DCEmulation

Here are a few links to tutorials and programs for burning Dreamcast discs via your Mac.

Programs & Tutorials
http://dcemulation.org/?title=Mac_Tools

Other Tutorials

All the previously linked tutorials were unreachable, post any good tutorials links you have to this thread or PM me!

Just thought I'd give a quick Mac update, since this is now many, many years out of date:

1. THE GOOD: For the most part, the easiest way to burn games on a Mac appears to be using LiquidCD. The latest version of LiquidCD burns perfectly good, playable discs from DiscJuggler images (.CDI), with one notable exception: the "filled" images (ones packed with dummy data to "fill" the disc and thus push the data to the outer parts of the disc) don't work. But any Dreamcast .CDI image that is its natural size, and not in excess of 700MB, seems to burn just fine. No more CDI conversions for Mac users!

2. THE BAD: Pretty much every Mac-specific Dreamcast tool is now not only out of date, but non-functional. I was quite disappointed to load up Mac Dream Tool (for the first time in several years) just to get the following message:



Back in the heyday of DC homebrew, Macs were PowerPC-based. They started switching to x86 in 2006, but maintained software compatibility through a wrapper built into the OS. However, that was removed in the move from Leopard to Snow Leopard, and now with Lion, support for PowerPC apps is long gone.

Cumulatively, what this means is: it is now just as easy for Mac users to burn pre-existing .cdi images as it is for Windows users. On the other hand, Mac users are completely screwed if they want to burn something that is *not* available in .cdi format, as all the old image building and conversion tools are not compatible with modern OSX.

I don't suppose there's any chance of an update to Mac Dream Tool...?

I.M. Weasel has been online just a few days ago - maybe you could PM him and see if he's interested in updating his tools?

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I reject the reality and substitute my own.

That's not really true, all you need is cdrecord, mkisofs, scramble and ipins.

cdrecord and mkisofs are part of dvdrtools and are originally designed for *nix, that's completely open source. You can download the code and build it manually, or just install MacPorts and type "port install dvdrtools" and it will automatically install it.

Source code for scramble is here and it can be easily built on *nix.

ipins isn't necessary on OS X as you can use a simple command with dd to inject the bootsector into the first 32K of the ISO file (dd if=IP.BIN of=track.iso bs=512 count=64 should do the trick).


That having been said, it would be really nice if Weasel could recompile his tools for Intel. I have also given some consideration to programming some OS X tools for DC myself, but I am still a pretty elementary level programmer.

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It's thinking...

Well, I sent him a PM, and cross-posted my above post to the Mac/Linux/BSD forum. Hopefully one or the other of those will catch his attention. I was a beta tester for the last couple of versions, so I may even still have his email address somewhere... but I'll have to go digging for it.

That's all I ever did when I used OS X for DC discs. Back in the day, I didn't need MacPorts either, all of the binaries were available natively. This might some horribly ignorant for a Mac mod to say, but has this changed? There aren't binaries that we could host for Intel-based Macs?

I would hope there would be some method of porting the old Cocoa applications to something Intel-friendly.

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MacPorts does download binaries, you could just copy them and zip them up and host them and anyone could download them and run them. But MacPorts is really good to have and is pretty effortless anyway.

As far as porting the old Cocoa applications like Mac Dream Tool, it should be just a matter of recompiling the applications for Intel instead of PowerPC. It shouldn't take much effort at all. We just need the source code, if I.M. Weasel still has it.

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It's thinking...

Okay, slight update.

Discs burned with Liquid CD that have 2 data tracks work fine. Audio/data disc images aren't booting... though I'm not yet sure whether that's the program or this Dreamcast. I don't have any known-good burned discs to test with.

I'm so glad that this thread is alive! It's about time for a DC revival.

I swear I posted in this thread too... anyway, check the mac forum for my response.

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Mac Dream Tool Version 3 & MDT Services 1.2
http://dcemulation.org/?title=Mac_Tools

"You don't have to be forgiven. Clint Eastwood taught us that."