I'm a little stuck on how to burn Sega Mega CD games? I have burnt Sonic Megamix to a cdr which play perfect (downloaded the game as a disc image) However I have downloaded Sonic Cd++ (as a disc image also) and it plays but it has no music - the music will activate after you have time travelled but it doesn't work at the start of any levels? I have read that I need a cue file but since the download is a disc image how can that be correct? I'm thinking this game may just be buggy as its a hack but not 100% sure.... Any help appreciated.
After a bit more reading it seems there is no audio tracks included with this disc image (I think) I'm assuming I'll have to add the tracks somehow - I'm confused....
I tried burning Sonic CD++ myself some time back. What I did was use the NTSC version of the original game, got the ++ aspect in the form of a patcher, got another patch that improves the movie cutscenes playback, used the audio tracks from the JAP region version of the game, got the correct CUE file, packaged it all up as a .iso, burned to CD, and gave it a try. Nothing. Worked fine when playing on Kega Fusion from the DVD drive in my PC but failed on the real Sega CD. I'm still at a loss to this day. Bad CD media the Sega CD didn't like? Still don't know. I'd really like to play my custom game on the original console... As for the reason the music will play in the past but not the present or future, that is due to the fact the music for the past is located inside of the main game .bin file. The rest is in the form of audio tracks seperate from the game .bin file.
From the sound of it the patches weren't made with real hardware in mind. Sonic++ may have been but the additional patches you use probably weren't. Emulators are an amazing convienence that at the price of free we should be down on our knees thanking these people for putting together for us but they are hardly a proper substitute for real hardware.
In all honesty the improved movie playback patch was made with the real CD console in mind. I know for fact the ++ patch works on real hardware too. That leaves me confused as those are the only 2 patches I used. I even tried with no patches and it still wouldn't work. Maybe my burning method was screwed? I'll have to try it again sometime now that I have a better CD burner and some decent CD media.
MEGA-CD requires pregap on the audio tracks. The first audio track pregap after the data track is particularly important. Some CD dumping tools actually insert the pregap on the extracted wav files and that results into 2 seconds of silence at the start of each wav. No pregap and it will malfunction at CD-DA playback.
Thanks for the replies - I'm a bit lost with it all so looks like it's without music or nothing. If anyone sorts it or finds a way to get it running with music please let me know.
You're missing the point. He, as well as me, want to burn a hack of the game to a CD. We don't want the plain game. Sonic CD++ is a hack that will play on original hardware if burned properly. I have a copy of the official pressed disk game somewhere around my heap...
I was saying that the damn real thing requires PREGAPS on the audiotracks and nobody ever paid attention. What the heck is a pregap, you ask ? It's some sort of "landing zone" (silence) zone put between tracks to allow for the laser to travel from a track to another without "pops" of audio. The BIOS and the Drive hardware on a REAL MEGA-CD will malfunction if a game disc with audio tracks has no pregaps... If a game work on a emulator, it doesn't mean it will work on the real hardware as it is.
As sonicdude10 says this is a hack - I have the real game it's just I want to play through the hack as there are several differences. @l_oliveira I saw what you said but I don't really know how to do it - I also haven't got the audio tracks needed on my PC.
There's two ways of making copies of MEGA/SEGA-CD discs: BIN/CUE -> This kind of image has the tracks information on the cue file (which is a text file) and the disc data is stored on the bin file. This keeps the disc structure untouched so the gaps are preserved. MP3/ISO -> This format gives a lot smaller images as a lot of data is discarded, including the gaps. This is ok for emulators since the emulator doesn't care about the original disc structures as it will "rebuild" the disc structures when it's emulating the system. So the ideal format for copying these is BIN/CUE, but because the main target of the ISOs floating the internet are emulation, you have to learn how to deal with that.
Technically, the pregap is there as a "safe zone" because the cd audio standard does not specify how to determine which sample belongs to which sector, and different drives use different values, so the 2 sec gap before and after data tracks is to make sure that there is no overlapping of data and audio sectors. It has little purpose inbetween audio tracks, most modern discs don't even have them, and some modern equipment can't even read them (they are stored in subcodes). Not quite sure from the top of my head why they put gaps in the cd audio standard though, the sample offsetting isn't a major problem there... maybe something to emulate the gaps that vinyl records had between tracks. I don't think it was to get rid of popping when moving to another track...
In this particular case, all MEGA-CD games will have at least one pregap in the beginning of the first audio track. Just look any original disc. You're obligated by the drive to *at least* put one pregap on the first track after the data track. Not doing so will cause the drive to not be able to play any CD-DA tracks... Some games may even hang because they wait for the drive to return "playing" status and since that never happens ... You know ... Besides that, games may rely on the pregaps for track timing too, since you can tell the drive to seek to a specific area of the disc in several different ways. That's why I keep saying that the ideal way is make a bin/cue image of the original disc. This is the TOC of my original Japanese copy of Earnest Evans: Can you see there's 00:01:59 (1 second/59 frames) gap every audio track ? It's not specially called "pregap" but it's a gap. If these gaps are not there, the MEGA-CD will play a little bit of the end of the previous track by accident when the laser hovers to it and start playing.
I was able to get Sonic CD++ running just fine earlier and gasp, I had made sure to preserve pregaps! I don't know where this FMV patch is but I'd give it a shot if given a link. Can't be that hard to generate a full disc image with it.
The video (you can't call that FMV sadly lol) data is within the ISO filesystem so it's on the 1st track.
So it's a matter of swapping out the appropriate data and rebuilding the image? Not remotely difficult.
It's not called pregap because the cdrwin cue spec is slightly retarded and should've been replaced ages ago... The index00 IS the pregap (technically a negative index that works as a countdown till the next track). And what CDRWin calls Pregap is actually empty space inserted by software, not present in the bin file. So where your cue sheet says pregap before the first audio track in your image, that should be index00 as well - but cdrwin does not save that data, it just marks it as pregap and skips it, because per specification that area SHOULD be all empty zeroes. Whether it really is or is not is a different question. Anyway, Sega CD (and Saturn) games all have 2 sec pregaps not because the drive necessities them, but because SEGA said so in their cd authoring guide. From what I recall, on the Sega CD, many games do work straight from iso/mp3, but not all. Sonic CD worked that way for sure. and the thing that caused desyncs was not the (lack of) pregap, but the mp3 compression mangling track lengths improperly. This is from my memory anyway.
If someone could re build the disc image file I'd be very grateful. I have no clue when it comes to this kind of stuff although I do at some point want to start learning a bit more about it.
