Hey all, I've got a USB GDRom on the way and would like to rip my own copies of my Dreamcast collection to GDI's. I've been trying to research the topic for AGES...still can't figure out what it is I have to do exactly. I'd prefer not to have to hard mod a system in order to dump them, buying an SD adpater, or Broadband adapter is perfectly fine by me. I can't seem to figure out what the heck to do! I'd prefer to avoid physical modification, and the less setup to dump the disc, the nicer even if it means it takes longer to dump the disc. I know of GDITools and GDIBuilder...but those seem to just work with the files once everything's been dumped, and I can't even get past step 1 of just dumping a disc. If I can dump a disc from my Dreamcast I would assume the use of those tools will become much more obvious. Can anyone help me get started? I wouldn't mind writing up a "how-to" after I find some success, as I'm sure many others will have similar questions as these devices get more popular.
Burn httpd-ack to a CD-R, put it in a Dreamcast that has a BBA, swap the httpd-ack disc for the game you want to rip after httpd-ack has booted, then go to the LAN IP address of that Dreamcast with the web browser on your PC. You'll see a nice web page telling you the layout of your disc. Click on each track to save it to a file on your PC by downloading it with your web browser. Once you have every track, save the GDI file, and you're done with that disc. If you want to be sure your rip is good, head over to TOSEC to grab their latest database and compare your files' checksums with those in the database.
You can also use a serial sd-card adapter, which is NOT a gdemu/gdusb, to dump proper TOSEC-consistent GDIs at a fraction of the cost of a BBA. It's a bit slower though.
I think I'll go the broadband route...I'll have to pick up an adapter. In terms of hooking up the DC to the network, straight to my router, bridged connection with a laptop, or crossover cable, or does it not matter?
The BBA gives you all the same networking options as an Ethernet-connected PC would have. You can connect it to your network however you want, although simpler is usually better in terms of game stability (if you plan to do any online gaming). I connect my BBA to my router along with my other PCs.
Holy crap...I've dumped about half of my collection, but I don't think I have a single rip that matches the TOSEC MD5/SHA hashes...Is that normal? Should I be trying to re-rip each track multiple times? My GDI file and track 1 tend to always match, but past that...not usually. I did expect that with some of my games as they're are some with scratches, but some are pretty much flawless discs.
Are your files at least the same size? You must dump in 2352 mode and not 2048 mode for your files to match those in the database. If you have httpd-ack set to retry on read errors, you should see a list of the errored sectors on your TV. The default setting is to abort after something like 5 failed reads, so you shouldn't get bad dumps unless you disabled that setting. On another note, I'm not exactly sure why TOSEC uses 2352 mode. It may have made sense in the PSX era when certain games used false error correction data as a method of copy protection, but I'm not aware of any DC game that does it, so you're pretty much just wasting space by dumping the EDC when it's not necessary and something that you could restore later with GDIBuilder if you really wanted to for some reason.
They use 2352 bytes/sector because they didn't know if games used the EDC/ECC, now that we're sure it's not the case, it's pointless.
httpd-ack dumps 2352 by default anyway. You're fine. It's normal. I dumped every single one of my discs with httpd-ack too, and saw the same situation. My dumps were all valid, no read errors, and consistent. I think some of the TOSEC hashes are against bad dumps made using PC drives, like redump did. I played through many of my dumped discs from start to finish without running into any problems. If the dump boots and you didn't get errors dumping, don't worry about it.
I'll double check my settings then...Otherwise things have gone pretty well. I plan on posting a little write up of what I had to do. Which as everyone has said, isn't too hard but it's always nice to have as a reference.
