an IP.BIN and either hex edit it point to WWWSHARK.TXT or rename WWWSHARK.TXT file to whatever your IP.BIN is already pointing to (probably 1ST_READ.BIN) and then selfboot it yourself.

Have fun. Sports Jam is by far the best multi-event sports game on the DC and actually one of the best ever. So much fun with three or four people.

By the way, fackue got the method for loading GD-ROMs with Dream Hakker right except that you have to press Y before double-clicking the BIN since GD-ROMs are unscrambled and Dream Hakker looks for scrambled by default.


...word is bondage...

[brmanuk]

I tried the CDX and that loaded fine, so I put Sports Jam in and it loaded and went to the memory card save screen and crashed. I've tried a few tiems now and I can't get passed that screen. Thanks for your help though.

[doragasu]

I think I heard that game doesn't run properly in non japanese DCs. I heard if you pull all your VMs from your controllers and boot the game, you can pass the memory card save screen, but controls are locked and you'll only be able to see the intro. Can you confirm this?

[Sweater Fish]

I play the Japanese version of Sports Jam all the time in my US Dreamcast. I boot it with the Action Replay demo (brmanuk, did you use the free CDX demo that Boob! has or a pirated full version of the Gameshark CDX that can be found floating around other dhadier corners of the Internet? The two versions are totally different).

Maybe there's problems getting it to work on PAL Dreamcasts, though, I don't know. Or maybe all these ones Lik-Sang are selling for dirt cheap are from a bad pressing or something.

The game came out in the US, too, and I think in Europe even as well even, so that's always an option. It's a killer game.


...word is bondage...

[az_bont]

I've created a DiscJuggler image of the CDX demo, available here.

[brmanuk]

I think I heard that game doesn't run properly in non japanese DCs. I heard if you pull all your VMs from your controllers and boot the game, you can pass the memory card save screen, but controls are locked and you'll only be able to see the intro. Can you confirm this?

Yes its true. All the controls are locked, it gets up to the title screen but you can't press start.