Sonic Adventure 2 (Split) [NTSC-U]
------------------------------------------
Dreamcast Resurrection - 2009 (since 2008)

Check for more releases at these forums:
snesorama.us (all releases)
segahub.org (recent releases)
dreamcast-talk.com (recent releases)
-------------------------------------------
Ripped: Internet feature, japanese voices and a small trailer of disc 1 (useless, read below).
Downsampled: Nothing!
Source: GD dump and Echelon's release files.
Main features:
- Nothing ripped! Yeah folks, stereo music and full quality videos.
- Better quality ending song of Hero's story (read below).
- Not corrupted files at all, it was made with GD dump and Echelon's release (their patched version, so game works until the end).
- Dummied for 700mb. It means faster loadings.
- Used custom file order. It helps loading times and Dreamcast reader's noise.
- Selfboot.
- It has VGA Box support.
- Release comes with manual and covers.
- "Extras" folder in pack contains some useless stuff, including wallpapers that were in CD part of GD.

======= IMPORTANT =========
=== READ BEFORE PLAYING ===
===========================

As most of you know, Dreamcast GDs can store about 1gb and conventional CDs only 700mb, so some 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: Hero story.
DISC 2: Dark story.
DISC 3: Last chapter (you need to finish both stories to open this one), 2 players games.

Chao features are present on all discs, so don't worry about the disc when raising your pets.

You can play stories in any order you want.

When playing the Boss stages time attack, you can use the correct disc of story or Disc 3. If you're playing all bosses (Hero and Dark), use Disc 3.

The splitted files were only songs and videos, so the other game files are contained in all discs. Be sure to use the correct disc or music won't play and game will freeze when a video is accessed. If some of this happens to you it means that you're using the wrong disc.

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

I can say without doubt that Sonic Adventure 2 has the best engine ever made for a Dreamcast game. Amazing graphics with constant 60fps (slowdowns are so rare!), it's hard to believe that it's running on Dreamcast. How can you enjoy this great game with crap media? Imagine this great game with mono music and terrible videos. Well, that's Echelon's release. No offense to them, they were a great group and made an amazing job cracking all protections of this game. Additionally, they made their release in the same day that the game arrived at the stores. Without their work, this release wouldn't be possible. The problem about their release is media quality. They monoized some songs, but used a bad decoder. Developers had problems with space in disc too, because they encoded the music in 32khz (most common frequency is 44khz). Well, the problem is that most decoders messes non-44khz music. That's why quality of some songs in Echelon's release got so bad. Additionally, they preserved some songs stereo, so they had very few space for video, so its quality got terrible. To conclude, their release had no correct file order, so reader keep doing noise all the time seeking for distant files.

So, why don't do a split release and give gamers this masterpiece with GD quality?

I used Echelon's files, except media files of course. Media were replaced by the original files. To separate the correct files, I used a clever strategy than the last time. On my split release of Sonic Adventure 1, I just played the game and listened to music, so I could get the correct files. Yeah, that's dumb and demands a lot of work. This time I used Isobuster to get references of LBA for each file. So I made a simple program to give file name for each LBA informed. After that, I just used chapter selection in NullDC and used its sector reading with my program to get the files. Cool right?

In first disc (Hero) I had tons of problems. First of them was missing files. Not all scenes and stages of game can be accessed by scene selection, so some files got missing and I had to find them. Second problem was file order. Original file order was not optimized, so I had to think a little and make some tests until find a correct one. Third problem were random freezes in game that happened because of references for some videos that I forgot to include. Fourth problem were in final scene, where a video plays with a music, so both files are accessed at the same time. I had to move them close to each other to make it play without freezes. Fifth problem was the little trailer that plays after you finish a chapter. After finishing Hero Story, it will play Dark story trailer if you haven't finished that yet or Last Chapter trailer if you have finished Dark Story. The problem is that I forgot to put Last Chapter trailer in disc and there was no space left! It meant that if you finished Dark Story, game would freeze at the end of Hero Story. So I changed file reference to make it always play Dark Story trailer, so everything is working now and you can play the game in the order you want.

In this meantime, I found a cool OST disc on internet with the vocal songs of Sonic Adventure 2. The finish song of Hero chapter was present on this disc. Both game song and disc song were exactly the same and had the same volume. The difference is that the song of the vocal disc had a better quality (44khz), and game song was 32khz. So I encoded the song from the disc (in 44khz of course) and used it to replace the song of the game. It means that ending of Hero Story has better quality music! Funny right? Usually Dreamcast releases have downsampled stuff, but mine is still better than original.

In other discs things went smoothly because I already was used to the problems. In Disc 2, there was enough space so no trailer had to be ripped.

Enjoy the best Sonic Adventure 2 release ever. Plug your Dreamcast with VGA Box on your high definition TV, use a decent sound system and have a great gaming experience. I'm very proud of my work, and I hope you like it.

By the way, I forgot to say that game works great until the end, discs were tested a lot *looks at trash can and see a bunch of test CD-Rs*.

And for the ones who are complaining about changing discs, I'll release a single disc version in next days. But I'll use the same file order and downsample media with the best quality possible. It will be good, but split release is still better. So stop thinking and burn the discs now!