SEGA CD

[hansolo77]

I'm still working on setting up my stuff. It's been months, but I'm only available a few hours a day.

So whats the best method for SEGA CD games? I've touched on this before, but thought there might be some newer methods now that it has been a few months.

If you were to start from scratch, scour the web for individual games, download from IRC, Newsgroups, or torrent sites; all of the games come in the same format. A zip file, containing an ISO file (the actual game rom) and a few MP3's that are the music tracks. Now, the ideal thing to do is make a /roms folder and just copy all your .zips to that location and be good to go. GameEx will find these .zips and recognize them. However, there are no emulators that currently support zip files that I'm aware of. I know for a fact that GENS and any of it's hacked/3rd party version like FUSION and GENS32 don't. So what can you do? Well, you have to extract the zips. The first time I did this, I extracted all of my zips to the same folder (ie; /roms). This was all fine and dandy. It worked great. Configure GameEx to look for the iso's and you're set. The downside to this is that you may have tens of thousands of files in that folder, and most computers don't like that. So the next ideal thing to do is make a folder for each game. Here lies the problem. Although GameEx has an option in the configurator to have roms in their own folder (IE; the "Roms in Folders?" option), this feature doesn't work. I don't know why not, and I don't know if Tom has plans of ever returning to fix it. So to get around this, you have to write BATCH (.bat) files. You make a folder /roms and a folder /bat. Then tell GameEx that the rom folder is in /bat. You have to (painstakingly) write out a seperate batch file for each and every game you have. This task is way too complicated and time consuming. However, now we have GoodMerge support. Is there perhaps a way to use this to our advantage?

So here we are. Our options (that I'm aware of) are only of 2. Unzip everything to one folder, or unzip everything to their own folders and write batch files. Does anybody know of any other methods? I'd really like to be able to just keep the games in their original zips, but since the BEST emulators don't support that (and probably never will since the projects are closed now), we're stuck.

What do you think? Can something else be done? Tom, can you readdress this?

[night]

or what im doing what afcouse require some time as well....

Convert you iso/mp3 to Bin/cue as a bonus i found the emulators even have alittle better synch when its audio tracks instead of Mp3 ....

and you get rid of all those mp3 files as well...

[hansolo77]

I prefer to use GENS. Does it support bin/cue files? I know it supports ISO, thats why everything is automatically in that format.

[Adultery]

Just to chime in for a second...

GoodMerge may very well be an alternate solution. I'm pretty good at the whole GoodMerge thing, so I'll go get some ISO's and look into it.

As far as .zip support, I use KEGA Fusion and it supported my .zip files, but I'm unaware of it's method with Sega CD images. As stated before, I'll go grab an ISO and see what I can see.

Hope that helps!

[Atari800]

How about "Directory OPUS" or an equivilent

Somethat that treats ZIP files as folders/directories at the OS level

This would keep your file maintanence of those type games to a minimum

[hansolo77]

Cool thanks Adultery. The 2 of us should be able to find out the best method. And it'll work great with your website too.