13 replies to this topic

[ATARIeric]

is it possible to burn my atari roms on cdr's and insert it into my dreamcast and play them that way? do i need a boot disc ? utopia, stellaDC ? im so new its mind boggling i wish there were a step by step for dummies in laymans terms lol, for real!!


thanks in advance, eric

[PuddWakkr]

Try This to get yourself an emulator. The emulation section on this forum is probably your best bet if you want to find a tutorial.

[Ze_ro]

You might also want to try these sites:

DCEmulation's DCStella page

DCStella homepage

I've been procrastinating about burning a DCStella disk myself... one of the annoying things is that I think I have to rename all my roms first, since most have spaces in the filenames Plus, I'm missing a lot of the newer releases, but I'm not sure which one. Maybe I'll just wait for a flood on alt.binaries.emulators.misc...

If you have any specific questions after reading what's on those sites, you can try asking here and I'll help if possible. I've burned NES and Atari 8-Bit emulators so far without much trouble. You only actually need one CD... it can be made to self-boot (so you don't need a boot disk), and you can stick all the roms on the same disk.

By the way, there's also an emulator called [D]cs2600, but from what I've read, it's nowhere near as stable as DCStella.

--Zero

[NE146]

Ze_ro said:

I've been procrastinating about burning a DCStella disk myself... one of the annoying things is that I think I have to rename all my roms first, since most have spaces in the filenames :(

As quoted from Proveaux at Consolevision

01) Download Renamer from here, and install it on your computer.

02) Run Renamer.

03) With Renamer, select the roms directory.

04) Click Actions/Trim Extension.

05) Click File/Rename.

06) Click Actions/Insert, and type .bin where it says Insert. Click From right and then click OK.

07) Click Actions/Insert number, and type %04ld where it says Formating and click OK.

08) Click Actions/Misc/Truncate, and type 4 and click OK.

09) Click File/Export file.

10) Type rom_list.txt where it says File name and click Save.

11) Type %n %o where it says Line format and click OK.

12) Click File/Rename.

13) Move rom_list.txt from the roms directory to the directory that has dcstella.ini in it.

*** You Should Now Have A Rom List That You Can Use With DCStella ***

[PuddWakkr]

I was guessing who would put a list like that up first NE1 or Nukey.
NE146 was my guess... damn should put money on it

[Ze_ro]

I don't run Windows though... and moving everything over to a Windows computer and then back afterwards is probably more work than doing it myself.

There is a perl script for making a rom list that should work in Linux... but it doesn't seem to like the fact that all my files have spaces in the names. Oh well, maybe I'll look at it more some other day.

--Zero

[ATARIeric]

thankyou all for the replys, ty ne146 im gonna keep reading over and over and did i say over ? so if i make a disc with DC stella and do what NE146 says to do, and i add it all on 1 CDR i will be able to play my atari roms on a disc that is inserted into my DC without the use of my pc for emulation ? to me emultaion means to use your pc or thru a cable of some sort to my DC from PC, is stella able to be put on a disc and inserted into my DC ? this should be the post that if i get my responses in laymans terms i will be that much more closer to understanding and not look dumb lol

i swear, im paying attention!!!


thanks again and a million fold

eric

[Ze_ro]

WARNING: Technical terms ahead! Read at own risks!

So, I burned myself a DCStella disk finally, and it seems to all work... except that I never made the rom_list.txt file. You see, when I made my Nester disk and my Atari800 disk, I gave all my files nice long names like "Super Mario Bros. 3" and "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II - The Arcade Game", and everything worked nicely. However, that doesn't work with DCStella.

You see, CD's normally have restrictions on file names... you can't have more than 31 characters, and you can't have non-alphanumeric characters. So, when I burned the CD, file names like "3-D Corridor (Spiral Words) (31-03-2003) (Andrew Davie) (PD).bin" got mangled to be "3_d_corridor__spiral_words_.bin", which makes the menu look rather crummy.

To get around this, you can add "RockRidge extensions" to a CD, which lets you use long filenames, and stick whatever characters you want in there. However, DCStella doesn't make use of this information (Nester and Atari800 do), so you're stuck with crappy file names unless you make a rom_list.txt file.

I believe the reason for this is the libraries that were used to compile DCStella. You may see notice of a program called KallistiOS (Or KOS for short). It's an operating system that people use when porting emulators to the Dreamcast. So instead of writing tons of crap like file access routines and joystick reading stuff, they can just use the ones that KOS has. Atari800 and Nester both work through KOS, and therefor get RockRidge support, since I guess KOS has RockRidge support. However, DCStella uses an older set of libraries called "libdream". libdream doesn't support RockRidge extensions, therefor DCStella does not support them. Of course, this is all just my hypothesis... I could be entirely wrong.

If this all sounds complicated, then just ignore it all... as long as you do what NE146 told you to do, you shouldn't have this problem. Just remember that without a rom_list.txt file, you'll get a rather ugly menu.

(my disk still works fine, and the games still play and all... but I'll probably try to fix the problem and give the disk to a friend instead)

--Zero

[Ze_ro]

Oh, and two other bits of information:

From what I've done so far, I don't think you can use subdirectories... so just stick ALL your roms in the one folder. It's too bad, since I usually seperate things out to make it easier to find things.

Luckily, there doesn't seem to be a limit on the number of files in a directory... at least, I have about 2500 roms in there, and DCStella sees them all fine.

--Zero

[Ze_ro]

NE146: I see what you meant before about DCStella being a little slow... I tried playing Pitfall on it, and the slowness is very obvious! Games with music like Montezuma's Revenge and Donkey Kong Jr are very noticable too Damn, that kind of sucks... it's slight enough that I might not have noticed if I hadn't played the games on a real Atari so many times.

By the way, I tried using STList today, and it's very slow, and had a number of problems... It really should show a progress dialog, or at least open a window that tells you that the program is still running! The thing was running for about 5 minutes with NO window at all, until it finally popped up and told me that it was finished... by that time I had been moving files and directories, and basically screwed up everything while it was working in the background

--Zero

[NE146]

Ze_ro said:

By the way, I tried using STList today, and it's very slow, and had a number of problems... It really should show a progress dialog, or at least open a window that tells you that the program is still running! The thing was running for about 5 minutes with NO window at all, until it finally popped up and told me that it was finished... by that time I had been moving files and directories, and basically screwed up everything while it was working in the background --Zero

... What's STList?

[Ze_ro]

It's a program that's meant to create a rom_list.txt... but your method is much better.

By the way, it turns out there IS a limit on the number of roms... everything past 2048 on my latest disk doesn't show up!

--Zero

[NE146]

aah k. Yeah Stella emu for Dreamcast is one of the more obscure ones to get working. And after all that it's ok for some games (Adventure.. I think) and pretty bad on others. It's more or less a curiosity piece in it's current state as far as I'm concerned.

For Mame as well as consoles like the 2600, SNES, Genesis. Maybe it's time you started looking into the Xbox. I think you'll be pleasantly blown away

Personally I still use them both. I especially use the Dreamcast for 5200/8bit a LOT.

But yeah, the best DC emus are 5200/8bit, NES, Colecovision, Gameboy Color, and Sega Master System (except it doesn't save so forget about RPG's). So try some of those out next

[Ze_ro]

Well, I'm not about to buy an X-Box just for the emulators. I have my computer and Dreamcast right next to each other, but I find it easier to just pop a CD into the Dreamcast than to load up FCEUltra.

Nester is really handy too, since my Nintendo is really finicky, and doesn't work well at all. It's much faster to pop in a CD than to blow on the contacts for 20 minutes.

--Zero