Legend of Mana for Dreamcast
A port of the PlayStation game
Legend of Mana (North American release, SLUS-01013) to the
Sega Dreamcast, built from a byte-for-byte matching decompilation of the original game.
What works
- The whole game from the Squaresoft logo onward: menus, the world map, every field scene, battles, the ranch, shops and Home.
- Graphics on the PowerVR from the game's own PS1 drawing commands, the PS1's 320x240 drawn at 640x480.
- Music and sound effects through the game's own AKAO driver on the AICA sound chip, with the PS1's reverb.
- The FMV movies, decoded in software with their audio.
- Saves on the VMU, each PS1 save file kept as one compressed VMU file.
- Ring Ring Land on the VMU. The minigame the PS1 game sends to a PocketStation was decompiled and rewritten for the VMU. Sending a pet from the ranch installs it on the VMU, where you play it on its own.
- Dreamcast button art in the game's prompts and help screens, a second player on controller B, Jump Pack vibration, a soft reset (A+B+X+Y+Start) and 50/60 Hz on PAL consoles (Hold A on startup).
Playing it: the release kit
Each
release has a lom-dc-kit zip for Windows x64, Linux x64 and macOS (Apple silicon). It turns your disc image into the Dreamcast disc without Docker, Python or a compiler.
- Dump your Legend of Mana (USA) disc as a .cue and .bin.
- Unzip the kit and keep its kit folder next to the program.
- Run it with your disc:
- Windows: drag the .bin onto lom-dc-kit.exe, or run lom-dc-kit.exe "Legend of Mana (USA).bin".
- Linux: ./lom-dc-kit "Legend of Mana (USA).bin"
- macOS: xattr -d com.apple.quarantine lom-dc-kit, then ./lom-dc-kit "Legend of Mana (USA).bin"
- After a few minutes it writes a Legend of Mana (Dreamcast) folder beside your disc holding disc.gdi and three tracks, byte for byte the release's own build. Copy that folder to GDEMU or MODE, or open disc.gdi in an emulator.
About 2 GB of free space is needed while it runs. lom-dc-kit --help lists the options (-o for another output folder, --overwrite to replace an earlier GDI). The kit makes the GDI only; build from source for a CDI to burn.
