Anyone get Enhanced CD Audio support working with Sega Genesis/Megadrive (e.g. Pier Solar)? [RESOLVED!]

dedbob

I'm running RetroPie 4.1.14 on a RPI3, with AttractMode front end, launching Pier Solar using the lr-genesis-plus-gx emulator. The game itself launches and runs fine.

I've placed the game audio CD ISO file into the ROMs folder, named exactly the same as the ROM file itself, based on all the instructions I've found online... but not getting any CD music.

I've read around online and it seems like it's been supported in this emulator for a while, but I can't seem to get it to work. One thing I saw mentioned was that it would only work with a .bin ROM file, not a .md ROM. This hasn't seemed to make any difference for me.

Anyone had any luck with this? Any tips/suggestions?

mediamogul

@dedbob said in Anyone get Enhanced CD Audio support working with Sega Genesis/Megadrive (e.g. Pier Solar)?:

launching Pier Solar using the lr-genesis-plus-gx emulator.

~~Set the overall default MegaDrive/Genesis emulator or the default MegaDrive/Genesis emulator for the individual ROM to lr-picodrive in the runcommand menu and you should be good to go.~~

Edit: Well, scratch that. I just checked to be sure and 'Pier Solar' will only launch with CD audio for me in lr-genesis-plus-gx. I would have sworn it was the other way around. Aside from that, my files are named pier.bin and pier.iso and everything is working well.

mediamogul

@dedbob

The MD5SUM of my files are...

pier.bin:
e9c76d40d733165b5e499f43d4032e13

pier.iso:
5eda50f2626625ef16bf5623a9bb835d

dedbob

I tried renaming my files to match yours, as sometimes spaces can cause problems, but that didn't seem to help.

My ISO file has the same MD5 as yours, but my BIN is different. Maybe that's the issue. Will try to track down the right revision of the BIN file and see if that helps.

dedbob

@mediamogul

Confirmed that I've got the same MD5 checksums as your files, yet still no luck. Very frustrating!

Anything else you can think of that might be different about your setup? You have both files sitting in your Genesis/Megadrive roms folder?

The only other difference I see is your RetroPie version, but I don't think there were any changes to the Genesis Plus emulator between RetroPie 4.1.14 and 4.1.18, but I may have to backup my SD and then try updating it just to exhaust all possible options.

dedbob

@mediamogul

Yeah, just updated RetroPie to 4.1.18 and still no luck. I'm seriously stumped at this point.

There must be something else I'm missing, so hopefully someone visits this thread and has another suggestion!

dedbob

Ah ha! I finally figured it out!

Ran the emulator with verbose logging enabled and then dug through the runcommand.log and found the following line:

RetroArch [libretro ERROR] :: Unable to open CD BIOS: /home/pi/RetroPie/BIOS/bios_CD_U.bin.

Now it's strange, because I've run other Sega CD games with no problem, but I guess that emulator must use a different BIOS filename. I made a copy of my existing Sega CD USA BIOS file, renamed it to match the filename in the error message, and bingo!

CD audio now working perfectly!

Man, that was a lot harder than it needed to be. Next time I know to try verbose logging sooner!

mediamogul

@dedbob

Very good to hear.

herb_fargus

@dedbob it's also right at the top of the wiki page ;)

https://retropie.org.uk/docs/Sega-CD/

dedbob

@herb_fargus

Yeah, the reason I discounted the BIOS is that I've never had a problem with regular Sega CD games. I just noticed that it's because I had lr-picodrive set as the default emulator for Sega CD, and that emulator must not rely on this BIOS DLL naming convention.

Strange little inconsistencies between emulators.

herb_fargus

@dedbob indeed. Glad you got it sorted in the end.

Now only if the mp3 compression worked... Would sure make my Sega CD library smaller.