*Temporary edit by Aleron Ives*
Since BlueCrab seems to be dealing with the aftermath of the hurricane, I sadly must make this edit for him instead. A serious bug has been discovered in the loader disc which causes problems like those associated with the Utopia boot disc. You can’t target enemies with Rafoie, you can’t use Shifta and Deband on other players, and other things. Please don’t try to download it until a solution is devised. I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news…
*The original post follows*
So, I had posted on my Twitter a few weeks back about a big announcement coming up with regard to PSO, and I’m finally ready to make that announcement. I probably would have waited a bit, since I really wanted to have the news available in Japanese as well, but various circumstances happened, and I’d rather get this out now than wait any more.
As you probably know (if you play PSO on the Dreamcast), several versions of the game (USv2, JPv1, and JPv2) are reliant on a specific Sega server that no longer exists called the Hunter’s License server. Well, long story short, with a lot of research and studying, I was finally able to defeat that check to get those versions back online. I’ll go further into details on this a bit later in the post, but there is more to the announcement before that.
You may have noticed (if you play PSO on the PC as well) that Sylverant’s patch server has been sending out updated versions of the PSO binaries that have a fix for some maps in Ultimate mode integrated. This fix, which enables a few maps in Ultimate mode that Sega seems to have forgotten in v2, was up until this point only available for PSO for PC. Well, now I can say that it is also available for the Dreamcast versions of PSOv2 as well (US, Japanese, and European), thanks again to Aleron Ives’ work (and some of my own).
Both of these patches, as well as a patch to force PSO to connect to sylverant.net directly (so you don’t need to use the DNS trick with a BBA or a nasty Codebreaker code with dialup) have been integrated into a program that I’ve written for the Dreamcast that I’m calling Sylverant PSO Patcher. Sylverant PSO Patcher effectively acts as a boot-disc for PSO (legitimate GD-ROMs only — it does not and will not ever work with CD-R copies), that will automatically patch the game and launch it.
The Connecting to Sylverant page (the “Connect” link in the menu) has been updated to reflect how to connect to the server with the newly supported versions, both using Codebreaker and using Sylverant PSO Patcher.
More details are available if you wish to continue reading…
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