Making selfboot bleemcast games?

Just got a GDEmu, and i'm wanting to try out some ps1 games with. I have the bleem beta bootdisk, and I did try a selfbooting bleemed game with the GDemu and it works just fine. anybody able to help me out with what i'll need to do this?

 

What a coincidence somebody over at Dreamcast-Talk forums asked the same thing just today.

You said you already tried making a selfboot game so I assume you already have that part down right? I never have been able to get it up and running as it needs like Windows 98 or something else archaic to work.

I posted in this thread here and provided links to selfbooting script.

https://dreamcast-talk.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=655&p=112177#p112177

I posted that not even 3 hours ago lol.

P.S. I think you would like my Korean War Battlefield 2 total conversion mod if you click my banner in my signature.

Edit: I think you meant you only got them booting with boot disc now I reread it. You want to make selfbooting games check my link out.

 

huh, thats funny, even funnier is getting castlevania sotn is pretty much my primary intention too lol. i have a win2k vm doing nothing i'll give a go with, and if that doesn't work i've got an old P4 compaq pc i could load up with win98 and try there. btw it's good to see you still hanging around the dreamcast scene! i used to go by f34rthereaper(or some interation) back when dcisozone was a thing. i've been out for a a while now but trying to get back into it all

EDIT: I extracted a bleemed ps1 game and it seems like there's two tracks on it; track one is for the ps1 game and track 2 seems to be for the bleem emulator. Realistically could i not just replace that track with another ps1 game? i'll give that a try...

 

Ah wait were you the guy who did the Halo Revamped port for DC which was a modded Quake game? I remember that guys name was r34per?

If not, I do also remember your name on these forums over the years making a few posts here and there. But yeah, I have kept active in the community since my early days moderating dcisozone until now. Finally got a GDEMU of my own in August and have been on an even deeper dive trying to archive lost homebrew. Bleem games are what I have been interested in lately despite owning a jailbroke PS3 since August as well. Something about running those games on Dreamcast is more charming.

 

yep that was me! been thinking of working on it again now that i have a gdemu(the engine i want to use is wince), but i was in high school when i worked on it and i had more free time than i knew what to do; now not so much, i'm sure you know how that goes. And that's good! I'll probably bug you for some homebrew in that case

I did check out that bleem script, and i don't think it's needed per se. From the looks of it it just automates a few things and i think i can work around it using other tools. I've just gotta find out how the bleemed disks are organized and i might be able to make something happen. Do you by any change have any bleemed ps1 games?

 

Do I have any bleemed games? Lol, yeah I do bro. Go on Dreamcast-Talk after you log in. Peruse the download sections. I also posted in your thread recently trying to find the old Halo mod you made, and a guy came to the rescue and backed it up before TIZ nuked everything. Glad you are who I was thinking of, would be kinda weird if not. But how funny is it that I literally posted in your thread looking for your mod again lol.

https://dreamcast-talk.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=3513

And you can find the bleem games in the bleemed section. Kinda grey area so not gonna link it here. You do gotta be logged in to see downloads sections though.

Also, not to go too far off topic, but there is a new Quake port coming to DC of Quake World which is online only and with fully hardware rendered graphics, so your Halo mod could look pretty kick ass on that. I really need to get my Dreamcast online with DreamPi. So much has happened in the past few years regarding DC online games. Almost all of the games that ever supported online on DC are fully back up and working.

 

ooh cool i'll keep an eye out for that one! Not sure if you have a pi or not, but dreampi runs just fine a pi zero, which are only 5-6$ iirc. I've everything i need but a voltage inducer, do lots of people still play online? i've really wanted to play some AFO, PSU, and 4x4 evo again.

Also to stay on topic, i've been messing with some bleem disks i have, I extracted the contents of some selfbooting bleem cdi files with cdirip, and it gives me 4 files tdata01.bin tdisk.cue tdata02.bin and tdisk02.cue, the first being data for the ps1 game and the second bin/cue being the bleem data. Not sure what to do with them though from here, i tried to follow this guide- https://dreamcast-talk.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=8045 but i'm missing the bootfile.bin like it specifies, unless tdata02.bin would be that?

 

Mh not sure about that. All I know is the only way to get self booting bleem games is to create it with the script and burn your disc, then rip that image to share as a .cdi. at least that is how it was explained to me by Smith back in the day.

If there were another easier way I am sure others would have figured it out by now. Or maybe nobody gave it enough thought because of the incompleteness of the early betas and never cared enough to check more into it like you are doing? Either way I don;t want to discourage you, and I hope you can figure it out.

 

I'm not disagreeing with you at all about that at all haha, though if there is an easier way that more people can do readily i think is worth looking into. I'll keep at it and report if i've figured anything out

 

There's no easy way around selfboots with either audio tracks or variable 2nd session offset, BC! or not, except burning. That is until someone writes a low-level cd-burner emulator that properly supports multisession and mixed mode CD.

There might be a way to script it for the BC! games, but it would be much effort for little rewards.

You can burn to a CD-RW though, that's what I do to avoid wasting tons of discs.

Note that DCs don't read CD-RWs.

 

For sure keep us updated, I would like to see some progress with it myself as I am a huge PSX fan from back in the day. I love Sega stuff, but I didn't get a Saturn until 98, had a PSX in 97 though, so played more of those games up until about 2000 when I got a Dreamcast. After that I had a PS2 for a bit then went to Game Cube and then OG Xbox and then 360 and finally PC.

I did get a PS3 again in August and jailbroke it, so I can play PSX and software emulated PS2 games. But those don't have hardware acceleration like the awesome Dreamcast does with PSX games. So in a few cases games like Ridge Racer 1 can be 100% better emulated on Dreamcast since it has no analog, saves or FMV's that would not work in the first place. So those types of early games are best to play on it.

But keep us updated if you can figure something out, we all would appreciate it.

 

Sure they do. You just have to set the laser to "stir fry" and enjoy your six months of reading CD-RWs before the laser burns out.

 

Haha wtf?

 

They actually can read CD-RW, but you have to adjust the laser power with a potentiometer. That greatly diminished the lifetime or the laser diode though. Bottomline, don't do it, is not worth it.

 

DAEMON Tools (Mac v4 onwards; PC Ultra 3 or Lite 10 onwards) offers a Virtual Writable Device (Virtual Burner)
https://daemon-help.com/advanced/writablerom/

 

It wasn't sufficient to properly simulate burning selfboots last time I tried.

 

How was it lacking? Asking to save myself some time.

 

I'd say try it, maybe it's ok now. AFAIR, it didn't support multisession well.

 

You are correct, it does not

cdrecord -dev=x,x,x -msinfo​

doesn't return the required info (actually no useful info at all)

Going to try a bunch of similar Windows apps.

 

Just to be certain, you have to replace the 'x'-es by the actual address of the virtual drive. e.g. "1,0,0" or something. I think scanbus is the command to list the drives and their addresses.