Any good Dreamcast tips?

[Tanooki]

I'm sure some may have seen that post I made, got an amazing Dreamcast today for the price of a value meal basically and it works great.

I want to get back into this a bit, at a measured pace so I enjoy it and don't get burned or burnt out on it.

Any tips for someone who forgot nearly everything as I haven't had one in a dozen years?

I did a little work, and despite the arguments for/against some units not liking burns, mine is early enough (Sept 2000.) From memory I compiled a list of games we had in the home between 2 of them back from 1999-02 (when I moved out) and everything falls into that $7-20 range on most, a few in the $20-40 and little over that to $50. The only stuff higher are those overly hot topic bullethell (or not) shooters topping $100-150 which I don't want again.

Any advice, tips, game suggestions, apps/tools to use to burn stuff right(and a good media to use), sources to find very good/like new quality stuff since I know GD's can be testy. Thanks.

[stickem]

I get anything I want to download at isozone and use imgburn to burn. Use to be discjuggler was the preferred burning tool but I never had any errors with imgburn or cheapo discs. I plan on getting a vga box soon but svideo looks good on a crt. My cables are junk though I ordered here a few years back.

[ExedExes]

It was the Dreamcast that drew me here to Racketboy in the first place, well that and Together Retro. Then I got into portables and kind of neglected my DC. It turns out the first DC I bought new in 2001 died, probably because I killed it with my PAL copy of Shenmue II, fair enough. Bought a used replacement on eBay and it's still kicking after a few years, but I'm taking it easy on the non-official discs. The only disc I burned was the "Dream Explorer" ISO which had a whole mess of VMU saves, including the Detonator Pack for Dynamite Cop, an early form of DLC. For that I used Discjuggler.

Many DC games are affordable, with the exception of a handful of Capcom titles. I did pursue some of those bullet hells like Mars Matrix (around $40 when I bought it) and Giga Wing 2 (piece-mealed the disc and manual for around $50, just missing the back case art). I'm surprised on some titles like Tech Romancer (averaging $60 and up these days) holding their value. Stay away from the desirable Capcom stuff and you should be all right, lots of good deals and maybe even a few good exclusives. I can point you to good games to find. I got nearly all my games from eBay 5-10 years ago.

[Exhuminator]

Any advice, tips, game suggestions, apps/tools to use to burn stuff right(and a good media to use), sources to find very good/like new quality stuff since I know GD's can be testy. Thanks.

Don't use junk discs. Get yourself some proper Taiyo Yudens for burning:

https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00065DGYQ/

Burn with IMGBURN, slow as you can.

As stickem said, http://www.theisozone.com/ has all the good stuff. I've had great success with all their DCRES downloads.

As far as game suggestions, name some genres you care about.

[ElkinFencer10]

Top three suggestions I have -

Shenmue
Shenmue II
Ikaruga

[CRTGAMER]

As in any other console to save wear on the laser eye, best to use the original pressed discs especially when games are on the cheap. Look for the exclusives such as Toy Commander, Alien Front and Floigan Bros. Dreamcast Shenmue 2 beats the Xbox; the PAL version for the Japanese Language with English subtitles; use an import boot disc to convert to NTSC. There are a few homebrews that are not in the overwhelming SHMUP category that are decent too.

For the rare imports, concur with getting quality CDRs, I like TDKs. Though most ISO burns are complete, some games have missing music tracks or video either from a bad build or just lack of space in order to fit a CDR. I prefer the pressed disc to get the complete game and especially to save on that wear and tear of the laser eye.

[Jagosaurus]

To add some details to the .iso size discussion: I ran into this while researching USB Optical Disc Emulators recently. I was running burned CDRs on the DC back around 2000 and never thought twice about it.

A lot of .isos out there are patched/cut down to fit on the ~700mb of CDR versus the ~1GB of a GDROM.

Does iso zone have them clearly labeled (full release vs cut down for CDR)?

[Ziggy]

As stickem said, http://www.theisozone.com/ has all the good stuff. I've had great success with all their DCRES downloads.

A lot of .isos out there are patched/cut down to fit on the ~700mb of CDR versus the ~1GB of a GDROM.

This is why you should stick with DCRES. You can find more info about what the DCRES releases are in a spoiler in this post, but to sum it up, DCRES releases pay strict attention to quality. Like Jagosaurus said, some games had to be cut down in size to fit on a CD, and quality wasn't always a concern when this was being done. TuxTheWise wasn't happy about this and decided to make his own game images.

The main benefits of his releases are as followed:
1.) They're always self-booting.
2.) When compression / size reduction is required, quality comes first.
3.) File order is improved.

As for burning, everything has pretty much already been said. Go with quality CD-Rs, use ImgBurn or the demo version of Disk Juggler. Burn at the slowest possible speed.

If you need a complete walk through, check out my burning guide: http://www.racketboy.com/forum/viewtopi ... &sk=t&sd=a

Be sure to check out the updates in the first post, particularly the one that shows you how to add proper CDI support to ImgBurn.

[Tanooki]

Good posts.

EE: I've had now 3 DCs with this, for some odd reason I think I started lurking this site around the time I had a 2nd one for a brief time because they used to keep good up to date coverage of stuff at that rate still. And I researched probably 50+ titles I once owned or my brother did and got to the same conclusion, Capcom shooters, I think Gunbird2 the exception are a flaming pile of 3 digit purchase pain ($100-200) with cannon spike included. Many of them are cheap, almost all of them in LikeNew/Very Good condition are at worst the old $50 retail level but much are notably less. I have no problem with that. Only Capcom game I'd really want is SF3 3rd Strike.

Ex: You're not the first comment I've seen about burns and those discs. I'd probably only if I did it burn Propeller Arena (if it has a 1P mode worth it), Half Life, and maybe Quake1, and maybe some boot loader for PAL/JP games if I wanted stuff like Rez or Macross M3.

Elkin: I have Gamecube Ikaruga, and I dislike Shenmue as I had it in the day.

If anyone is curious about what I like or suggestions, this is what I worked on last night, games from memory and I looked at paid out ebay pricing (shipped is into the spread) Also this had my notes I found on burns so far, systems that work, etc. I pasted it from notepad into google 'word' docs.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_a6 ... mreRI/edit


Oh also I found for $25 today Crazy Taxi, Deep Fighter, and a Sega OEM Rumble Pack too so I have something to dabble with at least. I found a few other good things but they were untested and sandpaper looking thrashed(Gauntlet, Rayman2 and Expendable), and then found two others overpriced off ebay paid (DOA2 for double markup and EGG for $10 over normal.)

[stickem]

The pal/jn rips from isozone are already self boot for you, no need for a boot disc. The devs have already done the work. Example, the shining force 3 games already pre patched. Yes that's saturn games, which they have a great selection of, but just an example. I've heard good things about tuxthewise rips, but he's not the only good one to look for.