We will dictate what happens to the game from here on. We can vote to have the game released as a torrent, or wait till the donors get their disc's pressed which they way it looks now, might be a while more.
This was just posted by Assembler himself.
Geist force contains a very unusual drm that causes illegal function calls that will crash a retail dreamcast, but not an emulator (nulldc) or a dreamcast running 5.24 bios (prerelease).
The drm was removed but the game still makes illegal function calls
that can crash the dreamcast and cause texture corruption. Simply put,
the game was made for a slightly more powerful hardware than dreamcast
became.
To have the drm analyzed , removed and a working selfboot made would
require giving access to the files to a 3rd party. Even then it may take a
long time or may not be possible.
At issue is the money people sent me for pressed discs. Most sent it
unasked for and I have kept it in the site fund untouched. However, we
lost the machine that the openoffice files (records) when my basement flooded.
I will have to laboriously reconstruct the list of people. Mea culpa.
There are three ways to approach this.
1.Give access to the files and hope drm can be removed and files are
not leaked until pressed copies are done.
2. Release the gd-r rip as a torrent and ask people who donated extra
money to graciously donate the balance or get a refund.
3. Print the disc as-is flawed but playable as the drm might not be
removable, and the game IS a beta and had issues anyway.
4. Print up the art and cases professionally and send them out with a
gold master CDR of the GD-R rip data and self boot.
CRTGAMER wrote:Release the game now as an easy accessible download for anyone to try!
Any canceled or unreleased old game that can be discovered should be enjoyed by the masses and not held back. As for the ones that donated, they should get first crack, but this game has already been teased about too long. Though unlikely, maybe by releasing it as a download, somebody might fix some of the issues and upload the patched ISO.
How do donators feel about this?
Issue all the donators Geist Force burned in a name brand CDR of its current state. Include commercial printed jewel case inserts and manual. Once and IF Geist Force gets finalized with the fixes then each donator should get a pressed disc.
Note the big IF, all the bugs may never get fixed so let everyone experience a canceled beta game!
I see this getting released as a torrent this late in the game.
At least we can say Assembler went FAR and BEYOND what most people would go through to try and get this done.
I think people just want to test it out on their systems or emulate it. There are enough crackers in the Dreamcast community that eventually this could be solved and be 100% playable.
Just want to tell you that you did a good job handling this and the stress involved must have been great.
Nobody can say you didn't try your damnedest to make this possible.
