DreamOn Demo Disc Hacks

Hello again, remember me? Sorry I have been more or less completely post-less on here and Sega Memories for quite some time, as you may or may not know I have been rather busy the last few months, but here I am again. Anyway,after my one resource of ripping video from Dreamcast games decided to become incompatible with my new telly, I haven't been able to do any Rummage reviews or anything like that for the YouTube account. Now however I have a DVD recorder that I can grab footage with, and best of all it lets me record in NTSC as well so I can record footage of Japanese and American now if I want to. That means I should be bringing some brand new Rummage videos your way, as well as possibly some video features (thinking of making a video that explains the whole Bleemcast thing, for example) in the near future. In case you missed them before, here are the Rummage videos for Bangai-O, Pen Pen, and 18 Wheeler. To think I made all of those in one week and haven't made any in almost a year. Peh.

So to test it out I've put together a video just showing off some hacks I put together last year based on a tutorial up on DreamAgain.fr that gives you access to the menu from one of those PAL Dream On demo discs which you can use as a menu for multiple full games on one CD-R. It's mind bogglingly complex and i went through quite a few CD-R's trying to put together discs where every single game worked like a charm, but I managed to make three 100% successful discs each with 3 or 4 games crammed on. I'm taking screen shots using the DC for PC emulator Chankast (in which I cannot seem to switch the language to English).

First off: "Power Stone Collection", which as the name obviously suggests features both Power Stone games. Because I also had some more room left over I squeezed two small games also by Capcom on the disc for good measure; Cannon Spike and Net De Tennis. Thanks to a rather handy Photoshop PVR texture converter (I.e: the images the Dreamcast runs )I could also open up all the textures of the DreamOn menu and give it a fancy custom look with my own fonts and such. The best thing with this set is all the game's on it feature music that resides on the data side of the disc, so they all have music intact. You see, if the music runs on the audio side of a disc, then you can't stick it on one of these multi-game discs. making these things is complex enough as it is!

Another disc idea was to put both Tokyo Extreme Racer (AKA Tokyo Highway Challenge AKA Shutokou Battle) games onto one disc. I also had some room over here so I stuck a small racing game on there; Team 17's Stunt GP. Unfortunately with Stunt GP the music is CD audio so the game plays with no music but the Tokyo games are fine.

Finally, a disc with a random assortment of games that have just one thing in common: shooting things! I was going to make a whole collection of these 'GAGAPAK's, each with their own theme, but this was the only one that got finished. It contains 4 games: Incoming, Millennium Solider Expendable, Silent Scope and Under Defeat. The latter two games have music but the two rage produced games don't (western developed games tend to rely on CD audio a lot more than Japanese ones, it seems).

For those wondering, I don't intend to release these to the many torrent sites out there, although this is mainly because I don't know how to make this content into a burnable file thingy. I mainly did these for my own amusement (although it became frustration in the end what with all the attempts they took to work) and so i can say I've kind of made something that I can run on a Dreamcast...sort of. Anywhoo, here's the video showing off all the menus to these discs. I think I'll record in Short Play quality next time..



As for more hacking from me? Eh, probably not, although I do have all the files to The Lost Golem here that I might attempt to make a translation out of...

Eh, I probably won't ever get around to it.

10 comments:

Caleb said...

Very Nice Gagaman(n)!

I have had some experience with mashing games onto one CD but all those involved custom Japanese frameworks based off some sort of Jap internet browser disk.

I never really heard of this before!

Pretty awesome.

Animated AF said...

Yeah, I've put together the odd disc like that before too. This is so much slicker, though. =)

Anonymous said...

I've done that type of thing with homebrew, but never seen it done with commercial games! *runs off to try*

Caleb said...

I just saw the Lucy Lolly trailer. LOVED it. I totally need to buy the DVD...(though I am not sure if I can play a PAL DVD or not.)

-You know what I have seen these before on some of the homebrew compilations.

I never made the connection to the Demo disks before.

Dreamakuma said...

As for turning this into a burnable image just put it into a pc, run discjuggler and hit create new cd image. If you decide to do this please tell me. I own(not burned) abunch of games and love these compilations.

Animated AF said...

I might give it a shot at some point. I even have custom cover art for two of these discs already. Pretty sad, really!

As for homebrew running off this technique, I've tried that before and couldn't get a big majority of stuff to work though it. A shame because I still really want to try out Sonic Robo Blast 2 and Sonic Retro on the DC..

fatherkrishna said...

Good stuff Gagaman(n) - far too technical for me to understand, but it looks darned impressive!

Wow! Dreamakuma is here!!! Hurrah!

*Waves to Dreamakuma*

:)

Caleb said...

Just so everyone knows Sonic Retro AND Sonic Robo Blast were both released in complete form on the DV Evo site.

http://www.dcevolution.net/

In fact they are still hosted there. Just scroll down to download the selfbooting images.

As for them not working I dunno. It's kinda weird that other homebrew projects were able to make multi-game disks using this method.

Dreamakuma said...

Howdy FK! I decided to trvel some in the dreamcast community. I do have a dc blog maybe sometime give it a look(It kinda sucks) but I'm trying here. *Waves back at the father of awesome*

Animated AF said...

Bah, turns out my DVD recorder cannot record 60hz after all, it just throws an error at me when I try. Why bother letting me run 60hz through it if I can't record it?