GD-ROM "Swap Trick" Ripping Process
- Other Essential Guides

0.0  Disclaimer

Please note that producing a backup of your LEGITIMATELY OWNED Dreamcast games, using the methods described in this docuement (and all related pages on my website), for YOUR personal usage at home, is NOT illegal; or at least, definitely not in the UK. As for other countries - I have no idea, so consult your local solicitor now if you are concerned. Anyway, moving on...

1.0  Introduction

This document contains many useful guides on how to extract the contents of any ISO images you may have dumped using the GD-ROM "swap trick" process as described in my document titled "The Main Guide". Here I'll be delving into doing tasks you'll need / want to do after ripping your games, such as verifying files and making self-boot CDI images from the files inside a DC ISO.

Most of the guides I've written here either expand on areas that are not dealt with clearly in the StateS / Yursoft ripping guides (e.g. ripping CD audio tracks), or describe how to use other applications (e.g. ExoBoot for making self-bootable DC disc images) that weren't around at the time the aforementioned guides were written.

2.0  How to extract audio tracks from a GD-ROM using Yursoft's method (into a BIN file), and how to split the tracks up

IMPORTANT NOTE: At the moment, there isn't actually a way of making a DC disc image (whatever the format) with CD audio tracks. ExoBoot doesn't support them because the utility it runs to build the disc image, MKISOFS, does not support CD audio tracks (not surprising, as the ISO format itself does not support CD audio tracks at all). So for now it is not possible to have mixed audio & data track DC games playable in Chankast. Unless of course you play the tracks in a seperate application in the background =P

While Yursoft's method is better and more tidy than extracting each track to a .WAV file (as in the StateS guide), he missed a couple of details from his original guide, which I'm sure we can forgive him for. For those who are confused with how to do it, here's the process in full plus the right settings to use in CDRWIN:

1. Select the "Extract Sectors" option.
2. Enter the filename as "AUDIO.BIN".
3. Set the File Format to "AUTOMATIC".
4. Open the TOC file for your game in GD Lister and enter the first sector of the first audio track as the starting sector in CDRWIN. Then, enter the last sector of the last audio track as the finishing sector in CDRWIN.
5. Set "Error Recovery" to Abort and "Jitter Correction" to Auto.
6. Press the Start button (in the CDRWIN window, silly =P) to begin extraction. Then, erm, wait until it's finished.

Once you have your AUDIO.BIN file, you may want to actually get the audio tracks out of it. Yursoft's method of extraction, using GD Lister, does not work for me because the program never prompts me for the source file - this goes for versions 1.6 and 1.7. The only way to get around this problem is either to extract each CDDA track from your Dreamcast game to WAV files (see the StateS guide for info). However, I have found that in one game, ChuChu Rocket (which has a very large quantity of CDDA tracks), I cannot extract every single track in this way; my Lite-ON DVD drive refuses to extract any tracks beyond around track 9, unless I dump all the tracks into a .BIN file. Therefore, I came up with an alternate method to pull CDDA tracks inside a .BIN file:

1. Open your target AUDIO.BIN file in Cool Edit, or Audacity (which is freeware), or an equivalent application, though bear in mind I only have experience with only the two apps I mentioned.
2. With Cool Edit, you can open the file directly - with Audacity, open it up first, go to "Import", then click on "Import Raw Data", and navigate to the BIN file. Then, when prompted to, input the following preferences:
   • 16 bits per sample, signed
   • 44100 Hz sampling rate
   • 2 channels (Stereo)
3. Depending on the app you are using these values may be worded differently, so be on the lookout for changes. Some apps like Audacity may also require you to set the "endianness" of a file; if so, pick little endian.
4. Wait a few seconds (depending on the size of the file) and you should see a waveform image of all the audio tracks with a small amount of silence seperating each of them. After this is done, set the selection / time format to CDDA, which is measured in minutes, seconds and frames at 75 frames per second.
5. These can be exported to WAV files simply by highlighting the required track and saving it. To achieve this with reasonable accuracy, open your game's TOC file (which you should have ripped already), check the length of the audio track you want to cut, then highlight it in the respective wave editor you are using, and use the "Export" function of your editor to save the highlighted track to a seperate WAV file. Make sure to zoom in on the waveform data as much as possible to ensure maximum accuracy. Finally, the gap length between each track is usually 300 sectors, or exactly 6 seconds. If it's different, use LBA Converter (in the ripping toolkit) to find the appropriate value.

2.1  How to verify that you have no corrupted files in your ripped DC ISO file(s)

Even if your game rip went perfectly in CDRWIN with no errors reported, this doesn't necessarily mean your rip has no corrupted files. But, checking numerous files inside the ripped ISO image should be enough to verify that it is a good rip - to some extent, anyway. To do this, you will need to bust all the game files out of the ISO with the extract.exe utility supplied with my GD-ROM ripping toolkit.

Copy it into the same folder as the ISO file and your ripped TOC.ISO file, open a Command Prompt window in the folder (recommend you install the CmdHere PowerToy in my ripping toolkit for doing this quickly) and type one of the following:

• If your rip is from a game with just a data track (of 984 MB), type: extract toc.iso image.iso 45150 and press Enter / Return.
• If your rip is from a game with audio & data tracks (in which case the data-containing second data track will vary in size), type: extract toc.iso image.iso (starting LBA value of second / last data track, plus 150) and press Enter / Return.

Once the files have extracted, you'll need to get a good, organized look at each & every one of them. To do this in Windows 2000/XP/Server 2003, right-click on the folder containing ALL the extracted files from your ISO, and click on Search (NOTE: In Win95/98/ME, you will have to browse to the folder manually - press F3 to bring up Find / Search for quick access). In the text entry field headed "All or part of a filename", type in "*.*" (without the quote marks) and click on the Search button.

Once the search is completed, sort all the files by their type / extension by left-clicking once on the "Type" button in the window containing the search results. Then, scroll down for any files which have the following extensions - all those listed below can be opened or viewed in some way to verify they are not corrupted.

• ADX - Cinepack / CRI ADX audio files. They can be played back directly using any of the following: 1) The Cinepack ADX Player (bundled with this toolkit), 2) WinAMP plus Rob Diehl's ADX plugin, or 3) foobar2000 plus kode54's foo_adpcm plugin.
• AFS - an archive of files. Can contain just about any type of file. Fighting Vipers 2 has all of its game files stored inside these. Use the bundled utility, afs_extract.exe, to get at their contents.
• BIN - can be just about anything, but one .BIN file you *really* should check after doing a rip is 1ST_READ.BIN - most of the time, any good rip of this file will have a string like this somewhere in it: "Lib Handle Start".
• DPS - Dream Passport Score files. Simply open them up in Notepad; their contents look just like raw HTML code.
• GIF - common image file format. Can be viewed with MS Paint, Windows Picture & Fax Viewer, and many many other programs.
• INI - initialization file of some sort. Also openable in Notepad. Contents of these tend to be made up partly of readable lines of stuff, partly of lines that are not readable and resemble garbled data - this is perfectly normal. Don't get these confused with standard Windows INI files as they are very different in layout & content, as previously mentioned.
• JPG - common image file format. Open with the same sort of programs as with GIF.
• LNG - language file. Don't know if these are in any game other than Fur Fighters. Open with Notepad - they will look like garbled data mixed up with readable words.
• PRS - an archive of graphic files; the ones I've opened had JPEG files, but others may have different formats. Use the utility in the toolkit to decompress these.
• PVM - an archive of PVR files. Use the utility in the toolkit to decompress these.
• PVR - texture files. Convert these for viewing in any regular image viewing / editing app with the bundled utility, pvr2bmp.exe.
• SFD - Cinepak / CRI MPEG Sofdec movie files. Can be played back using Media Player Classic, and probably many other similar programs. The video stream is usually in MPEG1, however the audio stream will probably be in a different format and may not play at all.
• TXT - text files. Open them in Notepad: some of them will be plain text, while others will resemble INI file contents.

Tip: if you need to convert a large numbers of AFS or PVR files with the supplied utilities in my GD-ROM ripping toolkit, save yourself some time by doing mass conversions of them. To do this, simply get hold of some AFS / PVR files you want to extract / convert respectively. Then, place those files into the same folder as the program that converts them. So this would mean putting all your AFS files in the folder that has afs_extract.exe inside it, and vice versa. Then, open a Command Prompt in each folder with the program, type "afs_extract *.afs" to extract all AFS files in the same folder, and / or type "pvr2bmp.exe *.pvr" to convert all PVR files in the same folder to BMP.

Note that not all of these types will appear in each game, but most will. And, that's all there is to it. If you have any files of the above extensions, you've tried to view them and found that everything in the file is garbled / the file won't convert or play back / etc. you will probably need to do a re-rip of your DC game. If that doesn't sort it out, try out different firmware revisions. Other than that, I can't give much other help in this area.

2.2  Converting the contents of your ripped DC ISO file into a self-bootable CDI image

Once you have dumped the contents of your DC game, to get a playable copy of the game, you will need to use ExoBoot (download it here) - a DC self-boot GUI - to either: A) convert the extracted files into a .CDI image file for use in Chankast, or B) burn the extracted files to a blank CD-R for play on a real Dreamcast (you will need to downsample various audio & video files beforehand to fit onto a 700 MB CD-R, should your dumped game be larger than 700MB - see StateS's GD-ROM ripping guide for details on how to do this). In both cases, ExoBoot will automatically launch various DOS programs to make the extracted data self-bootable beforehand (as well as other DOS programs to burn the data to CD or compile the data into an image, depending on the option chosen).

However, ExoBoot does have its limits; it CANNOT make self-bootable .CDI images with audio tracks inside them - don't worry though, because games like ChuChu Rocket & Ready 2 Rumble, which have CD audio, will work fine without it. For standard DC games (which just have a single data track) there are no issues. Exoskelet0r (the ExoBoot creator) was / is going to add support for games with audio & data tracks, but I don't know when this support will come about. Of course, if you have managed to rip any audio tracks from DC games which have them, hang on to them, cause they'll come in handy eventually =P

Once you have downloaded & unzipped ExoBoot, make a directory within its folder called "data" if it is not already there. If you haven't done so already, extract all the files from the ISO (see section 3.2.1). Then simply copy / cut & paste all the extracted files into the "data" directory in the ExoBoot folder. Then run ExoBoot, select the option "Mode 2 - Data to CD or image" (leave the "Remove dummy files" option as Automatic), and click on Next.

On the next screen (in Step 1) click Browse to go to the directory where your game data files are (e.g. D:\ExoBoot\data). There are now two different routes you may take, both described in the next steps.

2.3  To create a self-bootable DC game on a CD-R:

1. In Step 2, put a tick in the box labelled "Burn selfbootable game in a CD-ROM". Under Game Name, you will need to enter the game disc's volume label - to see this, insert the game into your test drive normally and look at what name it appears as in My Computer (e.g. Sonic Adventure appears as SONIC_ADV).
2. Optionally, you may also tick the nearby checkbox "Delete in the end the folder with the data files". Only do this if you are ABSOLUTELY CERTAIN that you will not need the files again.
3. In Step 3, input the CD-RW burning speed (which can be any of the following values, as long as your drive & CD-R support them: 1,2,4,8,12,16,24,32,40,48 or 52).
4. Click on the "Find Bus ID" button to get the SCSI ID of your CD-RW drive. This will open a new window with a list of all the occupied SCSI Bus IDs on your PC. The Bus ID is a value in the format x,y,0 where x is a number from 0 to 4 and y is a number from 0 to 7. Find the one for your CD-RW drive (e.g. 1,0,0) and enter it in the textbox marked "Enter Writer Bus ID".
5. Click on the Next button to begin burning a copy of your DC game.

2.4  To create a self-bootable DC game in the DiscJuggler (CDI) image format:

1. In Step 2, put a tick in the box labelled "Create image from the data files". Under Game Name, you will need to enter the game disc's volume label - to see this, insert the game into your test drive normally and look at what name it appears as in My Computer (e.g. Sonic Adventure appears as SONIC_ADV).
2. Under "Select Image Format", pick DiscJuggler (.CDI). Don't pick Nero (.NRG) because it's not compatible with DAEMON-Tools v3.29 (which you MUST use because it is the only version compatible with Chankast).
3. Click on the Next button to begin creating the bootable .CDI image, which should take only a few minutes. Finally, mount the image in DAEMON-Tools, load up Chankast, and see if it works.

3.0  The End

That's all for now - apologies if your head exploded while trying to digest all of that information!

3.1  Copyright Information

Unless otherwise stated, all of this information was written by myself (RobbyW / STC-Fan / zedeckseightyone) ©2004-2008 or adapted from sources who have helpfully contributed information to this document. You may NOT use any information from this document unless you ask nicely beforehand, or something like that.