Ripping GDR's

[Dot50Cal]

I have two GDR's that Id like ripped into ISO's. I havent got a clue how to do this but I hear ripping via the standard methods wont work. Does anyone have experience in this field?

[Mark30001]

If you don't have a Dreamcast/Katana dev box, you'll need either a Dreamcast Coder's cable (serial cable which connects to your Dreamcast) or a BroadBand Adapter using the broadband ripping method.

[Borman]

Does the fact that its a GDR, not just a game, change it though?

[Dot50Cal]

I hear it does, a member here tried it with the CC and BBA, wouldnt work. He even tried with a System Disc 2.. :\

[Alchy]

There was some work done on ripping GD-ROMs through a normal PC drive. Check this link out.

[wombat]

If you succeed with an other solution then the PC Drive one (and devkit) then please let me know, since I would also like to rip my gdr's and make selfboots of it.

When I'm at home I'll contact you I got alot of tools and things that are needed for this matter.

[Mark30001]

I hear it does, a member here tried it with the CC and BBA, wouldnt work. He even tried with a System Disc 2.. :\

Wow, I'll look back into things later. Let me know if there's been any progress though.

I'm thinking the only problem one should have is getting the data to fit on a 700 MB CD-R and editing the IP.bin files to get it to selfboot.

There was a member here nearly a year back that was able to rip some GD-ROM data for me with his Broadband adapter. I was unsuccessful in getting the CD-R to selfboot on a Dreamcast though...

[Dot50Cal]

Bump! I got retails ripping fine, but whenever I try to rip GDROM's it just makes track1.txt and closes out. Its 1KB.

Anyone ever run into this? Perhaps the offsets are different for the start?

[Smithy]

I -heard- something like only certain retail dreamcasts are able to rip GD-R's, has anyone else heard anything like this?

[Tachikoma]

I have heard the same thing, never got any of my GDR's to rip (other than making 1GB of garbage files), but can do it with retails fine. It's pissing me off as I have some really good stuff that needs backing up!

[Barc0de]

I m not remotely a DC guru but I do recall reading that indeed only certain early versions of the DC were able to read GD-R further to some manipulation (i.e not natively)

By the way, is there an NR-cube equivelant of a DC test console? How does it look?

[Mark30001]

Tachikoma, were you able to dump to an iso and extract data, only to receive 0 KB files?

[Tachikoma]

I can boot GDR's fine with the "Wombat method" (even thinking of installing a switch on the battery to save wear on the ribbon lead) on all my DC's but no bugger want's to rip them.

Tachikoma, were you able to dump to an iso and extract data, only to receive 0 KB files?

I got a full ISO with all the files/directories listed, but the files are all garbage or all 0's not even anything remotely useable, they are the right size (I assume) but it's like a bittorent file, just full of crap until all the holes are filled in.

[Mark30001]

What application did you use to view the ISO, or what program did you use to extract? The thing is that I've also used the GD-X duplicator dev unit, but the files extracted from the Track 3 ISO, using EXTRACT.EXE, are all 0 KB.

I've also successfully dumped a retail game (Sonic Adventure Japanese) with the unit, and all of the files are normal. My guess is that there is a problem in the application used to rip data from the ISO dumps, although I am not 100% sure.

Dot50Cal's problem may be in the application used to dump from the Dreamcast. Unfortunately I do not have a BBA to test anything.

[Tachikoma]

I can't remember offhand, I have the tools on a CDR somewhere, I will see if I can find it after work tonight. I think it might have been winrar to extract the files from the ISO, but could have been anything.

[Dot50Cal]

Woah no way Tachi, You need to use a special extractor as far as I know. Not sure if its the same with every app, but I tried to open the ISO it created in everything and all I got was garbage files.

Extracting it with the extractor dumped it all perfectly.

[Tachikoma]

Well bugger me, I might have made legitimate dumps after all... best get cracking at it on the weekend then!

[Mark30001]

I've included EXTRACT.EXE as an attachment (since most sites hosting it are bloated with spyware). ;)

[Tachikoma]

Downloaded, thanks!

[Mark30001]

I forgot to mention that the application will automatically dump your files to your 'Documents and Settings' folder. I don't know a command to dump the files in the same directory as the application, but I'm sure one exists.