Dreamcast-Talk.com

Apologies if this is in the wrong section. I couldn't think where else I would post.

I own a PAL Dreamcast, and so for me to be able to run NTSC or NTSC-J games, I need to use a boot disc. Now, I currently don't posses any NTSC or NTSC-J titles for the Dreamcast, so I have resorted to downloading a few online and burning them. So far the results have not been successful. I've come to realize that Utopia and DC-X don't support games that are supposedly 'self-booting' and I've been struggling to find games that aren't.

Since dcisozone is no longer around, I can't find websites that explicitly detail whether or not the file is self-booting or not and so it's been hit or miss lately. For the sake of testing, I really want to burn at least one NTSC game and boot it with Utopia just to verify, so I can begin importing.

Is there any where I can download non self-booting games?
Thanks!

What do you need to test? There's no reason to suspect that your boot discs won't successfully defeat the region lockout on a GD-ROM, as that is their main function. Even if you did download a non-selfboot image, booting it wouldn't prove anything, as the boot process for CD and GD is not the same. Selfbooting games are already patched to be region free, so they don't need a loader to defeat the lockout. As for DCISOZone, it became TheISOZone a few years ago and is still operating.

Aleron Ives wrote:What do you need to test? There's no reason to suspect that your boot discs won't successfully defeat the region lockout on a GD-ROM, as that is their main function. Even if you did download a non-selfboot image, booting it wouldn't prove anything, as the boot process for CD and GD is not the same. Selfbooting games are already patched to be region free, so they don't need a loader to defeat the lockout. As for DCISOZone, it became TheISOZone a few years ago and is still operating.

Well hey, I'm still learning. I've only really gotten into the whole Dreamcast scene two days ago, so I'm a newbie to say the least. Thanks though, I appreciate it. Any clarification is a big help!

The issue I'm having though, is that I can't seem to get burned NTSC game discs to work no matter what. It's made me somewhat nervous, to tell you the truth since my PAL burns work completely fine.

Which rips have you tried? There's always the possibility that the particular rips that don't work are just broken or burned incorrectly, and their dysfunction isn't related to the fact that they're NTSC (or whoever made the rips was a novice and didn't make them region free). Your TV supports PAL60, right? Not all games can output both NTSC and PAL signals, so if you're using an old CRT that can only display PAL, the NTSC games might not work. I'd be pretty skeptical of this being the problem, though, as most European TVs are designed to support both video standards. Which program are you using to burn CDIs? DiscJuggler used to be the standard, but ImgBurn with the Padus plugin seems to be a popular choice these days.

Solved.

It turns out a combination of two things were giving me faulty burns. Imgburn (with DiscJuggler plugins) and my LG disc burner. I've heard a few things before about LG drives causing issues similar to this.

My burner doesn't seem to be compatible with DiscJuggler, as the minimum write speed is '24X' and pressing 'Start' simply freezes the application. Nonetheless, I tried all this on my laptop which has a completely different CD burner and DiscJuggler managed to successfully burn the disc. It worked perfectly and I'm pretty satisfied now, hah.

Already, I've ordered Phantasy Star Online Ver. 2 [NTSC-U] so I can't wait to try that! Also, thanks Aleron. I had no idea self-booting games were region free, so you've saved me a lot of pain, lol.

Since you have a PAL Dreamcast, you might want to consider getting EUv2. If you have a BBA, it can go online without needing any boot discs if you set DNS 1 to the IP address of sylverant.net. It's a convenient "feature" that JP and US Dreamcasts can't use, due to the region lockout.