Unable to play Mirklings on Dreamcast

[Widge-5]

Hi there, i posted a comment on the itch.io age, but thought it might reach you if i posted an issue here instead.
I realise this project is 8 years old now, but I hope you might be able to resolve this issue.

I've tried to play Mirklings on two different Dreamcasts with no success.
I get the same result on both a DC modified with a GDEmu, running the CDI file directly, as well as on an unmodified CD using a burned CD-R.
The Dreamcast swirl logo shows as normal, followed by the Sega licensing screen (with the Not/Mirklings Executable graphic), but then, instead of going to the Dogma logo screen I get this weird graphical garbage on the screen. It's hard for me to explain it, so I recorded my CRT to show you:

As it happens on both a modded and unmodded console, i don't think it's a fault with the GDEmu, or the disc.
However, both of my consoles are PAL region.
I asked a friend in North America to try it out for me on his NTSC console, and he burned a CD-R with the same cdi from itch.io and had no difficulty getting into the game. So is this a region issue then?

I also tried in an emulator, Libretro Flycast on Raspberry Pi 5, as well as standalone Flycast on Windows, and it runs, even if I change the region to Europe (so it's not a region issue?). But the gun behaves oddly in the emulator - it doesn't track as it should and is inconsistent. Sometimes its stuck in one part of the screen, sometimes it only uses 50% of the screen on one side only... its unfortunately unplayable. 😢

The website version seemed to play perfectly fine in the web page though.

So really, there's two issues here, Unable to load the game properly on a real Dreamcast and unable to control the game in an emulator.

Do you have any idea what's going on here?

Thank you so much.

[Widge-5]

Little progress update here.

I tried the Dogma: The Golden Age compilation CDI and that actually loaded for me. i could launch Mirklings from there and actually get into the game. How strange that the compilation worked ok, but the standalone does not.

But I actually found that the same targeting issues were still present as I had observed in the emulators. The game doesn't seem to care where I'm aiming, the majority of shots just land in the center of the screen, with only occasional deviation to one of the far edges. Then it just crashes in less than 30 seconds.
So at least now I know that that issue wasn't just emulator-specific. It exists on real hardware too.

So sadly, the game is still totally unplayable, even if i can get it started on the Dreamcast or in an emulator.

It was so much fun to play in the web page, i was really looking forward to playing this on the actual Dreamcast. I hope that you one day manage to solve this.

[CaptainDreamcast]

Thanks a lot for taking the time to let me know about the issues and for taking the time to investigate!
The Golden Age compilation disc is technically just all the Mirklings code copypasted in there, but the underlying engine has six months more of bugfixes to it, so maybe that is what made it start up? Mirklings did work on my PAL Dreamcast when I tested it back then. Had a bit of an issue finding a TV the light gun works with for testing iirc (I ended up testing it at a friend's place), and I think I also noticed it wasn't working very well, but just barely well enough to get by (iirc the Dreamcast version also has less Mirklings so it doesn't slow down.) Crashes sound new to me, especially if they are so persistent. While I sometimes take a lax approach to fps performance values, try not to publish games when they're crashing, so I'm very sorry that it's crashing for you so persistently. No clue what could be causing this unfortunately. I would have also maybe slightly nudged towards a region issue (at least for startup), but the emulator experiments pretty much rule that out.

Regarding the light gun: Due to a lack of CRT TV I actually never looked into using the peripheral again (which is a shame). It's still there in the code, maybe I'll try making a new small proof of concept to figure out what's going on there, now that flycast works to pretty reliably emulate it. My current best guess would be that I messed up something using KallistiOS' light gun functionality and that's why it's all over the place.

Not sure when I'll get around to looking into it unfortunately, but I'll keep this open and let you know when I find out what could have been causing it. Thanks a lot again for taking the time to write all of your findings down and sharing them with me!

[Widge-5]

Thanks so much for the reply.
I have a little more information now. I have recently replaced the bios chip in one of my Dreamcasts with a "cake" bios chip. It still technically presents itself as PAL console, but is now effectively region-free.

I tried Mirklings, and it starts up fine. Of course it still has the aiming issue though, so not playable, and before long (around 10 seconds of gameplay) the screen just goes fully black. I had the same experience in the emulator, sorry I didn't mention that before.

I've also got my hands on an unmodified Japanese console (unmodified except for the power supply of course) and that was able to load Mirklings from a CDR without trouble, but the gameplay issues were still present.

So this confirms that the emulator experience aligns with real consoles, and maybe that the loading issue is related to PAL bios.

If you do choose to work on this game again at any time, I'd be happy to assist with more compatibility testing.

[CaptainDreamcast]

Thanks a lot for the further info! It really sounds like the PAL version is broken completely. I'd still vaguely blame the framerate select screen, because that one is the most prominent differences between versions, it might have been broken during Mirklings for some reason (although how is still a mystery to me, I'm pretty sure tested with it back then).

The crash after a while sounds like it could be the mirklings not being unloaded properly. I vaguely remember there being some issues, that I thought were fixed in the compilation disc, but evidently not. It's been a long time though, I'm not sure how accurate my memory on that is, I might be mixing it up with a similar bug in another game.

Good to know that the emulator experience is accurate enough to debug with it, that helps a lot with the light gun debugging! Still haven't gotten the chance to look into it further unfortunately, like I said, I'd first try to get some small light gun sample up and running to fix that, and then see if Mirklings can be ported to the current version of the engine somehow. I'll let you know when I have found anything more. Again, thanks a lot for taking the time to test the different versions and share your findings!