Emulator Problem: A How-To Tutorial for Sega Emulators

I'm as new as it gets when it comes to getting Sega emulators such as Saturn and Dreamcast to work. I'm already familiar with Gensplus and am able to get games on it to run flawlessly (except for Sega CD games and 32x); I've had some experience with Chankast and Satourne, and unless any might suggest otherwise for good reason, I'd like to keep the discussion between these two emulators.

What I'm green behind the ears about is how to successfully mount such files as .bin, .cue, and .iso in such a way that I'm able to play them on the emulators without having to burn the actual images and their accompanying files (like MP3s) on CDs or DVDs. So far the problems I've encountered on Satourne with a .iso type rom are incredibly slow graphics and sound (although it may just be the sounds, but I'm not sure), even though I made sure to configure the plugins and put everything in it's place. The .bin type roms I'm not even sure what happens. They just take me to Saturn's no-disc menu with grating noise in the background. Also, I notice that with Satourne, I only hear the sound when the program window is active as opposed to the separate game window that pops up when I push play.

Basically, what I would like is a comprehensive tutorial on how to get Saturn and Dreamcast emulators to run their respective roms when it comes to their different file formats. If anyone can refer me to a relevant thread or two on here than can solve my problems, I'd appreciate it. Other than that, I'm somewhat in the dark.

Saturn (not sure about DC) emulation is to be honest, still in its infancy.

There are very few emulators out there, and they all work with certain games to a varying degree. The Saturn is an incredibly complex system to emulate due to its multiple CPU's (also a bitch to programs games for).

If you haven't tried SSF you might want to look into it, as it seems to run most games at least half decent.

To mount disc images, get a program called Daemon-Tools. It creates a virtual drive on your PC that will mimic copy protection schemes and stuff like that. But you still may need to hunt down a BIOS for a particular machine if its giving you disc recognition problems. We can't provide info on where to get BIOS, ROMS, Images, and copyrighted material like that, so please don't ask.

For Sega CD you could try Kega Fusion.. It has support for MP3 CD's as well, but in general MP3 CD's can be flaky all on their own for technical reasons resulting from the conversion of CD Audio data. If data is not where a game expects it to be, the file time is longer or shorter than expected, etc this can cause games to hang/crash etc.

Kega is an all-around emulator that can do Sega Master System, Genesis (Megadrive), Sega CD, and I think Game Gear as well. Gens is also another emulator that should allow you to play Sega CD games using the MP3 method. The main difference between Kega and Gens is Kega is focused on accurate reproduction, including hardware bugs that exist in the production hardware and stuff like that. Gens is focused on playability and will use software hacks and the like to get a game to run properly.. It's mainly a philosophical difference, as the purpose of emulation is to historically preserve first, and play second. The end users rarely care either way so both are a good option.

Great, thanks for the info Zach.

So I'll need Daemon Tools to mount the CD images... and then I would just have either Satourne or SSF interact with the virtual drive. Ok, I think that'll solve my problem; I'll try out SSF and see how it works with different games. I can only assume the same would apply for Sega CD, so if anything I'll try Kega Fusion if I find that Gens isn't working out.

You said that the MP3 data for certain CD-based games may be flaky because of where the game thinks the data should be. Should I locate it in C:\ or simply on a virtual drive via Daemon Tools?

No,

Sega CD games that contain audio track data (audio that can be played in a standard CD player independently of the game) reference the audio from the physical CD using timecodes and track numbers.

However uncompressed CD Audio (.wav files) is HUGE and in the days of 56k when emulation came into fruition people needed an easy way to distribute CD based games containing audio files. The solution was an MP3 hack of sorts.

On an MP3 CD, there is a file that references the MP3 files defining their track numbers, timecodes, etc.. This is converted back into info the game can read, another form of emulation of sorts.. However because of issues with encoding audio files into MP3 file playtimes may come out different by plus or minus seconds, so there are a lot of variables that have to be accounted for and if any one of them is out of whack, the game has a melt-down, not knowing what to do.

I haven't used an MP3 CD in a long time, since I collect authentic full-quality full-size images (MP3 compression reduces the audio quality especially if done poorly at a low bitrate), but I believe how they work is you take the .ZIP or RAR file the game came into and extract all the files to a directory of your choice. This will dump the games CD image, MP3 files, and any relevant data files into the same directory. So you shouldn't touch or move anything, there is no need as long as all the files are in the same directory structure they were inside the zip file.. If you decompressed to C:\Games\SonicCD - or whatever, just leave the Image & MP3's there.

I'm not sure I remember how mounting and playing MP3 CD images work.. There MIGHT be an internal mechanism for mounting the CD image files within the emulators, but if not, just mount the image in Daemon-Tools and boot the Virtual Drive letter with the mounted image.

Zach said:

If you haven't tried SSF you might want to look into it, as it seems to run most games at least half decent.

Click to expand...

Actually, every game I've tried so far (8 or 9) have run satisfactory. Not perfect in any way though, but very much playable and enjoyable. So I would say it's better than half decent, but that is of course just my personal opinion.
I've only had problems with the other emulators for Saturn, but SSF is a joy to use once I got the hang of it.

That's good to hear. I haven't used SSF in a long time, but I know the last time I tried I had this weird problem where I couldn't config my PSX controller because the options menu was blank for some weird reason..

I'm not sure if it was a windows XP / Vista issue but I couldn't solve it.

Yeah, I think I'll definitely go for SSF then. Thanks.

Zach said:

I haven't used an MP3 CD in a long time, since I collect authentic full-quality full-size images (MP3 compression reduces the audio quality especially if done poorly at a low bitrate), but I believe how they work is you take the .ZIP or RAR file the game came into and extract all the files to a directory of your choice. This will dump the games CD image, MP3 files, and any relevant data files into the same directory. So you shouldn't touch or move anything, there is no need as long as all the files are in the same directory structure they were inside the zip file.. If you decompressed to C:\Games\SonicCD - or whatever, just leave the Image & MP3's there.

Click to expand...

Hmm... ok. I read elsewhere a recommendation to change the MP3 files to a different format, like Ogg Vorbis or WAV. Would that solve the problem of MP3 encoding, or would it just create another problem?

Also, switching to Dreamcast emulation, what should I do with a game that consists of filenames with extensions .001, 002, 003, etc. plus a .sfv (checksum) file?

The only other files I've encountered are binary (.bin) and cue-sheets (.cue). I'm not sure what to do with the binary file, but I know the .cue file contains information about the game's music, and it seems like that's the file I should be mounting, but I'm not sure.