Category Archives: Retro

Dreamcast – Skies of Arcadia – PAL – 60Hz – VGA Patch

October 26, 2023 11:05 PM / Leave a Comment /

During my holidays in Japan I bought a SEGA Dreamcast. To get the most out of it I bought a VGA cable to benefit from 480p and clear picture on my LCD. However Skies of Arcadia is one of those titles that does not support being run in VGA Mode.

I found a patch on this website Skies of Arcadia EURO – 60Hz/VGA Patch involving extracting the image, patching files, patching vga mode and rebuilding the image. I think this is actually a lot of work with a lot of separate tools involved.

I created a patch for the Universal Dreamcast Patcher which allows you directly applying the patch to your GDI Images.

  1. Download Universal Dreamcast Patcher (6MB – Local Mirror)
  2. Download the Patch: Download (9KB)
  3. Open the Patcher and apply the Patches to your GDI Images

This can be applied to your own dump/copy or TOSEC.

  • Skies of Arcadia v1.000 (2001)(Sega)(PAL)(M4)[!]
Posted in: Retro / Tagged: ,

Boot Batocera from HDD/SSD

September 5, 2022 1:47 PM / 18 Comments /

Recently I acquired a Fujitsu Futro S740. Its sold as a thinclient, but is technically a full blown pc with a small SSD (8 or 16GB). I replaced it with a M.2 2280 B+M Key SSD and planned to use it as “Retrostation”. I tried recalbox, however the S740 only allows GPT/EFI boot, there is no legacy mode anymore. So I tried batocera. It boots well from the USB Stick but after installing to the SSD from the Menu it doesn’t boot.

You can fix this by booting a Live Linux Distribution of your choice. I used Ubuntu MATE, can be downloaded here and burned to an USB Flashdrive with Rufus. Afterwards boot with the USB Flashdrive and then you just register it to the BIOS via Terminal (Start Menu -> System Tools -> Terminal):

efibootmgr -c -d /dev/sda -p 1 -L "Batocera" -l '\EFI\BOOT\bootx64.efi'

The command won’t work from within Batocera, using a bootable linux of an USB stick is mandatory.

Reboot and have fun.

Posted in: Hardware, Retro / Tagged: , , ,