GD-ROM Dumping Guide

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Revision as of 03:45, 21 August 2022

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 and GD-Rs to the Redump standard.

Note: Some GD-Roms will NOT dump with this method, and require a TOSEC-style SD Card 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 the TOSEC-style dump will be equal a redump dump for HD area, LD area still needs Plextor dumping. See GD-Rom SD Card Dumping Guide.

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

What are GDs?

GDs (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. The disc contains two distinct areas, a Low Density (LD) Area and a High Density (HD) Area, physically separated by a ring. To get a good dump, you need to extract both Areas 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 CD-Roms. Check for the GD-ROM logo on the disc or check the reflective side of the disc for a visible LD/HD Area divide if you are unsure.

Tools

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

• Windows PC
• Compatible drive(s)
• MPF application
• Download VGPC GD-Rom Dumping Kit (audio trap disc image, dcdumper, ice, startstop)
• Disc Image Creator
• CD-R to create an 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 (free trial) can reliably burn it properly:

• Open CloneCD 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 inside. Click on the "Protected PC Game" profile. The write speed shouldn't matter much since this is such a small image, but 8x speed recommended.

Dumping the LD Area

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

The LD Area is a standard CD-Rom, so it will be the only data to display on the disc when browsing the disc in Windows Explorer.

Dumping the HD Area

To dump the HD Area of the GD-Rom, the Swap Disc method is used. The Swap Disc method has two options:

• Pin Eject method - which isn't reliable.
• Prepare a Drive for Top Removal as seen here - a more reliable method. Afterwards, set the top back onto the drive with screws removed, this allows for easy top removal after the startstop (DCDumper) / stop (DiscImageCreator) step.

Method 1: DCDumper

One of the two ways to dump the HD Area is with DCDumper.

• Insert the audio Trap Disc to an HD Area compatible drive.
• In command line, cd (change directory) to the "VGPC GD-Rom Dumping Kit" folder.
• Run startstop [DriveLetter] 1
• Remove the top off the drive.
• Insert the GD-Rom and put the drive top back on.
• Run dcdumper [DriveLetter] -c446261 -df -ft -t0 -p20
• It will take several "PASS"es to get all matches, this is fine. If you need to stop (sometimes there is no progress for 30mins) and restart the dumping process, it will continue where it left off - so don't delete progress if you have to stop it.
• When the HD Area dump completes, you'll convert it to it's final form. 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).

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.

Method 2: DiscImageCreator

The other way to dump the HD Area is with DiscImageCreator.

• Insert the audio Trap Disc to an HD Area compatible drive.
• In command line, cd (change directory) to the folder containing "DiscImageCreator.exe".
• Run DiscImageCreator.exe stop [DriveLetter]
• Remove the top of the drive / use a pin to press the escape eject button.
• Insert the GD disc (or for Pin Eject method: gently push the tray back or put the drive cover back on) and run: DiscImageCreator.exe close [DriveLetter]
• Then run the dumping command: DiscImageCreator.exe gd [DriveLetter] foo.bin [DriveSpeed(0-72)] (Note: Add " /c2" at the end when dumping with a compatible Plextor.)
• Dump multiple times until you get an error-free dump (check the Command Prompt output after DiscImageCreator finishes dumping).

Submitting your dump info