Problems with burning English patched games

[enzymex1983]

Hi guys,

I recently acquired a nec pc fx, it was actually one of the last consoles that was missing in my collection.

I burned a lot of English translation games and most of them run fine. Some of them however, are seen as music cds by my console. I tried burning them on different brand cdrs but no difference unfortunately.

One or two of the games that do run, suffer from video skipping and loss of audio at certain points in the fmv scenes.

My question now is: do you guys think the problem could be in the burn speed (my burner can only do > 10x) or could the laser be the issue and I should adjust the potentiometer as shown here: youtu.be/SZymVnylftU

Hope to hear from you!

Regards from the Netherlands

[elmer]

Mar 5, 2023 11:04:10 GMT enzymex1983 said:

My question now is: do you guys think the problem could be in the burn speed (my burner can only do > 10x) or could the laser be the issue and I should adjust the potentiometer as shown here: youtu.be/SZymVnylftU

Well, "yes", and "yes" IMHO.

The PC-FX was designed before CD-Rs were even a thing, which is why there's no copy-protection, and it's going to struggle to read CD-R discs at the best of times.

Using 700MB (80 minute) CD-R discs instead of 640MB (74 minute) CD-R discs will always be problematic, because the 800MB discs are right at the limits of the CD standard, and IIRC no 800MB CDs were available when the PC-FX was designed.

On top of which, burning discs at 10x speed (or higher) can have its own effect upon the quality of the burn, and once again, the PC-FX's drive was designed for pressed-CDs, and not CD-Rs.

So ... adjusting the potentiometer can't hurt, and may well help, but you're always pushing things a bit when using CD-Rs on the 1st and 2nd generation CD consoles.

[enzymex1983]

Hi elmer,

thx, your explanation makes perfect sense. I think i'm gonna try some 640MB cdr's first, and maybe try to find a older cd burner to test writing at 1x speed before adjusting the potentiometer.

Do you perhaps know of a CD-R brand that has a high success rate on the PC FX. Until now, i've used Verbatim, Sigma and TDK with no difference in result. The games that play, play on all brands and the games that don't play, dont play on all three brands

[72pauldaniel]

In my experience on several platforms (NeoGeo CD, 3DO and PC-FX), the best CD-R media is Verbatim or Fuji Archival grade. If those are not available, Maxell CD-R Music has provided favorable results as well.

These are results observed using an external USB Verbatim Blu-ray burner that is capable of going down to 4x speed. Low-speed burning to quality media is key as I have burned discs that are well over 10+ years old that still work well.

[elmer]

BITD Taiyo Yuden 74minute CD-Rs were very highly-regarded, and I stocked-up with a bunch when they were going out of production in 2015.

Old stock still sometimes comes up for sale, like this ... www.ebay.com/itm/255939818699

[enzymex1983]

Hi guys, thx for the feedback.

Sooooo, a little summary of my journey thusfar:
- I tried adjusting the potentiometer but with differentiating results. I did max. 3 counter clockwise rotations of 45 degrees and most of the games didn't run any better and some even worse. However, some of the stuttery games DID run a little better. However, since I didnt manage to find one setting to rule them all, in the end I moved the meter back to it's original position.
- Seeing that the potentiometer tweak didn't do the trick, I looked for old cd-r burners on ebay and ordered a NEC cd writer that could burn at 4x speed (for 5 euros . However, stupid as I am, I didn't realize that it was a IDE burner.
- So next step was buying an old HP Pavilion desktop (also from ebay for 10 euros) and installed the nec writer in there. This was relatively easy for once
- Next problem was that Windows XP is so ancient, it is a pain in the ass to even get a functional internet browser working. After hours of trying to find a browser that ran on Windows XP AND had the necessary TLS versions installed, I ended up with Firefox 48.0 (the last version with support for xp).
- After trial and error I managed to install imgburn 2.5.7.0 and started burning the nec pc fx champion collection from the archive.org. I used TDK cd-r's as also advised in the zeroidgar patch file.
- To my complete amazement every single (translated) game I burned thusfar ran smoothly and without stuttering!

So my advise for everybody in the same situation: get yourself some TDK's and a 4x burner and try this first before adjusting the potentiometer, for me it worked as a charm!

[enzymex1983]

Mar 6, 2023 18:59:37 GMT 72pauldaniel said:

In my experience on several platforms (NeoGeo CD, 3DO and PC-FX), the best CD-R media is Verbatim or Fuji Archival grade. If those are not available, Maxell CD-R Music has provided favorable results as well.

These are results observed using an external USB Verbatim Blu-ray burner that is capable of going down to 4x speed. Low-speed burning to quality media is key as I have burned discs that are well over 10+ years old that still work well.

I use verbatims all the time, also for my Philips CD-i and Panasonic 3DO games. I can confirm that they work fine. I also initially used them for NEC PC FX games and most of them ran fine, but games with heavy FMV scenes did stutter. But in hindsight that might be caused by burning them with a modern cdr burner at 10x speed. Gonna try again with 4x speed and will let you know the result!

[enzymex1983]

elmer , 72pauldaniel :

One update: of all games I burned 3 will just not work:
- Choujin Heiki Zeroigar (English Translated, Rev 1.0.1)
- Ruruli Ra Rura (Text English Translated, Rev 1-Infinity)
- Farland Story FX (Text English Translated, Rev 2)

The non patched versions of these games work fine, but the translations do not, even when burning on 4x speeds.

When inspecting the .que file it seems that the data track is always a 2048 instead of 2352 (like all other roms).

Example:

TRACK 02 MODE1/2048
PREGAP 00:03:00
INDEX 01 00:40:05

It seems my PC-FX can simply not read this format and either tells me it's an audio cd (since all other tracks are audio I think) or directly start at the eject symbol in the rigth bottom of the startup menu.

If I play the bin/cue over retroarch it works.

I read that this number stands for "sectors per byte rip" and I think that the PC FX hardwarde does not support the 2048 format. Unfortunately i'm too stupid to understand the details of this. Can one of you guys perhaps confirm this?

I'm fgeeling a little bittersweet since I managed to get all games running without stuttering now, but the one I wanted to play the most still don't run

[72pauldaniel]

You may find this video of value:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZymVnylftU&ab_channel=Playongo


For reference, here is my CUE file from the patched version of Zeriogar, which works just fine on both my PC-FX consoles:


FILE "God-Fighter Zeroigar (English 1.01)_01.wav" WAVE

TRACK 01 AUDIO

INDEX 01 00:00:00

FILE "God-Fighter Zeroigar (English 1.01)_02.iso" BINARY

TRACK 02 MODE1/2048

PREGAP 00:03:00

INDEX 01 00:00:00

FILE "God-Fighter Zeroigar (English 1.01)_03.wav" WAVE

TRACK 03 AUDIO

PREGAP 00:02:00

INDEX 01 00:00:00

FILE "God-Fighter Zeroigar (English 1.01)_04.wav" WAVE

TRACK 04 AUDIO

INDEX 01 00:00:00

FILE "God-Fighter Zeroigar (English 1.01)_05.wav" WAVE

TRACK 05 AUDIO

INDEX 01 00:00:00

TRACK 06 AUDIO

INDEX 01 09:59:00

[enzymex1983]

Hi 72pauldaniel ,

thx for the response. Yes, this video is what got me even started trying to try and get the games to run better. I also posted in the comments to this video.

Ok, based on your response the track mode should have nothingto do with it then, I do however see that your format is iso/was based instead of bin/cue, maybe that has something to with it....

I think I will need to give up on the topic I think, Everything runs except for these 2048 track games... not sure how to proceed further...

[enzymex1983]

elmer , 72pauldaniel ,

I managed to get the translation patch for Zeroigar running on my NEC PC FX console 

72pauldaniel your reference .cue file with all the iso/wav references set me on the right track, thx!

Leaving the steps here for reference (learned a lot in the process):
- I found several original JP dumps of the Zeroigar game on a certain "archive"
- These dumps are all in bin/cue fomat and run fine, but when you try to patch them using the translation patch (https://www.romhacking.net/translations/2451/) you run into a checksum checksum error.
- So after doing some forensic search for another dump I accidentally found this google drive url: drive.google.com/drive/folders/1JhOiLH-dxHEpZJECtKRl00zTgIoLzHxY
- I found out that if I mounted the JP version from this google drive dir over deamon tools,
- I could then succesfully use Turborip to "rip'" the contents from this virtual daemontools drive to my hard-drive (I tried this also with the other dumps but tuborip kept giving an error, only with the google drive dump did it run without errors)
- After copying all ripped files into the official patch dir, the patch ran fine and resulted in a collection of iso/wav/cue files.
- I first burned the iso at 10x (using imgburn) but with no luck. The disc was recognized but hanged on a black screen after loading the game.
- However, the patch also generated a .cue file. After burning this at 10x the patch run perfectly fine and without stuttering on original hardware (my nec pc fx console)

If somebody is having the same problem, follow these steps and the game should run.

Update: same process also worked for Farland Story Fx and the only other game I couldn't get to run, Ruruli Ra Rura (Japan)

[enzymex1983]

.

[72pauldaniel]

Happy to help. Glad to hear it is all working for you now.