"Awesome," says I. "I found my old Dreamcast Archive!" Yarrr.

-=-=-

I still have my Dreamcast collection. It's one of the archives of games that I've successfully managed to keep. Mostly because I had no family members who also had Dreamcasts, and who would "borrow" games that I never saw again.
My 7 remaining Playstation games (out of about 100 or so) speak volumes of this behaviour.

I also have about 10 or so Gameboy Advance games remaining, though that recently got boosted by the GBA Advent I did.

Random Thought : Maybe I should do a Playstation Advent this year, but the discs won't fit inside the little Advent Calendar drawers, and that was too bloomin' expensive to replace so quickly!

Over the years, then, I've made sure to duplicate every game I have with a rom version, so that once it vanishes into the ether, I can still play it.
Yesterday whilst scanning through my old Hard Drives (Apparently I'm still in Spring Cleaning mode) I discovered my "backup" collection, and in there were all my Dreamcast games, replicated in Rom form. Yaarrrr!!!

I copied them over to the RogALLY, and discovered that there's a new (since I last saved these, about a decade or so ago) form of compression. "CHD" seems to be the modern standard, instead of having oodles of .cue and .bin files cluttering things up.

Sidetracked

A multi step task

Step 1, extract the bin/cue files from the zip files, each into their own archive.
.... D'oh, Windows.. Right.. Try again..
...

Step 1, Install WinRar

Step 2, extract the bin/cue files from the zip files, each into their own archive. (Ctrl+A, Rightclick, Extract)

Step 3, Install CHDMan and get a script that'll convert a folder into a single .chd file.

Step 4, Now do that over all the roms.
..

Oh no.. It's going to take all day.
And the RogAlly churned away, slow as all heck, and really wasn't doing a very good job of things at all.

I bet the Mac could do it better..

Mac

Step 1. Grab the Micro SD card from the RogAlly, pop it into a little Micro Reader, pop it into the Mac
Step 2. Replicate the CHDMan setup on the Mac, find a suitable script, run it on a folder.

... At this point, either the MicroSD Card or more likely the little reader got so hot that some kind of failsafe triggered, and the card would no longer read.

AaaaRrrRRrGH!!!

I gave it ten minutes and the thing seemed to be just fine.
But writing seemed to be the cause, so .. No more writing to the USB via the Mac.
..

Try, Try, Try again

Step 1. Copy all the roms over to the Mac's Hard drive.

Step 2. Run the converter script on each folder.

Step 3. Got a pile of .chd roms on my hard drive. Excellent!!

And now I'm at the point where I need to figure out how to get those back over to the RogAlly, as well as a backup drive.
I might use the backup drive as the path between the Mac and the RogAlly, since that (hopefully!!!) won't freak out and overheat.

Good grief..

So, that was my lazy Sunday.
How about you?
Did you do anything interesting yesterday?
Let me know in the comments/Discord.

... I really should get back to coding the Neon Stack Attack Tower Defence thing, today.

A.I. Corner

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