Hydra's-World

When you’ve got the files, do everyone else a favor and upload them somewhere else for others to get.

CRC Checking

When you’re downloading you’ll find that most of the ISO’s have been split up into several 15MB sized files. This is so they can be traded easier and are less prone to transfer errors than large 600MB+ files. Usually they’ll be compressed using archiving software like WinRAR or WinACE or just plain old WinZip. Sometimes you’ll find .RAR files inside a .ZIP file. Make sure you have the latest versions of these programs. Visit your local search engine to find them. As an added security measure a lot of good scene people use a CRC checking program on the files too. A commonly used one is SFV (SFV32.EXE), this program can make checksums of the files before the files are given to you, along with a list of the checksums for each of the files. When you’ve downloaded both the checksum list (.SFV) and the archives (.RAR or whatever) drop to a command prompt and change to the directory your files are in type in something like SFV32 -T “utp-dao2.rar” (Including the quotes). Then check the output of the program, if it says the files are bad then download them again. When you’ve got all the files extract them to a directory on your hard disk, making sure that your hard drive is de-fragmented first (an often over-looked cause of buffer-underruns). You should end up with (probably) a .BIN and a .CUE file. The .CUE file is for CDRWIN (See below) and it’s just a plain text file which you’ll need to edit and change the path of the .BIN file to where you extracted it to. E.g. change the line:

So that it reads:

or whatever path you used. Then save the file.

Currently all ISO’s and BootCD’s work with all Dreamcasts.

Known Problems

VGA Box

Well, not strictly a problem, but some people aren’t aware that not all Dreamcast games support the Scart lead/VGA Box, one such example is “Gauntlet Legends”. You must use a non-RGB cable for this, so if you live in the UK you must use a Lead which has “Composite, and Left + Right Audio only”, not an RGB Lead. Then you must connect that lead to your TV, hoping that it supports 60Hz Composite, not all TV’s do (most don’t) so you might need a Composite 60-50hz Converter. The one I use with my Saturn, NeoGeo and 3DO works fine for me. You can tell if a game doesn’t support RGB by trying to load it with a RGB Lead connected, the game will just reset the DC back to the menu without any messages or it will hang before the title screen appears. Note: With some games it’s possible to remove the RGB lead just after you insert the game CD, then wait about 30 seconds and plug the lead back in. This trick works on Gauntlet Legends but not with SFA3.

CUE Files

If you’re using BINChunker or FireBurner to open .CUE files and you get a “floating point error” then start up NotePad, and drag the .CUE file from Windows Explorer into NotePad and you’ll see something like this:

FILE "KAL-PS2.BIN" BINARY[]
TRACK 02 MODE1/2352[]
INDEX 01 00:00:00[]

What you need to do is to remove the little square boxes (which are CR characters) so that it looks like this:

FILE "KAL-PS2.BIN" BINARY
TRACK 02 MODE1/2352
INDEX 01 00:00:00

The save the file again. It should all be happy now, if not then post a message on the forums at DCISO’s

Burning the ISOs

First off, you’ll need a CD-Writer (duh!) and some blank CD’s. You may find that you need 80Min blanks to burn some of the bigger games.

After you’ve got hold of your CD-Rom images you need some software to write it to a CD. The best software around at the time for doing this was CDRWIN, by Goldenhawk Technologies. You’ll find that most CD-Rom images you can download are in the format that this program uses (.BIN and .CUE). Other people use FireBurner, which also accepts .CUE/.BIN files. The much newer ImgBurn should also work too.

Load up your favorite CD-Writing software and open the cue sheet (The .CUE file). In CDRWIN click the “Record Disc” button, then click “Load Cuesheet” and open the file. Then select your CD-Writer (if you have more than 1), set the recording speed (or just leave it on MAX) and click “Start Recording”. And voila! After about 10-30mins (depending on speed) your CD-Rom is burned! To verify the CD-Rom is burned, eject the CD and then insert it again (unless you know you don’t need to) and you should be able to list the contents of the CD (use Explorer or whatever).

More recently Dreamcast copies on CD have been released that are self booting. These CD-Rom images are normally in Disk Juggler format, so you’ll need to get hold of Disk Jugger 3.0 by Padus in order to burn them. The CDRWIN does not support multi-session CD-Rom images which must be used for these self-booting images which is why you need Disk Jugger instead. Again, ImgBurn might also work.

A CD copy of a Dreamcast game can be copied again and again using most CD copying programs, like CDRWIN.

Speed Loading Technique

CD-Rom drives read data from the outside of the CD at a higher transfer rate than the inside, so to make small games load faster you need to move the data from the inside of the CD where it’d normally be written to the outside of the CD. Here’s how I do it:

The new way

There is now a really easy way to do this, a kind programmer has released a program called DA.EXE.

Download DA from here.

This program inserts unused sectors before the main game data in the output ISO which you can use CDRWIN (or whatever) to burn. The program does NOT alter the order of the files in the resulting ISO, so they are left as they would appear on the CD if you burnt it normally. Using the old method changes the ordering of the files which might make the CD-Rom drive in your Dreamcast work more than the game designers had intended.. Using this new program leaves the ordering intact, so you’ll find the game loads even faster than the old dummy file method!

Right, get the DA program, and extract it somewhere into your system’s path, e.g. “C:\Windows”. When it’s there, and you’ve downloaded and extracted your .BIN file you need to drop to a command prompt and change directory to the location of the .BIN file. Make sure you have at least 650-800MB of Free disk space on a drive somewhere, then type in something like:

(Replace paths and filenames above as appropriate).

You’ll see a little menu come up, press 1 if you’re going to write the game to a 74Min CD, or 2 if you’re going to use an 80Min CD.

Then wait while your new .ISO and corresponding .CUE file are created for you.

In the example above you’d find GIGAWING.ISO and GIGAWING.CUE in your D:\TEMP directory.

Now load up CDRWIN and open the new .CUE file and burn it to a CD as you would normally.

That’s it, done!

The old way

You can do it the old way, using the following method, which I will leave here for those people who are curious.

Get hold of the following tools:

WinImage 5

FireBurner

A program to make dummy files. I suggest this one.

You also need some CD Writing software that supports the following features:

• File Priority
• Disc-at-once
• Ability to write Mode 1 – 2048 CD’s
• Ability to make ISO9660 Level 2 CD’s (filename lengths up to 31 Characters, NOT JOLIET64/256!)

Note: Dreamcast CD’s don’t mind having a Joliet directory structure, the Dreamcast ignores it, but you MUST have an ISO9660 Level 2 directory structure for games that use long filenames to work, like PowerStone 2 for instance.

There are other ways of making a CD without having software that supports file priority, but the method is not foolproof, nor easy.

Right, get hold of the .BIN and .CUE files for the game than you’re going to make faster.

Load up FireBurner, Click Visual Cue Burner, click the Right mouse button in the blank area, then click “Load Tracks from *.CUE.” Open the .CUE file.

A track listing should be displayed.

When you’ve got the CD Track listing displayed, click the right mouse button on the track and select “Save Track As (BINChunker)” from the menu. Click “OK” on the options (use defaults) then choose a directory to store your files in and click “OK”. After a while the .BIN will be converted to a .ISO file in the directory you chose.

Now close FireBurner.

Next, start up WinImage 5 and click “File/Open” from the menus, select “Files Of Type: ISO CD-File” and open your .ISO file.

You should see the contents of the CD-Rom listed similar to the view you have in Explorer.

Make a note of the Volume Name, shown in the top right hand side of the WinImage window. (or copy it to the clipboard). We’ll use this later.

Now we need to extract all the files from the .ISO, so create a directory to hold them all (don’t put the files in a directory with other files in it, use a NEW directory).

Now click “Image/Extract” and select “Extract with Pathname” (very important!!), select your new directory and click “OK”. After a while you’ll have a load of files in your new directory. Note: If you fancy altering any of the files that the game uses, like default high scores and so on, now’s the time! :-) Anyway, back to business.

Now start your CD-Writing software and import the files into a new session. Make sure that you use the following options for the CD:

• ISO9660 Level 2 (31 Character filenames).
• NO-JOLIET, UDF or HFS file system. (Very important)
• Disk-At-Once.
• Finalize Session.

Make sure your software does support 31 character file names, if you see names in the 8.3 format that contain the ~ character the game will NOT work! e.g. DATAFI~1.BIN instead of “DATAFILEWITHALONGNAME.BIN”.

Create a dummy file so that when combined with the existing files in the session there is very little (1MB or so) free space left on the CD.