Hey! It's been a while, hasn't it? I do apologise for not updating this blog basically right after I made it, hehe. Life finds many ways to distract me.
...Such as with the SEGA Dreamcast! One of my girlfriends lent me a spare one of hers at a convention back in April, and since then I've poured many hours into it. It's become one of my favourite consoles of all time; it has such a strong library of games and was very experimental in many ways. Unfortunately, complete in-box copies of games can cost quite a pretty penny on eBay. Sometimes you get lucky and find cheap ones (the Tony Hawk games are one good example), but if you're looking for a Sonic or a Disney game, that's gonna cost you.
Thankfully, Dreamcast games are stupid easy to burn to blank CD-Rs; you just need the right hardware and software. Guides have been written for this sort of thing before, but I wanted to create my own guide, for both me and my girlfriends. I figured someone out there would find it useful, so I'm publishing it here.
Note: This guide will not tell you where to get CDI files for Dreamcast games; you're going to have to find them yourself. They aren't too terribly hard to find on sites like archive.org, though. Just always be careful downloading ROMs on the internet, obviously.
Note 2: You are only able to play burned games on SEGA Dreamcast hardware revisions 0 or 1. If you have a revision number greater than this, you will not be able to play burned games. Look at the bottom of your Dreamcast to check your revision.
1) Install ImgBurn from www.imgburn.com.
2) Scroll to the bottom of the download page and download the Padus .CDI File Mounter. This is required to burn CDI files.
3) Place the three CDI File Mounter files into C:\Program Files (x86)\ImgBurn.
4) Get some CD-Rs. Discs with 700MB/80min work best.
5) Connect your CD/DVD drive and open ImgBurn. It should detect your drive automatically. If it doesn't, try going to Tools > Settings > I/O and changing your Interface setting. "SPTI - Microsoft" worked for me when running under Wine, but native Windows shouldn't have an issue with this out of the box.
