I’ve been playing around with Sega Dreamcast discs lately. Not playing the games on the DC discs, of course, just studying their structure. To review, the Sega Dreamcast game console used special optical discs named GD-ROMs, where the GD stands for “gigadisc”. They are capable of holding about 1 gigabyte of data.

You know what’s weird about these discs? Each one manages to actually store a gigabyte of data. Each disc has a CD portion and a GD portion. The CD portion occupies the first 45000 sectors and can be read in any standard CD drive. This area is divided between a brief data track and a brief (usually) audio track.

The GD region starts at sector 45000. Sometimes, it’s just one humongous data track that consumes the entire GD region. More often, however, the data track is split between the first track and the last track in the region and there are 1 or more audio tracks in between. But the weird thing is, the GD region is always full. I made a study of it (click for a larger, interactive graph):

Some discs put special data or audio bonuses in the CD region for players to discover. But every disc manages to fill out the GD region. I checked up on a lot of those audio tracks that divide the GD data and they’re legitimate music tracks. So what’s the motivation? Why would the data track be split in 2 pieces like that?

I eventually realized that I probably answered this question in this blog post from 4 years ago. The read speed from the outside of an optical disc is higher than the inside of the same disc. When I inspect the outer data tracks of some of these discs, sure enough, there seem to be timing-sensitive multimedia FMV files living on the outer stretches.

One day, I’ll write a utility to take apart the split ISO-9660 filesystem offset from a weird sector.

Nope! I’m never going to let go of the Sega Dreamcast hacking. When I was playing around with Dreamcast hacking early last year, I became aware that there is such a thing as an SD card adapter for the DC that plugs into the port normally reserved for the odd DC link cable. Of course I wanted to see what I could do with it.

The primary software that leverages the DC SD adapter is called DreamShell. Working with this adapter and the software requires some skill and guesswork. Searching for these topics tends to turn up results from various forums where people are trying to cargo-cult their way to solutions. I have a strange feeling that this post might become the unofficial English-language documentation on the matter.

Use Cases
What can you do with this thing? Undoubtedly, the primary use is for backing up (ripping) the contents of GD-ROMs (the custom optical format used for the DC) and playing those backed up (ripped) copies. Presumably, users of this device leverage the latter use case more than the former, i.e., download ripped games, load them on the SD card, and launch them using DreamShell.

However, there are other uses such as multimedia playback, system exploration, BIOS reprogramming, high-level programming, and probably a few other things I haven’t figured out yet.

Delivery
I put in an order via the dc-sd.com website and in about 2 short months, the item arrived from China. This marked my third lifetime delivery from China and curiously, all 3 of the shipments have pertained to the Sega Dreamcast.

Click for larger image

I thought it was very interesting that this adapter came in such complete packaging. The text is all in Chinese, though the back states “Windows 98 / ME / 2000 / XP, Mac OS 9.1, LINUX2.4”. That’s what tipped me off that they must have just cannibalized some old USB SD card readers and packaging in order to create these. Closer inspection of the internals through the translucent pink case confirms this.

Usage
According to its change log, DreamShell has been around for a long time with version 1.0.0 released in February of 2004. The current version is 4.0.0 RC3. There are several downloads available:

1. DreamShell 4.0 RC 3 CDI Image
2. DreamShell 4.0 RC 3 + Boot Loader
3. DreamShell 4.0 RC 3 + Core CDI image

Option #2 worked for me. It contains a CDI disc image and the DreamShell files in a directory named DS/.

Burn the CDI to a CD-R in the normal way you would burn a bootable Dreamcast disc from a CDI image. This is open-ended and left as an exercise to the reader, since there are many procedures depending on platform. On Linux, I used a small script I found once called burncdi-dc.sh.

Then, copy the contents of the DS/ folder to an SD card. As for filesystem, FAT16 and FAT32 are both known to work. The files in DS/ should land in the root of the SD card; the folder DS/ should not be in the root.

Plug the SD card into the DC SD adapter and plug the adapter in the link cable port on the back of the Dreamcast. Then, boot the disc. If it works, you will see this minor corruption of the usual Sega licensing screen:

Then, there will be a brief white-on-black text screen that explains the booting process:
Continue reading →

Console homebrew communities have always had a precarious relationship with console pirates. The same knowledge and skills useful for creating homebrew programs can usually be parlayed into ripping games and cajoling a console into honoring ripped copies. For this reason, the Dreamcast homebrew community tried hard to distance itself from pirates, rippers, and other unsavory characters.

Funny how times change. While I toed the same line while I was marginally a part of the community back in the day, now I think I’m performing a service for video game archivists and historians by openly publishing the same information. I know of at least one solution already. But I think it’s possible to do much better.

Pre-existing Art
Famed Japanese game hacker BERO (FFmpeg contributors should recognize his name from a number of Dreamcast-related multimedia contributions including CRI ADX and SH-4 optimizations) crafted a program called dreamrip based on KOS’s precursor called libdream. This is the program I used to extract 4XM multimedia files from Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare.

Fun facts: The Sega Dreamcast used special optical discs called GD-ROMs. The GD stands for ‘GigaDisc’ which implied that they could hold roughly a gigabyte of data. How long do you think it takes to transfer that much data over a serial cable operating at 115,200 bits/second (on the order of 11 Kbytes/sec)? I seem to recall entire discs requiring on the order of 27-28 hours to archive.

If only I possessed some expertise in data compression which might expedite this process.

KallistiOS’ Unwitting Help
The KallistiOS (KOS) console-oriented RTOS provides all the software infrastructure necessary for archiving (that’s what we’ll call it in this post) Dreamcast games. KOS exposes the optical disc’s filesystem via the /cd mount point on the VFS. From there, KOS provides functions for communicating with a host computer via ethernet (broadband adapter) or serial line (DC coder’s cable). To this end, KOS exposes another mount point on the VFS named /pc which allows direct access to the host PC’s filesystem.

Thus, it’s pretty straightforward to use KOS to access the files (or raw sectors) of the Dreamcast disc and then send them over the communication line to the host PC. Simple.

Compressing Before Transfer
Right away, I wonder about compiling 3 different compression libraries: libz, libbz2, and liblzma. The latter 2 are exceptionally CPU-intensive to compress. Then again, it doesn’t really matter how long the compressor takes to do its job as long as it can average better than 11 Kbytes/sec on a 200MHz Hitachi SH-4 CPU. KOS can be set up in a preemptive threading mode which means it should be possible to read sectors and compress them while keeping the UART operating at full tilt.

A 4th compression algorithm should be in play here as well: FLAC. Since some of these discs contain red book CD audio tracks that need archival, lossless audio compression should be useful.

This post serves as a rough overview for possible future experiments. Readers might have further brainstorms.