Dumping Dreamcast GD-ROM/GD-R Discs

Redump them and check if it's consistent, ideally with two Dreamcast. Also post the checksums to the dumpcast forum so others can confirm or infirm that it's a good dump in the future.

 

Just thought I would throw a quick comment into here:

Using the SD card adapter I am able to not only rip Dreamcast games but it also works for making full GDI dumps of my Naomi and Naomi 2 GD-Rom games.

 

There's also a certain Samsung drive which has an identical laser to a certain early dc gdrom revision. The story goes that Samsung supplied the drive to Sega and then repackaged and sold the surplus gdroms as pc cdroms/burners.

This is the drive I'm talking about:


EDIT: Here's the original youtube video where I heard it, he starts talking about it from 12:00.
ps. It's in russian

 

Is there a link somewhere to this sd-card cable method? I recently acquired a GDROM which I want to dump for use on an emulator but all links I was able to find were long evaporated into Internet limbos. It looks like all previous guides are now long gone.

 

You mean a gd-rom, or a gd-r?

For the former, simply use dcsdrip 1.1 (http://jj1odm.qp.land.to/dcserial_ft232bm.php#dcsdrip) or dreamshell.

For the latter, use the technique described in this document by dot50cal and myself (http://www.mediafire.com/?cnbkymnjomt) but use the sd ripper instead of the bba.

Both kind of disc can be dumped from a pc using a swap trick too, although very few drives work well for that. Lite-On ltd-165h worked for me for most games. Here's a tutorial in French (http://www.dreamagain.fr/tutos-dreamcast/94-soft-ripper-un-gd-rom-avec-le-lecteur-de-son-pc).

 

Thanks for the links!
However, the first one seems very down at the moment so I have not been able to access it. It always feels weird that this information is really hard to find in a proper dreamcast wiki and always has to be looked for on obscure and hidden web sites...

Also I have no idea what a GD-R is but I am fairly sure the disc I want to dump (Yu Suzuki game works) is a GD-ROM.
For the moment I am still stuck but I will retry the links you provided later.

 

You're welcome!

A gd-r is a recordable gd-rom that developers used to burn alpha/beta/test versions of software. It has a distinctive orange or blue labelling and doesn't include the ring with the sega stuff written on it on the data side. It does not boot on a retail console using normal means.

Here's a link to a mirror for that website: http://jj1odm.sizious.com/dcserial_ft232bm.html#dcsdrip

 

Thanks again for the information and for the link! The electronics required seem simple enough so I only need to get my hands on a Dreamcast.

The disc I want to dump is indeed a GD-ROM, I have found some dumps of it on the net but I would rather produce one myself since I have not found a database of Dreamcast disc hashes to verify that its integrity (maybe I did not search long enough though).

If I understand correctly, the SDCard method still relies on an exploit of some kind in order to execute some unprotected/verified code on the DC and this code can then proceed to copy the content of the GDROM on an SDCard plugged into the serial port.
I have been looking into the source code of DC disc dumping tool and/or of the corresponding exploits but there does not seem to be any available, is there a framework somewhere which would allow to reliably create these dumping tools?

 

DCSDRIP isn't open sourced AFAIK. A simple way to execute it a on Dreamcast is to burn a CD-R of DreamShell and put the dcsdrip executable on the SD-Card. Then you can use DreamShell to execute dcsdrip and you're in buisiness. DreamShell can also dump a disc to the sd-card, but I found dcsdrip to be reliably faster, and it's made by the guy that actually designed the SD-Card adapter. Dreamshell sourcecode is available on github: https://github.com/DC-SWAT/DreamShell.

The hash database for Dreamcast is called Dumpcast, I think it merged with TOSEC in the last months/years. In any case, looking for either database should provide you with proper checksums to compare to.

EDIT:
For clarity, in case you didn't know: Dreamcast homebrews that are properly crafted into a CDI image, like DreamShell, simply work as a CD-R. No console modification is required; just burn the CDI image with DiscJuggler or IMGBurn and the proper libraries.

Notoriously, the same is true for hacked commercial games, hence the warez golden-age of Dreamcast.