My very first post.

[Turbokat]

Hello to all, I am a fellow Dreamcast alumni and I am enthused to speak to such a diverse group. Been playing Dreamcast since launch, I own around 15 retro consoles mostly late 80's to now. I play anything, usually beat-'em-ups and fighters are my cup of tea.

I purchased a modded Dreamcast IDE off of someone which came with Dreamshell 4.00 RC4 CDR. Let's say there were many successes and a couple of inquiries. I am eternally grateful to SWAT and others who made this OS a reality. It's because of them I can now run back-ups! I own about 100 Dreamcast games.

With that being said I have two goals in mind. One is to play 100% of my library using Dreamshell. The 2nd is sharing that info with the broader internet so others won't have to do as much trial and error as I have fingering out how these ISO's respond to the OS(I'm certain you guys have been sweating bullets on this stuff too).

My more immediate dilemma is playing and editing CDDA titles. Currently Dreamshell runs KOF DM, Vigilante 8 2nd Offense, Guilty Gear X, and Plasma Sword however the music as you all know, does not work (Emulate CDDA doesn't work either). But I feel like I discovered a solution, credit to SWAT. I recall seeing a video of SWAT running Vigilante 8 2nd Offense on Dreamshell, he converted the raw CDDA's to ADPCM WAVs. Now I use a combination of both GDEMU Explorer from Livejournal and Audacity converter.

I used the Explorer to convert RAW CDDA files to WAV, then opened up Audacity and morphed those WAV files into ADPCM Microsoft WAV which did shrink the files. The issue is when injecting them back into the Vigilante 8 GDI folder I get an error message saying the files needed to be RAW. So I renamed the converted ADPCM WAVs back to RAW, but this time I get a new error claiming the files must be 3000 bytes and the size must be multiples of 5253. I am legitimately stumped, math was never my strong suit.

I'm hopeful you guys can assist? I feel like I'm close to figuring it out, some guidance would get me the rest of the way I'm sure.

[SWAT]

ADPCM need only for SD mod (because it slow), on HDD better use original RAW (PCM) tracks.
In some cases ADPCM works little worse than PCM. For you it does not make sense to use it, because not help to get CDDA working.

[Turbokat]

(27.04.2017 14:28)SWAT писал(а):  ADPCM need only for SD mod (because it slow), on HDD better use original RAW (PCM) tracks.
In some cases ADPCM works little worse than PCM. For you it does not make sense to use it, because not help to get CDDA working.

Sorry about the late reply. I've been at this since yesterday, I just hit a wall.

I got V8 half-way working with music. It can run with a clean GDI rip with DMA+CDDA emulation. It freezes when you select options though which is problematic. Clean GDI rips also give glitchy pixels since they aren't optimized.

I tried 2 optimized versions. One I implemented a couple of replacement music tracks (wav tracks) the second is the normal music (still wav tracks) I converted the game folder using optimizegdi.bat and the sys folder from Iso Make with the pause command. Results are it let me play through Arcade but it froze after the first stage in Quest Mode. It also won't let me change songs in options or the pause menu (V8 special feature; let's you change tracks on the fly) every time I attempt this the game locks up.

You were right about ADPCM Swat, it tends to lock-up the title screen on an HDD. I abandoned that method. Now I'm using raw wave files (16-bit MS PCM) the above problems persist though. Not sure what else to do.

Something tells me if there really is a fix to this Vigilante 8 game it may provide a path to restore the music In other CDDA games as well. Namely King of Fighters Dream Match and Guilty Gear X.