Dreamcast Collectors! Obscurity seekers! TOSEC 20th Anniversary Release, project's internal spreadsheets included!

darcagn

darcagn

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Hi all,

for those that don't know, I maintain Dumpcast, a sub-site of DCEmulation where community members dump GD-ROMs with Dreamcast consoles and post hashes of the disc's track data. Maddog from TOSEC (The Old School Emulation Center) collects this information and adds it to their datfiles which can be used with a ROM manager program to maintain your archive/library of DC games.

The greater community has been so wonderful to support this project, and we have received information from dumpers around the world; everywhere there's a DC scene, there have been people supporting this project. It's been really fun getting to know people of many cultures and languages through our common love of the Dreamcast.

For the Dreamcast's 20th anniversary, a special release of TOSEC Dreamcast was made now including some of the most rare and exotic of GD-ROMs. The project has now reached 1,413 verified GD-ROM discs (2x dumped by 2x users on 2x Dreamcasts with matching hashes), 69 unverified GD-ROM discs (1x dumped only), and 44 prototype GD-R discs (prototype discs sourced from releases made in communities like Assembler and Hidden Palace).

It is September 9th, 2019, today one of the best home consoles ever created turns 20! (Maddog will actually tell you its' the best console by far, but rumor is that he is slightly biased in his opinion...). So, after celebrating Gorski's birthday in the previous release, we now celebrate the Dreamcast's birthday! By the way, we know that it
was released earlier in Japan, but we simply had to go with the iconic 9/9/99 US release date. Nobody can remember the Japanese release without looking it up in Wikipedia, right?

Quite obviously, there are big updates in the Dreamcast dats, which should be worthy of enthusiastic celebrations among Sega fans. Many ultra rare and accordingly hard to get and expensive discs have now been added for your enjoyment. The biggest change by far is that Maddog finally decided to drop the "2 dumps" rule for adding stuff to the public dats. This served its' purpose very well in preventing errors and fake submissions by dumper wannabes for many years. But now, as we get closer to a complete set and we are diving deeper into the seriously rare, expensive and obscure stuff, it has become counterproductive, as it prevented many good dumps from trusted sources from being included. There's always a chance some of them are not correct, but it's very slim indeed. So, we introduce the Various Unverified Dumps dat. You will find many interesting discs hiding in it. Of course, we still hope to depopulate that eventually and add dumps from it to the regular verified dats, but the contents should make all Dreamcast fans very happy indeed. The verified dumps also got a great boost. Weird and wonderful stuff like the elusive Taiwanese Illbleed, the Portuguese Dreamkey 3.1 (last ever PAL disc produced), several rare Capcom samplers, the last unverified shmup (Mars Matrix JP) and the last unverified fighting game (Street Fighter Zero 3 for Matching Service) are all now verified for posterity. We will leave you to discover the rest of the changes yourself.
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A list of discs in the project is here!

Not too sure what the definitive rules are here, but let's just say go search archive.org for "tosec dreamcast," sort by date and look for the first week of September, and you'll be a happy DC fan.

In addition, there's something special for you hunters of the most obscure. Maddog has released the project's internal spreadsheet, which is the likely world's best investigated, most well-researched, and most accurate listing of the Dreamcast's catalog of discs dumped, undumped, and sometimes unseen. For the most dedicated Dreamcast collectors, this is a holy grail, trust me!

Check out the spreadsheets and more background info here!
 
Are there any plans to include the more recent indie titles (e.g. Another World, Armed 7, etc.) in the project library?

Ted.
 
At the moment TOSEC has no commercial indie discs at all. This is sort of a unique challenge. The Dreamcast uses multisession CDs (MIL-CDs), and there's no open standard image format in existence that supports multisession. I'd prefer to avoid proprietary image formats as much as possible, and all the formats that DC software has been distributed in (CDI, NRG, MDS/MDF, CCD) are proprietary and the dump files will not be 100% the same for every dump for every person for every version of the software.

Redump just last month added support for MIL-CDs and a few have been added to their database (GameShark CDX, Cheats 'n Codes 1, MP3 DC, Super Game Converter, etc.). Redump is storing these titles as individual raw track files with a custom CUE sheet format extended to support multisession, created by their custom DiscImageCreator software. This solves the above problems but at the same time it also means there's no program in existence that can burn the Redump images nor is there any emulator that can play them or any optical drive emulator that can mount them.

So nothing has been determined for sure about what direction will be taken. Right now it looks likely TOSEC will adopt the same method as Redump. But if that's the case it will take time before emulators support this format, and it will likely require a little bit of expertise with manual command-line methods to burning DC discs to burn them, and may need to be somehow converted (or burned and re-imaged as CDI) to get going on ODEs.
 
I don't know how to feel about everyone uploading ROM collections, betas etc to archive.org... Their website archive is a highly useful resource, would be a shame to lose it (worst case) because some idiot plonked down something like a Halo 6 build on there "because everyone does it" and the copyright holder went after them.
 
cta said:
I don't know how to feel about everyone uploading ROM collections, betas etc to archive.org... Their website archive is a highly useful resource, would be a shame to lose it (worst case) because some idiot plonked down something like a Halo 6 build on there "because everyone does it" and the copyright holder went after them.
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Don't they have an exception to DMCAs? I figure in the worse case they'd remove the offending data and give the uploader's info to the infringed party.
 
cta said:
I don't know how to feel about everyone uploading ROM collections, betas etc to archive.org... Their website archive is a highly useful resource, would be a shame to lose it (worst case) because some idiot plonked down something like a Halo 6 build on there "because everyone does it" and the copyright holder went after them.
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I can totally understand that perspective, I think it's weird too but it's a trend that seems to be picking up since Nintendo destroyed so many ROM sites. Sega doesn't seem to bother protecting its old IP so Archive.org becomes a good host for their content. So I'll just say that I had nothing to do with this set being on archive.org nor did I know it was going to be uploaded there before it was. Now that it's there, it's just way more convenient for me to point others there.
 
darcagn said:
Sega doesn't seem to bother protecting its old IP
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I'm honestly baffled that they explicitly allowed the Bolo Museum to release the Fish Life GDI publicly, it's a very nice but unexpected move from a videogames company.

I guess that they realize that preservation is good for them and doesn't harm their sales anyhow.
 
FamilyGuy said:
I'm honestly baffled that they explicitly allowed the Bolo Museum to release the Fish Life GDI publicly, it's a very nice but unexpected move from a videogames company.

I guess that they realize that preservation is good for them and doesn't harm their sales anyhow.
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I too was baffled when I had heard they allowed it. Companies pretty much universally say "no" just so they don't have to spend the time for lawyers to figure out if it's okay to do so legally!

I think at this point Sega knows they get by because of their history, and probably doesn't want to turn off fans to their brand when they can't stop the fans from doing what they want anyway.
 
darcagn said:
I too was baffled when I had heard they allowed it. Companies pretty much universally say "no" just so they don't have to spend the time for lawyers to figure out if it's okay to do so legally!

I think at this point Sega knows they get by because of their history, and probably doesn't want to turn off fans to their brand when they can't stop the fans from doing what they want anyway.
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I agree. It's like they already experienced both the positive and negative sides of piracy, and they reckon that the publicity/engagement linked with basically-piracy of old titles from their Golden era is good for them in the big scheme of thing.
 
Is it just me or are the torrents available for the TOSEC 2019 dumps on archive.org not complete? PAL, US and JAP only contain ~50% of the library...

Ted.
 
cta said:
I don't know how to feel about everyone uploading ROM collections, betas etc to archive.org... Their website archive is a highly useful resource, would be a shame to lose it (worst case) because some idiot plonked down something like a Halo 6 build on there "because everyone does it" and the copyright holder went after them.
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More like Nintendo instead. They're on a fking witch hunt for every Tom, Dick and Harry right now.
 
Sega Dreamcast - Games - US (TOSEC-v2019-08-22) on archive.org lists 304 files in the US TOSEC dump. The associated TOSEC torrent on archive.org only has 116, from 4 Wheel Thunder to Metropolis Street Racer. Over half the files are missing?

Ted.
 
The torrent seems to indeed be missing files, but they are all there in the archive. I extracted the list of individual files and downloaded them one-by-one with `wget` (automated).

If you're on the archive page, expand the "ZIP" list in "Download options", you can run the following JavaScript to gather up all links:

JavaScript: 
console.log(Array.from(document.querySelectorAll('.item-download-options .format-file a.download-pill')).map(x => x.href).join('\n'))

Paste them in a file (e.g. links.txt) and download them all individually, e.g.:

Bash: 
while read -r line; do wget -c "$line" || {echo "ERROR"; break}; done <links.txt

It's not ideal, maybe there are already tools that does this, but it works either way :p.
 
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SMiTH said:
its getting harder to find a reliable source for .gdi files anymore
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Well. As said, they're all on archive.org. They're accessible on other sites too if you just look up the dump filename and DuckDuckGo or Google it. I don't really know how it can get easier than that.

Not to pick on you but every time someone says this what they end up really meaning is that they are extremely picky about how they want files given to them.
 
darcagn said:
Not to pick on you but every time someone says this what they end up really meaning is that they are extremely picky about how they want files given to them.
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true. i prefer to download the entire collection PAL, JP, US, etc.
i don't like searching for files one by one.
and the current torrents are either incomplete or lack seeders.
 
Thanks for the spreadsheets, got a couple of catalog numbers that I didn't have yet.
 
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