Sega CD roms...best practices?
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Hello all,
I've tried searching for this issue, but all I really see is problems with BIOSes, and how to convert. No one talks about how they have their Sega CD ROM collection set up. That's what I'd like to ask about here...
Here's the ROMs I have...
-I have a couple of ISO's by themselves.
-I have a few ISO's with cue files, but I don't think I want that method because I understand each game will show up twice in the menus that way.
-I have several bin/cue combos, but some of them have corresponding wav files, and some do not.This is a disorganized, confusing mess to someone who hasn't really set up their Sega CD ROM collection before (me).
My priority is to have fully working games, of course. But I'd like to accomplish that goal keeping the Sega CD folder as clean, organized, and taking as little space as I possibly can.
Does anyone have any good advice on how to accomplish this, or can point me toward a tutorial I may have missed in my searching? Thanks in advance.
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Assuming you are using the lr-genesis-plus-gx core you can convert them to CHD format - nice compression rate (about 50%), plus one file per game.
I believe there is a decent enough guide for this on the libretro forums, apologies I don't have a link but I'm at work but if you search CHD on their forums you'll likely find the thread.
The CHD converter program is available with the latest MAME distributions (if memory serves it is called chdman.exe) - make sure you get it from the latest MAME build as the CHD format has changed over time so if you download an old version from an early version of MAME it may not work.
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This is my Solution for Sega CD roms (Recalbox, but works on others too):
In Recalbox "Game Options" i change the Emulator to "Lipetro" and the Core to "GenesisPlusGX"!
Additional i need three new Regionfree Bios files!
In the zip file can found this three files:
-EU_MegaCD2_30031993_regionfree.bin
-JP_MegaCD2_22121992_regionfree.bin
-us_scd2_930314_regionfree.bin
Now i Rename this files to:
bios_CD_E.bin
bios_CD_J.bin
bios_CD_U.bin
and copy it to the "\RECALBOX\share\bios" folder.Now i can compress the "wav" Audio files from a Game to "ogg".
So i have the game "iso", the audio "ogg" and the "cue" files.
In the "cue" files its needed to Rename the "wav" to "ogg" and "WAVE" to "OGG". -
I appreciate the replies.
I was pursuing the CHD file angle, as I was previously unaware that could be done with Sega CD games (also learned it could be done with Turbo Graphx 16 games). While I was googling to try to find toold and get answers to questions as to how WAV files played into all that, I found a link with Sega CD games already in CHD format. Thing is, they're all dated 2013. I'll try playing some of those when I get home and see how they work out.
Another question: from what I understand, there's still really no way to combine multi-disc sets. Is that right, or did I miss yet something else?
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@amishgamer The chd format gets constantly updated so the compression you make yourself today might be a bit better than from a chd from 2013. There's some guide floating around with a batch file or something. I personally use QT Chdman gui which is part of the qmc2 package http://qmc2.batcom-it.net/index.php/download/
You just need thechdman.exefrom latest pc mame.You need a cue file for every game. You can try to make one but it's easier to just find the game that has one already.
You can't combine multi-disc sets. With chd it'll be a neater library than before anyways.
@PittStone There's no need to compress wav to inferior ogg . Chd is a lossless compression format.
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Thanks for the info. But, there's still something else I'm not understanding...
Do the WAV filed get rolled up in the CHD file, or are they still required to be seperate?
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@amishgamer I've only converted single bin\iso\cue so I don't know for sure. It SHOULD include the wav files if your cue file has no problems.
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Thank you for all the help, everyone. I managed to compress my entire collection into CHD files. Much cleaner, and much smaller space-wise. And, they all work...except for the Sega-CD 32x games (there's only three or four of those). I guess I have to do some more homework on that one.
Not all my images were bin/cue. Getting them to be bin/cue so I could convert them to CHD was tedious and sometimes frustrating, but I got it done.
Thanks again.
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