Introduction: Dreamcast - Burn Games With ImgBurn

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Hello everyone, a few days ago I got my hands on my old Dreamcast console and decided to play with it. As you may know Dreamcast GD-ROMs are quite vulnerable to scratches and so some of my games did not work anymore.

Luckily there is a way to burn games images acquired online to CD-Rs and make them work like the original games. And I will show you how you can do this.

Important: I did not come up with this method myself. I found it online and decided to write an Instructable to let people know about it and to provide some advice how it is done. Please have a look at the sources and give the guy some credit for his great tutorial :)

Ok. Here we go :)

Sources:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6XHs0MQjD8

Step 1: Prerequisites

Before we begin we need to fulfill some prerequisites:

  1. Take a look at the bottom of your Dreamcast to determine if you have a PAL or a NTSC console. This is important to know so that you download the correct version of the games you wish to play. Although I heard that you can play NTSC games on a PAL console and vise versa I do not have proof of that.
  2. Now download the necessary Dreamcast Drivers for ImgBurn and add them to the path where you installed ImgBurn. You can download them from here. (ImgBurn Installer included. Btw you need 7-Zip to unzip the downloaded archive.)
    1. Default path of ImgBurn: "C:\Program Files (x86)\ImgBurn"
    2. Add the files pfctoc.dll, pfctoc.h and pfctoc.lib you downloaded to the Default path of ImgBurn
  3. Buy some CD-R discs. CD-R discs from Verbatim with 700MB/80min worked best for me.
  4. Acquire game images (CDI images). You can download game images for your Dreamcast online. Please keep in mind that there could be consequences if you illegally download games you do not own.

Step 2: Write the Game Image to Disc

Ok. After you fulfilled all prerequisites you can finally burn your game image to the disc.

  1. Start ImgBurn
  2. Click on "Write image file to disc"
  3. Now select your CDI game image file as Source and put your CD-R disc into your disc drive
  4. "Write Speed" should be set to "4x" automatically when you select a CDI image file.
    1. Do not increase this value since it could cause error making the game unplayable.
    2. As you can see in the ImgBurn Log the game image I chose was burned at 10x write speed since the DVD drive of my Laptop cannot burn at a lower write speed. Games like Crazy Taxi and Sonic Adventure 2 did work despite the increased write speed without problems.
  5. Wait. (This will take quite some time)
  6. As soon as you see the message box "Operation Successfully Completed!" you can eject the disc and you are ready to go.

Step 3: Play

Now all you need to do is the following:

  1. Put your newly created game disc into your Dreamcast
  2. Power it on
  3. Enjoy :)

That´s it. Now you can play again with your favorite games even if your original game discs won´t work anymore.