Problems when making selfbooting image.

[Gondar]

Chankast made me dig up my good ol' Dreamcast (hello old buddy old friend, why did I leave you in the closet for soo long ).

Ok, here's my problem. It's seem to have been too long since I've been using it. After I've dumped an image to my PC (yes, yes.... I know what I'm doing, done it hundred of times in the past).

So, now I got a working iso on my hdd (tested on the console). BUT when I try to make it selfbootable the iso-file seems to get corrupt. I've tested every single program/guide I've found, same result. Yes I know how to convert iso/cdi/bin/whatever to other formats. The only thing I can think of is that it would be an WindosXP issue. I've done it in the past and it was a piece of cake. Why (oh why ) does the image become corrupt? I can't even mount it with virtual-daemon, or burn it for that matter.

I guess sooner or later Chankast will support utopia, so it's not a big deal. It's just so freaking annoying. It gets really annoying when you use some of the emulators on the DC (nes on DC... cool) where you first have to use Utopia, then the cd with the emu and THEN switch to the cd with roms :P

Specs: Got 5 computers.... 4 with WinXP and one with FreeBSD installed. Any selfboot programs for unix? Any clues anyone?

/sorry for my bad english..... you should see my german

[Rayden-X]

There are many selfboot tutorials of there. I know for unix systems you can use cdrecord and mkisofs to do it.

[Gondar]

Originally Posted by Rayden-X

There are many selfboot tutorials of there. I know for unix systems you can use cdrecord and mkisofs to do it.

Yes I know there are many tutorials out there.... I've done it before (allthough long time ago) and I've followed a couple of them to the letter. But still a no-go. And I thought that maybe WinXP needs something (like ASPI layers or something else) for it to work, that I've forgotten to install. Would be nice to know if someone else experienced the same problem.

I will however see if I can find it for unix and try it there tomorrow (right now I'm playing Jet Grind Radio. I had totally forgotten how fun it is).

offtopic: Seems noone tried Elemental Gimmick Gear on chankast yet. Did it never become popular? Funny but insanely hard game if you ask me. As close to Zelda as it gets on Dreamcast for those of you that don't know.

[zizozac]

does you created your iso using mkisofs ? if you created it as discussed in tutorials then it will not openned directly as i know ; you should burn that first as tutorials that discuss cdrecord said cause you make the starting of the new session is not 0 so it will be corrputted when you open it alone like this :

mkisofs -C 0,11111 -V gamename -l -o data.iso data

as you see if you used arugment -C number1,number2 and number2 is not 0 then it will seems to you it is corrputted

second ; why when you burn it doesn,t burned correctly ? the most reason to me cause your cd-writter is not supported by cdrecord itself .... try to download latest cdrecord and compile it then try again ; i hope that help

[Gondar]

Aha... tnx. Tried it with a friends cdburner instead of my Nec-1300 dvdburner, worked as a charm.

[edit:] Just figured out that it was "not" because of the burner. I switched brand on the cd-rw (to one supporting higher speed) and the problem went away.

[blast7]

Originally Posted by Gondar

Aha... tnx. Tried it with a friends cdburner instead of my Nec-1300 dvdburner, worked as a charm.

[edit:] Just figured out that it was "not" because of the burner. I switched brand on the cd-rw (to one supporting higher speed) and the problem went away.

I'm having this exact same problem when trying to create self-booting DC games (from non-self boot images). What was the solution? I've been using GQ 52x media to burn the discs (which have worked fine when burning images of DC games downloaded from the internet) and a Sony CD-RW Burner that's about a year and a half old (I also have a brand new Sony DVD Burner, but I haven't tried using it to burn DC games yet). I also have a copy of Nero and Alcohol 120% on my system in conjunction w/ cdrecord and mkisofs. Nero wont burn the ISO on a new Mode 2 session (it forces a no multi-session mode 1 burn) and Alcohol 120% only supports burning Images (no multi-session). So cdrecord is my only hope, yet the resulting disc will not boot in the DC. It causes a forced reboot of the DC, and no this is not a self boot game that I'm working with..... it is absolutely a non self-boot game that I downloaded and burned in BIN/CUE format then mounted w/ daemon tools and copies all the enclosed files to a folder on my HD before attempting the self boot tutorial process.

Like Gondar, I thought the problem was with WinXP or possibly mkisofs since the resulting ISO was corrupt, but it seems that this isn't the problem.

someone please help!!

[upwardexhalebwn]

Is the disk scratched ?

[blast7]

do you mean the disc I'm trying to burn the new selfboot image on? No it's a brand new blank disc...... same w/ the disc I burned the original non-selfboot CUE/BIN image on. Plus I can play the non-selfboot version on my DC just fine (w/ Utopia) and all the files are copied just fine in Windows explorer after I mount the CUE/BIN image.

I've tried this about a half dozen times so far w/ no success. cdrecord reports that each session burned correctly, but when viewing the newly created selfboot CD in windows explorer, only the audio.raw file is shown (I need to check some of my selfboot games to see if this is correct)

still in agony :-)

[blast7]

oh, and when I boot the game in DC it goes straight to the CD Playback screen and it shows two tracks..... when I go back to the DC "desktop" and choose "play" it immediately reboots and ends up at the CD playback screen again

[Riskbreaker927]

*whispers*I think utopia is already supported... you just have to have the right version of it, and the right version of daemon tools, i forget which of both but it's in another thread, keep it on the dl...
*runs into a dark alley*

[blast7]

huh? I don't think you understand the problem. Utopia is a boot disc for DC that allows you to boot non-selfboot games. I'm trying to use the Echelon method of turning a non-selfboot game into a selfboot game.... this has nothing to do w/ Utopia I only mentioned it because I can play the non-self boot version of the game using the Utopia boot disc, thus eliminating a bad image as the culprit.

:-)

[General Plot]

Originally Posted by blast7

huh? I don't think you understand the problem. Utopia is a boot disc for DC that allows you to boot non-selfboot games. I'm trying to use the Echelon method of turning a non-selfboot game into a selfboot game.... this has nothing to do w/ Utopia I only mentioned it because I can play the non-self boot version of the game using the Utopia boot disc, thus eliminating a bad image as the culprit.

:-)

Yes, but with the right version of Utopia, you can use it on the emulator, just like a real dreamcast to boot non self-boot games. Chankast does support this.

[blast7]

ah... I get it. Yes I'm aware that Utopia will work w/ Chankast but that's the whole problem. I don't want to have to use the boot disk anymore, it's a pain in the ass :-)

More info, I tried using BIN2BootGUI last night and then Alcohol 120% to burn the image and got the exact same results as when I used cdrecord and mkisofs. This leads me to believe that it is not a problem with my CD Burner (as Alcohol 120% has successfully burned many selfboot games for me) or with the cdrecord, mkisofs, or Alcohol 120% software. It seems like the bootsector hacking code in both these methods (do they use the same... BINHACK and IPINS?) seems to be doing the wrong thing. Or it could be the code that creates the new image file.

I'm still at a loss and would really appreciate some help here....... I'm running WinXP SP1 if that matters.

[KanedA]

same problem here with soul calibur can't make it right...

[blast7]

More info.......

I noticed when mounting the image of a self boot game (or looking at the files on a already burned selfboot CD) that works in my DC that the files I see are all the data files on the disk (not audio.raw) whereas when I use the Echelon method (or BIN2Boot) all I see is Audio.raw after burning the CD. Oh, and the Echelon or BIN2Boot method leave the image file corrupted, whereas all my other selfboot images mount just fine.

Can a DC expert please help me out? I'm a Software Enginneer so I'd really like to understand exactly what the difference is between a selfboot and non-selfboot game so I can stop using these "magic" apps and create a more robust program to convert non-sboot to sboot. Any info anyone has on developing DC games might help (such as the DC OS's APIs and file formats..... is there a dev kit for DC?)

So what method is being used by these games to make them selfboot? Does anyone know? Is the data supposed to be in the first session and audio.raw in the second?

[General Plot]

Here's a link to a site's image of a scan from the pages of the DC SDK (Software Development Kit). It shows where everything should be:


http://www.dreamcasthistory.com/hkt01.html

At the bottom of the page you'll see a link labeled "GD ROM" which will show a scan of the page.

[Bopig!]

Whoa. I've never seen a dev kit before. Looks like a custom PC which I assume it is. Very cool.

[General Plot]

Originally Posted by Bopig!

Whoa. I've never seen a dev kit before. Looks like a custom PC which I assume it is. Very cool.

Believe it or not, you can sometimes find those dev boxes on ebay for about $1,000 or so.
It's the originals that Sega gave to licensed software companies to make games for, but it only reads the GD-ROM's, you have to interface it with a real pc that has a special Hitachi GD burner to actually burn games onto blank GDR's (which can also be found on ebay from time to time). Definitely would be cool to mess around with.

[blast7]

yeah.... very cool site! I'd kill to get my hands on those manuals for a couple of weeks!

Oh, and while that layout of the GD-ROm was very interesting it's not really what I'm looking for. I'm trying to understand the file structure of CD-ROMS (not GD-ROMs) that are playable on the DC. That description of the GD-ROM was just showing what the different sectors on the disc are used for, not the file structure that explains how the boot process happens.

[General Plot]

Here's a site with ALOT of DC utilities. I'll bet there's something in the DC Boot Tools. Might be worth checking into.
http://www.megagames.com/dc/dc_utils.shtml