iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

(9/9) In the end, I'm glad I went back to this one, because that pop was becoming hard to ignore once I'd noticed it!

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(8/9) The PAL RGB fix is pretty straight forward and ensures 60hz is used, though I've never done this on a Windows CE game before, so it was definitely new (and fun) territory.

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(7/9) In a decoding test, one clip ended at -16, but adding 48 zero bytes took that to +1424. The new padding left it at -16, which helped point me in this direction, although those numbers alone don't prove what was causing the audible pop.

(6/9) I also changed the loader to choose its padding by audio format, keeping zeros for PCM and using 0x80 for ADPCM. The idea was to alternate positive and negative steps to avoid that suspected drift, and it even fits in the existing code with no need to edit recordings!

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(5/9) I kept the library's allocation sizes and changed the game to prepare the full length before handing the sound over. That meant changing the loader's rounding from 32 to 64 bytes, which comes down to the two constants highlighted here.

(4/9) The padding looked like another part of it, since the game fills it with zeros. My suspicion from the tests is that those bytes make the decoded ADPCM waveform drift upward, leaving a sudden jump when playback stops and giving us that pop.

(3/9) What stood out was that the game rounds sound lengths to 32-byte boundaries, while the library rounds to 64 but still copies the smaller amount. For 73 of the 149 sounds I checked, that leaves 32 bytes at the end of the playback buffer unwritten.

(2/9) I'd been hearing a pop after some sound effects, including gunshots, and found it in both the Japanese release and the Smash Pack version I used for the English patch. With the sound data matching across versions, I started tracing the Windows CE loading code.

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(1/9) Almost two and a half years after releasing my "Virtua Cop 2" English patch for Dreamcast, I've put out v1.1 with fixes for the audio popping and the game starting at 50 Hz on PAL consoles using RGB! DOWNLOAD: github.com/DerekPascare...

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Best I can do is guy wearing sunglasses in Cyberia...

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I heard some kusoge-obsessed freaks even did an English translation patch for it. Can you speak to the veracity of these claims? 😅

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Thanks! Yes, it was a beast and a half...

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(3/3) Every few months, I made a little progress, always being sure to keep very good notes. I knew it was a matter of time, and thank the Lord above, that time is now... Something as "trivial" as this took me dozens and dozens of hours to finally crack and deliver in this final v1.4 update.

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(2/3) So, what was the elusive bug that kept me hacking away at the same game, little by little, for years? Like many ADV/VN games, "Nakoruru" features a history viewer to scroll through past dialogue. Due to expanding maximum size of dialogue text, tons of things downstream needed tweaking.

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(1/3) Over three years after its initial release, I'm proud to finally have squashed the LAST BUG in our English translation patch of "Nakoruru: The Gift She Gave Me" on the SEGA Dreamcast! DOWNLOAD: github.com/DerekPascare...

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Yes, the person who published the build makes that clear.

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The NAOMI-to-Dreamcast ports continue! This time, it's "Senko no Ronde Special". See CaptainKoffski's post for download link: dreamcast-talk.com/forum/viewto...

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Updated info here... bsky.app/profile/drea...

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A big update for openMenu! As such, I've bumped it up to v1.7.0 😎 As always, Windows and Linux users need only to open Card Manager and let the auto-updater do its thing. A manual update is still required for macOS users. github.com/DerekPascare...

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