Dreamcast GD-Roms and piracy

[Bill Brasky]

I read that there was some trickery involved in getting Dreamcast games to fit onto a cd-r, but most PS One and PC games don't use anywhere near the full capacity of a regular cd-rom. I imagine most Dreamcast GD-rom games are the same, using only a fraction of available space. Why wouldn't they be able to be copied directly to a cd-r, without compression or removing audio files?

[christianscott27]

I used to burn DC games from time to time, I always found everything I needed here , they're still active in fact. I believe the issue wasnt the space required but rather the way the data was laid out on the CD. IIRC it was something like the difference between a clockwise spiral and a counterclockwise spiral, in other words you had to create the right structure for the DC to read the burnt game disc. About one out of every four discs I'd burn would end up being coasters, it wasnt the most fool proof piracy.

[Bill Brasky]

I see. Are there any single disc games that they could never copy? I read some games that come on 2-4 discs were a problem because it would do some kind of check when you switched discs.

[SINGLE TOOTH]

The Dreamcast uses a GD-ROM format whereas Playstation uses a normal CD. The GD-Rom can hold about a Gigabyte of information compared to about 700 megabytes of a CDROM.

That is why you can't copy games directly; your computer cdrom cannot read a GDROM. What the pirates did, is burned a custom disc with special software and used the used the Dreamcast's own GDROM to read the games then send the disc image out the Broadband adapter to another computer.

 

As far as space goes, It depends on the game... There are games that use the whole disc, span several discs, or only use a small percentage of the disc.

 

As far as I know, just about every game can be burned, with the proper methods. There may be a few that cannot be burned, but I don't recall them.

 

If the game did use the full gigabyte capacity of the GDROM, the pirates would then rip the game. Ripping a game entails either removing certain things like music or cutscenes, or simply compressing them.

Edited July 16, 2007 by SINGLE TOOTH

[Shawn]

You dumb down the frame rate on the videos and reduce the bit rate on the audio files and\or just remove the video files and all dc games are able to fit on single disc (or spanned disc sets if it's a multiple disc game). It's pretty easy to do, I did alot just to add custom soundtracks and to remove retarded load video's I didn't like. Half the time the GD-ROM is just buffed out with a huge junk file to fill out the disc as alot fo the DC games are around 500 to 800MB.

[yuppicide]

The Dreamcast had to be the easiest thing ever to hack. I remember my friend pre-ordered one, picked up the system the day it came out and less than a week later had about 75 games. Alright, I'm not sure it was a week since I am not sure how quickly games came out, but it was so quick to me it seemed like overnight he instantly had all these games.

[Bill Brasky]

Half the time the GD-ROM is just buffed out with a huge junk file to fill out the disc as alot fo the DC games are around 500 to 800MB.

 

That's what I figured they were doing a lot of the time.

[yuppicide]

Nintendo DS is the same way .I believe the cart sizes are 128M, 256M, 512M, etc. and they are filled with nothing to use up the space. When you download an NDS game off the internet they have a program that will strip off the excess crap to save you space on your memory card.

[SINGLE TOOTH]

Nintendo DS is the same way .I believe the cart sizes are 128M, 256M, 512M, etc. and they are filled with nothing to use up the space. When you download an NDS game off the internet they have a program that will strip off the excess crap to save you space on your memory card.

 

On a Optical Disc they usally put the garbage files on the beginning of the disc to push the usable data out toward the edge of the disc to get better read speeds.

Not sure why they would do it on a DS though.

[stvd]

Half the time the GD-ROM is just buffed out with a huge junk file to fill out the disc as alot fo the DC games are around 500 to 800MB.

 

That's what I figured they were doing a lot of the time.

 

That has a lot to do with it as demonstrated by Ikaruga.

IIRC it's less than 20mb to download but when you uncompress it it

increases to @800mb :0

[Fighter17]

I'm always surprise that Ikaruga is like 20 MB compress. >.>

 

I'm always surprise what hackers can do to anything electronic.