Toejam & Earl 3 - Dreamcast Beta

If you are having trouble contacting assembler wouldnt one of the mods be able to pass down the word of you wanting to make a fundraiser for an unreleased game? And maybe a physical pressing is not a good idea seeing how the final game actually came out.

 

x

 

I've never use a devkit myself, sadly, but I believe it's similar to what you're describing with "project files". There's tools in the SDK to build the isos and description files required for burning gd-r or for mastering, but they're different from the ones to operate the gd-m. In any case, when playing a game on a devkit, you can log the gd-m access and see which "sectors" have been read on the drive emulator. The gd-m hdd is typically a 4gb drive with two 2gb partitions, each could contain a game build.

 

It's as you say, the project files contain a full map of what files on the hard drive map to what sectors on the virtual GD-ROM. The files are setup in folders according to which disc, session and track they have been allocated to. For example, "D1S2T3". Inside of these folders the raw files that you've added to the project exist according to the hierarchical folder structure of where they were copied from.

You can have audio files within a data "track", which will exist as raw files on the hard drive. You can also have audio "tracks", which would be a '.raw' file in WAV (typical CDDA) format.

 

Glad to hear this coming along so promisingly. Good work to everyone involved.

 

IIRC you can use GD Workshop to master the file you'd then push to a burner. It's actually a pretty cool setup all things considered though I'd love to get my hands on one. Too bad I'm not interested in spending more than $300.

I'm also quite interested in donating.

 

x

 

If the modified file is the exact same size, then you could replace it directly through Windows Explorer and not alter the project in GD Workshop. If the modified file is a different size, you would probably want to remove the original file through GD workshop and insert the modified file into your existing project.

 

GD-Workshop makes building an bootable GD-ROM (emulated or real GD) really easy.
You copy your game data to the internal HDD of the devkit, then just drag and drop the files onto a track and it imports all the files into your GD-ROM project.
When you done that, you specify where the IP and IP000.BIN files are and hit "Close GD-ROM Door"

What GD-Workshop then does is that it links all the files that you have in your project with the files that are on the internal HDD of the devkit.
So when you change a file on the devkit, you just click "Open Drive door" and hit "Close Drive door" and it rebuilds the project. And the time it takes is about 5-10 seconds to rebuild the thing

Where GD-Workshop is also very easy, is that you can log all activity and let it optimize your project automaticaly (Start profiler, set it to Count by Hits and play the game. After playing stop the profiler and it rearranges the files by amount of access hits)

After optimization you can burn it to GD-ROM via a GD-ROM burner attached via SCSI (I don't have one of those unfortunately) directly from GD-Workshop

 

Beware, this thread has been picked up by the gaming press. I wish the ball was already rolling so we could quickly finish it up, before any unwanted sega lawyers swing by.

 

Indeed the word is being spread, did we have any issues with previous releases? I don't think this release would hit their sales, TJE3 on Xbox did not have raving reviews!!! Anything positive about SEGA like this release can only help them, unless it's only run by lawyers and accountants nowadays...

 

x

 

As they say possession is 9/10th of the law and they don't physically have this kit anymore. Their loss.

 

My fundraiser for Microsoft n64 prototypes was shut down. It isn't unheard of.

 

But you just released everything freely, then had no legal hassle isn't it?

 

The content preemptively found its way to the web prior to any legal notice, because someone *cough* thought ahead once the gaming press picked up on it. It took a few weeks to shut down the fundraiser that was raising money for the games, but had that someone (cough) lagged, the games may not have been out there.

 

Can you tell us more about the copy protection?

And I wonder why a game has a copy protection so early.

 

I would guess that was done for the beta in case someone at SEGA tried to leak it out or something.

 

There is one obscure LBA reference (a non-standard one implying a shld operand) but it's not a problem using my pack. I think this is the 2Ksports-like hack.
There is also a media check to verify it's on a gd-rom, this had to be cracked (only one byte to change!). I don't know if this one is in the 2Ksports series, I never messed with them.

 

When or if this ever got released I'd download and just burn to the disc, same thing to me if it's being played on the system as a pressed one. Still plan on trying to land a donation when that starts up.