Final Fantasy - RCE or not-RCE?

[elfranko]

Happy new year everyone!

One of my lovely Crimbo pressies was the fab Final Fantasy. Play247 made a warning that this disc could be RCE cause a lot of people were complaining as such, although no notification has been made. My Cyberhome can play RCE's as its region settable, but I set it to region 13 (Multi) just to see the effect - sad as I am.

Any how, much to my surprise, both discs played straight away, no probs. I tried setting the region again to 13 and again it still played. Hmmm.

Then I installed DVD Killer on my software-region locked DVD player on my PC. Disc 2 worked fine, but disc 1 instantly came up with the RCE 'Region Map of the World'. Huh?

Comments?

frank

btw - thought the film was great; who thought the film lacked emotion or character? Both my wife and I, non-filmbuff and -buff respectively, were captivated and were drawn in by the characters, effected by the emotion and genuingly routing for the characters.
Only a good film, good characterisation and good scripting can draw you in like that. The only problem I had withit, and this is what may have annoyed most people I don't know, but it was the mixture of the Japanese 'Gaia' idea with American-type characters; this left me a tad confused by events and gave a kind of 'huh?' factor with the ending.

[neilalford]

Disk 1 is RCE, my Sony player wont play it (so I'm desperatly waiting for my X-Box DVD playback kit to arrive), Disk 2 isn't, but obviously I don't want to watch the making of before the film really.

[Lorne.t]

Disc 1 has RCE and disc 2 is ok on my toshiba,I think this is the general case.

[Dagada]

It plays fine on my PS2 with Region X.

If you've got a Tosh SD2109 there's a sneaky cheat to skip past the RCE. :) This works even if your machine is R2 only! Nice. Basically, all you need to do is to choose title 1 for the movie, or whatever for the extras, and press enter - it'll skip past the RCE and play the movie.

[elfranko]

Okay, so we know that it is RCE, but why is my machine still playing it even when set to region 13/Multi region? Isn't RCE supposed to kick in at this point, as it clearly does on my PC?

f

[ProgressiveScan]

Originally posted by elfranko
Okay, so we know that it is RCE, but why is my machine still playing it even when set to region 13/Multi region? Isn't RCE supposed to kick in at this point, as it clearly does on my PC?

f

Yeah, I was sad and tested it on a system I was making multi-region and managed to get the RCE to kick in.

Also tried it on my DVD-ROM player and it worked as well - both disc 1...

I think it's something to do with the handing over of the keys during the Region check.

[Paul Buglass]

Hi Frank,

The answer is simply that RCE can only 'catch' some multi-region players out, not all. It depends on the way a particular player makes itself multi-region.

When RCE was new there were many threads on the forums with people explaiing and guessing at how it works. The practical result is that many players work fine with RCE, such as Wharfedale 750S models and Dansai DV852, etc, while some result in the dreaded RCE map. This is why people with the capability to set their player to a specific region can have a second way of playing RCE DVDs if their multi-region setting falls foul of RCE. That's not to mention the various ways of 'fooling' some players such as various Tosh models etc to skip the RCE bit and play the disc.

Hope this helps.

Best wishes

/Paul B, York, UK.