To cleanse the palate from last time, which turned into a bit of a trainwreck, I think it's time for a genuine brag post. A lot of people have congratulated me for securing this gem, which has apparently eluded collectors for longer than I've been part of the scene. We're of course talking about the CD-ROM version of DIOS for PC-8801MC: Having snagged a game of such internet notoriety, I thought it might be wise to keep a lid on it until I was sure the disc was fine. However, as it happened, it was clear from the start that the disc *wasn't fine*, so I had to post about it to get technical help. This unleashed a bit of WHEN ARE YOU UPLOADING IT??  from the romz crowd (i.e. the real preservationists, if you ask them). But soon enough I think everyone understood I had run into issues, and let me concentrate on trying to solve them. Indeed, there turned out to be several. 💦 For starters, the disc had these unnerving marks toward the center. I remember thinking (and saying out loud lol), oh that's no biggie, there's no way the disc is full enough to have data there. But then someone on Discord went, uhh Krug, you do know CD tracks start from the center? 🙀

Ok ok, no panic. Why of course  I knew that lol, you fell into my ebin ruse of a trap card by thinking I didn't. (Phew, that was a close one...💧) My general understanding of optical media notwithstanding, I had read up on car care products, toothpastes, and machines that shave the plastic layer down, and was ready to get my hands dirty if needed. Let's just see how the dumping goes first, and think about our options later. As luck would have it, Redumper gave me no less than 36330 (???) errors, and started retrying the problem spots one at a time. I literally went to see an opera -- a dress rehearsal of The Coronation of Poppea, for anyone interested 😎 -- while it was doing its thing. When I got home, the dump had finally finished, with an error count of 0. Wow. After a round of consultations, however, it became clear this wasn't enough to be sure the dump was good, so I tried again, and this time got 0 errors on first pass. Holy smokes! I think we did it, boys... Subsequent dumps would produce matching hashes, so yep, the disc was in the bag. I'll leave the eggheads to figure out what those heart-stopping errors were about.

Now, you probably rank me pretty high on the weirdo scale, but even I haven't reached the level of buying a real PC-8801MC -- the system famous for having two unique games*, one of which has so far been unobtainium. So the next step was getting DIOS to run on an emulator. I'll spare you the play by play of how everything went, but let's just say both the M88 family of emulators, which needed a very specific version of the CD-ROM plugin to work (with a very specific way of loading CD's from a physical drive, as opposed to images), and MAME, which to its credit went out of its way to warn the user that it doesn't work (even though it does, despite the warning, with some other systems) had me on the ropes. It turned out the only emulator with adequate CD-ROM support (M88 ultimately failing to produce CD audio for me) was the one called PC-8801MA -- named after, you know, a model that doesn't have a CD drive... Anyway, after getting over one last hurdle -- the CD image needing to be converted to a single-file bin+cue, as opposed to the usual(?) kind separated into tracks -- I got the game running. 🕺

(*We can argue whether or not Takarabako and the CD Audio-enabled game ports, however many of those actually came out, count.)

In passing, this might be a good time to mention I've fansubbed the intro for everyone to enjoy: Just marvelous stuff. Everything about this game actually rocks so much, it's criminal how few people seem to know about it. Well now that's of course about to change, once I get to uplo... uhhh, why does it get stuck when I select new game?💧

Oh man, there's a copy-protection check. Based on subsequent research, the way it seems to work is, the game wants you to create a user disk from the main menu; once you do, it reads data off the single bundled disk -- basically the entire disk I think -- and writes it to a blank one, with one exception: there's a section that gets rewritten, which the game will use to see if your copy is authentic. Ok, so the problem is pretty clear: my dump of the disk is uncracked, and the emulator is stumbling on the protection. Well fret not, I'm well-versed in cracking J-PC games using "personal backup" software (a.k.a. "filers") from the day. The only problem is, there doesn't seem to be a crack for the CD version of this game -- at least, not in any of the publically available parameter disks from the period after the game came out -- possibly due to its obscurity, even when it was released... That might prove to be a problem.💧

Fiddling around on the menu screen, something funny quickly caught my eye. There was a remnant of the original floppy disk version, upon which this one was doubtlessly built: A pop up dialog referred to the only bundled disk as Disk C, which is the one used for this purpose on the floppy version. That being the case, I bet there's a chance the crack for that version might work on this one as well...💡 Zoinks! It actually let me past the check :D But what the heck, the whole game is bugged out. Talking to the characters produces screeches, and everything just generally feels messed up. Could it be my CD dump is bad after all? Luckily it turned out the crack had just messed up the CD version disk, because the data wasn't identical with the floppy version one.

This is where my collector friend Wurstulus chimed in, saying he had compared floppy version Disk C and User disk, and figured out the exact segment that gets rewritten. His theory was, maybe we can find the spot where the rewriting is supposed to happen on the CD version disk, insert the rewritten data from the floppy version user disk there manually, and treat the edited file as our user disk. Before I could even parse all that, he sent me an image for testing. And mother of god, it actually worked!! :D :D With this ingenious homebrew "crack" secured, we were close to the finish line. While all the issues seemed to be gone, surely the game needed to be played through to make sure there isn't a second check halfway through, where hordes of angry gamers will get stuck, unleashing their fury at me in the comments. Well that's no biggie either, as among other accolades, Old Krug is also an accomplished gamer, having once held a Mega Man X speedrun time in the top 100, or whatever it was. One could say side-scrolling action is my *forte* 😉 Oh you have got to be shitting me. This first boss is absolutely impossible. I'm hours into this already, and it just doesn't seem to die -- or even flash from taking damage, as you'd expect bosses to do when you hit their weak spot. 🤣

Guess I'll do this the old-fashioned way, and find a playthrough video to watch as I go. Uhm... is there no playthrough of the PC-88 disk version anywhere?  The only one I could find was Macaw45's VOD from seven years ago, and loading it gave a connection error, regardless of browser, app, IP address, etc. Messaging Macaw about it later, he said he has the same problem lol, so Twitch must've deleted it or something. Anyway, a friend who remembered watching Macaw's playthrough said I just need to keep hitting it, until a dialogue box appears. Will that box appear on the CD version, which btw so far hasn't used dialogue boxes? Using save states, I'm hitting this guy for what feels like an eternity, jumping over his beam after every round of shots, and loading every time he gets me. I swear I must be like 150 hits in, with one less-than-perfectly timed input being enough to kill me. But then, it suddenly happens: the boss starts talking! :D :D

I don't want to spoil the fun, so I'll just mention the rest of the game was a relative breeze, and the dump is now confirmed completely playable up to the end. So lemme just log on to Internet Archive, and... oh, the site seems to be down? I wonder what's up with that...

We all know how this  story ended up going, so I'm glad we eventually got through it. And to the extent there may have been further incidents after this blog post came out, I'm sure you'll have heard about them. Until then -- happy gaming, everyone!😎

I'm going to be getting a dump of a "genuine" CD-ROM version user disk from a friend with a real PC-8801MC, which will hopefully make our homebrew crack obsolete. I'll add a note when that disk image gets tested, and goes live.🕺

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