Dreamcast How To

If you read my last blog entry I talked about being able to play burned games on the Dreamcast. Just in case anyone is interested in doing it themselves I thought I would post links for everyone to get the ROMs, the program to burn the games, and a video tutorial on how to use it. This way you too can burn games for your Dreamcast and have access to over 250 titles, both domestic and import for your Dreamcast.

First we should start with where to download the ROMS (games). I use two places, both equally. They are both good except EMU Paradise has faster download speeds. Both though are through servers which allow for a steady, consistent, and safe download. WARNING: Be careful where you download ROMS from. There are a lot of bogus websites out there that claim to be ROM sites that do nothing more than infect you with a virus. It has happened to me and it just happened to Brian T. recently. So be careful and just go to the 2 sites that I have listed here.

EMUPARADISE
DCISOZONE.com

Once you have a game downloaded you will need to decompress the file. They come as a Rar file which is similar to a Zip file. There is a free program called WinRar which can be downloaded here. Just install it with the recommended settings.

After you have downloaded and installed WinRar you need to locate the ROM file in Window’s Explorer. Once you find it right click and pick “extract here”. Sometimes the CDI file will be directly extracted or sometimes it extracts sub RAR files that are numbered 01-?. If this is the case just right click on the first numbered RAR file and pick extract here again and then you will have your CDI file, which is the disc image of the game.

Now that you have the CDI file you need to burn it to a CD-R. Make sure it is a CD and not a DVD. There are several programs that you can use to burn disc images but the main one that I use is called Discjuggler, which only handles CDI files. It can be downloaded for free from here. Now this is only the demo version which gives you unlimited access to the program, but limits you to only being able to burn up to 700MB. This is fine because the CDI files never exceed that limit. When installing Discjuggler just do the recommended installation.

Now to setup and use Discjuggler you will need to watch this video tutorial. It will explain everything you need to know about burning the games to disc, which is relatively easy.


If you don’t like this video you can search youtube for a bunch of other videos with different ways to do it. I use this method because you change some settings under the advanced burn options, which is how I have always done it and haven’t had any problems with any games yet. But some people don’t change those options and say that the games work just fine too. I guess you can play around with it a little bit and figure out the method you like best.

Once that is complete you are ready to go. Sometimes if it does not self load you may need a boot disk. Just in case I placed the link here. I have never needed it yet but I have it just in case. Also you do need it to play imports. Enjoi.

-Brian R.