Disclaimer:  Don’t copy Dreamcast games that you don’t already own, you’ll go to pound-me-in-the-ass prison if you get busted.

I recently discovered that you can download, burn, and play Sega Dreamcast games without ANY hardware modification.  I guess there was a huge vulnerability in it’s copy protection, to which code-junkies everywhere not only copied games, but made homebrew games and software such as Linux ports and emulators.

After I exclaim this fact, I usually get the response “Yeah, I’ve known that since it came out.”, but nobody I know personally has ever attempted using any of it.

In order to copy games that you already own, you will need a bunch of extra hardware and software, which is unnecessary due to the fact that just about every Sega Dreamcast game in existance has already been leaked to the net in a disc image format.  Original Dreamcast games are coded on a “GD-ROM” (Giga-Disc), and through some clever engineering from off-the-shelf parts, Sega was able to get 1.2 GB off ordinary CD-ROMs through using almost double density techniques… or something.  Groups who had all the fancy hardware to copy the games had to also somehow compress some of the data in order to allow the Dreamcast games to fit on a 700MB CD-R, I think they pretty much just compressed some of the audio and videos but I could be wrong…

There are TONS of YouTube videos and personal websites that go over in great detail on how to copy Dreamcast games, but it’s actually very simple.

Things you’ll need:

-Alcohol 120% Virtual Drive Software

-Padus DiscJuggler Burning Software

-Downloaded Disc Image (I’ve always seen them as *.cdi files but I’ve heard there’s some in .nrg format…)

-Blank CD-R

Note:  Lots of the disc images out there for Dreamcast games are archived in funky .rar files where it’ll be an archive full of archives. All you need to do if you get one of these is open the top archive file and extract the .cdi inside of  it… that’s it.

Step 1: Load the .cdi file into a virtual drive using Alcohol 120%

Step 2: Copy the virtual disc with ‘copy disc on the fly’ using DiscJuggler with the RAW read/write option toggled in the ‘advanced’ tab.  DON’T have it test or verify your compilation, it won’t know what it’s doing and end up wasting a blank CD.

Step 3: Wait for a long time while it burns your game and then test it with a Dreamcast.

I’ve gotten a hold of rotten images that don’t work no matter what, even after using that cdifix.exe utility. So if you get a hold of one of those, don’t try and muscle a working burn with it, you’ll just waste your discs.

There’s tons of different stuff out there that you can burn and run on the Dreamcast, here’s just a few:

-Bleemcast! is a Playstation emulator for the Dreamcast, which is only compatible with certain games, but it renders the games with better resolution than the Playstation could.  You download them and burn it together on one disc (no disc swapping required)

-Nester NES on the Dreamcast, which works pretty well.

-There’s an SNES emulator called DreamSNES but it sucks ass because it’s based off of SNES9X, which a 200MHZ PC cannot handle well, let alone a 200MHZ Sega Dreamcast.  Needless to say, don’t expect to play your games at fullspeed with DreamSNES… better yet, just skip playing with that one, it’s just headaches and heartache.

-There is also LinuxDC, which is pretty self-descriptive…  I haven’t tested it yet, but I probably will at some point.  (If you’ve played with Linux on the Dreamcast, feel free to comment about your experience)

So there you have it, new ways of playing with the ancient Sega Dreamcast.  I think toying around with the Dreamcast could be a good warm-up for those who want to port Linux to their PS3, but have no idea what they’re doing and don’t want to fuck-up their equipment.

Sweet Dreams.

Sources:

http://www.megagames.com/dc/dc_backup_faq.shtml

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamcast

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GD-ROM

..and tons of useless YouTube Videos

2 Responses to “Copying Sega Dreamcast Games – Give New Life To An Old Console”