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Dreamcast Resurrection - 2009 (since 2008)

Check for more releases at these forums (search for user "TuxTheWise"):
snesorama.us (all releases, see my signature)
segahub.org (recent releases)
dreamcast-talk.com (recent releases)

NOTE: I've seen some people uploading my releases in other servers. I recommend you always getting
my releases of my uploads in the forums above, because sometimes I release fixes or re-launch some
games that have problems. If you get my uploads you'll be sure of having the latest releases.
Additionally, you'll get the original package, not images made from discs, so you'll be sure that
nothing is corrupted.

Dragonriders: Chronicles Of Pern (PAL)

Ripped: Nothing.
Downsampled: Videos; audio 44khz stereo -> 32khz mono; audio 22khz stereo -> 22khz mono.
Source: GD dump.

This was a tough game to work on. As you know, Echelon's release do not play videos at all. It
happens because if game cannot fetch the video files on a certain (little) time, it just skips the
play. Well, after optimizing the file order I had the same problem.

After some tries, and some time thinking, I decided to use the original GD file order without
modifications. Well, the videos played. However, the fastest area had to be occupied by streaming
data, what affects the performance a lot because the files that are used during the loading times
were in the "slowest" part. The performance was so bad, that in some cut-scenes, the game used
about 5 seconds of loading each 2 or 3 lines when playing a background music. That was very
annoying and I had to do something about that.

That was the moment when I decided to downsample the media. With that, I could reduce the data
needed to be read for the music and move more files to the "faster" area of disc. Additionally,
when moving files to the faster area (where data density (data/range in radius) is bigger), I
could optimize file order a little and still maintain the videos working correctly.

The results got great, better than I expected. Loading times are much better than the ones on
Echelon's release and on my first tries, reader noise is very reduced and all videos are playing
correctly. For the ones that never played the original GD, there are 4 videos: 1) Developer logo;
2) Story introduction just after the first video; 3) Another story video when you start a new
game; 4) A video that plays when you select the "View Credits" in the options menu.

Oh, and another thing about videos. The first one had a lot of "ticks" in audio. You know the
things that appear when you copy an audio track of a damaged CD? The "ticks" I'm talking about is
something like that. When listening to it for the first time, I thought it was some player
problem, but after demultiplexing the video on PC I noticed that the "ticks" were in original
audio. This glitch is also in the NTSC-U release of this game, and it's a shame that developers
hadn't noticed that before launching this game. Well, I have filtered the audio and could take
most of "ticks" off. It's better than the original audio, but it's not perfect. You can still
notice some very little pauses, but there is nothing that can be done about that. Blame the
developers, not me.

This is the PAL version but it works fine on NTSC consoles and with VGA-Box. It also comes with
text in 3 languages (English, German, and the last one is French I think), that are selected
depending on the language that you have configured on the BIOS.

I'm very proud of this release, it has demanded a lot of work but the results got great. I have
never seen a fully working release of this game before, so I think you'll want to grab this one.
Have fun with it, it's not a very good game but at least it has a nice presentation...

Features of my release:

- Not corrupted files at all, it was made with GD dump files.
- Used custom DCRES optimization techniques. It means faster loadings and less Dreamcast reader
noise.
- Selfboot.

About the game:
- It has VGA Box support.

Other comments:
- "Extras" folder in the pack contains some useless stuff.