Resident Evil 2 silliness

[Darkfalz]

I own a large number of Dreamcast games and had have a great deal of fun and challenge ripping and backing them up for my own personal use.

I am also a bit of a perfectionist with regards to this...

The last two nights I have been working on Resident Evil 2. Standard downsampling job. But not for me, because I like using round numbers, getting it as close to full as possible, downsampling the higher bitrate files, larger files and so on... it be can be a headache because of my nitpicking ways!

Finally, after settling on a final downsampling strategy for both discs, I noticed in the root folder three identical sized, similarly named files with identical time stamps.

Hrm, I thought. It's not possible they are the same, is it?

Sure enough, they are CRC32 identical!

D'OH!

Removing the two reduntant copies left me PLENTY of room for a selfboot with no need to downsample anything. Of course, using my own LBA relinker they are still present on the CD.

So even us seasoned pros do stupid things now and again. He he.

Relinking identical files is SO COOL!

But even professional rippers can miss those identical files... I remember a Maken X rip by a well known group that was released as non-selfboot, and they even claimed that was impossible to make it selfboot without overburn.
But if you looked up closely, there were many identical files that could be relinked, saving enough space to selfboot it without overburn.

I guess that a good practice is to do a "DIR /OS" to see if there are identical size files... then they can be CRC32 checked to confirm the duplicate.

If only those nasty D2 discs had identical files to relink... I still have the full 4 gd-roms ripped in my HD waiting for a miracle.

[Darkfalz]

I self booted it the exact same way :P (And Yes, Kalisto also missed this on their release of RE2 - heh).

Another one is Psychic Force 2012... lots of repeated P04 files, just enough for me to make a boot disc version... which ws okay sine the game doesn't support VGA anyway.

[darklegion]

Originally Posted by bucanero

.

If only those nasty D2 discs had identical files to relink... I still have the full 4 gd-roms ripped in my HD waiting for a miracle.

There is a new 5 99Min CD (disc 3 split into 2 discs) release of that just coming through on the newgroups now.I'd post the NFO but I assume its not allowed?

Originally Posted by darklegion

There is a new 5 99Min CD (disc 3 split into 2 discs) release of that just coming through on the newgroups now.I'd post the NFO but I assume its not allowed?

Yeah, I've seen the .nfo about this first D2 rip.... I'vent seen any comments yet, if the disc images works fine or not... but I guess they're not a fake.

time will tell

[DrEaMpLaY]

Originally Posted by bucanero

Yeah, I've seen the .nfo about this first D2 rip.... I'vent seen any comments yet, if the disc images works fine or not... but I guess they're not a fake.

time will tell

No its not

[darklegion]

Originally Posted by DrEaMpLaY

No its not

Good to hear!
Now i've just got to find out if my burner(s) supports 99min cd's (I've heard mixed reports)
FYI I have a Pioneer 106D, and 110D (the latter has problems with even 'reading' 99min cds, from what I've heard)
Just waiting on the discs to arrive, so I can try for myself.

[darklegion]

Originally Posted by darklegion

Good to hear!
Now i've just got to find out if my burner(s) supports 99min cd's (I've heard mixed reports)
FYI I have a Pioneer 106D, and 110D (the latter has problems with even 'reading' 99min cds, from what I've heard)
Just waiting on the discs to arrive, so I can try for myself.

Just had a go burning the game with both of the mentioned burners.The 106D wouldn't overburn at all and the 110D would overburn but not enough to burn the first disc (was short just a few MB).I ended up wasting most of the 99min cd's I had thinking it was a speed or program issue because simulation mode was working fine.These burner's can't do multisession in raw dao mode BTW, so don't even try using RAW dao with Alcohol 120%.CDrecord can burn the game fine too, provided overburn works properly but I used a newer version than what comes with Echelon's selfboot.
One last note: Nero 6.6.0.16 did not handle things well at all.As soon as it reaches the point where it can't overburn any further (even in simulation mode), it crashes and can't be closed even by force-closing it with the task manager (under windows XP).The drive made some very grating noises while this is happening too and I had to reboot in order to get the drive to reset itself and allow me to eject the disc

If I get some spare cash I might pick up a Liteon CDRW, they are pretty damn cheap these days and they can overburn reliably unlike the Pioneer drives.

[Capcom Man]

Originally Posted by Darkfalz

using my own LBA relinker they are still present on the CD.

Would you mind posting that LBA relinker? I'm just like you, I hate downsampling anything and want to keep the games as orginal as possible.

[DrEaMpLaY]

But you can always make better version of your backup than orginal game ( yours favorite songs, voices or movies etc)

[Darkfalz]

Originally Posted by Capcom Man

Would you mind posting that LBA relinker? I'm just like you, I hate downsampling anything and want to keep the games as orginal as possible.

All my DC tools can be found on my homepage.

[Excalibur007]

I have never understood how to use that relinker. Would you mind posting a quick how-to?

[Darkfalz]

The file you wish to rip, replace it with a file of 0 bytes with the same name. You can do this easily by deleting it, then using the right click windows thing to create a new text document, and just rename it to the old file.

Now once you built your ISO, use the Single File LBA Copier. Put the ISO in the ISO field (duh), put the file with the data in the second field and the 0 byte one in the second field. Click "Copy" and you're done!

[Excalibur007]

Thank you very much. Worked like a charm. I used the singlefile lba copier to eliminate 74 files totaling 19.1 MB. It took a while to do each file individually, but I still don't know how to use the "multiplefile lba copier".
I also added a dummy file of 14 MB to bring the total size to 698 MB and sorted the files as well. Loading times are great. This makes for ONE more GDROM to be put away for safe keeping.

I'm glad you said that about Resident Evil 2. I've been putting off ripping it because I was dreading the downsampling. I too, am very picky about how I downsample. I try to find a bitrate that keeps as much quality as possible and use the same bitrate on every file to be downsampled, leaving little-to-no room to spare afterwards. Knowing that info about RE2, I'll go ahead and rip it as soon as my PC is fixed. It also makes me curious about several other games I've had to do a lot of downsampling with. It would be nice if we came up with a list of games that have duplicate files like Maken X and RE2.

-Ex

[Darkfalz]

The multiple one can generate a script but only so long as the files are identical. You can edit it manually though. It's not just for identical files, but to replace say, the Japanese speech with the English speech (ripping the Japanese speech, but allowing it to be selectable without crashing, which will just use the English speech anyway - it's clean this way).