Is this possible?

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jelloshooter
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Is this possible?

Post by jelloshooter »

I apologize profusely if this is has already been discussed to death. I was wondering, if I used a Broadband Adapter to hook up my dreamcast to my pc would it be possible to play the game directly off the disc (meaning without dumping the files onto my hdd) in NullDC or would the data transfer be too slow for this?

Thanks for your time guys!

-jelloshooter
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Maddog
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Post by Maddog »

No need to apologize, it's a perfectly legit question.
In theory it could be possible to implement that, but it's not done currently.

httpd-ack has code that supports using the drive of the DC to transfer sectors off the GD-ROM to the PC and it's open source. If some emulator coder could add that to their emulator, so that the emulator grabs sectors off the GD-ROM as the game running requires them, then it could be done. Speed shouldn't be an issue, when dumping games I get a constant 1-1.1 MB/sec from the connection, which seems decent enough to me.
But ATM none of the emulators support this functionality. I suppose the reason for this is the limited interest. Since having a Dreamcast allows you to play the games on the actual console, it doesn't make much sense to use the Dreamcast just to pass off game data to an emulator. Add to that the limited availability and high price of the BBA and it probably makes less than 50 people worldwide that would be interested or able to use this method.
jelloshooter
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Post by jelloshooter »

Thank for your response! Sorry again for my ignorance on the subject, but why would the emulator need to have httpd-ack support? If you had the connection made and the files showed up, couldn't i just goto file-load image and then select the appropriate image from the disc?
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Maddog
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Post by Maddog »

In short, no.
The GD-ROM disc does not contain any kind of "appropriate image" that you can point the emulator to, it contains files within a specific filesystem.

To run the game on your emulator, you need access to the specific files as they are required by the game flow. This can't currently be done by fetching files from the GD-ROM, emulators are coded to do this from .gdi files that reside in the hard drive of your PC.
darcagn
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Post by darcagn »

Maddog wrote:In short, no.
The GD-ROM disc does not contain any kind of "appropriate image" that you can point the emulator to, it contains files within a specific filesystem.

To run the game on your emulator, you need access to the specific files as they are required by the game flow. This can't currently be done by fetching files from the GD-ROM, emulators are coded to do this from .gdi files that reside in the hard drive of your PC.
Although, it would be possible if someone created a dumper program that served via Samba instead of HTTP. But that would be way too much work.
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