So, the keyboard and mouse arrived, and I found out they're not the issue.
Immense thanks to Andy for pointing me towards this, or I would have wasted hours.
The OS is protected, so any changes made or drivers found wont persist through reboots. But this is easily disabled in command prompt.
So, I just had to sit and wait for about 5 mins for it to grab drivers for my devices and then I could start playing.
As I expected, the game wasn't booting because the motherboard didn't recognise the GPU, so un-protecting the OS from changes, and getting those drivers recognised fixed that issue!
Next, getting booted -:
I initially thought I could just bypass Konami's boot script and boot straight into gti3.exe, you can, but you need to ensure volume is set and enabled first. Thankfully in the gti folder on the D: drive there is a batch file that boots the game that does that for us.
So to bypass iKey check 1 we have two options:
Bypass idrec, or replace the script with Konami's other one to boot straight into GTI3.
I went for the former, purely because both me and my dad prefer the look of the game "checking" itself before booting, and bypassing idrec is as simple as just removing it from the script, which is handy having, because it will flag potential hard drive errors and other items.
now, I just need to instal our PCI to Serial drivers (I need a CD drive *sigh*) and we are good to go on the real machine!
I am working on bypassing the iKey in the background still, this is mainly so that we can keep these machines alive, and theoretically, with any hardware you can find. I can even look to patch it to make 4k possible, solid 60fps etc so we can really get the most out of these machines. And amp them to 11 (if you want to ofc).
These are further down the line dreams though. As I don't want the standard for these arcade machines to be "Oh, either spend £500 on a new Konami PC unit, or use technoparrot". This is a PC, this should be as easy as drop in replacements wherever you need to. Spending £200 on a motherboard for a duo cab that already costs you an arm and a leg is absurd when there are so many options out there that will work with a few extra steps on this platform.
Love or hate what I'm doing, I want to keep these machines alive, and as close to the real experience (or enhanced) without having to sell your left kidney to do so.
Once I'm done, it'll all be on archive.org, I'll also be posting steps on how to convert your OS to the same so you can keep your race data, or publish a script to do it for you (or both).
GTI Club: Supermini Festa
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- Posts: 26
- Joined: June 16th, 2024, 10:05 pm
- Location: Wales
- eBay: https://www.ebay.co.uk/usr/sco
- Initials: JTD
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Re: GTI Club: Supermini Festa
You got the game booting yet?
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- Posts: 26
- Joined: June 16th, 2024, 10:05 pm
- Location: Wales
- eBay: https://www.ebay.co.uk/usr/sco
- Initials: JTD
Re: GTI Club: Supermini Festa
I haven't been down to the machine yet and probably won't until next weekend.
I can forsee an issue with the serial port config, as I doubt they communicate over defaults but that should a case of just changing settings.
Failing that I just need to look harder at beating the iKey. It makes 1 call at this point so hopefully I can just set all the iKey flags to "yes" in gti3 and it's fine.