How to backup the entire content of a dreamcast gd-rom

Published in

· 9 Apr 2022

Probably many of you would like to backup games for your own libraries in order to be able to use them in the future, for example, with one of the emulators such as Redream, Flycast, Reicast, NullDC or Demul.

There is a fairly cheap solution, despite the complicated structure of the GD-ROM board.

The only thing we will need is:

a budget SD card reader (home-made or bought on Aliexpress) with an SD card
DCSD Rip ver.1.1 by jj1odm, burned on a CD (* optionally it may be Dreamshell - for me the application has problems with correct operation)
GD-ROM Exploler 1.6.2 by jc (for Windows)

We can now start to work.

DCSDRip
After burning the disc at the lowest possible speed on blank CD, put it into the console.

DCSD ripper jj1odm (dreamcast)

After loading the program, several options will be available:

GD-ROM disc info - displays information about the disc, number of tracks, etc.
GD-ROM <bin> all track - copies all contents to a .BIN file
GD-ROM <bin> select track - copies a selected track to a .BIN file
GD-ROM <iso> all track - copies all contents to a file. ISO
GD-ROM <iso> select track - copies the selected tracks to the .BIN file
BIOS ROM - rips the console bios to the file on the card
FLASH MEMORY - restores the console cache, modem / clock settings
SD card dir - displays information about the contents of the SD card
SD card info - displays system information about the SD card

We are mostly interested in dumping the entire gd-rom to a file that we can open and run on an emulator. So we choose the GD-ROM <bin> all track option after inserting the game disc.

The application will start copying the content of the GD-ROM and all the tracks.

It is important not to interrupt this operation, remove discs, cards, etc.

The time of copying depends on the size of the game, speed of the SD reader and the SD card. In my case it varies from 45 minutes to 1 hour and 10 minutes.

DCSD ripper jj1odm dreamcast gdrom

After completion, we have an image (BIN + RAW) with the .GDI extension, which will allow us to run it in any emulator or open the GD-ROM content in the GD-ROM Explorer application from japanese-cake .
You can also open the prepared image on various Dreamcast emulators and virtual drives such as GDEMU / USB GD-ROM or other mods.

That's it. The backup is now complete.

You can run it on any emulator or GDEMU drive replacement or, for example, convert the game to a Discjuggler selfboot file, hack, translations and other modifications.