Burning grossly oversized images...?
 

I'm fairly new to the DC burning process, but I am making significant headway; I have DJ 4.x (registered), and have gotten a number of images to burn correctly using both it and Nero 5.5.

A couple of DC images I've tried have been over 700MB (one at 737,946 KB, one at 723,673KB), and they burned and booted fine.

However, I have been generating coasters trying to burn a pair of DDR CDI images -- one is 780,706 KB, the other 783,490KB. DiscJuggler (using default settings, and one attempt at checking Overburn) keeps asking for a second writable disc, indicating that it's out of write-space; Nero (after CDI2NERO) seemed to burn okay, but also produced a coaster. The discs go to the Audio screen on the DC, and won't boot even with a boot disc.

I located a NON-self-boot image of one of these DDR games (which came out to 588,853KB)... and it burned and plays okay.

I'm using an LG CED-8102B under Win98 SE, trying Kodak and Sony 80M/700MB CDRs.

So, my questions:

1) Is there a way to convert a self-booting CDI image to a smaller, NON-self-booting image? (I have no problems using Utopia, and would rather have a disc that works with an extra step involved than a self-booting coaster.)

2) Is there something simple I may be missing in DiscJuggler's settings, that would make these images burn correctly?

(There is the distinct possibility that my images are just hosed, but they did pass the unRAR and SmartPAR tests.)

3) Is there a different approach I should be taking?

Thanks in advance. I'm new, but I'm not hopeless. ;)

I've found a couple of extremely large images that didn't actually have that must data in them... Don't ask me how...

I have used CDMAGE to rip the data from the CDI file, then I went through and reburned it as a self-boot disc using Echelon's self-boot tutorial.

Give it a try if you think you're up to it. Also, if the IP.BIN file seems to be missing, just grab one from another game. It should work OK (it did for me).

Well, I tried it. CDMAGE didn't want to read DDR Club Mix (it wouldn't recognize it as a valid .CDI image), but it did read it as RAW and I extracted the files from both sessions.

I then tried Echelon's method, and every other utility I could find, and added several coasters to my collection.

Finally, as a "what's one more frisbee on the pile" act of curiosity, I tried it in DiscJuggler 4.0 one more time -- this time setting the Mode for unrecognized images to Mode 2, TOC to CD-XA, selecting RAW write and selecting Overburn CD, along with the previously-selected Add post-gap option.

And it worked. Go figure. :)

Maybe I'll go back and try the method with my DDR 2nd Mix CDI, which I only got working in a non-self-boot config. Anyway, thanks for the advice...

(If nothing else, I can extract the audio tracks and burn an audio CD.)

you can burn up to 840.960.000 bytes or 802 Mb on a 80 min blank in mode 2
(only one session,!!!lead in,pregap ,lead out and run_out_frames_ not subtracted!!!
(14002 sectors)

a cd uses 75 sectors per minute
so you get a maximum of sectors of:
80 minutes *60 seconds *75sectors = 360000 sectors on a 80 min disk

what you do with this sectors is yours,
if you use audio data you can use all 2352 bytes/sector for your audio-data
you can burn 2352*360000 bytes = 846720000 or 807,495 mb (bytes/1024/1024)

if you use mode1 data you can use 2048 bytes/sector for your data
the rest is for additional error correction.
2048*360000=
737280000 bytes or 703,125 mb in this case is the maximum

thats why your 80 min disks are labeled as 700 mb

if you use mode2 data you can use 2336 bytes/sector for your data
theres a REDUCED error correction to mode 1
so that you get more data on that cd
2336*360000=840960000 or 802 Mb

if you want a multsession disk you loose
11700 sectors for the first session,
(lead in, pregap, lead out)
for the second you loose 6902 sectors (reduced lead out)

and there´s some additional info in a cdi so don´t worry
about the file sizes.

let us know which games don´t work for you.

Np man, almost every game DJ iso i have shows it is over 750mb in my directory when opened in DiscJuggler they appear to be only 74-78 minutes. Also note that when a game is 77 min or lower its also possible to use bin2boot on it making it SB.

Try Downsampling
 

For a more advanced user, you can downsample your audio quality (*.ADX, and *.AFS files), or downsample your video quality (*.SFD and *.M1V files). Once you have downsampled enough, you can get larger games to fit on normal sized CD's.

You can do this be pulling files from the CD image (ISO, CDI, CCD, NRG, BIN) using CDMage.

Downsample videos using Dreamcast Movie Creater, and
downsample audio by using a combination of 2 programs, ADX2WAV and WAV2ADX