Help burning CDI on (modern) Macs

Discussion of topics related to licensed games, software hacking/modification, prototypes, and development kits belongs here. Includes topics related to emulating the Dreamcast console on your computer or on another gaming console. Discussion of Reicast should go in the Official Reicast Forum.
Post Reply
JungleMindState
DCEmu Newbie
DCEmu Newbie
Posts: 2
https://www.artistsworkshop.eu/meble-kuchenne-na-wymiar-warszawa-gdzie-zamowic/
Joined: Sat Jul 03, 2021 1:54 pm
Has thanked: 0
Been thanked: 0

Help burning CDI on (modern) Macs

Post by JungleMindState »

Title says it all. All information I can find online refers to long-dead and/or unsupported software, or requires an internal burner (non-USB) that were ditched in most Macs several years ago.

My understanding of the process thus far is that the .CDI needs to be unpacked to show two files - a data and an audio file, and these are what should be burned to disc. For the life of me I can't find anything for the Mac that will unpack CDI files since CDIrip never upgraded to Intel (or now M1) architecture and Apple dropped built-in PowerPC emulation many years ago.

I need Code Breaker in order to play some import games I've acquired. I have the .CDI and access to both disk utility and Toast for burning discs via the USB Apple Superdrive. Help?

On a side note - what's the point of extracting and distributing DC games to .CDI if the .CDI needs to be unpacked by special software before being burned to disc? Why not just distribute the files in a standard .ZIP?
|darc|
DCEmu Webmaster
DCEmu Webmaster
Posts: 16373
Joined: Wed Mar 14, 2001 6:00 pm
Location: New Orleans, LA
Has thanked: 103 times
Been thanked: 90 times
Contact:

Re: Help burning CDI on (modern) Macs

Post by |darc| »

JungleMindState wrote: Sat Jul 03, 2021 2:10 pm Title says it all. All information I can find online refers to long-dead and/or unsupported software, or requires an internal burner (non-USB) that were ditched in most Macs several years ago.
The software you reference above will function fine with an external burner, except the program is not capable of auto-detecting one. If you have cdrtools/dvdrtools/cdrkit (there are different forks of this software) installed on your Mac, you'll have to plug in your external burner and run

Code: Select all

cdrecord -scanbus
to get the device id and manually enter it into the script.

Or, if you don't want to do that, the "long-dead and/or unsupported software" that you can't find for Intel/M1 is open source, and the above script depends on them to function and source code is included that can be built on Intel/M1.
JungleMindState wrote: Sat Jul 03, 2021 2:10 pmMy understanding of the process thus far is that the .CDI needs to be unpacked to show two files - a data and an audio file, and these are what should be burned to disc. For the life of me I can't find anything for the Mac that will unpack CDI files since CDIrip never upgraded to Intel (or now M1) architecture and Apple dropped built-in PowerPC emulation many years ago.
a data and an audio file is a common pairing, but it can be any combination of track types. It will always be separated into two sessions however.
JungleMindState wrote: Sat Jul 03, 2021 2:10 pmOn a side note - what's the point of extracting and distributing DC games to .CDI if the .CDI needs to be unpacked by special software before being burned to disc? Why not just distribute the files in a standard .ZIP?
Because Dreamcast discs are multisession, they have to be stored in a multisession disc image format. Unfortunately, all of the disc image formats that support multisession are proprietary formats. DiscJuggler's CDI format became the preferred format of the early 00s and has stuck as the predominant format of choice (although in the 00s Nero .NRG files were common and later on Alcohol 120% MDF/MDS images became common).

The vast majority of users are Windows users or have access to a Windows machine with a CD burner, and for those people, opening DiscJuggler, opening the CDI file, and clicking "burn" is the easiest and most foolproof way to do things. It is a lot more complicated to distribute multiple tracks/sessions zipped up and have to explain to your user how those tracks are laid out into sessions and how to burn them so the game functions properly. cdirip by Lawrence Williams has been around for 20 years (as well as graphical front-ends for Mac) and can be built to run on Mac or Linux so unfortunately those users have to take that route. Personally I have been a Mac user in the past and while I can do the above steps, I always just ran DiscJuggler on a virtual machine because I already had one available to me and that was more convenient.
It's thinking...
Post Reply