Flycast: Pier Solar does not work

Created on 10 Mar 2020 · 5Comments · Source: libretro/flycast

Pier Solar doesn't work, the game doesn't load, right after loading the bios it closes the retroarch.

crash

Source

spielvan

Most helpful comment

I believe the problem is due to a copy protection mechanism used by this game.

flyinghead on 11 Mar 2020

👍3

All 5 comments

iirc the issue is known and cdi related. TBH, i know the game has some coding weirdness on megadrive, which makes only a few megadrive emulators suitable for it, so i'm not even sure it would run 100% properly on flycast if it didn't crash.

barbudreadmon on 11 Mar 2020

👍2

I believe the problem is due to a copy protection mechanism used by this game.

flyinghead on 11 Mar 2020

👍3

Thank you dear ones for the answer.

spielvan on 11 Mar 2020

I went testing on flycast with no luck. Here is a log: https://gist.github.com/requeijaum/a57ad7ad79049bbfd31507b40921ab1e

However, Demul got it running OK. A friend of mine has the original game (Dreamcast edition) but we used some shady CDI dump, since his console's optical unit stopped working.

This game uses some clever copy-protection techniques and may provoke some bugs during gameplay using emulators - eg: events not triggering correctly, etc.

requeijaum on 15 Jul 2020

Hope I'm not late, the game requires subchannel scanning for MCN/ISRC data. If a developer wants references to implement this, you can check out the source code of DEMUL.

Or reverse-engineer GDEMU, because they have also implemented this since firmware version 5.13.0.

I suspect either way it's going to be difficult and will take a long time to implement perfectly.