What's new

What's this "selfboot" thing?

cooliscool

Nintendo Zealot
Chankast functions much like a real dreamcast. In order for your games to boot on their own (early on, backups had to be loaded by the use of a BootDisc). Clever hackers found a way to make games boot on their own by injecting IP.bin into track two (all selfboot games are multisession, 1 audio, 1 data), which is how GD-Roms are read. This makes backups boot without the use of a mod chip or anything special. :)
 

Ennok

New member
In a dreamcast there are 2 "OS's" that can be used, one is the DC-OS(not the actual name for it) and the other is WinCE, I hesitate using the term OS to refer to each but I felt it's easier to understand this way. I'm not positive which one uses IP.BIN but the great thing is that either one can boot using ip.bin. This is the reason why some games won't have an IP.bin in them, they use the boot method that doesn't use ip.bin. Because the Dreamcast also uses/supports WinCE there are ppl who have made Linux emulators for the dreamcast, and emulators for many other consoles/computers/etc, they just code it in windowsCE and trouble shoot as needed.

The thing to realize that it doesnt' matter if a game has an IP.bin or not before you try and make it self booting. As long as you use the selfboot tutorial at the top of the forum any game you make this way should play in a dreamcast, this is the method I used to burn all the burnt games I have and they all still work to this day. Of course remember that cr-rw's won't work in a dreamcast without modifying your dreamcast in a very bad way, but the reason for using a cd-rw in this forum is so it burns as a selfboot then you can make a disk image out of it.

I'm one of the unlucky ones that the games that I do have either aren't compatible yet or I have the actual game cd so I can't do anything with them. For those wondering, the DC cd's use it's own type of file system called GD-ROM, it holds 1 gig of info on 1 cd and is unreadable on a regular cd-rom.
If you want to know how games are ripped off of gd-cd's then do a search .. i'm not gona explain it here.

Now.. there are alot of ppl wondering now .. how do they fit 1g of info on 700ish megs of cd space, well that's where ppl like echelon and the other DC rip grps were absolute genious, and i'll use Skies of Arcadia as an example since it took up 2 full GD-roms (some games didn't take up much space and didn't need to have anything special done to them). They compressed the entire cd so that it would fit on something we could burn .. then coded a real time de-compressor for the dreamcast so that the game would be decompressed as it was played allowing for the game to be kept on the same amount of cd's while allowing the the difference in size. Those who have A DC and a 2 disc version of Skies will notice a pause at combat .. this is the de-compressor at work. Absolute genius in my opinion but may account for alot of the problems we face now with chankast. Also to note is that some games were split off into 2 cd's with out compression and there was instruction on how to properly get the game going again on the second CD, I believe that Grandia 2 was part if this idea (ripper unknown), and there was a txt file saying when to save the game and resart the game using the second CD then restart the saved game to continue the game.

I did get Phantasy Star online V2 to work but I have an nvidia card and it's basically unplayable, although at certain angles I get the real screen and it looks realy nice!!

I hope any who read this can use the info in it as kind of a "ok so that's how the DC kinda works" guide. I didn't plan on getting into detail because i'm just going off the top of my head on the details from when I use to be into the DC scene 2 years ago .. I realy do hope this helps.

If any can clarify on the stuff here plz post your fix's

Ennok
 
Last edited:

posty_2k3

T3h pwn3r3r
I think that covers just about anything you need to know about the dc.. o_O. That was one hell of a first post Ennok.
 

steamover

Yeti & Snake Champion
btw... i was thinking the other day... now that we've chankast... do we need to respect CD size limitation? i mean...data needs to be compressed or ripped... but now.. is still necessary? I mean, anyone has tested to make a backup selfbootable with size more than a CD? (DVD format for example..)

should it work?... it's only an idea :?
 

PsyMan

Just Another Wacko ;)
In order to do that (copy a game without ripping it) you need a dreamcast BBA which is very rare to find...
On the other hand, you can also use a serial cable to copy the game to the hard disk, but this lasts about 24 hours for each GD-ROM :eek:
 
Last edited:

Ennok

New member
That's a very good question Steamover but I suspect that someone would have to do a completely new rip of a game since it would be a hell of a job to modify an existing rip. But the one problem I can see in this whole scenario is that our computers(aspi drivers) would have to accept the fact that we had a 1 gig cd-rom mounted. I'm not positive if alcohol or daemon would accept this ( I don't have the tech to rip off off my DC).

I do remember reading back when I was big into DC stuff that the original drivers that the GD-rom uses were first released on the PC, but is all but imposible to get now since it was a company only driver and even back then no one had the drivers(what I mean is that it was possible with these drivers for a regular CD-rom to read a GD-rom,.. and burn a gd rom, dont try and ge them .. 4 million ppl tried back then with no luck).

Sure I should try my grandia CD's to see if they work ( I haven't yet). But, it's a pain in the arse .. I'm barely on the edge of the recomended computer spec and anything I try could fail because of that. I did, however, get the skies of arcadia version that I have that gave me the "AV cable " nonsense to boot using the self boot method described here .. in a sense. It got past the spiral screen .. to the sega screen, then crashed. Same for DOA2. But there were no errors just a crash, so that could be a good thing for the next version of chankast.

Ennok
 

spaffdog

New member
might have missed it in someones post... but i saw mention of 'THE ONLY WAY' to make a selfboot is audio/data....

(all selfboot games are multisession, 1 audio, 1 data), <-- there it is

check my posts in win 2000 thread...

data/data is also a viable way of booting on a DC. more difficult to achieve, but it wrks.. from what i've found data/data boots wrk on win 2000.
 

steamover

Yeti & Snake Champion
Well, i'm downloading a backup of a japanese game (furai no shiren) that fits on a CD700 without selfboot... as i read on the nfo, if the selfboot is added then it needs a CD90min... so i'll try to do it.

Daemon supports CDs of rmore than 80min... 90min (800mb) works well..so maybe CDs with 1GB too.

Well, if someone has the time and tools to make a new backup without audio downsampling or movie ripps, prove it pls... i think it's interesting
 

Waan2k

Emutalk Lover :)
yeah I got giant gram 2000 and it data only no audio tracks on nothing, how do I go about making it a bootable cd?
 

Waan2k

Emutalk Lover :)
it shows up in chanka all the time as a audio cd where all my other backups work great.
 

steamover

Yeti & Snake Champion
if it shows as audio CD (2 tracks?) then it's not selfbootable.... have you tried it on the DC?
 

Top