Magic Engine Won't Load CD Image

[fabio]

I have a collection of Turbo CDs that I want to back up onto hard drive for use with Magic Engine and Hyperspin within an arcade cabinet. Sadly, I am not having any luck getting a disc image to load manually within Magic Engine.

I created my bin/cue image using ImgBurn, updated my pce.ini with the below, and mounted my image with daemon tools lite (drive g - the third cd drive). When I load magic engine, it simply says "No CD". Does anyone have any tips for what else I could try to get this working?

# ----
# cd-rom settings
# ----
#

[cdrom]

;
; CD-ROM driver
; --
; 0 -> auto-detect [default]
; 1 -> SPTI (WinNT)
; 2 -> ASPI
;

driver=

;
; CD-ROM drive
; --
; 1 -> first CD-ROM drive [default]
; 2 -> second CD-ROM drive
; ...
;

drive=3

;
; CD-ROM drive letter
; --
; (Windows 2000/XP only)
;
; D:
; E:
; ...
;

drive_letter=G:

[SuperPlay]

I used:

Turbo Engine Emulator (Has rip CD option): http://aamirm.hacking-cult.org/www/turbo.html

Mount using Alcohol 52%: http://www.free-downloads.net/downloads/Alcohol_52__Free_Edition/

[NightWolve]

Aren't you using the latest version of ME where you can pick the CD drive within the GUI ?? The only thing I'd change in the pce.ini file for this is set "driver=1" for SPTI which should be the norm. Doubt anyone is still on Win98/ME, so SPTI should always be used. I'd remove the "drive=3" and "drive_letter=G:", blank 'em out and just choose the drive in the menu when you try to boot a game. One other tip, make sure to boot with a real SYSCARD3 ROM file and not the built-in versions as they're buggy.

[fabio]

I gave turbo engine emulator a shot and it immediately crashes upon launch. I'm running xp, so perhaps it doesn't work with that?

I tried the suggested magic engine settings, but still am having no luck. I am running the latest version on their site. I just tried ootake as well for the heck of it, and it also won't recognize my cd image, so I'm guessing it might be a problem with the image. Would anyone recommend a program with which I should create my bin/cue from my CD?

[NightWolve]

GoldenHawk's CDRWIN ought to work. It'll rip it at your slowest speed as trialware, which is good anyway.

http://download.cnet.com/CDRWin/3000-2646_4-10028672.html

Also, my TurboRip would rip it to ISO/WAV/CUE and the benefit there is that you'd get to pick individual audio tracks to listen to if you wanted, but it's not as convenient long-term storage wise to have many files for disc image storage (two files, BIN/CUE is simpler).

https://www.ysutopia.net/get.php?id=TurboRip

(It might or might not work for ya, and also, it's command-line, so not as easy to use though...)

The other thing, I'd also try the Alcohol 52% suggestion as well when it comes to virtual CD emulation.

[OldMan]

You aren't ripping as one huge file, are you?

[Bernie]

The issue is ME is not seeing his virtual drive.  I think I'm reading it right anyway.  You're mounting the image, right?  Use Ootake, it has no issues with virtual drives.

[OldMan]

The issue is ME is not seeing his virtual drive.

Maybe that's because his virtual drive software doesn't know how to deal with a pce style disc?
The same way older versions of windows had problems with an audio/data/audio layout.
Or possibly because his ripper actually read the 'gaps' (which have actual data in them) between the warning track and the real data track....and got the track sizes wrong?

More information needed.

[NightWolve]

Maybe that's because his virtual drive software doesn't know how to deal with a pce style disc?
The same way older versions of windows had problems with an audio/data/audio layout.
Or possibly because his ripper actually read the 'gaps' (which have actual data in them) between the warning track and the real data track....and got the track sizes wrong?

More information needed.

Nah, I've been playing CD games off the HDD with MagicEngine like this for ages going back to 2002. All virtual CD emulators that I ever installed properly mounted a NEC disc image and it worked just fine with MagicEngine. Also, a BIN/CUE image ripped with the gap data (which is by default) wouldn't affect anything because the references in the CUE file would be proper. It's when you rip the disc on a track per file basis like the way TurboRip does and you wrongly include the pregap data with a data track (like track 2 of a NEC disc) without proper referencing in the CUE file. You're supposed to either ignore/throw that data away (as TurboRip does) or you properly reference that track in the CUE file to take it into account, making sure index 1 starts after the gap data. Doing that wrongly will cause problems.

Anyway, yeah, either the image is bad or MagicEngine isn't seeing the virtual drive at all like Bernie said.

EDIT: I just remembered, Alcohol 52% has limited ripping ability, in addition to virtual CD drive emulation. It only rips to MDS format, but it will know how to mount said format and mount it well. So yeah, uninstall Daemon Tools and install this (reboots will likely be needed):

http://www.free-downloads.net/downloads/Alcohol_52__Free_Edition/

You'd click on the "Image Making Wizard" link, choose "Normal CD" for Datatype, name it, choose output folder, and hit "Start". That's about it. Mounting thereafter is very easy so you should be able to figure that out.

[SuperPlay]

NightWolve:

CDRWin now there is a name I have not come across for a while :-)

Great work with TurboRip by the way: I have just tried this out and it works fine for me under Windows 8 64Bit.  I love the TOC database integration and the automatic generation of missing application files.

Also it was very interesting reading the background to this project.


Is there a reason why using Turbo Engine to rip is bad? When I mount a ripped image in Alcohol 50% and use TocRead the TOC seems to be accurate.

[fabio]

Thanks all, for your suggestions!

NightWolve - I was able to get up and running by using Alcohol 52% and following the steps that you mentioned.

[Bernie]

NightWolve:

CDRWin now there is a name I have not come across for a while :-)

Great work with TurboRip by the way: I have just tried this out and it works fine for me under Windows 8 64Bit.  I love the TOC database integration and the automatic generation of missing application files.

Also it was very interesting reading the background to this project.


Is there a reason why using Turbo Engine to rip is bad? When I mount a ripped image in Alcohol 50% and use TocRead the TOC seems to be accurate.

It's not that Turbo Engine create a "bad" rip, it's just something that Aamir added and its basically a beta version.  It was a work in progress when I was helping him test the emulator, and still had a lot of bugs.

[SuperPlay]

Hi Bernie

Thanks for the info :-)

[KnightWarrior]

Ootake takes the cake

[NightWolve]

CDRWin now there is a name I have not come across for a while :-)

Yeah, heh. I wonder if they're out of business now, though. Golden Hawk's general website doesn't load and it's been 2 years since the last update... Kind of a shame, CDRWIN still has the best editor for CD-TEXT creation I found and their command line stuff was pretty cool. I actually created a testing disc using it for TurboRip so that I could support the feature competently. I titled every track, added songwriter, album title, used every known CD-TEXT feature, etc. and got it all working and properly processed. It's rare to find audio discs supporting it though because the idea came towards the end of the CD format's life, but some are out there. Better to support the CDDB online database when it comes to naming tracks by looking up the disc's TOC, but that's a tougher task for down the road if I feel like it.

Great work with TurboRip by the way: I have just tried this out and it works fine for me under Windows 8 64Bit.  I love the TOC database integration and the automatic generation of missing application files.

Good, that means the 32-bit emulation layer is working with it. I did some work on the next update not too long ago, but then I stopped and lost interest again, though I fully intend to eventually give it the update it deserves! What I accomplished so far was to make it work directly with NT SPTI so I won't need some stupid ASPI DLL anymore (so for NT4/2K/XP/Vista/7/8, direct SCSI commands via Windows API). What I didn't get going on though is reading the Q subcode data to truly detect track sub indexing (pregap 'index 00' or further indexing, 'index 02' or more for rare audio discs and one PC-FX disc that I know about thanks to David Shadoff which has a data track with 5 indexes, etc.). Once that's done, TurboRip will be reliable for use on PC-FX discs and others, etc. I think adding OGG encoding to compliment the MP3 support is also in order. So basically, once the core source code is pretty finalized, with an understanding of the CD format being almost mastered and a solid version is compiled and released for command-line, the next step would be to work on a GUI version. That'd be a nice challenge down the road.

Also it was very interesting reading the background to this project.

Cool, glad you read the ReadMe. Few people ever bother to show interest on such details. Yeah, basically, I needed it for the Ys IV dubbing idea (and potentially for it to be helpful for projects by others) because nothing would properly rip a mixed mode NEC disc. There is actually nothing wrong with them or "nonstandard;" they're following Yellow Book specifications/guidelines as far as I understand it of adding a 3 second pregap when transitioning from an audio track to a data track and a 2 second postgap for the opposite, when going from data to audio.

When you'd try to use CDRWIN to rip a mixed-mode NEC disc on a track-per-file basis though, it'd fail on track 2 (and track 1 as a wave file would include the 3 seconds of pregap at the end of it which technically belongs to track 2). You'd have to specify the start and end sectors and subtract off the 2 second postgap to get the damn thing to rip it for you... I manually used to do that shit all the time before I developed TurboRip... It's fine if you ask the program to rip a whole BIN/CUE for you or whatever else (MDF, IMG, etc), but trying to rip all tracks to separate files  (ISO/WAV/CUE format), that never worked right, at least with CDRWIN (I think ISO Buster was another one, looked like it would work, but didn't)...

NightWolve - I was able to get up and running by using Alcohol 52% and following the steps that you mentioned.

Congrats! I was losing hope that you'd figure it out and I was just about tired of offering more ideas. ;)