Heroes of Might and Magic III Dreamcast unreleased community fundraiser

[FatalistDC]

Hi everyone,

I am another (sadly) former member of Assembler Games.

Years ago, in 2005 I bought GD-Rs and Dreamcast promos from a member of Assembler Games (LeGIt). I bought Heroes of Might and Magic III and Test Drive Cycles from him. He sold me Heroes III for $600, £355 at that time.

Now I am willing to make a public release. I have ripped the game and my question is if people would be willing to make a community fundraiser for this game to be distributed.

I comment a few aspects of the game:

- It's a beta, version 0.800, not a final version. It's a Windows CE game.
- It crashes randomly. It can crash on the FMV intro or when loading.
- There are options or menus where the game always crashes, for example going to the Thieve's Guild in the Tavern always crashes the game. Again, it's an unfinished beta. The original GD-R has always been like this.
- In my opinion I think maybe this game could be canceled due to memory problems. In addition to the reason why so many games were canceled.
- For me this game would have been one of the best Dreamcast games in terms of quality. Wonderful music, great artwork, etc. Heroes III is considered the best game in the saga.

I can upload soon a video of the game running on retail Dreamcast to my YouTube channel ( FatalistDC ). I have some problems capturing audio from DC with the capture card that I need to solve.

Some more rare or unreleased material can be released in the future.

I would like to thank thedoctor45 for providing me a DC with DreamShell used to rip this game.

 

[thedoctor45]

Thanks for sharing this great lost Dreamcast title with the community, I'll make sure to spread the news regarding the fundraiser.

regards
doc

 

[FatalistDC]

Thanks for sharing this great lost Dreamcast title with the community, I'll make sure to spread the news regarding the fundraiser.

regards
doc

Thanks!

 

[octavia]

Thought this had been lost forever

 

[Wombat]

YES YES YES! I have been eagerly waiting for this moment to happen. Really happy you are open to doing this @FatalistDC

In terms of ripping the data, when using DreamShell / SD-card it's best use Dreamcast SD Rip (more information here)

If I recall correctly the disc you have was heavily scratched? If this is indeed the case, it might be wise to do multiple dumps with multiple systems. By doing this you might get more of the data of the disc.

 

[thedoctor45]

He‘s using a Compact Flash mod with DreamShell so I don't think the DC SD-Rip method will work in this case, but I've never used it myself so I could be wrong. The built in GD-Ripper software does check for bad sectors though and makes several read attempts if it encounters any so I don't see why the resulting dump should be incomplete if the ripping process managed to finish without problems.

The MSR Alpha I posted about on Assembler last year was also dumped using this method and I never had any issues with the files, then again I'm not an expert on ripping discs for the DC so I might be missing something.

 

[megavolt85]

for rip GD disk without bad sectors to G1ATA device need ~12 minutes
after rip you can open console and look information about bad sectors

 

[Arcadia]

Holy moly, HoMM 3 for the DC? I'd never thought I'd see the day.

 

[fafadou]

Whoah HoMM3 and test drive cycles.
@megavolt85 gives you good advices.
In order to fix it, you can Ask for help to @japanese_cake and @SiZiOUS they had worked on many unreleased.
Of course the whole community is ready to do his best.

What about test drive cycles ?

 

[speedyink]

Glad this hasn't been lost. As a Heroes III fan was always intrigued.

 

[Sega Dreamcast Info]

Its long time i m waiting this moment

 

[1]

@FatalistDC We're happy to host a fundraiser here if you like or @Anthony817 maybe on his dreamcast forum? Whatever happens we're happy to put a link up to it and share it here.

 

[Anthony817]

Wow! Fantastic news!

I have posted a link to this thread at the site I hang out most. Hopefully some of the people there will take notice!

Heroes of Might and Magic III Dreamcast unreleased community fundraiser - Dreamcast-Talk.com

 

[segamax]

I remember someone had it and I forgot it was you
Very good news that you’re willing to release it to the public, good luck for the community fundraiser, I might help a bit here.
What I would really love to see is Dee Dee planet ?

 

[Borman]

Nice to hear TD Cycles show up after this time. Worms is still missing from that era.

 

[Anthony817]

Atreyu817 was supposed to get that Worms Pinball game from the person who posted the video on YouTube. I arranged for them to exchange info and the guy was going to ship it to him after seeing his credentials in the community and what he did over the years. However, unfortunately the guy stopped responding. This was years and years ago by now, something like what, 7-8 years? Damn, time flies.

He also claimed to own a TD Cycles disc at one time before selling it off. Not sure what the deal was with that one because he typically shared every beta he owned from games I knew about back in the day.

 

[FatalistDC]

Wow! Fantastic news!

I have posted a link to this thread at the site I hang out most. Hopefully some of the people there will take notice!

Heroes of Might and Magic III Dreamcast unreleased community fundraiser - Dreamcast-Talk.com

Thanks!

 

[FatalistDC]

YES YES YES! I have been eagerly waiting for this moment to happen. Really happy you are open to doing this @FatalistDC

In terms of ripping the data, when using DreamShell / SD-card it's best use Dreamcast SD Rip (more information here)

If I recall correctly the disc you have was heavily scratched? If this is indeed the case, it might be wise to do multiple dumps with multiple systems. By doing this you might get more of the data of the disc.

Hi Wombat. Yes the GD-R was scratched from the beginning, is one of the most scratched GD-Rs I have but nothing critical I think.

 

[FatalistDC]

I'll do a video of Heroes this saturday and upload it to my channel. With sound I hope.
After Heroes III, Test Drive Cycles is next. Keep in mind that is a 2 - 5% demo game. There's a video on YouTube uploaded by someone that maybe too has the same build as me?

 

[darcagn]

I have seen dreamshell produce bad dumps before, but it should get the job done. You should dump the disc multiple times, hash the files and compare the hashes. Assuming it is a 3-track game, the track03.iso should be 1032499200 bytes. If that file size is correct and the hashes match after multiple dumps then it is fairly reasonable to say that you have produced a good backup.

I'm assuming you have a System Disc 2 and you're just swapping it in and out before dumping?