Anyone Here Know About Dreamcast Stuff?

[plopperz]

Well, I've just bought a Dreamcast off eBay and I'm having problems playing backups. It'll run the commercial games that came with it fine, as well as the utopia boot disc; but attempting to play a burned Crazy Taxi or Half-Life just makes a loud grinding noise. I've tried burning the CDI's with various settings in DiscJuggler, and all that did was give me a nice collection of coasters.
Any help is much appreciated

 

[Titcher]

I'll hazzard a guess that the grinding noise is the thing spinning up and such attempting to read the disc. The only advice I can give is to try better discs burned at lower speeds, as low as 4x or 8x.

 

[___]

Also, I can recommend alcohol 120% over disc juggler. It did a nicer job burning the images for me and it supports all the cdi formats DC games come in. Some of the cdi images I have downloaded in the past (some emulator discs and a couple of demos) were on older formats as I understood and as such disc juggler wasn't able to open them for some reason. I had a bunch of trouble with the program.

 

[satanic virus]

If you are downloading disc images, look for 'self-booting'. I burned many with disc juggler on lowest burn speeds and all worked no problems.

I assume you know this but just in case ... DC needs to use cdroms for backup games and not dvd's :rolleyes: I could not get games to run using Utopia boot disc, so resorted to the self booting ones instead. I did not spend much time on it however ..

 

[Consequence_9]

I used to frequent the US dcemu forums before they went under, and I remember this issue being discussed in depth.

Here's the basic premise:

The grinding is due to the laser having to move back and forth on the disk to read the data. On original gd-roms, most of the data was physically located closer to the center of the disc, so load noise was reduced. When one burns an image to a cd, that data gets spread out across the whole disc, resulting in the laser having to move further to read it. The solution to this is to create a dummy file approximately the size of the remainder of the space on the cd and have the burning program burn it to the disc after the game file. This squashes the game data towards the center of the cd, thus reducing grinding and possibly even load times. It's also much better for your gd-rom drive, and will probably increase the overall life of your console. just google how to make a dummy file.

Another thing you can do is lubricate the rods the laser assembly is on with some sewing machine oil or 3-in-1 oil (ya ya, ha ha ;P)

hope that helps!

 

[telegramguy]

Or... emulate it. my used core2duo with an old X700 runs nulldc great at 800x600

 

[___]

Or... emulate it. my used core2duo with an old X700 runs nulldc great at 800x600

Oh common... he just bought the console. Wtf? It's so much better to play the games on original hardware let alone own the original games.

 

[wraggster]

use an older version of discjuggler to burn the discs

tutorials here --> http://www.dcemu.co.uk/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=21626

 

[abertalia]

The grinding is due to the laser having to move back and forth on the disk to read the data. On original gd-roms, most of the data was physically located closer to the center of the disc, so load noise was reduced. When one burns an image to a cd, that data gets spread out across the whole disc, resulting in the laser having to move further to read it. The solution to this is to create a dummy file approximately the size of the remainder of the space on the cd and have the burning program burn it to the disc after the game file. This squashes the game data towards the center of the cd, thus reducing grinding and possibly even load times. It's also much better for your gd-rom drive, and will probably increase the overall life of your console. just google how to make a dummy file.

Thanks, that explains the reason why you hear about burned discs ruining the drives.

I had the same grinding/slowing problem with Dynamite Cop. Probably due to the speed like xnopasaranx said, as it wouldn't allow me to go lower than 16x speed with whatever program I was using.

I really don't feel like paying for Alcohol 120 <_<

 

[plopperz]

Thanks for the tips guys
Tried BootDreams, an older DiscJuggler, and Alcohol 120% at 4x with selfboots; more coasters
I've narrowed it down to either my CD-Rs suck (cheap brand I picked up from Wal-Mart) or my Dreamcast hates me.
I'll get some decent CDs and try that.

 

[b1ueskycomp1ex]

or my Dreamcast hates me.
I'll get some decent CDs and try that.

Really crappy CDs are usually the culprit. If not, then you might have one of the more difficult models of dreamcast to burn for. Bootdreams has worked wonders for me in the past.

Also, for whoever said about emulating dreamcast, my computer runs nulldc fine, as well, and it's:

2.2Ghz Athlon 64
2GB DDR1 Ram (crap)
Geforce 8400GS (also crap, like a low-end 7xxx Card)

So I know dual core definitely isn't a requirement, and I've run DC games with 1GB of ram just fine. It's the graphics card that needs to have a the power, and even that isn't so bad.

But we're talking about running games on DC =P