Pier Solar does not work

[spielvan]

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

[barbudreadmon]

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.

[flyinghead]

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

[spielvan]

Thank you dear ones for the answer.

[requeijaum]

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.

[ShikaSan]

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.

[chrisasma103]

Apparently, with the right dump of the game and using the HLE BIOS, it will work on Retroarch Flycast. You just have to wait at the SEGA logo screen for a minute or two. So, the game is technically playable on Flycast.

[ner00]

flyinghead/flycast#378 (comment)

After the first time, make a save state to avoid that.