GD-ROM Dumping Guide

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Revision as of 14:59, 19 May 2019

This is a step-by-step guide designed to be easy to follow so that you can make reproducible, good dumps of your GD-ROMs to the Redump standard. We have been unsuccessful getting GD-R's to dump with the redump method, further testing may be required.

Note: Some GD-Roms will NOT dump with this method, and require a TOSEC style dump for the HD area which then has to be "fixed" to meet redump spec. If the game is a single track in the HD area, then TOSEC-style dump will be equal a redump dump for HD area, LD area still needs Plextor dumping.

NOTE: A work in progress video dumping tutorial guide is available here.

What are GDs?

GDs—or Gigadiscs—are the type of optical media used by the Sega Dreamcast as well as the Sega NAOMI, Sega NAOMI 2, Sega Chihiro and Triforce arcade systems. It is special compared to its relative—the CD—in that it contains both a low density (LD) and a high density (HD) area. To get a good dump, you need to extract them both from the disc.

If you have any of the officially released discs for the Dreamcast or any of the above mentioned arcade systems, you are pretty much guaranteed to have a GD. The Dreamcast did however support loading of MIL-CDs, which lead to a number of unlicensed software being pressed on regular CDs. Check for the GD-ROM logo on the disc or check the reflective side of the disc for a visible LD–HD divide if you are unsure.

Tools

First you need to make sure you have the necessary equipment. To dump a GD you need:

• A Windows PC
• Compatible drive(s)
• DiscImageCreator app
• Download VGPC GD-Rom Dumping Kit (audio trap disc image, dcdumper, ice, startstop)
• A CD-R to create and Audio Trap Disc.

Burning an Audio Trap Disc

You'll need an Audio Trap Disc for the HD Area dumping process as it tricks your drive into reading into that part of the disc.

The Audio Trap Disc image is included with the VGPC GD-Rom Dumping Kit. Because the image intentionally has errors, many programs won’t burn it properly. We’ve found that CloneCD can reliably burn it properly:

• Open Clone CD and click on “Write from ImageFile”.
• Click on “Browse” and navigate to where you extracted the VGPC GD-Rom Dumping Kit, and select “TOC122A.CCD”.
• Then, select the drive with the blank CD-R(W) inside. Click on the “Protected PC Game” profile. The write speed doesn’t matter much since this is such a small image. Still, you should probably avoid setting it too fast or too slow. Somewhere between 4x and 24x should be good, so set it to 8x if you don’t want to overthink.

Dumping the LD Area

The LD Area should be dumped with DICUI using this guide: Disc Dumping Guide (DICUI).

The LD Area is a standard CD-Rom, so it will be the only data to appear when mounted in a computer.

Dumping the HD Area

To dump the HD Area of the GD-Rom, the swap disc method is used. To do this you will have to remove the four bottom screws of your drive and faceplate. Afterwards, set the top back onto the drive. It will be removed after the startstop step.

• Insert the audio Trap Disc to an HD Area compatible drive.
• Run startstop.exe [driveletter] 1
• Remove the top off the drive
• insert the gdrom and gently push the tray back (or put the drive cover back on).
• Run dcdumper [drive letter] -c446261 -df -ft -t0 -p20
• It will take several "PASS"es to get all matches, this is fine.

If dcdumper fails to run with an error complaining about MSVCP100.DLL being missing, install the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package (x86) to fix this issue.

Converting HD Area dump Sections to Tracks

Run “ice.exe dense.bin 44990 > gamename.txt” This will produce a bunch of files starting with “Track 03” and going as high as however many “tracks” were on the HD section of the disc (sometimes there will only be one, sometimes it will go up to Track 98).

Submitting your dump info