I recently downloaded a really neato tool for my PC which allowed me to watch all the cinemas and hear all the audio tracks from a PlayStation game CD-ROM. I got all excited and tried hunting for one for the Dreamcast, but to no avail. Does one exist that anyone out there knows of?
I really don’t think that any such program was made, because CDROM drives can only read a fraction of the data contained on a DC GDROM.
GDROMs have two sections on them. There is a tiny inner circle that is in CDROM format that your PC’s CDROM drive can read. There is also a bigger outer circle that is not readable by a standard CDROM drive.
The section that is readable by a CDROM drive usually does not have much on it. It usually only has an audio track that says “this disc can only be used on a sega dreamcast” if you try to put it in a CD player. There is occasionally wallpaper stored on that section of the disc that you can see if you put the disc in a PC.
Unfortunately, the section that stores the actual game data can not be read by a standard CDROM drive. The cinemas, music, and lots of other stuff are stored on this section. If PCs can not read this section, why would anyone bother to make a program to play DC cinemas?
Yeah, I had read about that as well. What got me interested, however, is that there are people out there selling burned copies of DC games…which are on CD! I wonder how they got the ROM info?
Could you please post a link to this program, or an article describing it? I tried searching for it and didn’t have any luck…
at zohpar.net you’ll find it. On the right side is a loooooong list of stuff to download. Towards the bottom are utilities for the PlayStation.
Its a neat utility because there’s often sound bites that are on the disc but aren’t used in the game. In Silent Hill, over which I obsess quite frequently (my favortire PS game after FFtactics), there’s a dog being mauled which I don’t recall hearing at all.
In Castlevania:SOTN it seems that there is dialogue for a fifth ending which no one has found. Hmmm…
At any rate, enjoy, though be forewarned that PCs weren’t meant to run PS games on them. Sometime the program crashes when attempting to read a file (seems to happen with the audio files, suprisingly enough) (This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down blah blah blah) but that is pretty rare.
Whew! Need any help using it send me a mail, otherwise have fun!
PSMPlay is a pretty good one–probably the best. Also lets you save them as avi’s, which saved me the trouble of going into the debug room just to see the hidden video on the xenogear’s 2nd cd…
Dreamcast cd’s are rather odd. The first track is an audio warning; the second contains the actual data, IIRC. The bigger cd’s (>700 mb) can be copied with dvd-burners, smaller ones with cd burners, but I’ve never been able to get it to work. It’s a SERIOUSLY hairy process. I recommend against piracy solely because it’s extraordinarily annoying to go through.
DVD burners, eh? I don’t have a dvd driev on my PC… I wonder if it could be used, after some modification (probbly to the driver) to scope out the GDROMs.
sigh I wish I was more of a computer nerd.
You cannot copy a DC cd with a dvd burner! Where do you get this information? The only way to get the data is from one of the special people who made a super special G-cdrom reader & sucked off the data, patched it, if necessary, & then put it on cd. Of course, I won’t tell you who those people are.
What you are looking for are FMV’s I suppose…‘full motion videos’ which is what these console games often use.