[Evil Unka Tony]

Now for the basic rundown: After building the DC-to-PC serial cable (which costs around $28 US for all the parts), the DC must be initialized in order to send/recieve data. For this you need the Serial Slave image burnt to CD and loaded into your DC after popping out the Utopia bootdisk. You'll know the DC's ready when 2 blue bars appear on the sides of your TV screen. Now you can begin DC-to-PC comms.

The Tekram DC390 driver is used to emulate your DC as a 1x SCSI DC-Rom drive. I won't go into the bitrate, xon/xoff etc settings for proper comms for security reasons. Your ASPI layer MUST be updated to the Tekram ASPI layer for any of this to even work, so be forewarned.

CDRWin 3.8d SHOULD read the DC as such given the proper settings have been set in device Manager for the Tekram driver. Your DC is NOT Plug-and-Play compatible, so don't bother rebooting and hoping Windows will see it. It ain't gonna happen. Everything MUST be set up by hand.

Now here's the biggest part to DC ripping: Dummy adding and encryption cracking. After the game has been ripped with CDRWin, the image file must be dummied first and foremost to move all the data to the end of the CD. Many DC games are encrypted, and possibly contain CDDA tracks, so this must also be accounted for. If you don't know anything about encryption and programming, now's not the time to learn, because you'll have a nice collection of coasters to share with your loved ones. The patches you see on DC CopyWorld are NOT encrytion cracks, so don't bother.

DC copying is not for the meek or the impatient. It takes a lot of time, energy and money. If you don't want to invest any of those, then don't bother trying to learn. Like I stated in the beginning, this is not meant to be a tutorial for those who want to pirate games, make money, etc. it's here simply to disbar any and all rumours and false methods you've learned. If anything, I hope it at least saves you money on CDs trying the other so-called "ripping" methods.

If you really want to learn after reading all of this, here's what I suggest: Get on teh net, go to every site you can find on DC information, schematics, hardware specs, etc. Check around, talk to ppl via IRC, etc. And most of all, have fun.

Evil Unka
irc.relic.net
#PSX-DC and #PSXDC-Help