Can I play Cube/dreamcast discs on my PC?

[kevin_psx]

Sold my Cube. But kept 1 good game Skies of Arcadia. I kept it for the Nintendo Revolution but was wondering - can I play it on my PC via emulation?

What about the dreamcast disc?

[zerohero]

no

[roushimsx]

Sadly, no current emulators support reading the actual game discs so you're stuck downloading images of games you already have (unless you have a broadband adaptor or coder's cable...not sure if anyone ever bothered whipping something up for the modem).

Also, I'm not sure if Skies of Arcadia will work in emulation. Both Dreamcast and Gamecube emulation is still in their infancy and little things like compatibility and speed are still poor. For instance, Chankast, the most playable Dreamcast emulator presently out there, lacks a frame limiting option. If you have a PC powerful enough to run it at full speed (assuming the game you want to play is properly emulated), it might wind up actually running TOO fast.

So yea, if you're feeling a little froggy, go find some way to get a hold of disc images of those games you already own and give Dolphin and Chankast a go. You're much better off just buying a new Dreamcast or Gamecube...but yea..whatever works for you.

Oh, and another lame limitation: Since GD-ROMs were up to 1gb, warez groups would recompress video, rip audio, or do any number of other modifications to games to get them to fit on a normal CDR. Sadly, Chankast won't support games larger than a CD, so if you DO manage to rip Skies of Arcadia, if the discs are larger than 700 megs, it still won't work.

So........... yea. Have fun.

[sabre2922]

IMO its basically a waste of time tyring to emulate anything Dreamcast and up. Hell there still arent any REAL stable Saturn emus and probably never will be.

My theory is this: if you have a limited budget (wich Ive got next to none ) then I would suggest emulating 8-bit NES etc up to 64-bit N64 and JAG (cartridge systems) its just soo much easier to emulate any cartridge systems and put your money into 128-bit and up or basically Dreamcast,Xbox,PS2 and Gamecube.

Hell I have ePSXe on my 2.80 GHz computer and STILL dont bother with it much because no matter what others might try to say on here emulating anything Playstation and Saturn and up (excluding the cartridge format of N64) is a fucking hasssle and more trouble than its worth IMO.

[CosmicMonkey]

Hell I have ePSXe on my 2.80 GHz computer and STILL dont bother with it much because no matter what others might try to say on here emulating anything Playstation and Saturn and up (excluding the cartridge format of N64) is a fucking hasssle and more trouble than its worth IMO.

Indeed. Cool as it would be to have one box that could play all disk based formats perfectly, that's not happening. Not for a few years. Second hand DCs, Saturns and PSones are like, £20. It's easier to spend £20 than spend hours arsing around with the PC, and it's still not as good.

I'm not the biggest fan of emulation, but I am impressed by the Hi-res versions of N64 games that are being done for the 1964 emulator (or is it Project64?). Hi-res Zelda:OoT looks absolutely stunning.

And a PC CD/DVD drive will never be able to read a GD Rom. And probably not a GC MiniDVD either.

[kevin_psx]

'kay! I will just wait for the Revolution to play my Skies cube disc. Thanks!

[ADD - I sold the Cube to buy a Nintendo 64. N64 had better exclusives & was more fun.]

[roushimsx]

IMO its basically a waste of time tyring to emulate anything Dreamcast and up. Hell there still arent any REAL stable Saturn emus and probably never will be.

SSF is quite a nice emulator and very nearly complete. The SCSP emulation is the major hang up right now and both the CD and VDP2 emulation are near complete.

Never say never.

Hell I have ePSXe on my 2.80 GHz computer and STILL dont bother with it much because no matter what others might try to say on here emulating anything Playstation and Saturn and up (excluding the cartridge format of N64) is a fucking hasssle and more trouble than its worth IMO.

Try using a more up-to-date emulator and stick with the vanilla plugins. P.E.Op.S. Soft GPU plugin is the best for recreating a more authentic look and either Pete's or Eternal SPU are excellent for the SPU emulation. Tweaking cd rom plugins sucks, I know..which is why I rip my games to my hard drive. It makes using SSSPSX a fucking dream rather than a chore.

I'll take save states over horribly slow memory card accessing and limitations any day of the week, though I still play the games on the original hardware from time to time when I want to record gameplay videos and whatnot (FRAPS, Camtasia, and the like all seem to disagree with me, and the video recording in P.E.Op.S. doesn't capture the audio)

I'm not the biggest fan of emulation, but I am impressed by the Hi-res versions of N64 games that are being done for the 1964 emulator (or is it Project64?). Hi-res Zelda:OoT looks absolutely stunning.

Either one works fine, you just need to use Rice's GPU plugin.

And a PC CD/DVD drive will never be able to read a GD Rom. And probably not a GC MiniDVD either.

I believe the Icarus development team has already found a way to read GD-ROMs (they've stated that they will NOT support ISOs at all). I don't know anything about the MiniDVD format on the Gamecube discs so I'm not sure if it's possible to read those on a PC or not, but GD-ROMs have been reverse engineered.

Icarus' website seems to be down or else I'd gladly link to the pages detailing what the hell was up with that.

[CYRiX]

no

[CYRiX]

no

[InsaneDavid]

IMO its basically a waste of time tyring to emulate anything Dreamcast and up. Hell there still arent any REAL stable Saturn emus and probably never will be.

My theory is this: if you have a limited budget (wich Ive got next to none ) then I would suggest emulating 8-bit NES etc up to 64-bit N64 and JAG (cartridge systems) its just soo much easier to emulate any cartridge systems and put your money into 128-bit and up or basically Dreamcast,Xbox,PS2 and Gamecube.

Hell I have ePSXe on my 2.80 GHz computer and STILL dont bother with it much because no matter what others might try to say on here emulating anything Playstation and Saturn and up (excluding the cartridge format of N64) is a fucking hasssle and more trouble than its worth IMO.

Ahhh, I remember back when UltraHLE was your only N64 ermulated option, and no one had a fast enough computer to run it. And as for Jaguar emulation, yeah, it's all good if you have a computer up to the task - and if you do then you can probably afford to pick up a cheap GameCube and Dreamcast.

Saturn emulation died in it's early days because Sega pulled the plug on developing it.

I have to agree with roushimsx, ePSXe is great once you get it setup properly.

[MarHel78]

GD-ROMs can be read by standard PC DVD/CD drives. They can't read the game part, but sometimes there are goodies on the discs that can be read , i.e. the wallpapers on the Dead or Alive 2 disk. I think Shenmue has those, too.

[hu6800]

IMO its basically a waste of time tyring to emulate anything Dreamcast and up. Hell there still arent any REAL stable Saturn emus and probably never will be.

My theory is this: if you have a limited budget (wich Ive got next to none ) then I would suggest emulating 8-bit NES etc up to 64-bit N64 and JAG (cartridge systems) its just soo much easier to emulate any cartridge systems and put your money into 128-bit and up or basically Dreamcast,Xbox,PS2 and Gamecube.

Hell I have ePSXe on my 2.80 GHz computer and STILL dont bother with it much because no matter what others might try to say on here emulating anything Playstation and Saturn and up (excluding the cartridge format of N64) is a fucking hasssle and more trouble than its worth IMO.

Ok , (and im serious about this) How and where can
i get an emu to run PCEngine CD's and roms using windows XP ?

My magic engine is having troub.
i think i have version 9

[hu6800]

IMO its basically a waste of time tyring to emulate anything Dreamcast and up. Hell there still arent any REAL stable Saturn emus and probably never will be.

My theory is this: if you have a limited budget (wich Ive got next to none ) then I would suggest emulating 8-bit NES etc up to 64-bit N64 and JAG (cartridge systems) its just soo much easier to emulate any cartridge systems and put your money into 128-bit and up or basically Dreamcast,Xbox,PS2 and Gamecube.

Hell I have ePSXe on my 2.80 GHz computer and STILL dont bother with it much because no matter what others might try to say on here emulating anything Playstation and Saturn and up (excluding the cartridge format of N64) is a fucking hasssle and more trouble than its worth IMO.

Ahhh, I remember back when UltraHLE was your only N64 ermulated option, and no one had a fast enough computer to run it. And as for Jaguar emulation, yeah, it's all good if you have a computer up to the task - and if you do then you can probably afford to pick up a cheap GameCube and Dreamcast.

Saturn emulation died in it's early days because Sega pulled the plug on developing it.

I have to agree with roushimsx, ePSXe is great once you get it setup properly.

I did, I was running 2 high end 3DFX boards SLI mode and it still ran like crap.
UltraHLE needed work.

Ive seen a Neo Geo Emu that looked spiffy , but i dont know where to get it.

[roushimsx]

Saturn emulation died in it's early days because Sega pulled the plug on developing it.

Yea, but that's just GiriGiri. It's a shame Sega didn't play around with different ways to distribute it / sell it and killed it off so quickly. SSF has been picking up the slack quite nicely (wasn't SSF the first Saturn emulator to run Daytona USA?), though it doesn't have the gee-whiz Direct3d action going for it (imagine the difference between Pete's OpenGL and P.E.Op.S.)

I have to agree with roushimsx, ePSXe is great once you get it setup properly.

My problem with ePSXe is that there's so many outstanding bugs that haven't been patched in the last year or two since the last release. Shame that PSXeven development died, because it was really looking like it was going to be the next great PS emulator, but SSSPSX is doing a damn nice job. Frequent updates, awesome compatiblity, sweet interface, yadda yadda yadda

GD-ROMs can be read by standard PC DVD/CD drives. They can't read the game part, but sometimes there are goodies on the discs that can be read , i.e. the wallpapers on the Dead or Alive 2 disk. I think Shenmue has those, too.

That's because of a seperate partition on the disc. The developers of Icarus wrote a generic cdrom driver that should work with a majority of drives out there for reading the whole disc.

Ok , (and im serious about this) How and where can i get an emu to run PCEngine CD's and roms using windows XP ?

My magic engine is having troub.
i think i have version 9

1.0.0.0 PR10 is the latest build. If you've bought the emulator then just download the latest version off of their site. If not, it's only 15 euros and it's overall a pretty damn good emulator.

Another option is to use Hu-Go, which isn't the most user friendly emulator, but it is pretty nice. Plus Zeograd is a pretty damn cool guy

I did, I was running 2 high end 3DFX boards SLI mode and it still ran like crap.
UltraHLE needed work.

At the time, it was a technical marvel. I had a P2-400 w/ Voodoo2 12mb and it ran Mario 64 at full speed. It proved N64 emulation was possible TODAY instead of in 5 years and it was the driving force behind the whole "HLE" movement in emulator coding (for better or for worse). Since it was never really updated officially, a ton of stuff that normally would have been patched up and fixed in subsequent releases never was... but its impact was roughly on par with that of NESticle (again, another emulator which is archaic and primitive by today's standards, but at the time NES emulators were slow, buggy, and cost money)

Ive seen a Neo Geo Emu that looked spiffy , but i dont know where to get it.

There's a couple of goodies. MAME is an obvious one, but Nebula has a lot of neat/nice features as does Final Burn Alpha. Kawaks is still around, too.

[whoisKeel]

I haven't tested extensively by any means, but ePSX was working just fine for me a year or so ago. I'm sure there's plenty of incompatibility, but hell look at how many years it took for all nes games to be glitch-free.

I don't see the problem with gamecube discs either, aside from copyright protection aren't they just normal dvd's? You know the 3" dvd/cds fit in any normal cd/dvd rom, it's that inner circle they fit in.

I figure the ps2 will be emulated before the dc/gc/saturn tho. Just because of the huge following.

[sabre2922]

I figure the ps2 will be emulated before the dc/gc/saturn tho. Just because of the huge following.

Yes that is a very great possibility since the PS2 is very popular.

Also I would think that the first current-gen machine that would have the best chance of being properly emulated would be the Xbox since it has a built-in hardrive and is well very PCish much more so than the PS2 or gamecube anyway.

The best free PCengine/Turbographix-16 emulator that ive found is Hugo although ive the games seem to have a glitch or two when running on my windows XP for some reason.

Nebula I think is the best Neo-Geo emulator

Kega fusion 3.3 is an incredible Genesis Emulator that runs 32/X games without any additional plugins.

and of course Zsnes is a great SNES emulator with nice features.