Policenauts Saturn English Translation

Zoeicles

Hihii, I've had some pretty decent success running Saturn games using Yabasanshiro on a RP400 (using the Retropie image) overclocked to 2.147GHz and GPU to 750MHz. Was previously using it on 2GHz and without the overclock and it also ran pretty decently.

I've unfortunately hit a snag while trying to run the English-Patched version of Policenauts (1.01). The game plays the opening FMVs perfectly but when it finally jumps to gameplay, I examine an object and the game crashes every time.

I've tried
-binary and building yabasanshiro from source
-assigning multiple BIOS files to yabasanshiro using the -b flag in the saturn config file
-lr-yabause which runs the game poorly, and hangs around the same spot instead of crashing
-different file formats, CHD (didn't boot) and its currently iso/wav/cue
-Running yabasanshiro through the terminal to see if I could further diagnose the issue, but it doesn't give me a lot of information besides "Game Aborted". EmulationStation and Runcommand logs also provide no good info.

If it doesn't work I'll probably just go play the Playstation version, but if there's a way someone could help me tweak some settings on Yabasanshiro i don't know about or even figure out how to make the thing print out some logs it would be great! This has been making me tear my hair out for the past week.

SuperFromND

@zoeicles Sounds like a problem with the patch to me, then. I'm not familiar with the patching process in regards to Saturn games, but this usually happens whenever you patch a ROM with the wrong checksum.

ROM patches usually include the correct checksum for the base ROM to patch somewhere in either their readme file or their entry on ROMhacking.net. This particular game seems to have its own site which has this information, but from looking through the readme file the relevant checksums are thus:

CD 1 ISO File:
CRC-32: b3b87f1b
  MD5: de3919b70afc9b7c78868e1e856e192d
SHA-1: fdfaf4efe6a451c220cb176bfdb2c09c418e97d2

CD 2 ISO File:
CRC-32: 2f9772a7
  MD5: 3f941d382fc288391d38ff8160cb2906
SHA-1: 4f58d526c34718cbc8cbd6952144f1154c0e1458

CD 3 ISO File:
CRC-32: abf12dc9
  MD5: 766c9dd21c804ccf3893bca42aa8b6c3
SHA-1: 77ec55c679c3ebb66d2080c00c685c6a53cf8f08

As for how to get these files? You're on your own for that.

Zoeicles

@superfromnd I got the game pre-patched initially, so a few minutes ago I decided to patch the original JP files using the tutorial from that website you linked. Each of the different checksums for the ISOs were the ones indicated and they patched with xDelta3 successfully. Loaded up the game and I still get crashes.

So I started thinking maybe the issue was to do with the files being split as .iso/.wav/.cue instead of a .CHD file or a .cue/.bin. I tried using Isobuster to convert it back to a bin/cue format and was able to launch the game but still got the same crash. I thought maybe I had done the process incorrectly so I found someone else's conversion to a .bin/.cue format and the game will still crash at the same point. I also found another person's version of the game in .CHD and yep, same crash.

the crash specifically happens at this point in the longplay above, where you examine the gun in this opening office segment. You can examine other bits like the cigarettes and the machine on the right, but clicking either the gun or the picture frame crashes it. I dunno what's going on with the saturn hardware wise, but it transitions into a still zoomed in image separate from the rest of the environment, and that's where the crash seems to trigger.

It's so frustrating that I can't really get any more information from yabasanshiro (I also don't seem to be able to get much from lr-yabause because it just hangs at the section as opposed to crashing outright).