Help! Please!

[v2freak]

Hi everyone. I'm really new to all the emulation stuff and I would really like to play DC games on my computer (computers break less often than game consoles afterall; for me anyway). I've read almost every tutorial on how to do things and I'm still extremely confused as to where to even start.

The things I have at my disposal are

this reasonably fast computer, with Windows 2000 and a CD burner

CD-Rs

a Sega Dreamcast with all the chords and controllers in place and some VMUs plus a bunch of store-bought games that I'd like to play on here

Chankast Alpha v.025 with DC BIOS and DC Flash configured already

A zipped file I found which says Marvel vs Capcom 2; but I'm not sure what to do with it


Sometimes the tutorials are a little overwhelming for me! I never know what I'm supposed to have in the beginning of everything. Any help would be greatly appreciated! Thanks everyone!

 

[axcc123]

first of all you want to homebrew games with crankast you have to make them self bootable second of all unzip the marvel vs capcom and get daemon tools by using goolge or ur fav search engine and enjoy

 

[Agozer]

What's in the Zip file?

---

you don't necessarily need CD-Rs to paly Dreamcast games on Chankast. All you need is a virtual CD/DVD drive (like Daemon Tools) to do the work for you. If you have no ided what I just said, keep reading. If you do know what I'm talking about, skip the next part.

Virctual drives (or phantom drives) are a piece of software that emulates a psysical CD/DVD drive. Once you install a virtual drive, it'll appear as a new CD/DVD drive in Windows. You mount CD or DVD images to the virtual drive, thus simulating that there's an actual disc in the drive. The virtual drive can then be used like any regular CD/DVD-ROM drive (read and copy files from the drive to another location, for example). Of course, since all the data comes from the images on your HDD, you need more hard drive space as opposed using real discs.

Get Daemon Tools from http://www.daemon-tools.cc and install it (Read the readme thoroughly so you'll get the gist of it). Then mount a CD image to the virtual drive DT created for you. After that's done, all you need is to configure Chankast's CDRom plugin to use the virtual drive as the loading medium. Again, if you don't know how to set up Chankast, read the readme and look around, it isn't that hard to figure out. A word of advice though, Chankast is very picky about what you throuw at it, so games may fail to start altogether even if you've configured everything the right way; in this case (an IOError case for example) use Daemon Tools 3.29 instead of 4.xx.

 

[v2freak]

Alright, I'll try both of those tomorrow. Thanks so much, both of you!

 

[v2freak]

After throughly re-reading your post, I'm confused as to what I'm supposed to mount to the virtual drive. Does it have to do the "Marvel vs Capcom 2" zipped file I found? (I put it in quotation marks because I'm unsure as about the authenticity of it) Cheers

 

[Mouser X]

No, you need to extract the contents of that zip file first. When you do, it should put out a CCD, CDI, ISO, CUE+BIN, or some other such file. Then, when your virtual drive software goes to mount it, it should provide you with an "Open" dialoge box. In there, it should only show you the formats it's set to recognize. Just load the file it shows (by defualt, this should work, unless you changed its open settings, or something). Hope that helps. Mouser X over and out.

 

[v2freak]

Alright thanks. I think a big part of my problem is that the zip file is not legit. When I extract it, it says stuff like .001, .002 and so on

 

[Mouser X]

No, that's probably correct. It sounds to me like the ZIP was only a container file. You probably need to get a program that can now extract out of the *.001 and *.002 files. Try WinRAR, or 7zip. When games are released, they're released into multiple pieces to make it easier to download. Whoever you got the file from, they put all of those separate pieces into a ZIP file for oganizational purposes (make things easier to keep track of and such). It's probably still useful. Hopefully you haven't deleted it yet, because chances are it's still good. Hope that helps. Mouser X out.

 

[v2freak]

I used WinRAR to unzip the ZIP file initially - the one you said is a container file. Then in the new folder where everything was extracted, I'm getting "mvc2.001" all the way to "mvc2.009". Each is several megabytes large, but I don't think they can be extracted further.

Here is an example of what it looks like when I unzip the container file.

http://img77.imageshack.us/img77/3302/unopenablefile3yg.jpg

 

[Mouser X]

Search for 7zip. Try that out. I have a few different files that are named in a similar fashion, and 7zip usually works on them. It's probably not in a format that WinRAR is familiar with, or WinRAR isn't reading it properly. So, try 7zip, and see if that helps (I've had problems with 7zip myself, but that was an older version. It seems to work fine now. I use WinRAR for the most part because 7zip doesn't look as "clean," in that it has an overly-simplistic GUI). Hope that helps. If it doesn't, the only other thing I can think of is to find it somewhere else. Mouser X out.

 

[v2freak]

Well, I think I'm headed in a very good direction! Thanks again. I downloaded 7-Zip File Manager 4.32 and when I located the container file, I extracted it to a different folder. Unfortunately I got a type of error message so I'll try again tomorrow. When I opened the folder I extracted the container file to, there was a CDI file in it that was around 243 megabytes.

Edit: tried again today but it says the file is broken again! Still, when I go to the folder I extracted the stuff to, it says 243 MB

 

[axcc123]

try loadin it up

 

[v2freak]

Haha, I kept clicking Daemon Tools and nothing was coming up, then I noticed the tray icon area. So I went to the official site and it told me how to mount images. But first I right-clicked on it, went to Virtual CD/DVD Rom, and I set the number of devices to four. Once I did that I found the CDI which was extracted from the container file using 7zip, and I got the following error message:


"Unable to mount image. Invalid image file"

 

[axcc123]

find CD Mage and scan it

 

[Agozer]

find cd image and scan it

I think you mean CD Mage. You should fix your post so that people can understand what you are talking about.

But yeah, the CDI is most likely corrupt if DT refuses to mount it as is.

 

[v2freak]

After downloading CD Mage it said it was an invalid format of file. Gotta find another MvC2 file, then.

 

[v2freak]

I've had some difficulty finding another MvC2 file, so I guess this effectively shuts down my hopes of playing DC games on my comp for a while. Thanks to everyone that gave me advice though!

 

[Agozer]

It isn't too hard to find, MvC2 being one of the "must get" games for the DC. You are just looking in the wrong places.

 

[v2freak]

Haha, yeah, probably. I'm not too good at researching stuff.

 

[v2freak]

Well, I finally got an MvC2 game! I extracted the stuff and in the new folder there was an MDF file and an MDS file.

I then used MagicISO Maker to turn the MDF file into an ISO. The MDF file is 100+ MB big and the MDS is less than a MB. I also found a copy of the Utopia Boot Disk v1.3 [CDI] and I have Dameon Tools working with 4 drives. But I'm not sure where to go next! Thanks for any help in advance (again) !