CD Game Support

[Mikebloke]

3 minutes ago, SainT said:

 

I suspect you have a new cart. Hit OPTION when prompted to on boot up and use the link provided.

 

DO NOT USE THIS IF YOU HAVE A NEWER CART, IT WILL NOT WORK PROPERLY.

 

Thanks, just confirmed it. I read your initial post as a double negative and assumed I had an old cart.

 

For fools like me - downloading the proper patch via the options link does fix it - booted up a CD game.

 

Thanks SainT!

[cavedude]

4 hours ago, SainT said:

Another version to try for the older carts --

 

 

 

I've tested this and it's working on my downgraded dev cart, so it should be good for everyone now. But if I could have confirmation before I start shouting about it, please!

 

** Anyone who tested the previous version, please rename to firmware.ovr as it will not update the microcontroller firmware correctly without this change. Anyone installing from a regular previous firmware, just use as is **

 

This worked great for me. Thanks!

Edited April 14, 2021 by SainT

[Goochman]

Ok I must be really slow but Im still not clear on what file I need to update my original JagSD - From RetroHQ I downloaded the "Firmware" file for original owners titled:

firmware-210414.zip

 

Inside that is a firmware.upd file.

 

Since I did not try the original update file, I should rename this file to:

firmware.ovr

 

and place in the root directory of my SD card for the JagSD

 

Is this correct?

[Johnpv]

4 hours ago, SainT said:

Another version to try for the older carts --

 

https://www.retrohq.co.uk/products/jaggd/............zip

 

** REMOVED ** I'm happy this is working and it's only confusing matters. If you have the "Press OPTION for firmware update." while booting, THEN DO THIS.

 

I've tested this and it's working on my downgraded dev cart, so it should be good for everyone now. But if I could have confirmation before I start shouting about it, please!

 

** Anyone who tested the previous version, please rename to firmware.ovr as it will not update the microcontroller firmware correctly without this change. Anyone installing from a regular previous firmware, just use as is **

I grabbed it before you took it down, but I haven't had a chance to test it yet, will do tonight. 

[doctorclu]

Just wanted to say I got that feeling playing the Jaguar yesterday that I have not had since like 2000-2001.

 

Soooo many Jag CD games I haven't fired up in a long time.   I can see why it's been that long (cough cough... Hoverstrike) but a lot of fun to see them again.

 

Also great to play regular games, like Battlemorph.   Actually, I think Battlemorph and Gorf were the sole reason I kept a Jag CD around.

[+Stephen]

31 minutes ago, doctorclu said:

Just wanted to say I got that feeling playing the Jaguar yesterday that I have not had since like 2000-2001.

 

Soooo many Jag CD games I haven't fired up in a long time.   I can see why it's been that long (cough cough... Hoverstrike) but a lot of fun to see them again.

 

Also great to play regular games, like Battlemorph.   Actually, I think Battlemorph and Gorf were the sole reason I kept a Jag CD around.

Only reason I kept mine was for VLM.

[CD-i]

Got many games to work but still puzzled why Battlemorph won't boot. Converted perfectly from that redump set but started only once in about 15 tries ^^

Other games not working:

Dragons lair
World tour racing
Vid grid (hangs at loading screen in game)

But got varunas forces to boot ^^

[UHATEIT]

9 minutes ago, CD-i said:

Got many games to work but still puzzled why Battlemorph won't boot. Converted perfectly from that redump set but started only once in about 15 tries ^^

Other games not working:

Dragons lair
World tour racing
Vid grid (hangs at loading screen in game)

But got varunas forces to boot ^^

I have a few Varunas Forces and did get them to boot as well. Also have Dragon's Lair working. Still struggling with my American Hero, Robinon's Requiem, BIWN, World Tour Racing as well. The 1 Battlemorph I have has worked just fine. It's odd when some of these work for others and not for some. When Battlemorph loads it does say "No Memory Track" so before I get far into it will have to test if it generates a save file and actually saves. I believe it should tho.

[CD-i]

No memorytrack is currently not supported in this beta firmware.

 

Ok so noone got Robinson's to boot?

 

 

[omf]

13 hours ago, SainT said:

 

Ooh, that is interesting. I have a limit of 81 tracks for CD images currently, I'll have to increase that if it uses more. If you can (privately) provide a link to the image I'll take a look.

i did mention this previously on a twitter pm but as you didn't reply i thought you were not interested in it so i didn't peruse any further.

 

i will sort something out and get it to you

[Johnpv]

8 hours ago, SainT said:

Another version to try for the older carts --

 

https://www.retrohq.co.uk/products/jaggd/............zip

 

** REMOVED ** I'm happy this is working and it's only confusing matters. If you have the "Press OPTION for firmware update." while booting, THEN DO THIS.

 

I've tested this and it's working on my downgraded dev cart, so it should be good for everyone now. But if I could have confirmation before I start shouting about it, please!

 

** Anyone who tested the previous version, please rename to firmware.ovr as it will not update the microcontroller firmware correctly without this change. Anyone installing from a regular previous firmware, just use as is **

Just wanted to say this worked perfect for me and was able to get the couple games I tried to boot! 

[samson7point1]

On 4/13/2021 at 11:43 AM, SainT said:

 

You need to run from the directory the CCD is in. It doesn't translate the path from the CCD to the IMG. So what I said above was right... I'm not reporting a missing IMG but just bailing. ?

 

WTR doesn't work anyway... ?

I'm a bit confused by this.  I can't seem to get any CCDs to work.  bin/cue and cdi work fine, but the CCDs just exit without doing anything - I've tried this on three different images with the same results.  I've tried placing the image and the executable in the same directory and specifying the full path to the CCD instead of just the relative path and vice-versa.  I was able to find bin/cues for most of the ones I had in CCD but not everything.

[PeterG]

1 hour ago, samson7point1 said:

I'm a bit confused by this.  I can't seem to get any CCDs to work.  bin/cue and cdi work fine, but the CCDs just exit without doing anything - I've tried this on three different images with the same results.  I've tried placing the image and the executable in the same directory and specifying the full path to the CCD instead of just the relative path and vice-versa.  I was able to find bin/cues for most of the ones I had in CCD but not everything.

I had the exact same experience...

Ended up going to my CDs today and ripped them all as .CDI files to make them work, but with varying results.

 

Working:

American Hero (and a second Disc, no clue where I got that from but with noninteractive footage that I never saw before. Interesting)

Baldies

Caves of fear

Demolition Man

Primal Rage

Highlander (Yikes even more cumbersome than I already remembered. :-))

Hover Strike

Impulse X

Scatologic Demo Disc

Soulstar (Unencrypted?/ Has Music in Intro, no Music in gameplay)

Space Ace

Varunas Forces

 

Non working: Most aren't marked as "not contiguos" although I do not quite understand what it means as most are ripped exactly as the working ones above and in the same folder on the same SD card so no clue what makes the difference....

Battlemorph

BIWN Rev 18 & 23

Blue Lightning

Brain Dead

Dragons Lair

Iron Soldier 2

Myst

Soulstar (encrypted/ it locks on the Game Drive Menu and everything is frozen)

A video of the Jaguar Press conference won't even register that I pressed a button and just freeze everything

Frog Feast ( Stuck freeze on Loading CD Rom popup)

World Tour Racing (Shows Teque Logo and plays music from the intro afterwards only black screen)

 

[samson7point1]

11 minutes ago, PeterG said:

I had the exact same experience...

Ended up going to my CDs today and ripped them all as .CDI files to make them work, but with varying results.

 

Working:

American Hero (and a second Disc, no clue where I got that from but with noninteractive footage that I never saw before. Interesting)

Baldies

Caves of fear

Demolition Man

Primal Rage

Highlander (Yikes even more cumbersome than I already remembered. :-))

Hover Strike

Impulse X

Scatologic Demo Disc

Soulstar (Unencrypted?/ Has Music in Intro, no Music in gameplay)

Space Ace

Varunas Forces

 

Non working: Most aren't marked as "not contiguos" although I do not quite understand what it means as most are ripped exactly as the working ones above and in the same folder on the same SD card so no clue what makes the difference....

Battlemorph

BIWN Rev 18 & 23

Blue Lightning

Brain Dead

Dragons Lair

Iron Soldier 2

Myst

Soulstar (encrypted/ it locks on the Game Drive Menu and everything is frozen)

A video of the Jaguar Press conference won't even register that I pressed a button and just freeze everything

Frog Feast ( Stuck freeze on Loading CD Rom popup)

World Tour Racing (Shows Teque Logo and plays music from the intro afterwards only black screen)

 

I can help with the non-contiguous bit.  That refers to how the files were written to the SD card.  Contiguous means that they’re written one byte after another all in a row. Non-contiguous means that Windows (or whatever OS you use) fragmented the files when writing them to the SD card.  Normally fragmentation isn’t considered an error as most programs don’t care about jumping around in the storage to the different spots where the data actually exists, but the JagGD is working on very thin margins in terms of speed and can’t tolerate fragmented files. You can’t see fragmentation without special tools and unfortunately you can’t tell your OS not to fragment files when writing.  Your only option for fixing the non-contiguous ones is to reformat your SD card and copy everything back.  When you do that it should copy the files serially and the fresh file system won’t want to fragment your files.  Once you start deleting files from your SD card they will leave gaps and you’re likely to run into fragmentation again so you may have to do this more than once.

[UHATEIT]

What program are people using to rip to .cdi format? Imgburn only does bin/cue for me and cd2jcd refuses to convert any of them. alcohol120% will make .ccd but cd2jcd freezes and force closes anytime I try to convert a .ccd

 

The only conversions that have worked are .cdi I had bit don't know what program does those. As I want to try American Hero and Robinsons Requiem to make them .cdi and then try cd2jcd to make them into jcd

[+CyranoJ]

2 minutes ago, UHATEIT said:

The only conversions that have worked are .cdi I had bit don't know what program does those.

DiscJuggler

[PeterG]

16 minutes ago, samson7point1 said:

I can help with the non-contiguous bit.  That refers to how the files were written to the SD card.  Contiguous means that they’re written one byte after another all in a row. Non-contiguous means that Windows (or whatever OS you use) fragmented the files when writing them to the SD card.  Normally fragmentation isn’t considered an error as most programs don’t care about jumping around in the storage to the different spots where the data actually exists, but the JagGD is working on very thin margins in terms of speed and can’t tolerate fragmented files. You can’t see fragmentation without special tools and unfortunately you can’t tell your OS not to fragment files when writing.  Your only option for fixing the non-contiguous ones is to reformat your SD card and copy everything back.  When you do that it should copy the files serially and the fresh file system won’t want to fragment your files.  Once you start deleting files from your SD card they will leave gaps and you’re likely to run into fragmentation again so you may have to do this more than once.

Thank you for the explanation, very much appreciated. This could very well be with all the copying of stuff I did the last days. I will try that now. There goes the second's night sleep.  

[dragonHunter]

I'm having a weird problem where pressing B in the menu on any and all jcd files does nothing. I used the known-good set and converted them with no errors, but they just won't load. Non-CD games load fine. My Jaguar is a pretty early one, I think. My GameDrive has firmware v1.09, menu v1.06, asic v1.06, and stub v1.03.

 

Oh yeah, my sd card is a SanDisk Ultra 32GB class 10.

Edited April 15, 2021 by dragonHunter
Forgot to mention sd type...

[PeterG]

43 minutes ago, dragonHunter said:

I'm having a weird problem where pressing B in the menu on any and all jcd files does nothing. I used the known-good set and converted them with no errors, but they just won't load. Non-CD games load fine. My Jaguar is a pretty early one, I think. My GameDrive has firmware v1.09, menu v1.06, asic v1.06, and stub v1.03.

 

Oh yeah, my sd card is a SanDisk Ultra 32GB class 10.

Did you update the firmware? Seems like you still have the version without CD-Support.

Mine is like this after the update: Firmware V1.10, Menu V1.07, ASIC V1.01, Stub V1.03

[PeterG]

1 hour ago, samson7point1 said:

I can help with the non-contiguous bit.  That refers to how the files were written to the SD card.  Contiguous means that they’re written one byte after another all in a row. Non-contiguous means that Windows (or whatever OS you use) fragmented the files when writing them to the SD card.  Normally fragmentation isn’t considered an error as most programs don’t care about jumping around in the storage to the different spots where the data actually exists, but the JagGD is working on very thin margins in terms of speed and can’t tolerate fragmented files. You can’t see fragmentation without special tools and unfortunately you can’t tell your OS not to fragment files when writing.  Your only option for fixing the non-contiguous ones is to reformat your SD card and copy everything back.  When you do that it should copy the files serially and the fresh file system won’t want to fragment your files.  Once you start deleting files from your SD card they will leave gaps and you’re likely to run into fragmentation again so you may have to do this more than once.

So the formatting really did the trick for almost all games and now I see that SainT already mentioned that in his first post and I somehow missed it, duh. But well things look much better now and no prompts about not being contigous anymore...
 

Working:

American Hero

Battlemorph (Loaded on first try)

Blue Lightning
Baldies

Caves of fear

Demolition Man

Primal Rage

Highlander 

Hover Strike

Brain Dead

Dragons Lair

Iron Soldier 2

Myst

Impulse X

Scatologic Demo Disc

Soulstar (Unencrypted?/ Has Music in Intro but no music during gameplay for some reason)

Space Ace

Varunas Forces

Video Jag Press conference 1

 

Non working:

BIWN Rev 18 (Black screen)

BIWN 23 (Freeze/reaaaally slow loading, almost no progress)

Vid Grid (Black Screen)

Video of the Jaguar Press conference 2 (still freezing/Maybe bad source CD)

World Tour Racing (Shows Teque Logo and plays Intro and Demo mode before going to black screen)

 

Forgot to try: 

Frog Feast

Soulstar (encrypted)

 

 

[rayik]

3 hours ago, samson7point1 said:

I'm a bit confused by this.  I can't seem to get any CCDs to work.  bin/cue and cdi work fine, but the CCDs just exit without doing anything - I've tried this on three different images with the same results.  I've tried placing the image and the executable in the same directory and specifying the full path to the CCD instead of just the relative path and vice-versa.  I was able to find bin/cues for most of the ones I had in CCD but not everything.

Same here.  CCD just exit without error and no file being created.

 

 

 

[mario64]

2 hours ago, CyranoJ said:

DiscJuggler

Please post your exact ripping settings. I used DJ with Dragon’s Lair and the resulting CDI was not accepted by cd2jcd

[mario64]

19 minutes ago, rayik said:

Same here.  CCD just exit without error and no file being created.

 

 

 

Same here. No ccd’s work. I thought it was my rips. perhaps it’s a bug in cd2jcd

[Zerosquare]

I wonder if there would be a need for a tool which would copy files to a SD card while making sure they're not fragmented. (The "lazy" way would be generating a fresh FAT32 file system image and writing it to the card.)

Edited April 15, 2021 by Zerosquare

[+CyranoJ]

20 minutes ago, Zerosquare said:

I wonder if there would be a need for a tool which would copy files to a SD card while making sure they're not fragmented. (The "lazy" way would be generating a fresh FAT32 file system image and writing it to the card.)

The lazy way would be to find all the fragmented sectors and mark in the fat they're full