the Dreamcast Nightmare Emulator incident

[blueagent]

back in the planet-dreamcast days of 2003, a member posted an alleged first working Dreamcast emulator called the "Dreamcast Nightmare Emulator" which turned out to just be a fake trojin that had spreaded to several major download sites such as CNET's download section.

i had a dreamcast console back then so it didn't matter, but after its power supply fried in the mid 2000s, I tried out chankast in 2007 which was the actual first working emulator, and there were some ppl on "emutalk"forums who helped me set it up, but even this great emulator chankast, had issues with "evolution world of sacred device" where it freezes at the scene where linear heals the flower.

all information posted here can be verified with old members from back then.

I registered here in 2019 during the dreamcast's 20th aniversery, but my thread made at the time is gone. I wonder what happened?

[|darc|]

The Nightmare "emulator" was definitely way before 2003 -- it was either 2000 or very very early 2001. There's a news item from February 2001 in DCEmulation's news archive referencing it.

There were emulators before Chankast as well, but Chankast was the first publicly released emulator that could actually play retail games. But it was faaaaar from perfect, as you well know.

As for your thread, do you mean this one?

[blueagent]

The Nightmare "emulator" was definitely way before 2003 -- it was either 2000 or very very early 2001. There's a news item from February 2001 in DCEmulation's news archive referencing it.

There were emulators before Chankast as well, but Chankast was the first publicly released emulator that could actually play retail games. But it was faaaaar from perfect, as you well know.

As for your thread, do you mean this one?

i've only seen the post about the nightmare emulator before i left planet-dreamcast, i remember ppl were saying its just a fake trojin. i remember finding a CNET article stating that they had taken down the dreamcast nightmare emulator from their DOWNLOAD section because its a fake download, i honestly never tested if nightmare emulator had worked for real or not, bc my dreamcast console still worked.

there was also a hand-drawn pic of sonic crying and holding a flower by the dreamcast tomb-stone, i think it was on the front news of planet dreamcast, or maybe someone were reposting it, but it was so sad, the dreamcast was dead and ppl were leaving one by one on the planet site so i left in 2003.

https://www.emutalk.net/threads/ooommmmmggggggg.41084/

and chankast, and yea it was an excellent emulator but i had so many problems with it and i just screamed at everyone on the chankast sub forums above back in 2007 who tried to help me get it working haha. there were ppl tesing DEMUL there and i used that to get past the flower freezing scene and then chankast was actually able to let me finish the game to the end, without any problems.

https://dcemulation.org/phpBB/viewtopic.php?t=105116

i tried clicking on the thread link you showed me, but now i get the message "You are not authorised to read this forum."

i've uploaded the error message

thanks

[|darc|]

i tried clicking on the thread link you showed me, but now i get the message "You are not authorised to read this forum."

i've uploaded the error message

thanks

Ahh, sorry, I looked at the link again and it's in the Reicast Forum, which is now archived and non-public. We were asked by skmp, the developer of Reicast, to make an Official Reicast Forum for him here, but no one from their team ever really visited it and most everyone on here uses real hardware so it didn't get much traffic and most questions went unanswered, so I removed it.

[blueagent]

thanks, I thought someone here had limited my account here, because of what I posted on dreamcast-talk forum

[blueagent]

i found a legacy website from the early 2000s, which humorously described the nightmare emulator supposedly working with games that were dumped using that fake "DC rom ripper" software from back in the day, and funnily enough, there was also a ton of fake screenshots showing off the nightmare emulator running games. anyways here it is.

bluesting3sm.jpg (17.95 KiB) Viewed 541 times

- From Dreamcast ROM Maker Homepage:

"This program has now been perfected to work with every game tested so far, you just insert a game CD into your drive, press the 'convert' button and a ROM will be created on your computer! The ROM Ripper uses your ordinary DVD Drive to actually emulate the Dreamcast's own Drive and read the data off of the discs, this cannot be done with Windows explorer, you need this program.

Here are some screen shots of a newer version of Nightmare
working with the DC ROM Ripper 2.0."

Think of it, you could go down to your local video store and get a bunch of Dreamcast games, then copy them with the ROM Ripper 2.0- entire Dreamcast games for next to nothing!

The 'DC ROM Ripper' program took a lot of time and a lot of effort to create so we ask for a fee of $15 or $10 for us to send you the program, but it's worth 15 bucks to have the power of a Dreamcast on your PC, this price includes the cost of postage and packaging plus a CD, everything you need to start emulating the Dreamcast.

source: www.romripper.faithweb.com

well i just felt like posting this today because i see a lot of old posts on dreamcast-talk forums being simultaneously bumped, all on the same day of "feburary 2nd 2024", and sinking more recent posts, well i figured since there's now more activity in the dreamcast community i should post this too.

still it'd be nice if there's a generic usb disc drive out there that can read GD-roms. has anyone found anything yet?

[|darc|]

still it'd be nice if there's a generic usb disc drive out there that can read GD-roms. has anyone found anything yet?

I don't see this ever happening.

Drive firmwares are programmed in such a way that they won't read beyond the disc's Table of Contents. On a GD-ROM disc, the TOC only specifies the small standard density area. Some people open the drive up and put in a faked disc with a large TOC and then swap for a GD-ROM disc without triggering the open mechanism (which would re-read the TOC), but most drives are unable to handle the extra density of the GD-ROM's HD area when they are expecting to be reading a CD-R (since that's the first disc that was inserted).

Even if the drive firmware would allow reading beyond the TOC, your computer's operating system won't know to look there for a filesystem, so you'd have to write a custom driver.

So without a custom firmware and driver/software, no drive is just going to read GD-ROMs out of the box.

[blueagent]

still it'd be nice if there's a generic usb disc drive out there that can read GD-roms. has anyone found anything yet?

I don't see this ever happening.

Drive firmwares are programmed in such a way that they won't read beyond the disc's Table of Contents. On a GD-ROM disc, the TOC only specifies the small standard density area. Some people open the drive up and put in a faked disc with a large TOC and then swap for a GD-ROM disc without triggering the open mechanism (which would re-read the TOC), but most drives are unable to handle the extra density of the GD-ROM's HD area when they are expecting to be reading a CD-R (since that's the first disc that was inserted).

Even if the drive firmware would allow reading beyond the TOC, your computer's operating system won't know to look there for a filesystem, so you'd have to write a custom driver.

So without a custom firmware and driver/software, no drive is just going to read GD-ROMs out of the box.

thanks for the super detailed and concise information on this, it was very informative and i'm grateful for the information you've so generously provided. thank you again.

back in high school i tried in vain to read my dreamcast discs with different 16X CD-ROM drives that my friends/classmates had, then in the mid 2000s someone said CloneCD can rip DC discs, and also Alcohol120%, but it was all bogus.

i remember seeing photos from a guide where a dreamcast fan took apart his CD drive to rip his dreamcast disc, which shattered into a million pieces, and the guy warned us about not putting DC discs with a damaged inner ring into the drive, and how we must avoid looking at the laser which could burn our retina.

nowadays i'm abit worried about disc rot on my dreamcast games so ripping them to do a CRC check on them would be nice. i've seen the ASUS/Lite-ON/Buffalo brand of USB disc drive and i bought the lite-on one around 2 years ago and tried ripping the DC disc, but it didn't work unfortunately.

[|darc|]

nowadays i'm abit worried about disc rot on my dreamcast games so ripping them to do a CRC check on them would be nice. i've seen the ASUS/Lite-ON/Buffalo brand of USB disc drive and i bought the lite-on one around 2 years ago and tried ripping the DC disc, but it didn't work unfortunately.

In this case, I'd recommend just using a Broadband Adapter or SD Card Adapter and dump the disc using a real Dreamcast. Dumping a disc using a PC drive can take hours and is a meticulous process, whereas with a real Dreamcast it takes about 15 minutes with a Broadband Adapter or about 30 minutes with an SD Adapter.

[Calavera]

Was that the only fake Dreamcast emulator at the time? I remember there being what was claimed as a working emulator way too early one. I don't even think we had a decent 32X emulator for the PC at the time, let alone Dreamcast! I was trying to think of the name of it recently. Nightmare doesn't sound familiar but that could have been it. I didn't download it as it was obvious it was a fake.

Like many others though I found this place while searching to see if there was a Dreamcast emulator. I remember the first time I visited here I didn't really understand what I was looking at. The place was called Dreamcast Emulation yet there were emulators for the NES,SNES and other various systems. I thought why do they have these random emulators on a Dreamcast site? Then it finally clicked "Holy shit! You mean there is an NES emulator for the Dreamcast?! Whaaaaat?!"

I played the shit out of NesterDC, it was amazing at the time. I had used emulators on the PC for several years at that time but this was different. I remember thinking it was just like playing on a real NES since you were able to output to a TV and not a monitor. I can specifically remember me and my older brother playing Contra on it. Good times. Then the Xbox Emulation Scene came around and that was the end of my interest in Dreamcast emulation. Almost instantly the Xbox had NES,SNES,Genesis +32XCD and even N64. I haven't used an emulator for the Dreamcast in many many years but I've still got an old Xbox hooked up to a CRT out in my garage that I fire up sometime for some emulation fun.

[|darc|]

Was that the only fake Dreamcast emulator at the time? I remember there being what was claimed as a working emulator way too early one. I don't even think we had a decent 32X emulator for the PC at the time, let alone Dreamcast! I was trying to think of the name of it recently. Nightmare doesn't sound familiar but that could have been it. I didn't download it as it was obvious it was a fake.

Like many others though I found this place while searching to see if there was a Dreamcast emulator. I remember the first time I visited here I didn't really understand what I was looking at. The place was called Dreamcast Emulation yet there were emulators for the NES,SNES and other various systems. I thought why do they have these random emulators on a Dreamcast site? Then it finally clicked "Holy shit! You mean there is an NES emulator for the Dreamcast?! Whaaaaat?!"

I came here under the same exact circumstances. Around 2000-2001 I was in middle school and got into emulation on PC to play 80s and 90s console games that I never had access to. Classic RPGs like Chrono Trigger for example were already very inflated in value and inaccessible but were super easy to play on a PC. I already had a Dreamcast but searched for a Dreamcast emulator anyway and ended up having my mind blown stumbling upon DreamSNES as an SNES emulator for Dreamcast! And from Marcus's DreamSNES site I was linked to DCEmulation.

Anyway, at that time Dreamer and DreamEmu both existed and were legitimate Dreamcast emulators, but they were very simple early implementations that only ran a tiny subset of homebrew and certainly wouldn't play any retail games. They were more technical proofs of concept than anything usable.

Nightmare claimed to be able to play real full retail games which obviously wasn't true.

I played the shit out of NesterDC, it was amazing at the time. I had used emulators on the PC for several years at that time but this was different. I remember thinking it was just like playing on a real NES since you were able to output to a TV and not a monitor. I can specifically remember me and my older brother playing Contra on it. Good times. Then the Xbox Emulation Scene came around and that was the end of my interest in Dreamcast emulation. Almost instantly the Xbox had NES,SNES,Genesis +32XCD and even N64. I haven't used an emulator for the Dreamcast in many many years but I've still got an old Xbox hooked up to a CRT out in my garage that I fire up sometime for some emulation fun.

Yeah I haven't used a Dreamcast emulator in earnest in over 20 years. I also moved on to Xbox, then Wii, and now I have modded real consoles that output RGB to an upscaler and I have flash carts and ODEs for practically all consoles from Atari 2600 to GameCube. I still love Dreamcast homebrew and I'm writing my own code for DC a lot these days (and working as a contributor/maintainer for KallistiOS) but emulation on DC is not much of an interest anymore.

[Eviltaco64X]

"Holy shit! You mean there is an NES emulator for the Dreamcast?! Whaaaaat?!" I played the shit out of NesterDC, it was amazing at the time. I had used emulators on the PC for several years at that time but this was different. I remember thinking it was just like playing on a real NES since you were able to output to a TV and not a monitor. I can specifically remember me and my older brother playing Contra on it. Good times. Then the Xbox Emulation Scene came around and that was the end of my interest in Dreamcast emulation. Almost instantly the Xbox had NES,SNES,Genesis +32XCD and even N64. I haven't used an emulator for the Dreamcast in many many years but I've still got an old Xbox hooked up to a CRT out in my garage that I fire up sometime for some emulation fun.

I had a similar experience around 2003, only I was looking at Dreamcasts on Ebay and saw warez discs with NES roms on them. Back then I used emulators all the time on PC and it blew my mind that they existed on game consoles too. I didn't get into homebrew until a few years later. All the computers I had as a kid were quite old and I didn't have a CD-RW drive for a long time. Eventually I got one, made a few coasters messing up DiscJuggler (or Alcohol 120%), and got a working, bootable GenesisPlusDC disc. That was the first homebrew I burned successfully. I think I had to built out the romlist textfile manually. Seeing it boot and work on a TV felt so satisfying. I played a ton of games off that disc.

Similar experience with the original Xbox too. Also got in a little late with it (2007) and had a 360 first, but it was still an exciting time. Some great strides were still being made like CPS3 emulation, and XBMC had become really polished. Being able to watch Youtube videos, check the weather (lol), play SNES and N64 games with a fake blades dashboard was just fantastic. I'm still impressed by how well Navi-X ran. Even into the early 2010s the OG Xbox could hold its own pretty well streaming <480p shows and live TV. Netflix just didn't quite have the same charm as watching live Russian TV on Navi-X lol