Dreamcast game did work, now doesn't.

Vealmike

Hi, not sure if it's OK to post the game title.
I have a dreamcast game that was running perfectly and now won't play.
The game was downloaded as a .7z with 3 .bins and a .gdi.
I used chdman to convert it to .chd and (like the others) it worked fine.

Something was broken last time I went to play it.
It starts fine, there's an intro video that plays perfectly. But when the video ends, black screen, no game.

I've tried deleting the vhd files associated with the game.
I've not changed any of the menu settings.
I've redownloaded and recreated the .chd and I get the same result.

How can I go about debugging this please?

sleve_mcdichael

You can say the game title, you just can't say where to get it. Was it Hydro Thunder? I never did figure out what the heck happened, but that one caused me some grief as well.

https://retropie.org.uk/forum/topic/32590/hydro-thunder-dreamcast-flycast

They said it worked in Flycast. I got other games working in Flycast but Hydro Thunder just gave me black screen @10 FPS after the BIOS animation ended.

Nothing I tried worked; nobody was able to help, they could just say "it's working for me" (unfortunately I can't do any better than they, and I'm sorry for that.)

I gave up and installed Redream. It worked. Then one day, for no reason I can comprehend, it suddenly worked in Flycast, as well.

I ended up sticking with Redream for this title anyway, because it looks a lot crisper and runs a bit smoother, too. I still use lr-flycast for other titles (Crazy Taxi 1&2) as the graphics/gameplay differences weren't as apparent, there, but the screen-tearing seemed worse (on RPi4 @ 720p) in Redream than on Flycast, for those two.

(Edit: ah, no it wasn't that one, that had a lot more than three BINs in it. Still, if you can't get Flycast working, maybe give Redream a try. Even if it doesn't magically fix the other one like mine did, at least you might can still play the game.)

(Edit edit: well after looking at it again, it actually was three .bin files, but also a bunch of .raw files in between, and there exist other versions where they're all called .bin but there's still 37 of them.)

Vealmike

@sleve_mcdichael OK,it's Metropolis street racer.
I'll look into installing redream (nver heard of it!).
Many thanks for your time.

sirhenrythe5th

Maybe the supported version has been updated within the core updates?
I just checked: my MSR still runs, it is "Metropolis Street Racer (US v1.003).chd"

Vealmike

@sirhenrythe5th Yes, that's what I have. Just won't play under lr-flycast
@sleve_mcdichael Redream plays it with no problems! Thanks.