Newbie Having Issues with Dreamcast Games

[シーザーShitlordSeazer]

Hey guys, this is my first time posting but I'm pretty desperate and want to get this issue fixed because I bet it's something simple but i've just somehow managed to miss it.
So yeah, I am using Nulldc to play dreamcast games and most of them I just had to extract and they'd be packed in .cdi but there were few cases that I had extracted a game and it was bunch of files that weren't even the correct format. I tried googling up stuff and I didn't find a single solution to this issue. Bare in mind, I am complete and utter fool. Also very new to the whole emulating scene.

I'll post a link here where you can see what the files look like for me, also the games that i'm having issues with are the following :
- Skies of Arcadia
- Rival Schools 2
- Shenmue 2
- Grandia II
- Virtua Fighter 3



Here are some pictures :







Thanks for the help guys, I really never got to experience Dreamcast as a child so it's been quite wonderful having the chance to play all these games. So far, really loving Power Stone 2 and Shenmue 1.

[deadlegion]

Split archives. Extract from the first part (looking at pic 1 it would be .001).
I recommend you use 7zip, the latest version from the official site.

[シーザーShitlordSeazer]

Thank you for such a quick response but I am a literal moron. Any actual tutorial for this..? I've always learned better by watching not reading
It's just kinda confusing for me because I almost never even use 7zip since I've gotten used to Winrar and 7zip is in Finnish which is my native language it's just.. ugh.
I apologize for being such a dumbass. I just don't get how do i extract the files because they've already been extracted.. Do I install the game again?

I think I'm starting to get it now, I extracted the files into 2 bigger files but now as i archive them, what are the settings? there's no .cdi as an archive format option.
Did I even get it right at all?

[deadlegion]

It's a split archive inside an archive. It has been archived twice.
Not uncommon for scene releases to be shared that way...original scene releases are always spit archives of many parts (each are small size), so people take that original share and put it into one single archive or another split archive with less parts.

You extracted the first archive but now you have to extract this new set. With 7zip installed all you do is right click on the first part (.001), look for the 7zip options and select extract here.

[シーザーShitlordSeazer]

Alright, I think i found the "hidden" files.. I extracted them but now they're in a .bin format, do I just rename it now or what? The game obviously doesn't recognize them in this current format.

[deadlegion]

I'm not sure about bin/cue format for DC games tbh. They should be .cdi or .gdi really.
I would wait for Zorlon to come along and see this thread, he knows all about DC stuff.

[シーザーShitlordSeazer]

Oh, it'd seem like I need something called bin2boot but apparently it does not work on 64-bit. R.I.P.
I didn't find any alternatives. One way would be to somehow go backwards compatible with XP or something and I don't know how. complex shait.

All right, well i thank you for your help and advice. You've already helped me more than enough. Have a good night / day mate.
I hope I'll get this sorted out though.

Okay so I watched a video from this fella..


So i started messing around with the files and actually managed to get BootDreams to transform all the files into one big .cdi file, the emulator does recognize the file now
but when i try to play it, it only gives me sound, it goes to the music player on dreamcast and just plays the sound from the "cd". I am even more confused than I was before.
Been fighting with this for 8 hours now, somebody please save me lol. I'm sure I've messed something up but I just don't know what it is and I dont want to give up.

Oh wow I literally only now realized that BootDreams is a CD burner only, if I'm correct it doesn't actually "prepare" them for Emulation usage. Idk maybe I'm spouting nonsense but that's how I see it. Please mister moderator, The all knowing Dreamcast man save me.

[Zorlon]

Epic failure

Please start this again and post a screen grab again but of the extracted files from the 001 file

P.S. I have a good copy of some of the games up on the forum though if you wish to grab those

http://www.epforums.org/showthread.php?85172 Grandia II (Best RIP to CD with nothing removed and nothing resampled) though also released on PC and PS2, but with lower quality FMV
http://www.epforums.org/showthread.php?84563 Skies of Arcadia (Best RIP to CD) though weas re-released on GC called Skies of Arcadia Legends, GC version would be the better version
http://www.epforums.org/showthread.php?104042 Shenmue II with English Voices (Not my upload and the voices are from the Xbox version of Shenmue II)

Doing Bin to Cdi will not go well for most games unless you know what you are doing (the prog bin to cdi alone tends not to be of much help at all with CDDA games, not without proper hacking prior to using something like that) and that is a bit long winded to explain and can be done in a 64bit OS to be honest the converting is best left to the experts as it is a complex operation that can go wrong too easy during the process so stick to GDI images that are dumps of the original GD-Rom or cdi images that are rips from GD-Rom to CD-Rom (GD-Roms are apx 1.2GB total size so to put a full GD-Rom onto CD something must either be lost/resampled or split over several CD's though not all games use all the space a GD-Rom can hold so some games do just fit on to a CD-Rom or fit on a 99min CD-Rom)