Dreamcast Bleemshell new GDEMU menu for playing PSX games on DC

[Anthony817]

So I am sure many of you here will be familiar with @megavolt85 and his many great contributions in the Dreamcast community such as his widescreen codes for DC games, as well as most notably his contribution to maintaining Dreamshell and adding nice features to it. Built from the Dreamshell codebase, Bleemshell is specifically built for GDEMU and allows us to load up multiple PSX games all from a nice Bleemcast and PSX style menu.



Features so far...

*Ability to add game covers to image files.
*D-pad has been mapped to analog stick, and L2 and R2 are now working and mapped to D-pad Left and D-pad Right, while D-pad down is now mapped to Select respectively making more games compatible.
*Ability to choose between remapped controls or original Bleem beta controller mapping. Want D-Pad for Castlevania SOTN? You can absolutely do that.
*CDDA support means no more silent music on games like N2O: Nitrous Oxide meaning that sweet Crystal Method soundtrack works in game!
*Soft reset game by pressing Start+A+B+X+Y
*Reset console by pressing D-pad Down+A+B+X+Y

Planned features:

*Action Replay/Gameshark cheat code support.
*Possible FMV support? Not sure about this one but megavolt85 mentioned it to me in private message.
*If japanese_cake strips 100% of protections from retail GT2, MGS and Tekken 3 emus, then ability to choose what emulator to load games with for best compatibility.

If you are interested in following the as of now 23 page thread, then you can find it here. Small note however, is that you must be a registered member with a post count to see the hidden downloads section which it resides in.

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Bleemshell Alpha 3
Download: https://mega.nz/#!zEVFnAYJ!EaWLy6_7jqLC9ezkz545kpFz_qd_hSS5nRwPE5ZFZeQ

Video tutorial for making your own Bleemshell images with cover art. Note: Covers should be 256x256 pixels.

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CDI_Insert app for creating your own Bleemshell iso's.
Download: https://mega.nz/#!Lc9jnALb!QtJOgrG8MT3flaPovBqG04PRE2UlvVV39NlYXqDdklw

 

[NeoSnk]

This is awesome news! Thanks for sharing it.

 

[Yenaphe]

Wow, that's absolutely awesome! Thanks!

 

[Wombat]

This is really cool, like with pretty much all Dreamcast projects..... looking forward seeing this unfold

 

[Anthony817]

I updated the link with the latest version which is alpha 3. Now Select button was mapped to D-pad Down.

I also included the CDI_Insert app megavolt85 created for making ISO images with cover art. Directions are included in the readme.

 

[Dan12343]

*If japanese_cake strips 100% of protections from retail GT2, MGS and Tekken 3 emus, then ability to choose what emulator to load games with for best compatibility.

so does this mean protections regarding selfbooting or protections making sure it's playing MGS\Tekken?

if we can use retail emulator then can saving be possible? that would be really cool if saving was ever figured out

 

[Anthony817]

It means 100% of all protections. The potential for making selfbooting games, as well as loading others like the 2011 cracked version that was hacked to skip disc check.

Primarily though, he was originally looking into removing protections so they loaded the emulators up through GDEMU and USB-GDROM as well as IDE mod. Still to this day, on GDEMU at least the only way you can play any Bleem stuff is with the beta, the retail ones refuse to load.

Once those retails were stripped of protections, then a lot of things would be possible with the retail emulator disc's code. We already know they can be used to play other games with working FMV's and potentially saves.

Others who want to know more can read his Tweet about it here. Lots of replies on it. I also recently tweeted to him asking if he has seen this Bleemshell project yet but no reply yet.



I also started a compatibility list in 2011 of the retail bleem discs hacked to skip disc check. It shows at least what was possible with it.

racketboy.com - View topic - Bleemcast hacked again New compatibility list!

racketboy.com

 

[solitario1]

Does the retail version run games better than this version?

 

[Anthony817]

Yeah the Retail version of Bleem ran those 3 games beautifully. There was a hacked version of the retails that skipped the disc check and it did run other games that the beta version didn't with analog, and working FMV's.

 

[Anthony817]

Hey guys, just a small update. This is actually pretty huge news though. japanese_cake has finally gotten all 3 retail Bleems working on GDEMU, and the protections have been 100% removed! Hopefully this leads to things such as selfbooting versions of the 3 official games, but also the ability to add this to Bleemshell as individual cores to really help boost compatibility on the Dreamcast. He said he will release it soon!

 

[truemaster]

most important is that hes fine. and as always superb job

 

[Anthony817]

Yeah when he replied I told him it was so great to hear he was doing well before talking about Bleem. I was worried for a while, but I had aalso seen over the past year he continued to reply to tweets in other areas. So I knew he was still doing ok enough to respond to people.

 

[MastaG]

A bit off topic.. but did anybody test Crash Bandicoot 3 Warped on Bleemcast?

 

[Anthony817]

I am not sure about that one, but I think most of the other Crash Bandicoot games work on Bleem, including the racing one.

 

[ChrisDCG]

Hey Anthony, would you or anyone else know a method of how to do this on disc? I burnt the CDI Inserted Wipeout 3 (USA) and bleemshell.cdi to different discs. Imgburn doesn't allow to condense to one disc because it would have to be empty. Even then, I have no clue if 1 disc is enough for bleemshell and a game. Could a method of disc swapping/disc-friendly version/ or bleemshell.cdi and game combiner be developed?

 

[Anthony817]

Bleemshell is strictly for GDEMU, you can not use it with a disc on stock hardware, you literally need a GDEMU to use this. If you have a disc drive still just burn the beta boot disc and grab any old ISO of a PSX game and test that way. Or alternatively go to the Bleem section of Dreamcast-Talk forums and download them directly and burn to disc and play. Those are self booting.

Bleemshell will never work any other way than from GDEMU, other optical drive emulators can't even use it unfortunately.

 

[ChrisDCG]

Can I get a link? Looking for MM8.

 

[Anthony817]

I already provided a link in the original post for the latest release of the menu, but if you want to try certain games you will have to make them yourself, or load bleem beta in in one folder and the game you want to test in the next then press the skip disc button on the gdemu when the screen flashes on the bleem screen.

 

[Esppiral]

I am trying to convert some PSX games to work with Bleemshell but either the games do not show on the main menu or the console reboots endlessly

 

[Anthony817]

Check to make sure you have the GDEMU.ini as it does still need this to work. Also, it could be that the .IMG files you are adding could be too large? Try without a cover art image and see if still having problems? Additionally it was found that 250x250 is the best image resolution. Anything above that will have issues displaying the full art correctly in the menu.

https://bulkresizephotos.com/en has sliders for options and only loads the converting software. No images above 250x250 and they must be under 30kb.

Also, the .CDI you create can not be over 32 characters long.