Sonic Adventure [NTSC-U] - Split Release
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Dreamcast Resurrection - 2009 (since 2008)

Check snesorama.us forums for more releases
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Ripped: Internet feature.
Downsampled: Nothing.
Source used: Kalisto release files and GD dump from japanese version.
Main features:
- Discs dummied for 700mb. Dummy size is very small, so it makes no difference.
- File order in CD was made the same of GD and then changed a little (read all text for more information), what mean faster loadings and less Dreamcast noise.

======= IMPORTANT =========
=== READ BEFORE PLAYING ===
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As most of you know, Dreamcast GDs can store more than 1gb and conventional CDs only 700mb, so games must be splitted or downsampled in order to fit a CD. This one is a split release. It means that the game was originally 1 disc, and files were separated in multiple discs (in this case 3 discs). This is the content of each disc:

DISC 1: Opening videos, Sonic story.
DISC 2: Tails, Knuckles and Amy stories.
DISC 3: Big, E-102 Gamma and Super Sonic stories.

It's supposed to be played in this order, but you can play with any character you want (Story or Trial mode), just use the correct disc.

The splitted files were only songs and videos, so the other game files are contained in all discs. So if some song don't play or game locks in some video it means that you put the wrong disc.

Opening videos are present only in Disc 1, in other discs it was replaced by 3 seconds black videos. You can skip the 6 seconds black screen after Sega first screen pressing Start, just like you would do with the conventional videos.

Chao features should be working in all discs.

In Trial Mode, Sonic can play the Sand Hill minigame (that appears on Tails story). If you're playing it with Sonic, use Disc 2 or you'll get no background song. I haven't added this song to sonic disc because there was no space avaliable, sorry.

Disc 3 have a "Extra" folder where you can find files from CD part of GD: useless text files, 0GDTEX converted to bitmap and some cool wallpapers. I usually include the warning audio track on my releases, but in this case I used a japanese GD dump and I didn't fell like including the japanese warning.

Internet feature won't work on any disc.

=== YOU DON'T HAVE TO READ ANYTHING BELOW THIS POINT ===

Finally, after days of work and testing I'm finally releasing this: Sonic Adventure in CD-R with full quality! What it means? Stereo music and full quality videos. Other releases, including Kalisto one, had monoized and downsampled songs and videos, so they made it fit on a CD. With original data, game had 980mb, so I had to split if I want to preserve quality. At this point, some people will be blaming me for spliting Sonic Adventure in so many discs, but believe me, that was necessary. If you have any doubt about that, check the size of dummy file (DUMMY.DAT) in discs 1 or 2.

=== WANT TO HEAR A STORY? ===

After the idea of this release, I got the GD dump of the last japanese version of the game. I tried to crack the initializing binary file myself using the method I used in another release, but I couldn't find the correct bytes to change so I gave up. So I decided to use Kalisto release files, that I remembered playing until the end so I knew it was working correctly. By the way, I used the original rarset for that, so there are no corrupted files. First step was to delete internet files. I think I forgot some files in disc, but no problem, they are very small. I made a test disc to see if I haven't deleted any important file and it worked, so it was okay.

Next step (and longest one) was to separate files. The only way to do that was to play game until the end with all characters and analyse songs and videos while doing that.

After this, I analysed the sizes and tried a lot of configurations in discs until find the one of this release. I got surprised that files fit on CD, it got very tight.

Test time. Guess what I had to do. Exactly: play the game until the end using my discs. Long time, and some difficulties appeared.

First problem was the black video used in discs 2 and 3 that replaced opening video. For some reason, less than 3 seconds video made the game freeze, and I was trying using 1 second video. After some other test discs, I finally find out this and made it work.

Second problem was about original file order. In original file order, beside browser files (that got deleted), you have the videos in inner part of disc. That's the part where Dreamcast reads slowest. Having videos in this area makes sense, because in a video you usually doesn't need read performance, and you keep game files (that need performance) in the "fastest" area. But for my test disc, some videos got short time of freezing because reading speed was not enough for them. The only solution was to move videos to a "faster" area. I didn't want to keep game files separated so I moved the videos to the farthest part of disc. Another problem solved. It only had to be done in discs 2 and 3, disc 1 videos played okay in original file order.

Third and last problem of course were missing song files. Mistakes happen to everybody.

After correcting all this, files were finally ready.

=== FINAL NOTES ===

There are 3 songs files that were deleted because I couldn't figure out where they play. I finished this game thousand of times and never listened to them. The .adx are included in the folder "Deleted songs" in release package in case you want to do anything with them.

I'll work on a single disc version next days, so if you don't fell like recording 3 discs and don't care about mono songs and low quality videos, check my releases on snesorama forums in future.