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Maybe you have a rare, previously unknown, second revision of Soul Fighter? I think Hydro Thunder was first released with zero VGA support, then rereleased with an odd VGA mode that doesn't work well on LCD/HDMI (but it works fine for me with my CRT). If you can dump it, try comparing it against the TOSEC release. My Soul Fighter GD did not work on VGA, even bypassing the BIOS check.

Try to see what product code is written on the inner edge of the GD.

TapamN wrote:Maybe you have a rare, previously unknown, second revision of Soul Fighter? I think Hydro Thunder was first released with zero VGA support, then rereleased with an odd VGA mode that doesn't work well on LCD/HDMI (but it works fine for me with my CRT). If you can dump it, try comparing it against the TOSEC release. My Soul Fighter GD did not work on VGA, even bypassing the BIOS check.

Try to see what code there is written on the inner ring of the GD.

I doubt it considering the one on my IDE-modded Dreamcast is just the v1.0 GDI that's floating about the internet.

Can you get an MD5 hash of track 15?

Ok, so upon further testing, it seems like it's the TV that makes the difference. It works fine plugged into my capture card and also works when plugged directly into my computer monitor but when I tried it on an LCD TV I have, it said the signal isn't supported.

It seems the signal it's outputting over VGA isn't typical and thus isn't supported by some TVs.

Edit: I wonder if this is the case with Hydro Thunder as well. Maybe it doesn't have anything to do with the version of the game at all, but the TV. Or maybe it's both?

Edit 2: Just noticed you already mentioned that in your post above. lol Well in my case Hydro Thunder works on the same displays as Soul Fighter does. I'll have to test it on that same LCD that Soul Fighter failed to work on and see if I get the same result.

Edit 3: Hydro Thunder seems to be the same but different. It will output video on my LCD TV but it's all bugged out, flashing between the game and a black screen. So another weird signal but not exactly the same as Soul Fighter.

Oh, that's interesting. What monitor are you using? Soul Fighter would definitely have been outputting an interlaced signal. Does the capture device support composite/s-video too? I could understand how a capture device that supports both NTSC and VGA might also handle interlaced VGA. I have a capture device that supports VGA and composite/s-video, but I've never tried feeding Soul Fighter into that. I guess some monitors might support NTSC timings, but I think it would be very unusual for anything past early 90s.

The monitor is a fairly recent one. It's an AOC 24B1XHS. The capture device is a Startech USB3HDCAP. It handles pretty much any signal you throw at it, including 240p over component, which is why I bought it.

I have the exact same StarTech capture. Maybe the monitor uses a similar chip to what StarTech uses to digitize the VGA signal, which is how it ends up compatible?

I looked at Airforce Delta, and this is not a finished, working patch, but you kind of get it to run with this CB code:

0f01ff0e
0000e401

The original game runs at 320x480, but this incomplete patch runs at 640x480. Everything is squashed horizontally, with the intended visible area on the left half of the screen. The right half is what you get when you have an emulator try to do widescreen without a patch. It still seems to run full speed on the first stage, despite doubling the resolution, but later stages might have slowdown or run out of texture memory due to the larger frame buffer.

Howdy. Is there a CDI?

Long ago I would VGA Black Matrix+Bangaio when I used to have flatscreen and Toro box. Reverse switch trick called them 720x240

Concerning Hydro Thunder VGA, our friend and video expert, chriz2600 says, "The VGA mode of HT is completely broken. The video signal alternates between 525 (which is correct) and 524 lines, sometimes it's not putting out any horizontal sync at all."

Yep, I'd call that broken.