Dreamcast GDEMU info

[Anthony817]

Woah, that's awesome! Any places/thread where we can follow along the development progress?

Yes, but we actually need a thread here too so I might make one later today.

But you do need to be registered over at Dreamcast_Talk to be able to read the thread as it is part of our downloads section and that is hidden to the public.

Dreamcast-Talk.com - Login

You can see where megavolt and I were discussing it starting at that post in the link above. That was page 2, we are on page 23 at the time of this posting, and he is on alpha test 2.

New features are remapped controls to have D-pad as analog, and L2 and R2 is now working and are D-pad Left and D-pad R respectively.

So now Twisted Metal 2 and other games requiring L2 and R2 are much more playable than before.

 

[Yenaphe]

That's amazing thanks. Just saw the new thread, and i'll dig more info in the reamcast talk forum

Thanks a lot.

 

[solitario1]

How to use GDMENU SD maker with linux?

 

[einsteinx2]

How to use GDMENU SD maker with linux?

Not sure if it'll work with Wine or Mono or not, but it might. On my MacBook I just used a VM since I have a Windows 10 VM I use all the time for random Windows stuff.

 

[solitario1]

Not sure if it'll work with Wine or Mono or not, but it might. On my MacBook I just used a VM since I have a Windows 10 VM I use all the time for random Windows stuff.

I tested wine with PlayOnlinux and it didn't work ... once I tried it on the virtual machine and it didn't work because the vmware doesn't recognize sd card connected to the notebook on the virtual machine

 

[FamilyGuy]

How to use GDMENU SD maker with linux?

There's a striped down Linux version that doesn't move the files for you but builds up the list properly.

 

[megavolt85]

vmware

??????
use VirtualBOX

 

[solitario1]

??????
use VirtualBOX

I'm gonna try virtualBOX

 

[megavolt85]

don't use PlayOnlinux for run windows version of VirtualBOX
install native linux VirtualBOX

after install windows to VirtualBOX use Devices->USB for attach your SD reader to virtual machine

 

[sonik]

I've had some problems with madsheep's GDMENU_SD.
My antivirus don't like GDMENU_SD. And from time to time when moving content it messes up the folders. I can't find the source code to it to try to fix.
So I've created an alternative program. Been using it for some time now. Anyone want to help me test it? AFAIK it works only in windows.
There's also gui version for FamilyGuy's gdishrink in the works. And I'm testing a lot of games trying to figure out the incompatible ones.

 

[FamilyGuy]

I've had some problems with madsheep's GDMENU_SD.
My antivirus don't like GDMENU_SD. And from time to time when moving content it messes up the folders. I can't find the source code to it to try to fix.
So I've created an alternative program. Been using it for some time now. Anyone want to help me test it? AFAIK it works only in windows.
There's also gui version for FamilyGuy's gdishrink in the works. And I'm testing a lot of games trying to figure out the incompatible ones.

Make sure to use the latest version of gdishrink from the code section on SourceForge. It has a new experimental way to detect the zone to crop and should have better compatibility.

If you would like some features from gdishrink to help you out don't hesitate to ask.

BTW, one can use gditools to extract CDI files (not right out of the bat, but it's not hard either). So cdi4dc + gditools could be used to generate/extract the gdmenu disc.cdi with your own code to handle the list.

 

[sonik]

Make sure to use the latest version of gdishrink from the code section on SourceForge. It has a new experimental way to detect the zone to crop and should have better compatibility.

Thanks for the heads up. But the latest gdishrink commit is like 2 years old? Then I'm using the latest version

If you would like some features from gdishrink to help you out don't hesitate to ask.

gdishrink works very good and is a life saviour.
what's up with the games that does not work with it? some games even crash gdmenu when putting the cursor over them (I suspect it's when it reads the file 0gdtex.pvr)

 

[FamilyGuy]

Thanks for the heads up. But the latest gdishrink commit is like 2 years old? Then I'm using the latest version


gdishrink works very good and is a life saviour.
what's up with the games that does not work with it? some games even crash gdmenu when putting the cursor over them (I suspect it's when it reads the file 0gdtex.pvr)

The latest commit is a few weeks old.

gditools / Code / [4954d9]

sourceforge.net

The program assumed that the data between the end of toc and the first file was empty. Turns out it might not always be the case I guess, or there's some issue with detection.

The new version ensures it removes only null data.

 

[sonik]

When we manually create game ISOs we put a dummy file on the disc. It's a file normally filled with zero.
How it's made on a real GD? It's just empty data without a entry in the file system? I'ts done by the SDK tools?

 

[FamilyGuy]

When we manually create game ISOs we put a dummy file on the disc. It's a file normally filled with zero.
How it's made on a real GD? It's just empty data without a entry in the file system? I'ts done by the SDK tools?

It's trivial to add an empty file and remove it from toc. That's what

-hide 0.0

does in my selfboot pack.

They either do that or directly pre-compute the LBA of each file starting from the end in reverse and do the padding when building the iso.

There are betas in which the padding seems to be random files from development though, so I'm not sure how it was done during active development.

 

[Greenelfo]

gdishrink works very good and is a life saviour.
what's up with the games that does not work with it? some games even crash gdmenu when putting the cursor over them (I suspect it's when it reads the file 0gdtex.pvr)

I too have noticed when scrolling slowly through gdmenu it will eventually crash and display a black screen. This has been discussed by another poster on reddit where he fixed it by editing the gdmenu INI to a detect time of 2000.



Does this only occur on GDI images that were compressed using gdishrink? Does the latest commit fix the problem for artwork causing gdmenu to crash, removing the need to edit the detect time?

 

[sonik]

Without shrinking every game works for me.
A lot of games that previously crashed started to work with the latest gdishrink.
I have tested 200 dc games looking for compatibility problems.

All games listed here have problems:

Some of the games that not worked I have found that they are not RGB compatible. I'm taking note of these games too.

 

[FamilyGuy]

Without shrinking every game works for me.
A lot of games that previously crashed started to work with the latest gdishrink.
I have tested 200 dc games looking for compatibility problems.

All games listed here have problems:

Some of the games that not worked I have found that they are not RGB compatible. I'm taking note of these games too.

What kind of issues do they have? Is it caused by gdishrink or simply the gdemu?

I don't really have the time to look into that for the next few months, but if someone figures out the issue I'm all ears!

 

[sonik]

Some images using the old version resulted in files with only a few KB in size. It was faulty.
The new version have way better compatibility.
Some games boot and others crash the gdmenu.

 

[Greenelfo]

Some images using the old version resulted in files with only a few KB in size. It was faulty.
The new version have way better compatibility.
Some games boot and others crash the gdmenu

So does that mean the latest gditools has fixed the artwork crashing gdmenu problem for you?

When you say others crash the gdmenu, what steps do you take for this to occur and when does the crash occur?