High everyone, this is my first post here.
I recently got into dreamshell, about a week ago I got an SD Adapter.
I have sussed out the basics, and it is time to share some tips and tricks I have found out so far.
If no one already knows of tossEAC, I am a regular at redump.org and have dumped over 2700 discs from originals, for various systems including Dreamcast, I own a few hundred Dreamcast original games, which could be handy to do some front cover scans at 256x256
smaller than what I usually scan at
Anyway the first thing I would like to share is a method to compress multi track dreamcast games, to shrink the size.
So you have a game with a Track03 then some Audio and a final Data Track. Often Track03 is pretty big. Well here is a way to shrink your multi track games.
First optimize your gdi dump, this converts 2352 to 2048, and reduces size a bit.
So here is the trick, Trac03.iso if you look at it is 99% blank basically a dummy file. So just truncate it, I just chop mine down to 1 megabyte, which is actually longer than it needs to be but I don't really care as long as its 1 megabyte and not 700 happy days
Edit* I found out some of the track03.iso files do have some data past the first few hundred sectors, often their is a bit of data at the end of track03 as well, so here is the new trick (I use Total Commander to do it).
What you do is this.
I create an empty folder and call it track03 split. Then split track03, using Total Commander into pieces with a file size of 1048576, then I search the folder for duplicate files with the same size and same contents, it will find all the files the exactly the same and send it to your list box, you then delete all those files, then go to your track03 split folder and see what's left, usually it leaves the first file and a couple at the end, be sure to delete the crc file it creates, then just rename the extensions so they are continuous 001, 002, 003 etc... etc. and then join the files into a track03 again then add the iso extension.
What you have then is a smaller track03.iso, something like 2-3 megabytes.
I did find one game that their was a load of data in track03, so I left this game as it was, I think it was Conflict Zone (Europe), but apart from that game, nearly all the others I have done work great, and they all work fine.
Then just run the multi track gdi game with your truncated Track03.iso.
Its not actually compression but its the next best thing.
Next up is my SD compatibility list, I have got quite a few games booting fine, and some that I tried are not on any of the lists already here.
I have started collecting covers 256x256 from my original scans, should have a front cover rar I can share on mega sometime soon
.
A cover tip: If you have a game in a folder say "Crazy Taxi.gdi" in a folder called "Crazy Taxi" if you put a cover Crazy Taxi.jpg in your cover folder it will only show the cover when you click on the actuall gdi file, but if you want it to display the cover when you click on the folder as well as when you click on the gdi, put a cover in a folder called "Crazy Taxi" and have both the cover and the folder with cover in your covers directory and then it will show both, one when you click on the folder and also if you browse gdi directory and click on the gdi.
Another thing when I was optimizing gdi games it was creating a new gdi called optimized.gdi, which was not how I wanted the gdi to be named, so I altered the bat file, to look like this.
@Echo off
SET PATH=sys
For %%1 in (*.gdi) do (
echo Optimizing GDI image...
gdiopt.exe "%%1" "%%1".gdi
goto :break
)
:break
echo Complete!
This creates a gdi, with exactly the same name as it was to begin with, just with a double gdi.gdi extension, which can be easily renamed afterward, a lot easier than renaming each gdi after it had been named optimized.gdi.
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